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https://hackaday.com/2014/09/02/homemade-portable-gold-mining-trommel/ | Homemade Portable Gold Mining Trommel | Matt Terndrup | [
"hardware"
] | [
"gold prospecting",
"gx120 motor",
"Honda",
"trommel"
] | [TheJogdredge] has been testing out
his new gold washing machines
that he made at home. By running dirt laced with rocks through this trommel, gold and precious materials can be filtered out. A video of the process can be seen embedded below.
The rig — which is meant to be easily lugged around from site to site — is powered by a Honda GX120 motor. No plastic parts were used in the system to help make it more durable. But foregoing the use of plastic means that this guy is heavy. The rig weighs about 240 pounds dry, and 265 when soaking wet with a sluice box attached. The rubber tires allow for the machine to be maneuvered from place to place without much hassle.
Although the parts are described on the website, no how-to instructions for this specific device can be found online. This is probably due to the fact that [TheJogdredge] is trying to sell his products and make some money. Releasing the instructions on how to build your own would most likely cut into the potential profits of his design. Regardless of which, this is portable gold mining trommel and perfect for those looking to step up their gold mining and prospecting game. The real question on our minds is: can you get more gold for less effort this way, or
through electronic junk mining
? | 28 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1780431",
"author": "Waterjet",
"timestamp": "2014-09-03T02:13:31",
"content": "“Roughly, the rig weighs approximately 265 soaking wet.”“The rubber tires allow for the machine to be maneuvered from place to place without much hassle.”Uhh? It still weighs 265 pounds. Rubber tires hel... | 1,760,376,083.001751 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/02/gps-tracker-tracks-your-stolen-bike/ | GPS Tracker Tracks Your Stolen Bike | Rich Bremer | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"bike locks",
"gps tracker"
] | Bikes are great for cruising through congested cities but there is a serious downside to pedaling your two-wheeler around… bike theft. It’s a big deal, for example, yearly estimates for stolen bikes in NYC are in the 60,000 – 100,000 range. Only an extremely small percentage of those are ever recovered. [stbennett] just got himself a halfway decent bike and is not too interested in having it stolen, and if it is stolen, he wants a way to find it so he built himself a
GPS tracker for his bike
.
The entire project is Arduino-based. It uses a GSM Shield and a GPS module along with a few other small odds and ends. A 2-cell LiPo battery provides the required power for all of the components. It’s pretty neat how this device maintains an extremely long battery life. The metal cable of the bike lock is used as a conductor in the circuit. When the cable is inserted and locked into the lock housing a circuit is completed that prevents electricity from passing through a transistor to the Arduino. In other words, the Arduino is off unless the bike cable is cut or disengaged. That way it is not running 24/7 and draining the battery.
The entire system works like this, once the bike lock cable is cut, the Arduino wakes up and gives a 15 second delay before doing anything, allowing the legitimate user to reconnect the bike lock and shut down the alarm system. If the bike lock is not re-engaged, the unit starts looking for a GPS signal. At that time it will send out SMS messages with the GPS location coordinates. Punching those numbers into Google Maps will show you exactly where the bike is.
Of course your other option is to park your bike where nobody else can access it,
like at the top of a lamp pole
. | 37 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "1780017",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2014-09-02T23:32:22",
"content": "Id probably steal the bike for the GSM shield…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1782201",
"author": "DosX",
"timestamp": "2014-09-03T13... | 1,760,376,083.167015 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/02/thp-semifinalist-autonomous-recharging-for-multirotors/ | THP Semifinalist: Autonomous Recharging For Multirotors | Brian Benchoff | [
"drone hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"charging",
"drone",
"multirotor",
"opencv",
"quadcopter",
"the hackaday prize"
] | Even with visions of quadcopters buzzing around metropolitan areas delivering everything from pizzas to toilet paper fresh in the minds of tech blogospherites, There’s been a comparatively small amount of research into how to support squadrons of quadcopters and other unmanned aerial vehicles. The most likely cause of this is the FAA’s reactionary position towards UAVs. Good thing [Giovanni] is performing all his research for
autonomous recharging and docking for multirotors
in Australia, then.
The biggest obstacle of autonomous charging of a quadcopter is landing a quad
exactly
where the charging station is; run of the mill GPS units only have a resolution of about half a meter, and using a GPS solution would require putting GPS on the charging station as well. The solution comes from powerful ARM single board computers – in this case, an Odroid u3 – along with a USB webcam, OpenCV and a Pixhawk autopilot.
Right now [Giovanni] is still working out the kinks on his software system, but he has all the parts and the right tools to get this project up in the air, down, and back up again.
The project featured in this post is
a semifinalist in The Hackaday Prize. | 20 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1780031",
"author": "Leithoa",
"timestamp": "2014-09-02T23:37:40",
"content": "Using GPS wouldn’t require a receiver to be on the ground station, only that the ground station be at known/preprogrammed co-ordinates. Given the types of bodies deploying drones for delivery/mapping serv... | 1,760,376,083.580221 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/02/rigging-your-3d-models-in-the-real-world/ | Rigging Your 3D Models In The Real-World | Marsh | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"3d model",
"animation",
"armature",
"autodesk maya",
"character rigging",
"computer animation",
"hall sensor",
"joints",
"kinematics",
"magnets",
"maya",
"puppet",
"puppetry",
"puppets",
"rigging"
] | Computer animation is a task both delicate and tedious, requiring the manipulation of a computer model into a series of poses over time saved as keyframes, further refined by adjusting how the computer interpolates between each frame. You need a rig (a kind of digital skeleton) to accurately control that model, and researcher [Alec Jacobson] and his team have
developed a hands-on alternative to pushing pixels around.
Control curves (the blue circles) allow for easier character manipulation.
The skeletal systems of computer animated characters consists of
kinematic chains
—joints that sprout from a root node out to the smallest extremity. Manipulating those joints usually requires the addition of easy-to-select control curves, which simplify the way joints rotate down the chain. Control curves do some
behind-the-curtain math
that allows the animator to move a character by grabbing a natural end-node, such as a hand or a foot. Lifting a character’s foot to place it on chair requires manipulating one control curve: grab foot control, move foot. Without these curves, an animator’s work is usually tripled: she has to first rotate the joint where the leg meets the hip, sticking the leg straight out, then rotate the knee back down, then rotate the ankle. A nightmare.
[Alec] and his team’s unique alternative is a system of interchangeable, 3D-printed mechanical pieces used to drive an on-screen character. The effect is that of digital puppetry, but with an eye toward precision. Their device consists of a central controller, joints, splitters, extensions, and endcaps. Joints connected to the controller appear in the 3D environment in real-time as they are assembled, and differences between the real-world rig and the model’s proportions can be adjusted in the software or through plastic extension pieces.
The plastic joints spin in all 3 directions (X,Y,Z), and record measurements via embedded Hall sensors and permanent magnets. Check out the accompanying article
here
(PDF) for specifics on the articulation device, then hang around after the break for a demonstration video.
[Thanks Sam] | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1779433",
"author": "Xyroze",
"timestamp": "2014-09-02T18:07:40",
"content": "One issue that stands out to me would be resetting the rigs back to specific positions. Instead of being able to save and easily restore specific frames, you’d have to manually reposition it as closely as ... | 1,760,376,083.233671 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/02/30-years-later-ted-finds-his-voice-a-commodore-story-part-i/ | 30 Years Later TED Finds His Voice: A Commodore Story Part I | Bil Herd | [
"Featured",
"News"
] | [
"commodore",
"Commodore TED",
"commodore VIC",
"MOS",
"sid",
"VIC"
] | MOS SID Chip Sound Interface Device
In the before-time (I’m talking about the 1980’s here), when home computers were considered to be consumer items, there was the Commodore C64. The C64 derived its vast array of superpowers from two Integrated Circuits (IC) named VIC and SID standing for Video Interface Chip and Sound Interface Device. Chip names were part of our culture back them, from VIC up to Fat AGNES in the end.
We spoke about VIC and SID as if they were people or distant relatives, sometimes cantankerous or prone to sudden outburst, but there was always an underlying respect for the chips and the engineers who made them. VIC and SID together made one of the world’s best video and sound experiences; movement and noise, musical notes and aliens.
I was going on my second week as a young upstart engineer working for Commodore in the offices above the MOS chip fab building, when the head of engineering and my boss, [Shiraz Shivji], pulled me into his office. It had been a blusterous two weeks with un-imagined technology ever-present and spilling out from the offices as one roamed the halls. Video games played in one out of every two doorways causing one to wonder how many people were working, how many just goofing off, and how many were doing both at the same time.
Rare Commodore C-364 Top Right PCB
Rare Commodore C-364 Top Left PCB
Rare Commodore C-364 Bottom PCB Jumpers partial due to make Magic Voice desktop app speak.
I had already been on my own whirlwind tour of duty in that short time. 25 years after I went to work for Commodore I found out by reading [Brain Bagnal’s] book
On the Edge
that I had been hired only as a lowly technician. I had been immediately upgraded to programmer on my first day to fill in for a programmer who was out on vacation. They put me in his chair in a small office with 2 other people. All of the offices held three people at most; if we could have dispensed with the door we undoubtedly would have had four stuffed in the same space.
This office was unlike any other office. This office had a large collection of
spider plants
. I felt blessed to be working at Commodore and even more so sitting in the only office with green growing things.
Standing Silent: Former MOS Semiconductor in King Of Prussia PA
I didn’t get any of my software assignment done, I literally couldn’t sit in a chair with so much wonder in the air, I kept ending up in the hardware labs. On Friday of the first week I became the victim of what we called back then a “drive-by”. The head of engineering was passing by me in the hall when he stopped my foursome wanting to talk about chip yield. Somehow out of this group I was the guy picked to represent the Engineering R&D Department at that particular moment.
I must have done well, and I’m sure I’ll share that full story another time. The short of it was that I solved a problem rather than just having averted blame. The next time I was pulled into [Shiraz’s] office felt like another drive-by. I sat down attentively ready for my new mission. What I lacked in training and experience I was going to try and make up with exuberance.
ZX Spectrum
[Shiraz] opened a Commodore-made file cabinet (and you thought we just made computers) and showed me a Timex/Sinclair Spectrum. There it sat on my side of the desk; the competition, those that would steal our lunch money to feed themselves. The Enemy.
Commodore C116 – 1980 Computer
I was put in charge of the newest computer in that moment, no doubt as punishment for spending all my time in the hardware lab. I was introduced to TED, the Text Display chip, our newest single chip computer system. I didn’t mention that we had previously met, afraid that the wrong words would get me thrown off the project as quickly as I had just come on board.
A bit more of the conversations and issues surrounding the Commodore TED family can be seen in
this video I made a few years back
.
The standard stories aside, something happened this year when I found a rare version of the TED machine and took it to VCF with me. This TED was different from most, this one could speak to you.
Texas Instruments TI Speak and Spell from the 1980’s
This is back in the day when only one device was known to speak, the TI Speak and Spell. So naturally Commodore went and hired, or stole, maybe coerced, the very engineering talent that gave the Speak and Spell his voice. And now TED would speak with that voice, I still remember the day TED cleared his throat and spoke, he mispronounced a few words but it was a wholly wondrous moment in time, or least in my life.
What did TED have to say? That’s a story for a different day. Keep reading with
Part 2 of my story
.
[Photo of MOS Building courtesy of Fran Blanche]
[Photo of C64 Motherboard courtesy of Bill Bertram] | 62 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1778927",
"author": "gravatarnonsense",
"timestamp": "2014-09-02T14:13:38",
"content": "Perhaps someone could proof-read the next instalment first.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1779570",
"author": "Chris C.",
... | 1,760,376,083.391147 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/02/developed-on-hackaday-chromefirefox-appsextensions-developers-needed/ | Developed On Hackaday: Chrome/Firefox Apps/Extensions Developers Needed | Mathieu Stephan | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"chrome extension",
"developed on hackaday",
"limpkin",
"mooltipass",
"password",
"password keeper"
] | The Hackaday community is currently working on an offline password keeper, aka
Mooltipass
. The concept behind this product is to minimize the number of ways your passwords can be compromised, while generating and storing long and complex random passwords for the different websites you use daily. The Mooltipass is a standalone device connected through USB and is compatible with all major operating systems on PCs, Macs and Smartphones. More details on the encryption and technical details can be found on our
github repository readme
or by having a look at all the articles
we previously published on Hackaday
.
Our beta testers are now using their prototypes daily and their feedback allowed us to considerably improve the Mooltipass. The firmware development is coming to an end as most functionalities have been implemented in the last few weeks. The development team is therefore turning his attention to the Chrome/Firefox plugins and
needs your help
to finish them in a timely manner. As you can guess, our goal is to provide a slick and intuitive interface for all of the Mooltipass features. If you have (a lot of) spare time, knowledge of the browsers APIs, feel free to leave a comment below with a valid email address! | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1778489",
"author": "Mathieu Stephan",
"timestamp": "2014-09-02T11:10:24",
"content": "… Or send me an email at Mathieu at hackaday",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1779234",
"author": "MrX",
"timestamp": "2014-09-02T16:3... | 1,760,376,083.097991 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/02/extrinsic-motivation-p-np-if-you-have-a-time-machine/ | Extrinsic Motivation: P = NP If You Have A Time Machine | Brian Benchoff | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"cpu",
"Flux Capacitor",
"the hackaday prize"
] | Not all of the entries to The Hackaday Prize were serious – at least we hope not – and
this one is the most entertaining of the bunch
. [Eduardo] wants to put a flux capacitor in a CPU pipeline. Read that last sentence again, grab a cup of coffee, mull it over, and come back. This post will still be here.
Assuming the events portrayed in
BTTF
could be real in some alternate history or universe, consider the properties of a DeLorean time machine: It requires 1.21 Jiggawatts (we’re assuming this is Gigawatts from now on), has a curb weight of about three thousand pounds with the nuclear reactor and/or hovercar conversion, and is able to travel in time ± 30 years. If the power required to travel time were to scale proportionally with mass, sending a CPU register back in time would only require a Watt or so. Yes, ‘ol [Doc Brown] had it wrong with wanting to send a car back in time – sending information back is much, much easier. Now, what do you do with it?
[Eduardo] is using this to speed up pipelined CPUs. In a CPU pipeline, instructions are executed in parallel, but if one instruction depends on the output of another instruction, bad things happen CPU designers have spent long, sleepless nights figuring out how to prevent this. Basically, a MEMS flux capacitor solves all outstanding problems in CPU design. It’s brilliant, crazy, and we’re glad to see it as an entry to The Hackaday Prize.
[Eduardo], though, isn’t seeing the forest for the trees. If you have a flux capacitor in your CPU,
why even bother with optimizing a CPU
? Just take a normal CPU, add a flux capacitor register, and have the output of a long and complex calculation write to the time traveling register. All calculations then happen instantly, your Ps and NPs are indistinguishable. All algorithms run in O(1), and the entire endeavor is a light-hearted romp for the entire family.
This project is
an official entry
to The Hackaday Prize that sadly didn’t make
the quarterfinal selection
. It’s still a great project, and worthy of a Hackaday post on its own. | 43 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1778000",
"author": "arachnidster",
"timestamp": "2014-09-02T08:39:44",
"content": "You can even use it to compute things that couldn’t be compuled in any reasonable amount of available time using a traditional computer, such as factoring enormous prime numbers.The method is describ... | 1,760,376,083.523079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/01/gaining-access-to-the-oculus-developer-database/ | Gaining Access To The Oculus Developer Database | Matt Terndrup | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"bsqli",
"csrf token",
"oculus developer portal",
"sql injection",
"sqlmap",
"x-forwarded-for"
] | One of the hackers over at Bitquark
popped a shell on on the Oculus Developer Portal
giving him full reign over the special admin panel inside. If he felt so inclined, this allowed him edit users, modify projects, add news articles, edit the dashboard, upload SDK files, and variety of other goodies.
The process started by using a SQL injector called BSQLi to test out parameters, cookies, and headers. Injecting into the header revealed that the Oculus team members were inserting
X-Forwarded-For
headers directly into the database without proper escape formatting. This got him in the door, and with a little assistance from sqlmap, the database was enumerated, and a pattern was recognized. Oculus passwords that were stored in the DB were heavily hashed. However, the user session variables remained unprotected. A SQL query was quickly built, the latest admin session was promptly extracted, and then the information was plugged in granting access to the portal. A bit more snooping around uncovered that the AJAX eval() preview script wasn’t secured by a
CSRF token
which could easily be exploited by a malicious hacker.
The findings were then turned into Facebook who paid the guy $15,000 for the first vulnerability plus the privilege escalation attack. $5,000 was then awarded for each subsequent SQL injection as the admin account takeover vulnerability that was found, giving the guy a nice payout for a week’s worth of work. | 23 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1777343",
"author": "sqelch",
"timestamp": "2014-09-02T05:12:04",
"content": "Awesome, more like this?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1777389",
"author": "Chaemelion",
"timestamp": "2014-09-02T05:21:31",
... | 1,760,376,083.446755 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/01/homemade-activity-monitor/ | Homemade Activity Monitor | Matt Terndrup | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"arduino pro mini",
"fitness tracker",
"MPU-6050",
"retroband"
] | A group of developers have uploaded a tutorial on Instructables showing the steps needed to develop a
homemade DIY fitness tracker
. The design is the second iteration of an Arduino-based
wearable smart watch project
of theirs. This time around, they opted to focus more on the monitoring system rather than a visual display. It is called the ‘RetroBand’ and records steps taken and calories burned by the user.
The microcontroller used is an Arduino Pro mini 3.3v. Accelerometer and gyro sensors were integrated to capture the movement of the ‘RetroBand.’ A wireless bluetooth module connects to an Android phone which presents the data through a
Play Store app
complete with graphs included. An enclosure was 3D printed. Everything is powered by a one cell Lithum-Polymer battery. The code for the project can be found on
Github
, and additional information with a how-to manual is on
their website
(which is in Korean, but can easily be translated through the browser). | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1777248",
"author": "Johnny",
"timestamp": "2014-09-02T04:50:18",
"content": "I’ve always wanted to be able to know if I was tired/hungry. Genius!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1778984",
"author": "TacticalNinja",
... | 1,760,376,083.05051 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/01/update-3d-printed-concrete-castle-completed/ | Update: 3D Printed Concrete Castle Completed | Marsh | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d printed concrete",
"3d printer",
"concrete",
"Concrete Printer"
] | After two years of dreaming, designing, and doing, [Andrey Rudenko] has finally
finished 3D printing his concrete castle.
We’re sure a few readers will race to the comments to criticize the use of “castle” as an acceptable descriptor, but they’d be missing the point. It’s been
only three months
since he was
testing the thing out in his garage
, and now there’s a beautiful, freestanding structure in his yard, custom-printed.
There are no action shots of the printer setup as it lays down fat beads of concrete, only close-ups of the nozzle, but the castle was printed on-site outdoors. It wasn’t, however, printed in one piece. [Andrey] churned out the turrets separately and attached them later. He won’t be doing that again, though, because moving them in place was quite the burden. On his webpage, [Andrey] shares some insight in a wrap-up of the construction process. After much experimentation, he settled on a layer height of 10mm with a 30mm width for best results. He also discovered that he could print much more than his original estimation of 50cm of vertical height a day (fearing the lower layers would buckle).
With the castle a success, [Andrey] plans to expand his website to include a “posting wall for new ideas and findings.” We’re not sure whether that statement suggests that he would provide open-source access to everything or just feature updates of his future projects.
[Andrey] used wooden supports to print concrete bridges.
We hope the former. You can check out its current format as
the Architecture Forum
, where he explains some of the construction capabilities and tricks used to build the castle.
His next project, a full-scale livable structure, will attempt to print 24/7 (weather permitting) rather than the stop-start routine used for the castle, which turned out to be the culprit behind imperfections in the print. He’ll have to hurry, though. [Andrey] lives in Minnesota, and the climate will soon cause construction to take a 6-month hiatus until warm weather returns. Be sure to check out his website for more photos and a retrospective on the castle project, as well as contact information—[Andrey] is reaching out to interested parties with the appropriate skills (and investors) who may want to help with the new project.
[via
3ders.org
]
[Thanks Brian] | 23 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1776251",
"author": "John Schuch @JohnS_AZ",
"timestamp": "2014-09-01T23:39:14",
"content": "Very cool. But I find if REALLY strange that there are no pictures or videos of the rig actually printing the castle out in the field. Makes me wonder … Bogus? Totally closed? Patents pendin... | 1,760,376,083.293173 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/01/thp-semifinalist-the-medicycle/ | THP Semifinalist: The Medicycle | Brian Benchoff | [
"The Hackaday Prize",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"electric vehicle",
"medicycle",
"semifinalist",
"the hackaday prize",
"unicycle"
] | Despite a seeming lack of transportation projects for The Hackaday Prize, there are a few that made it through the great culling and into the semifinalist round. [Nick], [XenonJohn], and [DaveW]’s project
is the Medicycle
. It’s a vehicle that will turn heads for sure, but the guys have better things in mind than looking cool on the road. He thinks this two-tire unicycle will be useful in dispatching EMTs and other first responders, weaving in and out of traffic to get where they’re needed quickly.
First things first. The one-wheeled motorcycle actually works. It’s basically the same as a self-balancing scooter; the rider leans forward to go forward, leans back to break, and the two tires help with steering. It’s all electronic, powered by a 450W motor. It can dash around alleys, parking lots, and
even gravel roadways
.
The
medi~
part of this cycle comes from a mobile triage unit tucked under the nose of the bike. There are sensors for measuring blood pressure and oxygen, heart rate, and ECG. This data is sent to the Medicycle rider via a monocular display tucked into the helmet and relayed via a 3G module to a physician offsite.
Whether the Medicycle will be useful to medics remains to be seen, but the guys have created an interesting means of transportation that is at least as cool as a jet ski. That’s impressive, and the total build cost of this bike itself is pretty low.
Video of the Medicycle in action below.
The project featured in this post is
a semifinalist in The Hackaday Prize.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOTRm-SxaxM | 50 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1775481",
"author": "Indyaner",
"timestamp": "2014-09-01T20:15:50",
"content": "I’m a big sucker for monowheels and will sure buy/build one in my lifetime.But what I want to know is: Why is the Medic-Topic so heavy here? What does a monoqheel brings to the table that we all waited f... | 1,760,376,083.668348 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/01/hydropower-from-a-washing-mashine/ | Hydropower From A Washing Mashine | Marsh | [
"green hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"generator",
"hydropower",
"off the grid",
"pelton",
"pelton wheel",
"washing machine",
"water",
"water-powered"
] | Living off the grid is an appealing goal for many in the hacker community, perhaps because it can fulfill the need to create, to establish independence, to prepare for the apocalypse, or some combination of all those things. [Buddhanz1] has been living off the grid for awhile now by harnessing power from a nearby stream with
an old washing-machine-turned-generator.
He started with a Fisher & Paykel smart drive, which he stripped down to the middle housing, retaining the plastic tub, the stator, the rotor, the shaft, and the bearings. After a quick spot check to ensure the relative quality of the stator and the rotor, [Buddhanz1] removed the stator and rewired it. Unchanged, the stator would output 0-400V unloaded at 3-4 amps max, which isn’t a particularly useful range for charging batteries. By rewiring the stator (demonstration video
here
) he lowered the voltage while increasing the current.
The key to this build is the inclusion of a
pelton wheel
—which we’ve seen before
in a similar build
. [Buddhanz1] channeled the water flow directly into the pelton wheel to spin the shaft inside the tub. After adding some silicon sealant and an access/repair hatch, [Buddhanz1] painted the outside to protect the assembly from the sun, and fitted a DC rectifier that converts the electricity for the batteries. With the water pressure at about 45psi, the generator is capable of ~29V/21A: just over 600W. With a larger water jet, the rig can reach 900W. Stick around for the video after the break.
[Thanks Paul] | 53 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1774893",
"author": "Joel",
"timestamp": "2014-09-01T17:12:07",
"content": "Haven’t this been featured here before? Anyway, how would one regulate the voltage and frequency for such a setup? How important is it that these variables stay stable in practice?",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,376,083.982393 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/01/extrinsic-motivation-smart-antenna-tracker-for-rc-aircraft/ | Extrinsic Motivation: Smart Antenna Tracker For R/C Aircraft | Adam Fabio | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"drone",
"first person view",
"FPV",
"radio control",
"rc",
"tracker"
] | Long distance FPV (First Person View) flying can be a handful. Keeping a video feed alive generally requires a high gain directional antenna. Going directional creates the chore of keeping the antenna pointed at the aircraft. [Brandon’s]
smart antenna tracker
is designed to do all that automatically. What witchcraft is this, you ask? The answer is actually quite simple: Telemetry! Many flight control systems have an optional telemetry transmitter. [Brandon] is using the 3DRobotics APM or PixHawk systems, which use 3DR’s 915 MHz radios.
The airborne radio sends telemetry data, including aircraft latitude and longitude down to a ground station. Equipped with a receiver for this data and a GPS of its own, the smart antenna tracker knows the exact position, heading and velocity of the aircraft. Using a pan and tilt mount, the smart antenna tracker can then point the antenna directly at the airborne system. Since the FPV antenna is co-located on the pan tilt mount, it will also point at the aircraft and maintain a good video link.
One of the gotchas with a system like this is dealing with an aircraft that is flying directly overhead. The plane or rotorcraft can fly by faster than the antenna system can move. There are a few commercial systems out there that handle this by switching to a lower gain omnidirectional whip antenna when the aircraft is close in. This would be a great addition to [Brandon’s] design. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1774323",
"author": "strider_mt2k",
"timestamp": "2014-09-01T14:07:26",
"content": "Super awesome.Older systems that tracked people in stadiums wearing wireless mics were simply pan/tilt camera systems with a directional antennas attached to them. -Keep the subject in frame and you ... | 1,760,376,083.819472 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/01/a-peach-of-a-homemade-parts-tumbler/ | A Peach Of A Homemade Parts Tumbler | Kristina Panos | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"dirt cheap",
"lapidary",
"parts tumbler",
"rock tumbler",
"tumbler"
] | [Chris] finds the average price of rock tumblers insulting. Almost as insulting, in fact, as prepackaged fruit salad made with Chinese peaches. While there may be little he can do about the peaches, he has given the finger to lapidary pricing by
making his own tumbler on the very cheap
.
Simply put, he drilled a hole in bottom of the peach vessel and then stuck a threaded rod through it. He held the rod in place with a nut and a washer. After securing the proper permits to source sand and water from his property, he put both in the jar along with some old nails that had paint and crud on them. [Chris] put the rod in the chuck of his drill and clamped the drill in his bench vise. Half an hour later, he had some nice, shiny nails. Make the jump to be amazed and entertained. If you prefer using balls, check out
this homemade mill
.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmaONLqAPmQ | 32 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1774058",
"author": "Kemp",
"timestamp": "2014-09-01T12:26:39",
"content": "“After securing the proper permits to source sand and water from his property”A little confused by that statement. I’m not in a position to watch the video right now, but surely for non-commercial use (and p... | 1,760,376,084.044411 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/01/hackaday-retro-edition-386-compaqs/ | Hackaday Retro Edition: 386 Compaqs | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"386",
"hackaday retro edition",
"retro edition",
"retrocomputing"
] | [Antoine] recently learned of a little challenge we have in the hinterlands of the Hackaday webosphere – what’s the oldest, or lowest spec hardware you have that can load this
our retro edition
? He has a pile of old PCs at his work, and with a lot of idle time at work because of summer, he decided to dig into that pile and
get a really old computer up on the Internet
.
While the pile of PCs didn’t have anything as old as he was expecting, [Antoine] did find an old Compaq from 1992. It has a 386DX running at 25MHz, 4MB of RAM, a 300 MB hard drive, VGA, and an Ethernet NIC. Gathering the requisite CRT monitor, PS/2 keyboard, and an AUI to a more modern Ethernet connector.
When getting these ancient computer on the Internet, the secret sauce is in the software configuration. [Antoine]’s box is running DOS 6.2, but was previously configured to connect to a Microsoft filesystem server on boot. This server was probably somewhere at the bottom of the same pile the Compaq was salvaged from, so rolling his own modern networking stack was the way to go. A driver for the NIC was downloaded on another computer and transferred via floppy, as was
mTCP
, the key to getting a lot of old PCs on the Internet. The browser is
Arachne
, and with the right configurations, everything worked perfectly.
[Antoine]’s efforts resulted in a computer that can easily handle the stripped down Hackaday retro edition, and can handle light browsing on Wikipedia. The effective download rate is something like a 33k modem; even with a fast (10M!) Ethernet connection, processing all the packets is taxing for this old machine. | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1773477",
"author": "Galane",
"timestamp": "2014-09-01T08:51:14",
"content": "Put a contemporary, high performance ethernet card in there, something like a 3-Com Etherlink III, and I bet it’d perform much better.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,376,084.165069 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/31/arduino-based-led-wedding-lights/ | Arduino-based LED Wedding Lights | Matt Terndrup | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"arduino",
"bluetooth",
"neopixel ring"
] | [Rob] created these
amazing Bluetooth controlled LED lights
for his daughter’s wedding adding a colorful ambient glow to the ceremony. Each item held a Neopixel ring and an Arduino microprocessor with a wireless module that could be individually addressed over a ‘mini-network.’ The main master station would receive commands from a Windows Phone. Usually we see Arduino-based projects being run with Android apps, so it’s nice to see that Microsoft is still present in the maker community.
The enclosures and translucent vases that sit atop the devices were 3D printed. All eight of the matrimonial units synchronized with each other, and the colors could be changed by sliding the settings bar on the app. [Rob] says that it was a lot of fun to build, and jokingly stated that it kept him “
out of all the less important aspects of the ceremony. (food choice, decor, venue, who to marry etc etc).
” The outcome was a beautiful arrangement of tabletop lighting for the wedding. A demo of [Rob]’s setup can be seen in the video below. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1773119",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2014-09-01T06:18:38",
"content": "“it’s nice to see that Microsoft is still present in the maker community.”– No it’s not.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1773140",
"author": "M... | 1,760,376,084.49843 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/31/cnc-castle-decoration-in-3d/ | Baby’s Room Gets A Palace With This CNC Castle Decoration | Bryan Cockfield | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"baby",
"cnc"
] | [Vegard] and his wife were expecting a baby girl, and decided to build a castle for their new daughter. As a prototyping geek with his own CNC machine in his apartment, he decided to take to Google Sketchup to design this
well-crafted castle decoration for his daughter’s room
.
The first challenge was figuring out what the castle would look like. [Vegard] had never been to Disney Land or World, and so had never actually seen any of the fairy-tale castles in real life. After experimenting with some paper versions, he settled on a design which incorporates multiple layers and can house lights within them.
The next step was to cut the final version on the CNC machine, then sand and paint the parts. After figuring out a way to mount the castle to the wall, some LEDs were added for effect, driven by an Arduino. The final version looks pretty good!
Hacking your kids’ room is great fun, and you get to keep making new stuff to remain age appropriate. We bet [Vegard] can’t wait until she’s old enough to enjoy
a marble-run that wraps the entire room
. In the mean time he can work on a classic
robot stroller
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1772636",
"author": "Digital Corpus",
"timestamp": "2014-09-01T02:59:44",
"content": "Sorry to be that “one guy,” but Disneyland is one word whereas Disney World is 2.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1773296",
"author": "Mix... | 1,760,376,084.208793 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/31/hackaday-links-august-30-2014/ | Hackaday Links: August 30, 2014 | Brian Benchoff | [
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"adafruit",
"CAN",
"Circuit Playground",
"Gerber viewer",
"retro edition",
"retrocomputing",
"sdr",
"software-defined radio",
"thermal imager",
"well pump"
] | Adafruit did another Circuit Playground,
this time concerning frequency
. If you’re reading this,
no
, it’s probably not for you, which is great because it’s not meant to be. If you have some kids, though, it’s great. Not-muppet robots and oscilloscopes. Just great.
The Hack42 space in Arnhem, Neterhlands recently got an offer: clean out a basement filled with old computer equipment,
and it’s yours
. Everything in the haul had to fit through an 80cm square door, and there are some very heavy, very rare pieces of equipment here. It’ll be a great (and massive) addition to
their museum
. There’s a few pics
from the cleanout here
and
here
.
[Mike] has been working on a project to convert gerber files into SVGs
and it’s great
.
[Carl] did
a roundup of all the currently available software defined radios
available. It’s more than just the RTL-SDR, HackRF, and BladeRF, and there’s also a list of modifications and ones targeted explicitly to the ham crowd.
This is a Facebook video, but it is pretty cool. It’s
a DIY well pump made in Mexico
. A few rubber disks made out of an old inner tube, a bit of PVC pipe, and a string is all you need to bring water to ground level.
What can you do with a cellphone equipped with a thermal imaging camera?
Steal PIN codes, of course
. Cue the rest of the blogosphere sensationalizing this to kingdom come. Oh, what’s that? Only Gizmodo took the bait?
About a year ago, we saw a pretty cool board made by [Derek] to listen in on the CAN bus in his Mazda 3.
Now it’s a Kickstarter
, and a pretty good one at that.
Your connectors
will never be this cool
. This is a teardown of a mind bogglingly expensive cable assembly, and
this thing is amazing
. Modular connectors, machined copper shields, machined plastic stress relief, and entire PCBs dedicated to two caps. Does anyone know what this mated to and what the list price was? | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1772116",
"author": "IwantaFreeOnyxTOOO",
"timestamp": "2014-08-31T23:47:05",
"content": "These guys are really lucky to get a several free SGI Onyx. Hope they still work. Stuff in the back is are some PDP parts?, which??",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,376,084.444747 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/31/flying-a-drone-with-an-oculus-rift/ | Flying A Drone With An Oculus Rift | Matt Terndrup | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"android",
"autonomous drone",
"oculus fpv",
"virtual reality"
] | Controlling autonomous vehicles remotely with the use of virtual reality headsets seems like an obvious next step. Already, a few UAV companies have begun experimenting with these types of ideas by integrating Oculus Rift developer kits into their hovering quadcopters and drones. Parrot released a video on their blog showing that they developed a
head-tracking system for their Bebop Drone
in an effort to bring FPV flights to fruition. It looks like a lot of fun and we want to try one of these out asap!
As for technical specifications, they can be found in the YouTube description of the video embedded below. A quick glance showed that the operating system is based on Android and uses WiFi to connect the handheld tablet to the autonomous vehicle floating above. The range is a whopping 2km, giving plenty of freedom to explore. Moving one’s head swivels the attached camera giving a more immersive flying experience.
This isn’t the first example of FPV drones that we have seen. Previously, we covered an
Oculus Rift + Head Tracking setup
and another
similar integration with a Black Armor Drone
. We are bound to see virtual reality equipment used to control drones more and more as developers get their hands on cutting edge hardware like the Oculus developer kit 2 hardware which is currently shipping. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1772007",
"author": "Alexander Mogren",
"timestamp": "2014-08-31T22:30:38",
"content": "This is what my next project is about. I am building the quadcopter now and will be buying the DK2 soon and somehow implement this. Everything is not clear yet how it will go about but I will fig... | 1,760,376,084.55013 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/31/a-remote-controlled-fully-functional-steam-powered-tank/ | A Remote Controlled, Fully Functional, Steam Powered Tank | James Hobson | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"regner 40451 piccolo steam engine",
"steam engine",
"steam power",
"steam-powered"
] | Steam power anything these days is pretty cool, but rarely have we ever seen such a complex build as this
steam powered, remote controlled 1/16th scale tank.
[Ian] is an electronics design engineer whose hobbies include messing around with steam power. The Steam Turret Tank is based on a 1/16th scale Tamiya King Tiger die-cast model tank. It features a 3.5″ diameter
marine boiler from MaccSteam
, which is a fully equipped miniature version of a real boiler, complete with pressure gauges, safety valves, and a ceramic burner. It can produce pressures of up to 70PSI (max 120PSI), but for this project, [Ian] is limiting it to around 30PSI.
A small 2″ diameter fuel tank contains a propane mixture to fuel the boiler. Two
Regner 40451 Piccolo steam engines
make up the drive train, with mechanical linkages controlled by servos to engage the various features. The tank can go forward, backward, spin in place, and the turret can both rotate and adjust trajectory. It also has controllable headlights, and can even “fire” the turret.
He’s put an amazing amount of detail into his build log, so much that you could potentially recreate this — if you were determined enough.
Believe it or not, this isn’t actually the first steam powered tank
we’ve shared
, but it’s probably the nicest. Though the
steam powered hexapod
is pretty cool too… | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1771515",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-08-31T17:52:50",
"content": "Very nice build, perfect for fighting baby tripods in the streets of Edwardian London! (Come on, if this ain’t steampunk I don’t know what is.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []... | 1,760,376,084.270129 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/31/green-light-your-way-to-an-easy-commute/ | Green Light Your Commute With America’s Unsecured Traffic Lights | Edward Becker | [
"Security Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"HackRF",
"ISM band",
"traffic light",
"university of michigan"
] | Remember that episode of
Leverage
(season 5, episode 3),
where Alec uses Marvin to wirelessly change all the street lights green so they can catch up to an SUV? And you scoffed and said “that’s so not real!”… well actually they got it right. A
new study out of the University of Michigan
(PDF warning), shows just how easy it is to make your morning commute green lights all the way.
The study points out that a large portion of traffic lights in the United States communicate with each other wirelessly over the 900Mhz and 5.8Ghz
ISM band
with absolutely no encryption. In order to connect to the 5.8Ghz traffic signals, you simply need the SSID (which is set to broadcast) and the proper protocol. In the study the researchers used a wireless card that is not available to the public, but they do point out that with a bit of social engineering you could probably get one. Another route is the
HackRF SDR
, which could be used to both sniff and transmit the required protocol. Once connected to the network you will need the default username and password, which can be found on the traffic light manufacturer’s website. To gain access to the 900Mhz networks you need all of the above and a 16-bit slave ID. This can be brute forced, and as the study shows, no ID was greater than 100. Now you have full access, not to just one traffic signal, but EVERY signal connected to the network.
Once on the network you have two options. The completely open debug port in the
VxWorks OS
which allows you to read-modify-write any memory register. Or by sending a(n) UDP packet where the last byte encodes the button pressed on the controller’s keypad. Using the remote keypad you can freeze the current intersection state, modify the signal timing, or change the state of any light. However the hardware Malfunction Management Unit (MMU) will still detect any illegal states (conflicting green or yellow lights), and take over with the familiar 4-way red flashing. Since a technician will have to come out and manually reset the traffic signal to recover from an illegal state, you could turn every intersection on the network into a 4-way stop.
So the next time you stop at a red light, and it seems to take forever to change, keep an eye out for the hacker who just green lit their commute.
Thanks for the tip [Matt] | 85 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "1771121",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2014-08-31T14:13:38",
"content": "The Italian Job?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1771865",
"author": "F",
"timestamp": "2014-08-31T21:03:26",
"content": "not ... | 1,760,376,084.390018 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/31/thp-semifinalist-fnir-brain-imager/ | THP Semifinalist: FNIR Brain Imager | Brian Benchoff | [
"Medical Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"brain scanning",
"fMRI",
"fNIR",
"neuroscience"
] | The current research tool du jour in the field of neuroscience and psychology is the fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging. It’s basically the same as the MRI machine found in any well equipped hospital, but with a key difference: it can detect very small variances in the blood oxygen levels, and thus areas of activity in the brain. Why is this important? For researchers, finding out what area of the brain is active in response to certain stimuli is a ticket to Tenure Town with stops at Publicationton and Grantville.
fMRI labs are expensive, and [Jeremy]’s
submission to The Hackaday Prize
is aiming to do the same thing much more cheaply, and in a way that will vastly increase the amount of research being done with this technique. How is he doing this? Using the same technology used in high-tech vein finders: infrared light.
[Jeremy]’s idea is much the same as a photoplethysmograph, better known as a pulse oximeter. Instead of relatively common LEDs, [Jeremy] is using near infrared LEDs, guided by a few papers from Cornell and Drexel that demonstrate this technique can be used to see blood oxygen concentrations in the brain.
Being based on light, this device does not penetrate deeply into the brain. For many use cases, this is fine: the motor cortex is right next to your skull, stretching from ear to ear, vision is taken care of at the back of your head, and memories are right up against your forehead. Being able to scan these areas noninvasively with a device you can wear has incredible applications from having amputees control prosthetics to controlling video game characters by just thinking about it.
[Jeremy]’s device is small, about the size of a cellphone, and uses an array of LEDs and photodiodes to assemble an image of what’s going on inside someone’s head. The image will be somewhat crude, have low resolution, and will not cover the entire brain like an fMRI can. It also doesn’t cost millions of dollars, making this one of the most scientifically disruptive entries we have for The Hackaday Prize.
You can check out [Jeremy]’s intro video below.
The project featured in this post is
a semifinalist in The Hackaday Prize. | 22 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1770955",
"author": "Ames grisanti",
"timestamp": "2014-08-31T12:24:19",
"content": "This is a cool idea, but is a bit misguided. The imaging technique proposed will not penetrate the skull, so it will not be capable of imaging blood flow in the brain, it will however possibly meas... | 1,760,376,084.611915 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/31/homemade-triple-monitor-mount-looks-professionally-made/ | Homemade Triple Monitor Mount Looks Professionally Made | James Hobson | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"monitor mount",
"triple monitor mount"
] | Reddit user [popson] just finished off this impressive
monitor mount build
. Designed completely in Sketchup, it’s adjustable and will fit monitors from 20″ to 27″.
While designing it they stuck with standard material sizes, and it makes use of a lot of cold rolled steel — box tube, angle, and tube. Wide aluminum channel provides the adjust-ability for various monitor sizes, and standard VESA monitor mounting brackets guarantee monitors will fit.
There’s a lot of welding involved, but like [popson] says, he’s no pro — it’s not that hard to do. Once everything was done, they painted it glossy black to protect it from rusting.
The adjustment knobs are even home-made, cut from a wooden plank using a hole saw, sanded, and varnished.
He’s even added RGB LED light strips onto each of the monitors for a fully immersed gaming experience.
Alternatively, if you can’t weld, we’ve seen some excellent monitor array mounts
made out of wood
, or
ones relying on metal strut channeling
, for easy assembly.
[via
Reddit
] | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1770530",
"author": "llsg",
"timestamp": "2014-08-31T08:14:25",
"content": "Painting is harmful to your health as over time paint emits toxic fumes to the enviroment. You should instead make it out of wood or 3D printed parts.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,376,084.665185 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/30/proximity-sensing-leds-can-add-a-new-dynamic-to-your-projects/ | Proximity Sensing LEDs Can Add A New Dynamic To Your Projects | James Hobson | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"photo-transistor",
"proximity sensing LEDs",
"QSD124-ND"
] | Looking for a fun and easy way to add a bit more interaction to your LED-laden projects? Why not turn them into
proximity sensing LEDs?
Our hacker, [Will], is just getting into designing his own PCBs. He was looking for a simple project to try out that wouldn’t be too hard to design and manufacture a PCB for, so he came up with this clever little interactive LED array.
It’s actually a very simple circuit which also makes it super easy to build on a prototyping breadboard. Each proximity sensing LED is made up of five components. Three resistors, an LED, an IR LED, and a photo transistor. The IR LED is chosen specifically for the type of photo transistor being used — in this case, it emits a wavelength of 880nm, which is the type of light the photo transistor recognizes.
These components are wired in a manner that the IR LEDs are always on. The normal LED is wired in series with the photo transistor, and thus the LED only turns on when the photo transistor sees reflected 880nm light bounced back at it by whatever object you wave over top.
What would be really cool is if you added some 555 timers to the mix and had a delay before the LEDs fade away — then you could have a huge array that leaves motion trails long after you’ve triggered the sensors!
[via
Dangerous Prototypes
] | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1770118",
"author": "Khordas",
"timestamp": "2014-08-31T05:10:04",
"content": "555 timers are cool, but why not just put a capacitor in parallel with the output LED to give it some fade time?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "17... | 1,760,376,084.720714 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/30/wifi-raspberry-pi-touchscreen-camera/ | WiFi Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Camera | Matt Terndrup | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"adafruit",
"PiTFT Mini Kit",
"raspberry pi",
"wifi adapter"
] | Adafruit has a tutorial on their site that shows how to fashion together a
cloud-connected, point-and-shoot camera
. The best part of this project is that it can be customized to the heart’s content, unlike traditional digital cameras or smartphones. The integrated touchscreen and open-source computing allows for Instagram-like filters that can be scrolled through easily. No case is needed, but a 3D printed one can be attached for a more polished outcome.
The backup system of this Raspberry Pi-enabled device connects wirelessly to the internet and uploads the photos through the use of a Dropbox API. This functionality is great for syncing the camera to a cloud based server which then can be turned into a makeshift picture database for a website. The camera might be good for recording timelapse photography as well where a program could automatically create GIFs from the backup photos. It doesn’t seem like it would be hard to make either, especially because Adafruit pretty much always provides great documentation. Their videos are usually good too. The one posted below is relatively short, but provides enough information to see how it works. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1769688",
"author": "onebiozz",
"timestamp": "2014-08-31T02:20:02",
"content": "i have seen a few of these around, not the most practical but a fun little project",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1770843",
"author": "Lord Not... | 1,760,376,085.111407 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/30/rapid-fire-mod-for-a-wireless-mouse/ | Rapid Fire Mod For A Wireless Mouse | Rich Bremer | [
"computer hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"keyboard and mouse hack",
"mouse",
"optical mouse",
"rapid fire",
"rapid fire switch"
] | Sometimes changing your computer mouse can be uncomfortable for a while until you get used to the replacement. It may also take some time to get used to new features or the lack of features the new mouse has. [Jon] bought an awesome wireless mouse that he really likes but it is missing one critical feature: rapid fire for gaming. He previously modded his old wired mouse to have a rapid fire button using a 555 timer. That worked fine as the mouse ran off the USB’s 5 volts, and that’s the voltage the 555 timer needed. The new wireless mouse has a 1.5 volt battery and can not support the 555 timer.
What’s a gamer to do
?
[Jon] searched around the ‘net but could not find any wireless rapid fire mods. Eventually, he did find a low-voltage variation called the LMC555 and ordered a few for his project. The new wireless mouse was taken apart in order to find out how the mouse buttons work. In this case, the signal pin is pulled low when the mouse button is pushed. Now that it is known how the mouse button works, just a couple of resistors, a capacitor, an NPN transistor and a push button switch are all that are necessary to finish up this mod. When the push button is pressed, the LMC555 timer activates the transistor in order to ground the mouse button signal pin. This happens to the tune of 1236 times a minute! That is a lot of rapid firing.
The few components were soldered up neatly and packed into the limited spare area inside the mouse. A hole drilled in the side of the mouse’s housing holds the new rapid fire push button in an ergonomically pleasing location.
Earlier, we mentioned [Jon] has done this mod before on a wired mouse. He learned about that project
here on Hackaday
. Check it out if your wired mouse is craving a rapid fire button.
Video after the break…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfyascZjakI | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1769252",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2014-08-30T23:14:55",
"content": "LOL, and let the fire begin ….He could have done it with an Arduino!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1769321",
"author": "Jeremy Southard",
... | 1,760,376,084.962534 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/30/thp-semifinalist-retro-populator-a-pick-and-place-retrofit-for-a-3d-printer/ | THP Semifinalist: Retro Populator, A Pick And Place Retrofit For A 3D Printer | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"cnc",
"pick and place",
"retro populator",
"the hackaday prize"
] | A huge theme of The Hackaday Prize entries is making assembly of electronics projects easier. This has come in the form of soldering robots, and of course pick and place machines. One of the best we’ve seen is the
Retro Populator
, a project by [Eric], [Charles], [Adam], and [Rob], members of the
Toronto Hacklab
. It’s a machine that places electronic components on a PCB with the help of a 3D printer
The Retro Populator consists of two major parts: the toolhead consists of a needle and vacuum pump for picking up those tiny surface mount parts. This is attaches to a quick mount bolted right to the extruder of a 3D printer. The fixture board attaches to the bed of a 3D printer and includes tape rails, cam locks, and locking arms for holding parts and boards down firmly.
The current version of the Retro Populator, with its acrylic base and vacuum pen, is starting to work well. The future plans include tape feeders, a ‘position confirm’ ability, and eventually part rotation. It’s a very cool device, and the ability to produce a few dozen prototypes in an hour would be a boon for hackerspaces the world over.
You can check out a few videos of the Retro Populator below.
The project featured in this post is
a semifinalist in The Hackaday Prize. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1769606",
"author": "David Cook",
"timestamp": "2014-08-31T01:38:47",
"content": "When I consider the potential top 5 projects, this makes my list.• Supplementing an existing platform saves space in the workshop• Supplementing an existing platform also allows improvements to the exi... | 1,760,376,084.8652 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/30/homemade-superhero-james-diy-exoskeleton/ | Homemade Superhero: [James’] DIY Exoskeleton | Marsh | [
"Tool Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"exoskeleton",
"exosuit",
"iron man",
"iron man suit",
"Pneumatic cylinder",
"poweredexoskeleton"
] | We’re not just a bunch of monkeys with typewriters here at Hackaday; we don our hacker hat whenever our schedules allow. Or, in the case of Hackaday’s own [James Hobson]—aka [The Hacksmith]—he dons
this slick exoskeleton prototype instead
,turning himself into a superhero. Inspired by the exoskeleton from the film
Elysium
, this project puts [James] one step closer to the greater goal of creating an Iron Man-style suit.
For now, though, the exoskeleton is impressive enough on its own. The build is a combination of custom-cut perforated steel tubing and pneumatic cylinders, attached to a back braces of sorts. In the demonstration video, [James] stares down 170 pounds of cinder block affixed to a barbell, and although he’s no lightweight, you can tell immediately from his reaction how much assistance the exoskeleton provides as [James] curls the makeshift weights over and over.
And that’s only at half pressure.
[James] thinks he could break the 300 pound mark of lifting if he didn’t break his legs first.
There’s plenty of behind-the-scenes footage of the build process to be had, so make sure you stick around after the jump for a sizable helping of videos, and
check out [The Hacksmith’s] website
for more of his projects.
The final exoskeleton test:
Some exoskeleton build log videos. More on his channel! | 44 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1768461",
"author": "michael",
"timestamp": "2014-08-30T17:06:13",
"content": "not sure whats worse….how shoddily built that contraption looks….or the fact that he needs an exoskeleton to lit 170 lbs…..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,376,085.186721 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/30/voices-from-the-past-recovering-audio-from-wire-recordings/ | Voices From The Past: Recovering Audio From Wire Recordings | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"audacity",
"Webster Chicago",
"wire recorder"
] | [Nick]’s grandfather was quite the old school hacker. In the 1940s, he built his own wire recorder and microphone to capture everything from his children’s Chirstmas wishes to his favorite songs and programs from the radio. Only 20 or so spools have survived and were doomed to silence until [Nick] was able to
find a vintage wire recorder, restore it, and feed digitized audio into Audacity
.
Once he restored one of the two machines that he was able to get his hands on, [Nick] was in business. Since his grandfather also rolled his own spools, [Nick] had to build a playback spindle that would hold them. His uncle found an old mechanical counter to do the job, which [Nick] secured to the workbench. He fed the output from the wire recorder’s playback head into a guitar pre-amp, effectively digitizing the audio for recording in Audacity.
After playing all the spools, he adjusted the levels where necessary and cleaned up the recordings. His biggest challenge was feeding the wires back on to their original spools, which he managed with an electric drill and a rubber grommet. Be sure to check out the mp3 clips on [Nick]’s page. If you’re in the mood for old audio hacking stories,
here’s one about building a tape recorder in 1949
. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1768140",
"author": "ANC",
"timestamp": "2014-08-30T14:32:13",
"content": "This is so hard-core! Awesome job. Now, in 70 years, will his grandchildren have better luck with the mp3 CD’s or the old, dusty spools of wire?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,376,085.237299 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/30/extrinsic-motivation-off-grid-solar-system-monitoring-solution/ | Extrinsic Motivation: Off-grid Solar System Monitoring Solution | Matt Terndrup | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"photovoltaic",
"solar cell"
] | This solar monitoring project
was entered in The Hackaday Prize and didn’t make the semifinal cut, but it is worth featuring on the site because we think that it is pretty cool. The idea started all the way back in May of 2013 when [Michel] was planning to attempt to bring his house totally off the grid in an effort to become as independent from the local Utility company as possible. After a bit of calculating, he figured out that the solar cells on the roof could potentially provide about 80% of the power needed, which of course took into account the lack of sun during the winter months in his area.
[Michel] posts a lot of the technical details on the Hackaday.io page and lists the components that were required to set up this system. At night, a lighting mechanism shows whether the building is being run off of the Photovoltaic (PV) System or if it is getting power from the grid. He states in the projects logs why it is important to monitor the solar cells and provides some amazing graphs of the data that was recorded through the energy-intelligence platform that he integrated into his home. An example can be seen posted below. A few quick specs of the project include the solar field being made of 16 solar modules providing 4300 Wp (Watts – peak) of electrical power. The system comes with a comprehensive remote control as well. We like this idea a lot. Now, would you install something like this up on your own home or office? Let us know in the comments.
This project is
an official entry
to The Hackaday Prize that sadly didn’t make
the quarterfinal selection
. It’s still a great project, and worthy of a Hackaday post on its own. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1767910",
"author": "bat",
"timestamp": "2014-08-30T12:26:42",
"content": "nice job!the graphs clearly shows what are the downsides of an off-grid pv islands.of course it depends on the local regulation whether one is allowed to feed backjuice to the grid. but if you can have an on-... | 1,760,376,085.46058 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/30/purely-mechanical-display-uses-804-balls-to-create-a-kinetic-display/ | Purely Mechanical Display Uses 804 Balls To Create A Kinetic Display | James Hobson | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"breaking wave",
"kinetic display"
] | Whoa. That’s all we have to say about this art installation.
Oops, did we say
art?
Don’t let that three letter word scare you, because
this project called Breaking Wave
is nothing short of an absolutely incredible,
fully mechanical
, machine.
It’s kind of hard to tell in the picture, but there are 804 rusty spheres hanging from cables which make up the pixels of this display. Each of those cables
could
be attached to a servo for a very simple, digital-to-analog display — it’d be expensive, but you could display anything. But no, that’s not how this works. Instead of each of those cables is wrapped around a different size drum or roller, which are all connected to a large central hub motor driving a cam.
As the beastly hub-motor spins, the display morphs and changes shapes. It is all pre-programmed manually by varying the sizes of the rollers and the lengths of the cables, a mind numbing task of its own. What’s more, because it is three dimensional, you can only see the patterns if you’re standing in the right place at the right time.
And the artist statement? Actually kind of makes sense:
Breaking Wave tells the story of the search for patterns, and the surprising results that come by changing our point of view. 804 suspended spheres move in a wave-like formation. When the wave crests and breaks, the balls hover momentarily in a cloud. From almost anywhere in the room, this cloud is purely chaotic, but step into one of two hidden spots, and this apparent chaos shows a hidden pattern.
Scientists search through billions of experimental data points in order to find patterns to develop new drugs, to treat Multiple Sclerosis, Cancer, and other diseases. Without a particular framework or perspective, these are just 0’s and 1’s, with no form or information. But with the perspective of an understanding of molecular dynamics, these data points create a clear picture about the hidden dynamics within the body, and allow scientists to craft drugs to successfully treat these diseases.
And how it was made:
[Thanks Scott!] | 32 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1767384",
"author": "ioch",
"timestamp": "2014-08-30T08:25:54",
"content": "I amazed. Its all implemented in hardware. I didn’t knew someone still do this anymore. I thought its all arduinos and steppers nawadays",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,376,085.40446 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/29/3d-printed-bump-keys/ | 3D Printed Bump Keys | Matt Terndrup | [
"lockpicking hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"bump key",
"lock picking"
] | Getting past a locked door is easy if you have the right tools. It’s just a matter of knowing how to adjust the pins inside to an even level while turning the mechanism at the same time when everything is perfectly in place. That’s the beauty of a bump key. You never have to see the actual key or what it looks like. And with a simple hit to the back of the key, and bumping it just enough, the lock can magically be opened.
Lock picking items like this can be ordered online for a couple of dollars, or as [Jos Weyers] and [Christian Holler] showed in
a recent Wired article
, alternatively you can print your own at home. The video of these 3D printed keys (which can be viewed below) attempts to prove that a person can unlock a door with plastic, which was a little bit surprising to us because it seems like the edges would break off right away. But as it turns out, a thin plastic bump key can be made and does function. Not sure how long these keys can last though, but sometimes all you really need is a one time use when trying to open a specific, tricky lock.
As the article states, “
Weyers and Holler aren’t trying to teach thieves and spies a new trick for breaking into high-security facilities; instead, they want to warn lockmakers about the possibility of 3-D printable bump keys so they might defend against it.
” Although this information is geared towards lockmakers, we see our Hackaday readers finding this data useful as well. Organizers of hackerspaces who hold regular lock-picking events might want to print their own keys and teach classes centered around security. The uses for this are boundless in regards to educating the public about how locks truly work.
We searched through Shapeways, i.Materialise, and Thingiverse searching for 3D bump key STL files and came up short handed. So if you decide to create your own version of this, be sure to upload the models somewhere so other people can learn from it! | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1766996",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2014-08-30T05:50:46",
"content": "“passed” -> “past”kthxbye",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1770247",
"author": "Tony",
"timestamp": "2014-08-31T06:06:06",
"c... | 1,760,376,085.295767 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/29/the-chalkjet-an-ink-jet-printer-for-the-streets/ | The ChalkJET: An Ink Jet Printer For The Streets | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"Chalk printer",
"Chalkjet",
"chalkspray",
"ME102"
] | Need to do some guerrilla street advertising? What you need is the ChalkJET 9000,
an ink jet printer on wheels.
Using two Arduino Duemilanoves for the brains, this little cart features eight cans of spray chalk which can be individually actuated. Small solenoids pull down on levers in order to spray the cans. Encoders on the wheels of the cart keep track of the spacing in between each pixel as the cart gets dragged along.
A small LCD mounted on the handle allows you to select which text you would like to print, but it doesn’t look like manual entry of new words is possible — You’ll need to load up a library while connected to a computer before hitting the streets!
This was the final project for four UC Berkeley mechanical engineering students back in 2009. Can you imagine throwing a larger version of this onto a car?
[via
HackedGadgets
] | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1766599",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2014-08-30T03:08:27",
"content": "2009? What is this? Hack-a-decade?Fail for using two Ardunii, and fail for no free text entry.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1766851",
"... | 1,760,376,085.34236 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/29/googlexs-project-wing/ | Google[x]’s Project Wing | Matt Terndrup | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"autonomous delivery",
"google x",
"project wing"
] | Autonomous delivery is the way of the future. Soon, flocks of flying hover crafts will glide through the air like acrobatic birds of flight bringing home items to those who need them. Whether those objects be food, or electronics, or clothes, pretty much anything under the weight limit of these devices can be sent to people anywhere nearby.
Now,
Google has stepped into the ring
saying that they are interested in delivering products to individuals in the next few years through an innovation they are calling Project Wing. It aspires to reduce the friction of moving things around. Google released a video introducing the idea which shows a man calling up a service asking for some food for his dog. Instantly, a small delivery vehicle took off from the ground and flew to the intended destination dropping off a package containing delicious doggy treats.
Google clearly states in the video that this type of system is still years away from a readily available consumer product, but it is the first prototype that the company wants to stand behind. Google has marketed the design pretty well so far, and the musical use of [Norman Greenbaum]’s classic 1969 rock song ‘Spirit in the Sky’ was an obvious, yet totally awesome addition to the video. We are curious how services similar to this will affect postal delivery jobs in the future, and also what the legal ramifications will be, but all that information will surely be discussed very soon. In the meantime though, Google has released an
interest form
that will take the names and emails of those who would like to partner with them in an effort to bring autonomous product delivery to the world. | 52 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "1765892",
"author": "Bill Jackson",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29T23:04:00",
"content": "Yes, I am going to develop a project Wing-Hawk, which will attack a wing craft and steal the payload and bring it to me secret abode…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,376,085.547267 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/29/thp-entry-level-ultrawideband-radio/ | THP Semifinalist: Level, The Ultrawideband Radio Module | Brian Benchoff | [
"Radio Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"radio",
"radio module",
"tv whitespace"
] | When you start looking into the Internet of Things, the first thing you realize is that despite there being grand ideas for Internet connected everything, nobody knows how these things will actually connect to the Internet. There are hundreds of different radio protocols being pushed, and dozens of networking schemes currently in development. The solution to this is a radio module that can do them all, talking to all these modules and serving them up to the Internet. This is the idea of
[Hunter Scott]’s Level
, a radio module with a frequency range of 30 MHz to 4.4 GHz. That’ll cover just about everything, including some interesting applications in the TV whitespace.
[Hunter]’s module is based around TI’s CC430, basically an MSP430 microcontroller and a
CC1101 transceiver
smooshed together into a single piece of silicon. There’s bit of filtering that makes this usable in the now sorta-empty TV whitespace spectrum, something that a lot of IoT and wireless networking protocols are looking at.
If the form factor of the device looks familiar, that’s because it is; the board itself is Arduino compatible, but not with Arduinos themselves; it will accept
shields
, though, meaning building a bridge to Ethernet or WiFi to whatever radios this board is talking to is really just a change in firmware.
This board is excellent for experimenting with different radio modules, yes, but it’s also great for experimenting with different radio protocols. [Hunter] has been looking around
at different mesh networking protocols
.
You can check out [Hunter]’s two minute video overview, along with a more detailed overview of the schematic below.
The project featured in this post is
a semifinalist in The Hackaday Prize. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1765580",
"author": "yohan",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29T20:31:14",
"content": "Just curious, how does it handle the physical length for antennas?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1765704",
"author": "qwerty",
"tim... | 1,760,376,085.60532 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/29/hacklet-13-chopper-royalty/ | Hacklet #13 – Chopper Royalty | Adam Fabio | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"Chopper",
"hacklet",
"jet",
"led",
"light pipe",
"motorcycle",
"The Hacklet",
"turbojet"
] | This week’s Hacklet focuses on two wheeled thunder! By that we mean some of the motorcycle and scooter projects on
Hackaday.io
.
We’re going to ease into this Hacklet with [greg duck’s]
Honda Sky Restoration
. Greg is giving a neglected 15-year-old scooter some love, with hopes of bringing it back to its former glory. The scooter has a pair of stuck brakes, a hole rusted into its frame, a stuck clutch, and a deceased battery, among other issues. [Greg] already stripped the body panels off and got the rear brake freed up. There is still quite a bit of work to do, so we’re sure [Greg] will be burning the midnight 2 stroke oil to complete his scooter.
Next up is [Anders Johansson’s] jaw dropping
Gas turbine Land Racing Motorcycle
. [Anders] built his own gas turbine engine, as well as a motorcycle to go around it. The engine is based upon a Garrett TV94, and directly powers the rear wheel through a turboshaft and gearbox. [Anders] has already taken the bike out for a spin, and he reports it “Pulled like a train” at only half throttle. His final destination is the Bonneville salt flats, where he hops to break the 349km/h class record. If it looks a bit familiar that’s because this one did have
its own feature last month
.
[GearheadRed] is taking a safer approach with
FireCoates
, a motorcycle jacket with built-in brake and turn signal indicators. [GearheadRed] realized that EL wire or LED strip wouldn’t stand up to the kind of flexing the jacket would take. He found his solution in flexible light pipes. Lit by an LED on each end, the light pipes glow bright enough to be seen at night. [GearheadRed] doesn’t like to be tied down, so he made his jacket wireless. A pair of bluetooth radios send serial data for turn and brake signals generated by an Arduino nano on [Red’s] bike. Nice work [Red]!
[Johnny
] rounds out this week’s Hacklet with his
$1000 Future Tech Cafe Racer From Scratch
. We’re not quite sure if [Johnny] is for real, but his project logs are entertaining enough that we’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Down to his last $1000, [Johnny] plans to turn his old Honda xr650 into a modern cafe racer. The new bike will have electric start, an obsolete Motorola Android phone as its dashboard, and a 700cc hi-comp Single cylinder engine at its heart. [Johnny] was last seen wandering the streets of his city looking for a welder, so if you see him, tell him we need an update on the bike!
That’s it for this week. If you liked this installment
check out the archives
. We’ll see you next week on The Hacklet – bringing you the Best of
Hackaday.io
! | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1765136",
"author": "greg_duck",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29T17:35:13",
"content": "For reference: I have just burned some of the 2 stroke oil in the furnace I am working on (to be on IO before too long)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,376,085.667656 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/29/bit-banging-ethernet-on-an-attiny85/ | Bit-banging Ethernet On An ATTiny85 | Mathieu Stephan | [
"hardware"
] | [
"bit banging",
"ethernet"
] | [Cnlohr] just published an ingenious but dangerous way to
send Ethernet packets using an ATTiny85
. The ATtiny directly drives one pair of differential TX wires of a standard Ethernet cable. Doing so will force the TX signal ground to be the same as the ATTiny’s and in some cases may put 48V on your AVR if your cable is plugged into a Power Over Ethernet switch… which may be a problem.
In the video embedded below [cnlhor] explains that the microcontroller is clocked at 20Mhz to bit-bang the Manchester encoded electrical signals. Using a neat trick his home switch will detect his platform as a 10MBit Ethernet switch which can then send hard-coded packets to his computer. As you can guess, each of this packets takes quite a bit of space inside the ATTiny’s flash memory: 2+Kbytes. All of the code used may be downloaded on the
creator’s GitHub repository
, though he constantly warned us that it shouldn’t be used for real life applications.
Edit: One of our readers also let us know of a similar awesome project called the
IgorPlug-UDP
. Make sure to check it out! | 56 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "1764618",
"author": "ArchimedesPi",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29T14:03:53",
"content": "That’s extremely clever! Kudos to [Cnlohr].",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1764621",
"author": "arachnidster",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29... | 1,760,376,086.084882 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/29/extrinsic-motivation-daisy-kite-airborne-wind-turbine/ | Extrinsic Motivation: Daisy Kite Airborne Wind Turbine | Matt Terndrup | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"bicycle wheel",
"rollerblade wheels",
"Wind turbine"
] | Got another THP entry for ya’ll that didn’t quite make the cut, but is worth sharing. This time we are featuring
an airborne wind turbine
that, as the project description states, ‘can harvest strong and expansive wind safely and efficiently.’
Ram air kites spin a parachute that in turn transfers torque that can be captured on the ground. In a true hacker spirit way, the rig developed by [Rod] utilizes bike wheels and rollerblade wheels in the design. This homemade generator needs a lot of space to be deployed, but it looks like a nice solution to airborne energy harvesting. [Rod] goes over the specifications for the project throughout the build logs on the Hackaday.io page and includes a couple of video describing how it was created and showing what happens when it is released into the air currents outside. Diagrams and models of the open source airborne wind energy generation device are also included.
Below are a few of his videos. Watch them over, and let us know what you think.
This project is
an official entry
to The Hackaday Prize that sadly didn’t make
the quarterfinal selection
. It’s still a great project, and worthy of a Hackaday post on its own.
Description Video:
Demo Video: | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1764261",
"author": "Marc",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29T11:33:50",
"content": "so how much power does it generate?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1764267",
"author": "YourIEEEmom",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29T11:36:01",
"... | 1,760,376,085.837017 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/29/the-pac-man-bus-stop-for-gamers-at-heart/ | The Pac-Man Bus Stop For Gamers At Heart | Matt Terndrup | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"bus stop display",
"MaKey MaKey",
"norwegian creations",
"pac-man",
"trondheim maker faire",
"trondheim makers"
] | Waiting for the bus can be drag. You never know exactly when it will come, always looking down the road hoping to spot the vehicle as it turns a corner. When it doesn’t show up right away, the result is usually staring down at a ‘smart’ phone checking it for any incoming messages. Directing the attention up might produce a list of estimated arrival times and maybe even a map showing the routes that are taken throughout the day. But there is only
one bus stop in the entire world
, that we know of, where people can play Pac-Man while they watch for the bus to arrive.
It was created by the combining efforts of two maker communities in town. Norwegian Creations and
Trondheim Makers
teamed up to build an interactive gaming display that gave individuals the ability to pass the time by directing the famous video gaming character around a blue maze, eating yellow pellets and avoiding colorful ghosts along the way. This display was also made to raise awareness for the upcoming
Trondheim Maker Faire
that year. They choose Pac-Man as the foundation and integrated a slightly modified invention kit called
Makey Makey
with a Raspberry Pi running
RetroPie
into the actual frame of the bus stop. The people involved must have had some serious business connections in order to get approval for that. They figuratively hacked into the bus stop’s power grid gaining the necessary 230 volts required to energize the custom gaming unit. Once hooked up, anyone standing by could play Pac-Man until the bus came. [Ragnar] at Norwegian Creations told us in an email that future ideas of theirs include syncing up several stops that can communicate with each other, which could lead to some great multiplayer interactions. They also have a fantastic video that they uploaded that shows the building process of their current design. Check that out below, and let us know what other types of games you would like to see at a bus stop near you.
[vimeo
http://vimeo.com/104494655%5D | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1764236",
"author": "No Hack",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29T11:25:37",
"content": "it certainly is cool!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1764796",
"author": "etopsirhc",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29T15:08:42",
"content": "th... | 1,760,376,085.886365 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/28/led-light-staffs-for-the-ultimate-portable-rave/ | LED Light Staffs For The Ultimate Portable Rave | Matt Terndrup | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"arduino pro micro",
"Crashspace",
"fire poi",
"led poi",
"light staff",
"Neopixels",
"Teensy 3.0"
] | [risknc] and [mpinner] have been working on a couple of LED light staff designs for a while now and have come up with a
prototype that can light up the night
with an array of streaming colors. There is even a dial that can turn up and down the brightness.
Originally, [risknc] began developing his own project at SpaceX and dove further into the idea right before Burning Man. The visual effects, when twirled through the air, produced an extremely bright flow of energy that can be seen circling around the user.
The 8ft long carbon fiber staff was stuffed to the edges with RGB LEDs. Neopixel strips at 60 LED per meter were used to alternate between colors, and a whole bunch of white capable LEDs were embedded into the staff as well. One of early designs was purposefully left at a local hackerspace called Crashspace in Culver City, California. Photos of community members trying it out surfaced on the
hackerspace’s website
. In addition, a description of the staff and a few high-quality photos of the ‘Sparkle Stick’ were uploaded on to the
Suprmasv projects page
. Searching through the pictures reveal an instance that shows the LED light staff being used during a flow session with a fire poi spinner in the background. Perhaps there is a way to combine LEDs and fire? Anyways, a later version of the staff was tested out at the 2014 Maker Faire in San Francisco.
Full specs and logs of the project can be found on Hackaday.io. A quick video of [mpinner]’s light staff being spun around comes up after the break. In the video, it looks like they are testing it out outside of Crashspace as they run through the darkness of the alleyway in the back, lighting up the area with a nice LED glow. Plans for the future include building a bunch of them and wirelessly syncing them up. CAD models will be uploaded soon as well. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1764013",
"author": "millsy",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29T10:03:11",
"content": "Wow that thing looks so much better than I thought it would. As an avid fire staffer who’s fire desires are commonly curtailed at major festivals, I’ll be looking to recreate my own version of this asap."... | 1,760,376,085.971114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/28/make-your-own-mac-pi-for-some-desktop-nostalgia/ | Make Your Own Mac Pi For Some Desktop Nostalgia | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"mac os 7",
"mac Pi",
"PiTFT",
"Raspberry Pi B+"
] | Do you miss your Mac Classic? Well if you’re looking for a fun little project, why not build yourself a
Mini Mac Pi
that emulates Mac OS 7?
It’s a fairly simple project that makes use of the Raspberry Pi B, a 320×240 2.8″ touchscreen LCD (the PiTFT), a lithium-ion battery, a buck-boost circuit and of course, a power switch. The cute enclosure is made by 3D printing, and all the files are available on
Thingiverse
— they’ve been sliced up in a way that they will be printable on most consumer printer bed sizes.
Once everything is assembled, you’ll need to run
Mini vMac
alongside Raspbian in order to run Mac OS 7. There are a few caveats though — The original resolution is 512×342, so there’s a bit of screen clipping that occurs. There’s also minor application support, but for the purpose of nostalgia, we think the included selection is more than enough to satisfy most memories.
The Mac Classic was a specific model of Mac, and the form factor between the 128/512/Plus, SE, and Classic lines are *extremely* similar and often confused. This design features the post-Snow White design language found only in the Mac Classic, and can rightfully be referred to as such. -ed | 10 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1762895",
"author": "Sam Traeger (@SamSkjord)",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29T02:27:17",
"content": "I want one for no valid reason, luckily that’s never stopped me before.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1762924",
"author": "nyd... | 1,760,376,086.233049 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/28/thp-semifinalist-theta-printer/ | THP Semifinalist: Theta Printer | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"3d printer",
"polar coordinate",
"the hackaday prize",
"theta printer"
] | The early 3D printers of the 80s and 90s started off as cartesian bots, and this is what the RepRap project took a cue from for the earliest open source 3D printer designs. A bit later, the delta bot came on the scene, but this was merely a different way to move a toolhead around build plate. We haven’t really seen a true polar coordinate 3D printer,
except for [Tyler Anderson]’s incredible Theta printer
.
[Tyler]’s theta printer is designed to print in as many different materials as possible, without the reduction in build volume that comes with multiple toolheads on more traditional printers. It will be able to lay down different colors of plastic in a huge build volume, and even some of the weirder filaments out there, all in a single print.
The theta printer is based on a polar coordinate system, meaning instead of moving a hot end around in the X and Y axes, the build plate rotates in a circle, and the extruders move along the radius of the circle. This spinning, polar coordinate printer is the best way we’ve seen to put multiple extruders on a printer, and has the added bonus of being a great platform for a 3D scanner as well.
With four extruders, four motors to control the position of each extruder, a rotation motor, and the Z axis (that’s 10 steppers if you’re counting), this is very likely the greatest number of motors ever put in a 3D printer. Most electronics boards don’t support that many stepper drivers, and
the one that will
won’t be ready for the end of The Hackaday Prize. Right now, [Tyler] is running a fairly standard RAMPS board, running two extruders and R axes in parallel. Still, it’s good enough for a proof of concept.
One interesting aspect of [Tyler]’s design is something even he might not have realized yet: with a single bed and four extruders, he’s effectively made a 3D printer geared for high-volume production; simply by printing the same part with all the extruders, he’s able to quadruple the output of a 3D printer with the same floor space as a normal one. This may not sound like much, but when you realize
Lulzbot has a bot farm producing all their parts
, the Theta printer starts to look like a very, very good idea.
Videos of [Tyler]’s Theta below.
The project featured in this post is
a semifinalist in The Hackaday Prize. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1762653",
"author": "Ryan Voots",
"timestamp": "2014-08-29T01:20:32",
"content": "I love it. It looks like it’d be so easy to go closed loop control on each of the axises too making it much more repeatable than most other repraps. I may have to try to build one myself soon just to... | 1,760,376,086.333155 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/28/stupid-security-in-a-security-system/ | Stupid Security In A Security System | Brian Benchoff | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"alarm company",
"alarm system",
"home alarm system",
"home security",
"security"
] | [Yaehob]’s parents have a security system in their house, and when they wanted to make a few changes to their alarm rules – not arming the bathroom at night – an installer would come out, plug a box into the main panel, press a few buttons, and charge 150 €. Horrified at the aspect of spending that much money to flip a few bits, [yaehob] set out to
get around the homeowner lockout on the alarm system
, and found security where he wasn’t expecting.
Opening the main panel for the alarm system, [yaehob] was greeted with a screeching noise. This was the obvious in retrospect tamper-evident seal on the alarm box, easily silenced by entering a code on the keypad. The alarm, however, would not arm anymore, making the task of getting ‘installer-level’ access on the alarm system a top priority.
After finding a DE-9 serial port on the main board, [yaehob] went to the manufacturer’s website thinking he could download some software. The website
does
have the software available, but only for authorized distributors, installers, and resellers. You can register as one, though, and no, there is no verification the person filling out a web form is actually a distributor, installer, or reseller.
Looking at the installer and accompanying documentation, [yaehob] could see everything, but could not modify anything. To do that would require the installer password, which, according to the documentation was between four and six characters. The system also responded quickly, so brute force was obviously the answer here.
After writing up a quick script to go through all the possible passwords, [yaehob] started plugging numbers into the controller board. Coming back a bit later, he noticed something familiar about what was returned when the system finally let him in. A quick peek at where his brute force app confirmed his suspicions; the installer’s code was his postal code.
From the installer’s point of view, this somewhat makes sense. Any tech driving out to punch a few numbers into a computer and charge $200 will always know the postal code of where he’s driving to. From a security standpoint, holy crap this is bad.
Now that [yaehob]’s parents are out from under the thumb of the alarm installer, he’s also tacked on a little bit of security of his own; the installer’s code won’t work anymore. It’s now changed to the house number. | 66 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "1762016",
"author": "Mithrandir",
"timestamp": "2014-08-28T20:04:39",
"content": "“changed to the house number” – this is brilliant.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1762102",
"author": "kerimil",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,376,086.438477 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/28/droning-on-maiden-flights/ | Droning On: Maiden Flights | Adam Fabio | [
"drone hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"drone",
"Droning On",
"Hackaday Tesetbed",
"KK Multicopter",
"quadcopter",
"radio control"
] | When we last left off, the Hackaday Drone Testbed was just a box of parts on workbench. Things have changed quite a bit since then! Let’s get straight to the build.
With the arms built and the speed controls soldered up, it was simply a matter of bolting the frame itself together. The HobbyKing frame is designed to fold, with nylon washers sliding on the fiberglass sheets. I don’t really need the folding feature, so I locked down the nylock nuts and they’ve stayed that way ever since. With the arms mounted, it was finally starting to look like a quadcopter.
Using the correct screws, the motors easily screwed into the frames. I did have to do a bit of filing on each motor plate to get the motor’s screw pattern to fit. The speed controls didn’t have a specific mount, so I attached them to the sides of the arms with double-sided tape and used some zip ties to ensure nothing moved. In hindsight I should have mounted them on the top of the arms, as I’m planning to put LED light strips on the outside of edges of the quad. The LEDs will help with orientation and ensure a few UFO sightings during night flights.
Power distribution is a major issue with multicopters. Somehow you have to get the main battery power out to four speed controls, a flight controller, a voltage regulator, and any accessories. There are PCBs for this, which have worked for me in the past. For the Hackaday Testbed, I decided to go with a
wiring harness
. The harness really turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. I had to strip down the wires at the solder joint to add connections for the voltage regulator. The entire harness was a bit longer than necessary. There is plenty of room for the excess wire between the main body plates of the quad, but all that copper is excess weight the ‘bench’ doesn’t need to be carrying. The setup does work though. If I need to shed a bit of weight, I’ll switch over to a PCB.
Click past the break to read the rest of the story.
The Electronic Speed Controls (ESCs) used in the Hackaday Test Bench contain linear regulators – trusty LM7805s to be specific. In an R/C situation, the 7805 supplies power to the receiver through the power wire of the three-wire servo lead The other two wires carry ground and PWM.
Connecting three linear regulators in parallel is generally a bad idea, but that’s exactly what the ESC designers have done, most likely to reduce costs. Since we have 4 ESC’s, connecting everything together would mean 12 parallel linear regulators split into four triplets, with several inches of wire between each triplet. That’s a recipe for disaster!
Linear regulators generally don’t play well together. One regulator will end up taking the load and either overheat or go into thermal shutdown. The extra heat does no good for the FETs running at 30 amps on the opposite side of the PCB. We’re going to get comments saying “but it worked for me”. But this is one of those things that will sort of work 60% of the time, then blow up without warning.
In many situations, the best course of action is to cut 3 of the four power leads, running the receiver and flight controller from the remaining ESC’s regulator. In this case however, we’re dealing with 4 cell LiPo batteries. Dropping the 16.8V batteries down to 5V at the currents we’re going to need would exceed the thermal limits of the regulators. The safe bet is to use an external regulator. I chose a
switching dc to dc converter from Hobbyking
. It wires directly into the main battery, and provides plenty of power.
At this point, things were down to the wire – literally. It was time to wire in the flight controller and receiver. The Hackaday Testbench is going to test several flight controllers, starting with the KK 2.1.5 multicopter board. It’s a good idea to isolate the flight controller from vibrations, so I used Kyosho Zeal gel mounting pads to stick it down to the top plate. The receiver stuck down next to it with standard double-sided foam tape. I’m using a Spektrum radio system for these early tests, though I’ll definitely be spending some time with the popular openTX software and radios.
I connected the RX to the KK board using male to male servo connections. Everything followed the diagram. The BEC plugged into the battery input of the RX, which then sent power to the KK board through the servo leads. The ESC leads plugged into the M1-M4 connections of the KK board. With all the hard work done, it was finally time to power up the quad. Again, I kept the motors connected but no propellers installed.
The KK board came right up and informed me it was in safe mode. The button and LCD interface on KK board is actually pretty easy to use. I was able to enter the servo monitor and saw that my aileron, elevator, and rudder channels were reversed. A few quick transmitter setting changes corrected the issue.
I configured the board for X mode and calibrated the ESCs using the KK boards pass-through mode. All the motors spun in the correct direction, and everything seemed ready to go. It was time to fly!
Maiden flight is a bit of a nerve-wracking affair for any aircraft. I kept the KKbaords PI values at their defaults for this flight, so I really had no idea if I was going to be faced with a slow to respond drunken quad, or an angry shaking bee. Outside I spun up the motors and got it light on its skids, just enough to verify the control inputs. Left stick made it lean left, and forward made it tip forward. Everything looked good so I advanced the throttle to hover. The Hackaday Testbed made its first lift off, and was actually very stable.
I hovered out the battery pack, switching the KK board in and out of self level. The PI values definitely aren’t optimal, as the quad feels a bit mushy. Still, it was a very successful first flight! | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1761780",
"author": "Jeff Marshall",
"timestamp": "2014-08-28T18:21:10",
"content": "“The HobbyKing frame is designed to fold, with nylon washers sliding on the fiberglass sheets. I don’t really need the folding feature, so I locked down the nylock nuts and they’ve stayed that way e... | 1,760,376,086.278922 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/28/800-inches-per-minute-at-0-00025-resolution/ | 800 Inches Per Minute At 0.00025″ Resolution | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"chipkit",
"pic32",
"plc",
"PONTECH",
"quick240",
"velox slides"
] | The folks over at PONTECH have just released a pretty impressive opensource PIC32 library for controlling a linear slide at speeds of
800 inches per minute!
PONTECH makes the Quick240 (Quick Universal Industrial Control Kard) which is based on the open source
chipKIT platform.
It was designed for industrial automation systems, where typically a ladder logic PLC might be used. The benefits to using a system like this is that because it is open, you are no longer stuck with proprietary hardware, and it is much more flexible to allow you to “do your own thing”. Did we mention it is also Arduino compatible?
Using this system they’ve successfully controlled two 8″ Velox slides at a whopping 800 inches per minute with a resolution of 0.00025″ — just take a look at the following video to appreciate how freaking fast that is.
The StepAndDirection library can be found over at
GitHub
for use with a PIC32 microcontroller. | 140 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "1761319",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2014-08-28T14:07:59",
"content": "What sort of horrible measurement is “inches per minute”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1761324",
"author": "medix",
"timestamp... | 1,760,376,086.602837 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/28/extrinsic-motivation-integrated-room-sunrise-simulator/ | Extrinsic Motivation: Integrated Room Sunrise Simulator | Matt Terndrup | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"alarm clock",
"ATMEL MEGA168A",
"LUTRON MRF2-600MTHW"
] | A Hackaday Prize entry that didn’t make the semifinal cut but deserves its own featured post is this
wireless alarm clock
that simulates a sunrise in the morning. It was created by [Ceady] and connects to an in-wall dimmer that slowly but surely increases the light over 10 minutes to help gently wake a sleeping person up . The Wireless Interface controls the speed of the illumination mechanism and has the ability to turn the lights off when the snooze button is pressed. Is is a neat little hack that brings together a typical alarm system and in-house lighting in a nice internet-of-things type of way. We foresee items like this being used in everyday household bedrooms in the near future.
Circuit schematics have been uploaded to the Hackaday.io page, along with detailed project logs and a list of the component’s parts. A video of the alarm clock being tested out comes up after the break:
This project is
an official entry
to The Hackaday Prize that sadly didn’t make
the quarterfinal selection
. It’s still a great project, and worthy of a Hackaday post on its own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_oC-QTgq18 | 13 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1760938",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2014-08-28T11:02:49",
"content": "It also comes in handy when you wake up with the munchies, apparently.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1761093",
"author": "Bobb",
"timestamp... | 1,760,376,086.699788 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/27/led-water-wheel-display-is-dekatron-tastic/ | LED Water Wheel Display Is Dekatron-tastic! | Adam Fabio | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"74xx595",
"dekatron",
"led",
"TLC59282"
] | Sometimes, it’s the simple things that mesmerize. [JohnS_AZ] has
created a simple dekatron style
LED ring, but we can’t seem to stop watching his video. [John’s] LED ring began as a visual indicator for his Hackaday Prize entry, a
water consumption display
. Judging by
his website
,
[John]
is a bit of a display nut. Nixie tubes and huge clocks feature prominently.
We’ve seen plenty of LED projects using the trusty 74xx595 8-bit shift register. [John] personally isn’t a fan, as the entire chip is only rated to drive about 50mA. While hackers routinely push the chip several times past this limit, [John] found a chip designed for the task in the Texas Instruments
TLC59282 16 channel constant current LED driver
. (PDF link) While more expensive than the ‘595, the 59282 makes life much easier. Only one resistor is needed at the chip’s current sense pin, rather than a current-limiting resistor for each LED. The 59282 also provides a blank input, which is perfect for driving with PWM.
[John] designed a simple PCB with a the 59282 driving a ring of 16 LEDs. While he waited for the boards to come in, he wrote some test code for a Microchip PIC16F1509. [John’s] code is not optimized, but that makes it easy to see exactly which bit patterns he’s writing to the LEDs. It all makes for a great demo, and reminds us of those old
Dekatron tubes
.
It’s the demo video that makes this project. Click past the break and give it a watch. After several long days of judging entries, a really nice LED ring might be just what the doctor ordered. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1757783",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-08-27T12:30:06",
"content": "Sweet!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1758029",
"author": "DigiGram",
"timestamp": "2014-08-27T13:59:17",
"content": "The tlc5904 woul... | 1,760,376,086.652187 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/27/make-your-own-uv-exposure-box-for-pcb-manufacture-at-home/ | Make Your Own UV Exposure Box For PCB Manufacture At Home | James Hobson | [
"how-to"
] | [
"DIY UV Exposure",
"UV exposure box"
] | [Shane] needed a UV exposure box to help speed up the process of making PCB’s at home. Not wanting to spend a few hundred on one, he decided to design and build his own,
using a planter box!
Why a planter box? To be honest, it was simply the first opaque container [Shane] found, so he decided to base the design around it. Inside the planter box are two 15W fluorescent daytime bulbs which output a similar amount of UV to normal sunlight. A mirror is placed below them to help reflect all the useful light out of the box. A pane of glass was cut to fit on top of the planter box, giving you a nice surface to place curing PCB’s on.
All in all, it’s a pretty simple and inexpensive method to make your own UV exposure box. We’ve also seen it done before using
UV LEDs and IKEA picture frames
— just make sure you don’t start tanning your hands while you’re working! | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1757354",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2014-08-27T09:52:19",
"content": "The easiest way to make an exposure box has always struck me as to use one of those UV nail curing lamps they sell on ebay for next to nothing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,376,086.749092 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/foosball-now-part-of-the-internet-of-things/ | Foosball Now Part Of The Internet Of Things | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"arm",
"barcode scanner",
"foosball",
"internet of things",
"STM32-E407"
] | At a local LAN event, [Thomas] wanted a way to easily show off the capabilities from some of the Internet-of-Things devices everyone keeps talking about. His idea was to build an
internet-connected foosball/table soccer/table football
table to show off some hardware and software.
[Thomas]’s table automates almost everything that is part of the great sport of foosball. Once a user logs in using the barcode scanner, the game begins by deploying the tiny ball with parts salvaged from a Roomba. The table uses infrared sensors to detect the ball. Once a goal is scored, it is posted online where anyone can see the current score and a history of all of the games played on the table.
There are a few other unique touches on the foosball table, such as the LED lighting, touch screen displays, and an STM32-E407 ARM processor to tie the whole machine together.
For more information including the source code and demonstrations, check out
[Thomas]’s project blog
. And, if you get lonely, perhaps you can try the
robot foosball player
! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1758043",
"author": "AlxRnz",
"timestamp": "2014-08-27T14:06:55",
"content": "One correction. The name of the ARM processor is actually STM32F407ZGT6. STM32-E407 is the name of the board.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "3545052"... | 1,760,376,086.78773 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/gemma-powered-neopixel-sound-reactive-drums/ | Gemma-Powered NeoPixel Sound Reactive Drums | Matt Terndrup | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"gemma",
"neopixel"
] | This tutorial from Adafruit shows how to create a
custom interactive drum set that lights up with sound
. It uses a mic amp sensor that is connected to a miniature Arduino Gemma board to detect when the instrument is being hit by the sticks. Neopixels then illuminate into a range of colors creating a beautifully synced up music presentation.
The container that houses the electronics is 3D printed. The entire circuit is integrated into the snare, mid-tom, hi-tom and a drum kick. All the code and step-by-step instructions can be found on Adafruit’s website. Now imagine something like this being
packed up in a suitcase
and carried from venue to venue as an up-and-coming band travels from state to state on tour; especially at Drum n’ Bass raves or electronic based music festivals. A video of the kit being used is below. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1756163",
"author": "OneShot Willie",
"timestamp": "2014-08-27T02:42:08",
"content": "Hmm… Piezo activated maybe?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1756200",
"author": "Matt Terndrup",
"timestamp": "2014-08-27T02... | 1,760,376,086.834444 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/new-chip-alert-the-esp8266-wifi-module-its-5/ | New Chip Alert: The ESP8266 WiFi Module (It’s $5) | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"ESP8266",
"radio module",
"Seeed",
"wifi",
"Wifi module"
] | Every so often we run across something in the Hackaday tip line that sends us scurrying to Google, trying to source a component, part, or assembly.
The ESP8266 WiFi module
is the latest, made interesting because it pretty much doesn’t exist outside China.
Why is it cool? It’s a WiFi module with an SOC, making it somewhat similar to
TI’s CC300
in conception (A.K.A. the thing that makes the
Spark Core
so appealing), in that a microcontroller on the module takes care of all the WiFi, TCP/IP stack, and the overhead found in an 802.11 network. It’s addressable over SPI and UART, making this an exceptionally easy choice for anyone wanting to build an Internet of Things thing; you can simply connect any microcontroller to this module and start pushing data up to the Internet. Oh, it’s also being sold for $5 in quantity one. Yes, for five dollars you can blink a LED from the Internet. That’s about half the price as the CC3000 itself, and a quarter of the price if you were to build a CC3000 breakout board.
There’s a catch, right, there’s always a catch.
Yep. About two hours after this post is published it will be the number one English language Google result for “ESP8266.” As far as the English-speaking world is concerned, there is absolutely nothing to be found anywhere on the Internet on this module.
Seeed Studio recently sold a few of these modules for $7 and
has some documentation
, including a full datasheet and an AT command set. All the documentation is in Chinese. There’s also an “ESP8266 IoT SDK”, but from a quick glance at the code, this appears to be an SDK for the SOC on the module, not a simple way to connect the module to a microcontroller.
Anyone wanting to grab one of these modules can do so on Ali Express. Anyone wanting to
do
something with one of these modules will have a much more difficult time, most likely poking and prodding bits randomly with the help of Google translate. Should someone, or even a group of people, want to take up the task of creating a translation of the datasheet and possibly a library, we
have a pretty collaborative project hosting site where you can do that
. You may organize in the comments below; we’ll also be taking bets as to when a product using the ESP8266 will be found on Kickstarter. My guess is under a month.
EDIT:
Here’s a translation of the datasheet and AT command set
.
Edit two: [bafeigum]
is writing a library
go help him out.
Thanks [Liam] for the tip. | 145 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "1755617",
"author": "Telek",
"timestamp": "2014-08-26T23:57:38",
"content": "I would suspect with this sort of deal by the time you receive delivery someone will have translated the documentation :-D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_... | 1,760,376,089.382316 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/arm-bmw-the-open-hardware-cortex-m0-development-board/ | ARM-BMW, The Open Hardware Cortex-M0 Development Board | Mathieu Stephan | [
"ARM",
"hardware"
] | [
"arm-bmw",
"cortex m0",
"development board"
] | [Vsergeev] tipped us about a
neat Cortex-M0 based development board
with a total BoM cost under $15. It’s called the ARM Bare Metal Widget (ARM-BMW), focuses on battery power, non-volatile storage and debuggability.
The chosen micro-controller is the 50MHz
NXP LPC1114DH28
which provides the user with 32kB of Flash, 8kB of SRAM, a 6 channel ADC and I2C/SPI/UART interfaces among others. The ARM-BMW contains a 2Mbyte SPI flash, an I2C I/O expander, several headers for expansion/debug purposes, 4 LEDs, 2 buttons, 2 DIP switches and finally a JTAG/SWD header for flashing and debugging. As you can see in the picture above you may either populate your own HC49UP crystal or use the internal 12MHz RC oscillator.
The platform can be powered using either a USB cable or a LiPo battery. As you can guess it also includes a much-needed battery charger (the MCP73831T) and a switched capacitor DC/DC converter to supply 3.3V. You may find all the files on the
hardware
or
software
repositories. | 29 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1754983",
"author": "Mathieu Stephan",
"timestamp": "2014-08-26T20:04:51",
"content": "on a side note, I’m not seeing what prevents the battery from reaching 2.1V in this setup…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1755671",
... | 1,760,376,088.958139 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/retrotechtacular-turn-on-the-magic-of-colored-light/ | Retrotechtacular: Turn On The Magic Of Colored Light | Kristina Panos | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"additive color",
"CMYK",
"color",
"electromagnetic spectrum",
"light",
"Maxwell disc",
"pigment",
"prism",
"reflection",
"refraction",
"rgb",
"Spectrophotometer",
"subtractive color",
"visible light"
] | Chances are, you take color for granted. Whether or not you give it much thought, color is key to distinguishing your surroundings. It helps you identify fire, brown recluse spiders, and the right resistor for the job.
In the spotlight this week is a 1950s educational film called “
This is Color
“. It also happens to be a delightful time capsule of consumer packaging from the atomic age. This film was made by the Interchemical Corporation, an industrial research lab and manufacturer of printing inks. As the narrator explains, consistent replication of pigments is an essential part of mass production. In order to conjure a particular pigment in the first place, one must first understand the nature of color and the physical properties of visible light.
Each color that makes up the spectrum of visible rays has a particular wavelength. The five principal colors—red, yellow, green, blue, and violet—make possible thousands of shades and hues, but are only a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum.
When light encounters a transparent material more dense than air, such as water or glass, it has to change direction and is bent by the surface. This is known as refraction. A straw placed in a glass of water will appear bent below the surface because the air and the water have different refractive indices. That is, the air and water will bend or refract different percentages of the light that permeates them.
When light encounters a smooth, solid surface, reflection is focused in one direction. A rough surface reflects light in all directions because the light hits so many different angles. This phenomenon is the basis for manufacturing knowledge about printing inks, lacquers, dyes, and chemical coatings. This is demonstrated with a coating made from linseed oil and glass that has been ground into a fine powder. Here, the linseed oil acts as a vehicle, and the glass as a pigment of the most basic form: fine particles of an insoluble substance suspended in the linseed oil. The refractive index (RI) of the linseed oil is different from that of air, so the light that permeates it is partially reflected.
If the RI of the pigment is the same as the vehicle, light will pass through to the surface begin coated and there will be no reflection. The coating is transparent. If the surface is white, nearly all the light will be reflected back through the coating. A black surface will reflect almost none of the light.
However, if the RI of the pigment differs from the RI of the vehicle, reflection occurs at each particle of the pigment. If it is thick enough, enough reflection occurs that the surface color will not be visible. The coating is opaque.
To reveal the relationship of colored pigments and light, we are shown the effect of several colors of glass. Each color of glass has all of the spectral colors inherent in it, but only certain colors are passed through while the others are absorbed. This experiment makes it possible to create graphs of the wavelengths that each spectral color transmits.
Using a device called a spectrophotometer, which measures the amount of light that is reflected or absorbed by a material at all points in the spectrum, the fine folks at Interchemical Corporation can nail down the exact green they need for a package both initially and for every production run thereafter. We are now equipped to understand the subtractive process of printing the color green: yellow and blue do not make it, but instead leave it. Really, though, they allow it to be transmitted.
Green occurs in the overlap of the reflectance curves of yellow and blue. This is another way of visualizing the subtractive process; we can see from the graphs that blue will absorb the red and yellow wavelengths. Yellow will absorb the blue and violet wavelengths, which only leaves green.
There is another way to invoke green, and it is used in color television screens. A checkerboard distribution of yellow and blue squares will, from a distance, blend together within the human eye. This is known as additive color mixing. This average of the reflectance curves for yellow and blue produce a certain shade of gray, which can be visualized with a Maxwell disc. Additive color mixture is not a property of light, but instead takes advantage of the way that the eye detects color.
Whether you’re squinting at a resistor or a spider, the important thing to remember is that color is not an intrinsic property of physical objects, it’s an intrinsic property of the visible light that strikes them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYmLH2PnLpA
Retrotechtacular is a weekly column featuring hacks, technology, and kitsch from ages of yore. Help keep it fresh by
sending in your ideas for future installments
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1754504",
"author": "Roy Wiggins",
"timestamp": "2014-08-26T17:22:13",
"content": "Not every color has an associated wavelength and you don’t need to have the wavelength to see a color (pure yellow + pure blue will appear green, no green-wavelength necessary). So our everyday notion... | 1,760,376,089.012288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/28/reverse-engineering-a-huge-led-display/ | Reverse Engineering A Huge LED Display | Brian Benchoff | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"LED display",
"led matrix",
"outdoor display"
] | In a fit of awesome salvaging, [Piet] picked up a huge, 16 character, 2 line display. It’s monstrous, designed for outdoor installations; road signs, train stations, and the like. It also draws 23 Watts
when nothing is being displayed
,
making this the perfect piece of salvaged equipment to reverse engineer
.
The display was originally connected to a computer running proprietary software. The protocol between the display and computer is also proprietary, giving [Piet] the choice of either reverse engineering the protocol, or reverse engineering the hardware and building a new driver board. For anyone with a soldering iron, the second option is the simplest.
Disassembling the display, [Piet] found each character in the display was its own board with a 7×14 array of pixels, each with four LEDs. The rows and columns of each character are addressed with a shift register, and with an Arduino, [Peit] got a single character working.
The Arduino would struggle to display all the characters in the display, so a Raspi was pulled out, a driver and frame generator written, and the whole thing connected to Twitter It’s a beautifully display that draws 200 Watts when its scanning the pixels, and a wonderful reuse of disused hardware. Video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trRJJdUFywk | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1760714",
"author": "Adobe/Flash hater",
"timestamp": "2014-08-28T09:05:44",
"content": "No scrolling messages from Colossus?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1761220",
"author": "RP",
"timestamp": "2014-08-28T1... | 1,760,376,088.891613 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/27/3d-printing-a-beautiful-prosthetic-hand-for-a-stranger/ | 3D Printing A Beautiful Prosthetic Hand For A Stranger | James Hobson | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed hand",
"3d printed prosthetic",
"grashopper",
"rhino 3d modeling"
] | Here’s a story that made us feel all warm and tingly on the inside. [Evan Kuester] is currently studying his Masters in Architecture with a specialty in digital fabrication. His program has access to some nice 3D printers, and he was itching for a good project to use them for. Why not a
3D printed prosthetic hand?
He got the idea after noticing a fellow student on campus who was missing her left hand, and did not have any kind of prosthetic. Eventually he worked up the nerve to introduce himself to her and explain his crazy idea. She thought it was brilliant.
Using Rhino, [Evan] began modeling the prosthetic hand using a plugin called Grasshopper. He wanted the hand to be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing, so he spent quite a while working with [Ivania] to make it just right. His first prototype, the Ivania 1.0 wasn’t quite what he imagined, so he redesigned it to what you see above. It’s a beautiful mixture of engineering and art, but unfortunately the fingers don’t move — perhaps an improvement for version 3.0? Regardless of functionality, [Ivania] loves it.
Oh, and [Evan] and [Ivania] are close friends now — in case you were wondering. | 85 | 34 | [
{
"comment_id": "1760251",
"author": "NotArduino",
"timestamp": "2014-08-28T05:08:32",
"content": "Bro is stuck in the friend zone. You can’t 3d print your way to a girlfriend…or can you?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1760261",
"auth... | 1,760,376,088.583789 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/27/homemade-nerf-blasters-with-3d-printed-parts/ | Homemade Nerf Blasters With 3D Printed Parts | Matt Terndrup | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"bullpup",
"nerf hacks"
] | This spectacular bullpup nerf gun
was developed by the guys over at Mostly Harmless Arms. It is complete with 3D printed parts in a variety of colors. The Extension Spring/Latex Tubing (ESLT) Blasters were based off of [Kane]’s snapoid trigger design with 1/4″ aluminum for the plunger rods which worked out really well. [Prince Edward] adapted [Kane]’s work and modified it with 3D printing in mind.
The original post from 2012
gave an in-depth look into where the idea started.
The documentation for
all the printed part files
and high quality photos can be found on Nerfhaven. It is really nice to see such a clean design that can be fashioned together on a relatively small budget. This makes these playful nerf blasters easy to duplicate, allowing for a full out office war. Granted, access to a 3D printer is needed, but additive manufacturing devices are getting more and more common these days. Now it’s just a matter of seeing how well they work, which can be deduced from the videos after the break:
Firing Demo:
Explanation Video:
[Thanks for the tip
Langley!!] | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1760066",
"author": "Waterjet",
"timestamp": "2014-08-28T03:27:34",
"content": "*sigh* At least this is a low pressure air + PVC pipe application. Kinda neat, surprised this wasn’t crowd funded and injection molded.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{... | 1,760,376,088.781627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/27/the-inaugural-hackaday-io-meetup/ | The Inaugural Hackaday.io Meetup | Ben Delarre | [
"Featured",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"hackaday-projects",
"hackaday.io",
"meetup"
] | Last Monday we held our very first
Hackaday Projects Meetup
at the Congregation Ale House in Pasadena, CA. We knew there were a lot of
Hackaday.io
members in the area and figured a meetup is a great excuse for them to meet each other.
The turn out was surprisingly good, with a wide variety of makers and hackers. People I met included aerospace engineers, embedded device developers, 3d printer inventors, and web developers. About thirty Hackaday readers turned up along with some newbies and a merry few hours of drinking beer, exchanging tales, poking at blinky things and admiring 3d printers ensued.
[Joseph Chiu] from
ToyBuilderLabs
brought along some of the largest single piece 3d prints many of us had ever seen. The
Deezmaker
crew also came along and showed off their Bukito Portable’s favorite party trick – printing upside down! There was a demonstration of a ChipKit based ultrasonic ping pong ball levitation machine. [Liam Kennedy] showed off his
ISSAbove
system connected to an LED ring, and we were even treated to a look at the first ever prototype Raspberry Pi in the USA by [Ron Evans], one of the founders of
GoBot
and
CylonJS
. More pictures and some additional event recap are found below.
All in all a great time was had, and this will now become a regular event roughly once a month somewhere in the Pasadena area.
Host your own Hackaday Projects Meetup
But it doesn’t just need to be limited to those in Southern California. If you’d like to organize a Hackaday.io meetup in your local area please
let us know via meetups@hackaday.com
and we’ll make sure we give you a shout out to get you started. It really is great to meet more people from the Hackaday community and we’re already seeing some collaboration start to come out of this. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1759738",
"author": "Dra",
"timestamp": "2014-08-28T00:47:32",
"content": "This REALLY needs a fold, guys. What the hell?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1759802",
"author": "Mike Szczys",
"timestamp": "2014-08... | 1,760,376,088.843493 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/27/defcon-blackphone/ | DEFCON: Blackphone | Brian Benchoff | [
"Featured",
"hardware",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Blackphone",
"security"
] | Despite being full of techies and people doing interesting things with portable devices, you don’t want to have an active radio on you within a quarter-mile of DEFCON. The apps on your phone leak personal data onto the Internet all the time, and the folks at DEFCON’s Wall Of Sheep were very successful in getting a few thousand usernames and passwords for email accounts.
Blackphone
is designed to be the solution to this problem, so when we ran into a few members of the Blackphone crew at DEFCON, we were pretty interested to take a quick peek at their device.
The core functionality for the Blackphone comes from its operating system called PrivatOS. It’s a fork of Android 4.4.2 that is supposed to seal up the backdoors found in other mobile phones. There’s also a bundle of apps from
Silent Circle
that give the Blackphone the ability to make encrypted phone calls, texts (with file sharing), and encrypted and password protected contact lists.
The hardware for the Blackphone is pretty impressive; a quad-core Nvidia Tegra provides all the power you need for your apps, video, and playing 2048, a 2000mAh battery should provide enough juice to get you through a day or two (especially since you can turn off cores), and the usual front/rear cameras, GPS, 802.11bgn and GSM and HSPA+/WCDA radios means this phone will be useable on most networks. | 35 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1759213",
"author": "qwerty",
"timestamp": "2014-08-27T21:07:20",
"content": "I’m highly skeptical about this device security level. Android is Linux, plus a growing layer of closed source drivers and apps that can do anything they’re instructed to do, including of course reading al... | 1,760,376,089.205989 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/27/thp-semifinalst-laser-solder-paste/ | THP Semifinalst: Laser Solder Paste | Brian Benchoff | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"laser",
"laser solder",
"solder paste",
"solder paste extruder",
"the hackaday prize"
] | A relative latecomer to The Hackaday Prize, [AltMarcxs] has nevertheless come up with a very interesting tool for fabrication, the likes of which no one has ever seen before. It’s
a rotating laser soldering paste applicator
, meant to be an add-on to a CNC machine. What does it do? RIght now it looks extremely cool while being an immense time sink for [AltMarcxs], but the potential is there for being much more than that, ranging from a pick and place machine that also dispenses solder paste, to the closest thing you’ll ever get to a carbon fiber printer.
[AltMarcxs]’s build consists of two 3W laser diodes focused just beyond the tip of the syringe. The syringe dispenses solder paste, and rotating the diodes around, [Alt] is able to put a melted solder blob anywhere on a piece of perfboard. He put up
a reasonably well focused video
demonstrating this.
With a few homebrew pick and place machines making the semifinalist cut for The Hackaday Prize, it’s easy to see the utility of something like this: Putting a board in a machine, pressing a button, and waiting a bit for a completely populated and soldered board is a dream of the electronic hobbyist rivaled only by a cheap and easy way to make PCBs at home. [AltMarxcs]’s machine could be one step on the way to this, but there are a few other ideas he’d like to explore first.
The build also has wire feeders that allow a bit of copper wire to be soldered to the newly formed metal blob. There are plans to replace this with a composite fiber, replace the paste in the syringe with a UV resin, cut the fiber and cure the resin with the laser, and build something much better than
other carbon fiber 3D printers we’ve seen before
.
The project featured in this post is
a semifinalist in The Hackaday Prize. | 24 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1758663",
"author": "SparkyGSX",
"timestamp": "2014-08-27T17:27:31",
"content": "I don’t get it; the point of dispensing solder paste on a board is that you can push in components in it, while it’s still a paste, so the components will be flush with the board, and stick in the paste... | 1,760,376,088.64714 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/27/bils-quest-for-a-lost-finger-episode-i/ | [Bil’s] Quest For A Lost Finger: Episode I | Bil Herd | [
"Featured",
"Lifehacks",
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"alginate",
"body hack",
"cast",
"finger",
"mold",
"plaster",
"Prosthesis",
"x-finger"
] | A little over a year ago I had a semi-gruesome accident; I stepped off of a ladder and I caught my wedding ring on a nail head. It literally stripped the finger off the bone. This was in spite of me being a safety-freak and having lived a whole second life doing emergency medicine and working in trauma centers and the like. I do have trauma center mentality which means, among other things, that I know you can’t wind the clock back.
A few seconds make an incredible differences in people’s lives. Knowing that it couldn’t be undone, I stayed relaxed and in the end I have to say I had a good time that day as I worked my way through the system (I ended up in a Philadelphia trauma center with a nearby hand specialist) as I was usually the funniest guy in the room. Truth be told they ask incredibly straight questions like”are you right handed?” “Well I am NOW”.
So now I could really use a bit of a body hack, having seen
the X-Finger on Hackaday
long before I knew that I would one day work with them, I was hoping that we could get one to work for me. In speaking with a couple of the mechanical engineers on the Hackaday staff we decided to get [James Hobson] and [Rich Bremer] involved and that the best way to do it was to get a casting of my injured hand out to them.
Starting with casting
alginate
I mixed it 1:1.5 by volume with warm tap water and mixed. I had a backup amount ready to go in case I ran short, which it turned out that I did indeed need. Since one hand was now ensconced in gooey mold making stuff I had to use a drill with stirring rod to quickly mix up the rest.
The alginate sets within 12-15 minutes and because it has a little “give” to it I was able to squeeze my hand out without damaging the mold.
Next a mix of casting plaster is made per the instructions and poured in being careful not to trap bubbles.
Hand Casting
Cutting out the casted hand was a matter of a single edge razor blade and the cast was complete and ready to be shipped to the mechanical guys.
With the hand cast is on its way to [James Hobson] for his evaluation with an eye towards mechanical design, look for a followup Part II post of his initial assessment of my hand sans finger. We have discussed making the mechanical finger replacement a Hackaday project and getting input from viewers at large. Are any of you interested in taking part in the process? If so please leave a comment below. | 89 | 37 | [
{
"comment_id": "1758064",
"author": "RandyKC",
"timestamp": "2014-08-27T14:15:00",
"content": "Bil, marriage costs us more than our fingers sometimes.I usually view the ring finger as an accessory grasper. It usually works in conjunction with the middle and ring. Typing would be the main limitation... | 1,760,376,089.135498 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/an-ipod-dock-converted-into-chromecast-speakers/ | An IPod Dock Converted Into Chromecast Speakers | Matt Terndrup | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"chromecast",
"hdmi to vga adapter",
"musicbox"
] | [easybakejake] figured out a way to fuse together
an iPod speaker dock and a wireless Chromecast receiver
. His method utilized a modified HDMI-to-VGA adapter. From the looks of it, apps like music for Google Play, Pandora, and Music All Access seem to able to be streamed through this device.
A few problems did come up with this project though when researching the functionality of this music hack. For one, there is little to no documentation since the tip came to us through a
Reddit post
. Another inconvenience had to do with supporting different monitor sizes. [easybakejake] confirmed in the comments of that post that he ran into an error where the input was not working; probably due to a resolution issue. Eventually, he got it working and dubbed the device the MusicBox. Now stick it on a roomba and get it to DJ a party (like this Parks and Recreation skit that follows after the break):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXhsUPtsiLU | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1753980",
"author": "XLT_Frank",
"timestamp": "2014-08-26T14:13:25",
"content": "Wow. I seriously just had that thought the other day, not the dock, but an audio solution for Chromecast in other rooms where i have audio gear. Right now I have my beloved Slim Device (pre-Logitech b... | 1,760,376,089.436737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/laser-engraved-business-cards-with-leds/ | Laser Engraved Business Cards With LEDs | Matt Terndrup | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"business card",
"led",
"plexiglas"
] | Regular paper business cards are boring. They are flimsy and easily forgettable for the most part, and when stacked together or thrown in a pile, it’s hard to locate a specific one; like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Plastic cards aren’t much better either because they still fall into that ‘who cares’ category. But
plexiglas business cards with laser cut etchings beautifully lit up by an LED
?! Yes please.
The design was developed by Romanian engraving company called Gravez Dotro who fixed the problem of simply glancing at a business card, putting it in a wallet, and causally forgetting about it later, never to contact the person that gave it out. If someone hands away one of these though, the receiver is definitely going to remember it. The solution isn’t that high-tech and just about anyone with access to a laser cutter can make their own. It will be interesting to see what people come up with. If you feel like creating one, be sure to send us pictures. We would love to see them. Video of the design comes up after the break.
Also check out the
Ask Hackaday article about paper USB business cards
by [Mathieu Stephan] | 38 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1753553",
"author": "YourIEEEmom",
"timestamp": "2014-08-26T11:23:18",
"content": "Yea, these are great. Many of the ones I gave out, are still kept today on the desk of those who were lucky enough to get one:https://vimeo.com/39917579",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,376,090.048535 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/custom-racing-chair-with-a-kinect-and-haptic-feedback/ | Custom Racing Chair With A Kinect And Haptic Feedback | Matt Terndrup | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"best buy",
"haptic feedback",
"Kinect",
"racing game",
"two bit circus"
] | The people at Two Bit Circus are at it again; this time with a
futuristic racing simulator
where the user controls the experience. It was developed by [Brent Bushnell] and [Eric Gradman] along with a handful of engineers and designers in Los Angeles, California. The immersive gaming chair utilized an actual racing seat in the design, and foot petals were added to give the driver more of a feeling like they were actually in a real race. Cooling fans were placed on top for haptic feedback and a Microsoft Kinect was integrated into the system as well to detect hand gestures that would control what was placed on the various screens.
The team completed the project within in thirty days during a challenge from Best Buy who wanted to see if they could create the future of viewing experiences. Problems surfaced throughout the time frame though creating obstacles surrounding the video cards, monitors, and shipping dates. They got it done and are looking towards integrating their work into restaurants like Dave & Buster’s and other facilities like arcades and bars (at least that’s the rumor going around town). The 5 part mini-series that was produced around this device can be seen after the break:
[vimeo
http://vimeo.com/61396603%5D
[vimeo
http://vimeo.com/61396604%5D
[vimeo
http://vimeo.com/61396606%5D
[vimeo
http://vimeo.com/61396607%5D
[vimeo
http://vimeo.com/61396608%5D
Two Bit Circus also developed this ‘
Human Asteroids
‘ game with the help of a laser projector and a Microsoft Kinect. | 14 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1753120",
"author": "Sheldon",
"timestamp": "2014-08-26T08:40:33",
"content": "Really nice looking build and probably a good show for TBC and BB but it seems a little forced for some frivolous features (uploading contacts so you can video chat while driving? controlling “every” aspe... | 1,760,376,089.821111 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/25/prove-your-geek-cred-with-a-binary-watch/ | Prove Your Geek Cred With A Binary Watch | James Hobson | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"binary display",
"binary watch",
"binary wrist watch",
"pic",
"SSOP-20"
] | After just one prototype, [Elia] has finished his super awesome
Binary Wrist Watch
.
He designed the PCB in
KiCad
, using a template for the PIC he found in a standard library — unfortunately it turns out the SSOP-20 PIC footprint in this library was actually a TSSOP-20. Confusingly enough, there was also a TSSOP-20 footprint in the library. Luckily it’s just a few millimeters off so [Elia] was able to just bend the pins in a bit before reflow soldering it in place.
The trickiest part of the project was actually making the wristband. He tried several different styles before settling on a paracord braid design he found on
Instructables.
We especially like his quote at the end of the project:
Although not having worn the watch in the presence of normal humans, I can already guarantee that now everyone will be able to easily identify me as a nerd.
Acceptance is the first step in realizing you have an addiction, right?
[via
Dangerous Prototypes
] | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1752623",
"author": "Mrt Lmn",
"timestamp": "2014-08-26T05:06:53",
"content": "would that mean that in the picture its 6:23PM?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1752878",
"author": "awasson",
"timestamp": "2014-0... | 1,760,376,090.098973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/25/piaware-automated-airliner-tracking-on-the-raspberry-pi/ | PiAware, Automated Airliner Tracking On The Raspberry Pi | Brian Benchoff | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"ads-b",
"flight tracking",
"FlightAware",
"piAware",
"RTL-SDR",
"transponder"
] | For the sufficiently geeky aviation nerd there’s FlightAware, a website that tracks just about every airliner and most private planes currently in flight. The folks at FlightAware compile all the information with the help of a few thousand volunteers around the world that have a bit of hardware to listen to ADS-B transmissions and relay them to the FlightAware servers.
Now you can do this with a Raspberry Pi
, and as a nice little bonus FlightAware is giving away free enterprise accounts to anyone who does.
Listening in on ADS-B transponders is something
Raspberry Pis have been doing for a while
, but doing anything useful with the altitude, speed, heading, and registry numbers of various planes flying overhead is pretty much FlightAware’s only reason for existing, and the reason they’ve developed an easy to use software package for the Pi.
Setting everything up requires
getting dump1090 running on the Pi
, the only hardware required being an RTL-SDR USB TV tuner, a GPS module, and an antenna for 1090 MHz. From there, just send all the data to FlightAware and you get a free enterprise account with them. Not a bad deal for the aviation nerds out there. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1752005",
"author": "Tim",
"timestamp": "2014-08-26T02:14:54",
"content": "An enterprise account costs $89/mo. If you have a need for one already the total hardware cost would be paid off within 2-3 months.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"c... | 1,760,376,090.158646 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/25/impressive-homemade-segway-is-the-real-deal/ | Impressive Homemade Segway Is The Real Deal | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"balanduino",
"home-made segway",
"MY1929Z2",
"segway"
] | [Kristian] just put the finishing touches on his full size Segway
built from scratch.
Back in 2012, he made a small balancing robot using a gyroscopic sensor and a PID controller — you can see the
original post here.
The cool thing is, he’s basically just scaled up his original project to create this full-size Segway!
It uses two 500W 24V DC motors (MY1929Z2) on an aluminum check plate frame, with the rest of the structure made from steel plumbing and fittings. What we really like is the steering linkage; similar to a real Segway, you pull the handle in the direction you want to turn. He’s accomplished this by putting another length of pipe parallel to the wheels which is connected by an elbow fitting to the handle bar. It’s supported by two pillow block bearings, and in the back is a fixed potentiometer — when you lean the handle bars one way, the pipe rotates, spinning the potentiometer. To make it return to neutral, he’s added springs on either side.
There’s an impressive build log to go along with it, and a great demonstration video after the break.
He’s even written an Android app for tuning the PID values while driving it!
[Thanks Sigurd!] | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1751396",
"author": "FlippyBits",
"timestamp": "2014-08-25T23:17:34",
"content": "Great build! He may be able to just epoxy a strain gauge to the bottom of the frame to replace the dead man switch.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,376,089.871596 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/25/50-semifinalists-selected-for-next-stage-of-the-hackaday-prize/ | 50 Semifinalists Selected For Next Stage Of The Hackaday Prize | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"semifinalists",
"TheHackadayPrize"
] | Who cares about Open Design and building the next generation of Connected Devices? It turns out a lot of people do!
The Hackaday Prize put out the call for Open, Connected design ideas and
around 800 projects
were posted over the last few months to answer that call. The cutoff for documenting your concept and making entry to the contest was just before midnight last Wednesday. Since then our crew has been going through the entries to select 50 to move on as Semifinalists. Here’s who made the cut:
This
list of 50 semifinalists
will have until 11:50pm PDT on September 28th, 2014 to refine their designs. Congratulations!
You simply must read
the Official Rules
for all the details about becoming a finalist during the next round of judging. But we can certainly share some pointers we learned from judging the full pool of entries. The video is your time to make your project shine; tell
this awesome panel of judges
what the project is, why you’re building it, exactly how it is “connected”, and any thoughts you have on future uses or derivatives of the idea. Project logs insight regarding the feasibility of seeing the hardware finished so keep up with those as your build progresses. And as you near the deadline, hone your project Images, Description, and Details to best engage the judges and readers. Keep the updates coming because everyone is excited to find out who it is that will earn a trip to space!
Semifinalists (alphabetical):
This list of semifinalists is presented in alphabetical order by title.
$300 Pick and Place / 3D printer
$5 Polymerase Chain Reactor
3D Haptic Vest for Visually Impaired and Gamers
autoCut – robot lawn mower on steroids
Autonomous recharging and docking for multirotors
Bionic Yourself
BuckyBot
Cheap satellite transponder
ChipWhisperer
TM
: Security Research
CNC Add-on: Rot. Laser Soldering Paste applicator
Diabetes Data, Everywhere
DIY 3D Printable RaspberryPi Raman Spectrometer
FarmBot – CNC Farming and Gardening
fNIR Brain Imager
Global radiation monitoring network
Goliath – A Gas Powered Quadcopter
GRID-EYE BLE-capable thermal camera
Handheld 3GHz Spectrum Analyzer
Honeybee Hive Monitoring
Hoverlay II
Hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar) alert system
level: An Ultrawide-band Radio Module
LoFi
Low-Cost Solid State Cosmic Ray Observatory
Medicycle – Urban Responder
Moti, a smart servo
NoteOn Smartpen
NSA Away
Open Source Science Tricorder
OpenExposer
OpenMV
OSHWatch
OSRC – Open Source Remote Control
PortableSDR
Project Jarvis – A.I Home Automation & Assistant
PyPPM: A Proton Precession Magnetometer for all!
Remote Water Consumption Display
Retro Populator
SatNOGS – Global Network of Ground Stations
Simple, low-cost FMCW radar
Solar Energy Generator
SolarSurfer
Stubby the (Teaching) Hexapod
The Moteino Framework
The Walltech OLED BTLE Smart Watch v6.1
Theta Printer
TJ – $99 Thermal Imager
TOME – Portable 3D Printer
Turtle Sense
Web security everywhere
All of these entrants have done great work so far. Good luck as your builds move forward. The clock is already ticking!
UPDATE
:
I forgot to mention… those hundreds of other prizes that we’ve been
mentioning all along
will be awarded to all of the entries. If you officially submitted your project before the deadline you will be rewarded for being a Quarterfinalist. Watch for a post later in the week about exactly what and how we’ll be getting it to you. We just need to make sure we have the logistics sorted out before giving out the details. Thanks! | 152 | 34 | [
{
"comment_id": "1750601",
"author": "Remarknl",
"timestamp": "2014-08-25T20:11:35",
"content": "What happens to the other 750 projects?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1750666",
"author": "Mike Szczys",
"timestamp": "2014-08-2... | 1,760,376,090.454273 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/25/homemade-hot-water-shower-might-shock-you/ | Homemade Hot Water Shower Might Shock You | James Hobson | [
"how-to"
] | [
"diy hot water heater",
"diy hot water shower",
"hot water heater",
"shower"
] | [Stephen] doesn’t have the luxury of readily available hot water in his apartment, and since he’s just renting he didn’t want to buy one of those instant powered units, so he decided to go ahead and
build his own!
He’s using a submersible 1000W immersion heater in a 2.5 gallon water container which has been mounted high up in his bathroom to let gravity do the work for actual shower. It’s not quite an instant shower unit as the water needs to heat up like a kettle before being used — this takes about 4 minutes to hit the optimum temperature.
The current shower head installed drains the tank in about 2.5 minutes, which might not seem like much time for a shower, but let’s be honest — we could all probably cut back our shower time and save some water for the environment! Something one of our Hack a Day Prize entries is
hoping to solve through music!
Oh and the shocking bit? Don’t use the water when the heater is on… | 68 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "1749979",
"author": "Telek",
"timestamp": "2014-08-25T17:09:50",
"content": "Very nice! Although what apartments don’t have hot water? :-PIf my math is correct, 1000W could raise the water temp in a 1.5gpm low flow shower head by about 10C (~100mL/sec, 1C/L/s). I wonder if that wo... | 1,760,376,090.2653 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/25/chromecast-is-root/ | Chromecast Is Root | Brian Benchoff | [
"Android Hacks",
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"chromecast",
"root",
"rooted",
"Teensy"
] | Image from [psouza4] on the xda-developers forum
Chromecast is as close as you’re going to get to a perfect device – plug it in the back of your TV, and instantly you have Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, and a web browser on the largest display in your house. It’s a much simpler device than a Raspi running XBMC, and we’ve already seen a few Chromecast hacks
that stream videos from a phone
and
rickroll everyone around you
.
Now the Chromecast has been rooted
, allowing anyone to change the DNS settings (Netflix and Hulu users that want to watch content not available in their country rejoice), and loading custom apps for the Chromecast.
The process of rooting the Chromecast should be fairly simple for the regular readers of Hackaday. It requires
a Teensy 2 or 2++ dev board
, a USB OTG cable, and a USB flash drive. Plug the Teensy into the Chromecast and wait a minute. Remove the Teensy, plug in the USB flash drive, and wait several more minutes. Success is you, and your Chromecast is now rooted.
Member of Team-Eureka [riptidewave93] has put up a demo video of rooting a new in box Chromecast in just a few minutes. You can check that out below. | 44 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1749569",
"author": "Nate B",
"timestamp": "2014-08-25T14:10:44",
"content": "Aaaand countdown ’til Teensies go out of stock in 3.. 2…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1749614",
"author": "yahoooooooo182",
"time... | 1,760,376,090.689413 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/25/ask-hackaday-can-paper-usb-business-cards-exist/ | Ask Hackaday: Can Paper USB Business Cards Exist? | Mathieu Stephan | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"business card",
"NFC",
"usb"
] | The
swivelCard Kickstarter campaign
recently received a lot of press coverage and makes some impressive claims as their goal is the development of USB and NFC business cards at a $3 unit price. While most USB-enabled business cards we featured on Hackaday
were made of standard FR4
, this particular card is made of paper as the project description states the team patented
a system for turning regular paper into a USB drive.
As you can guess this piqued our interest, as all paper based technologies we had seen until now mostly consisted of either
printed PCBs
or
paper batteries
. ‘Printing a USB drive on regular paper’ (as the video says) would therefore involve printing functional USB and NFC controllers.
Luckily enough a quick Google search for the patents shown in one of the pictures (
patent1
,
patent2
) taught us that a
storage circuitry
is embedded under the printed USB pads, which may imply that the team had an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (
ASIC
) designed or that they simply found one they could use for their own purposes. From the video we learn that ‘each card has a unique ID and can individually be programmed’ (the
card
, not the UID) and that it can be setup to open any webpage URL. The latter can
even be modified
after the card has been handed out, hinting that the final recipient would go to a ‘www.swivelcard.com/XXXX” type of address. We therefore got confused by
Imagine giving your business card with pictures, videos, presentations, and websites for the recipient to interact with!
paragraph that the project description contains.
This leads us to one key question we have: what kind of USB drive can make a given user visit a particular website, given that he may have Linux, Windows, Mac or any other OS? They all have similar USB enumeration processes and different key strokes to launch a browser… our wild guess is that it may be detected as storage with a single html file in it. Unfortunately for us the USB detection process is not included in the video.
Our final question: Is it possible to embed both USB and NFC controllers in a thin piece of paper without worrying about broken ICs (see picture above)? NFC enabled passports have obviously been around for a long time but we couldn’t find the same for USB drives.
Possible or not, we would definitely love having one in our hands!
Edit: One of our kind readers pointed out that this campaign actually is a re-launch of a failed
indiegogo one
which provides more details about the technology and confirms our assumptions. | 72 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "1749173",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2014-08-25T11:14:18",
"content": "Why not print a QR Code on the card?Which company allows you to plug in any USB device someone gave to you anyway?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1... | 1,760,376,090.56326 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/25/the-handsfree-icebucket-challenge-backpack/ | The Handsfree Icebucket Challenge Backpack | Matt Terndrup | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"als icebucket challenge",
"Arduino Uno",
"barometric pressure"
] | The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has taken the internet by storm as tv stars, musicians, athletes, kids, students and everyone in between have thrown freezing water all over themselves in an effort to raise awareness (and millions of dollars) to help cure the neurodegenerative disease. So when [Christopher] was challenged by a friend, he decided to make
an icebucket backpack
that would pour the liquid from above without having to use his hands.
The wearable device uses a Barometric pressure sensor that is triggered when air is blown into a tube. This sensor is attached to an Arduino Uno. Once activated, the pouring process begins drenching the person below in ice cold water. It’s a little unnecessary, but it gets the job done in a fun, maker-style way. Now if you make something similar, don’t forget to actually support the cause and donate money.
To see the icebucket backpack in action, check out the video after the break:
[vimeo
http://vimeo.com/104234935%5D | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1749128",
"author": "Adobe/Flash hater",
"timestamp": "2014-08-25T10:59:16",
"content": "Oh brother. I’m guesings this one is for the people who have ALS and can’t lift a bucket But don’t want to be left out?I can’t wait till the either Bad Kidney or Irritable Bowel funding people c... | 1,760,376,090.607709 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/24/a-virtual-touchscreen-3d-ultrasonic-radar/ | A Virtual Touchscreen (3D Ultrasonic Radar) | Matt Terndrup | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"analog signal",
"arduino",
"ultrasonic sensor",
"virtual touchscreen"
] | Producing items onto a screen simply by touching the air is a marvelous thing. One way to accomplish this involves four HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor units that transmit data through an Arduino into a Linux computer. The end result is a
virtual touchscreen
that can be made at home.
The software of this device was developed by [Anatoly] who translated hand gestures into actionable commands. The sensors attached to the Arduino had an approximate scanning range of 3m, and the ultrasonic units were modified to broadcast an analog signal at 40 kHz. There were a few limitations with the original hardware design as [Anatoly] stated in the post. For example, at first, only one unit was transmitting at a time, so there was no way the Arduino could identify two objects on the same sphere. However, [Anatoly] updated the blog with a
2nd post
showing that sensing multiple items at once could be done. Occasionally, the range would be finicky when dealing with small items like pens. But besides that, it seemed to work pretty well.
Additional technical specifications can be found on [Anatoly]’s blog and videos of the system working can be seen after the break.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpZ_CqVk3e8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPAPJX-6rJ4
[Thanks for the tip João!] | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1749274",
"author": "l10r",
"timestamp": "2014-08-25T12:00:21",
"content": "Wow….And the music, what is that? it’s awesome",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1749428",
"author": "cb88",
"timestamp": "2014-08-25T13:13:00",
... | 1,760,376,090.728604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/24/open-source-marker-recognition-for-augmented-reality/ | Open Source Marker Recognition For Augmented Reality | Matt Terndrup | [
"Software Hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"augmented reality",
"opencv",
"pattern recognition"
] | [Bharath] recently uploaded the source code for an
OpenCV based pattern recognition platform
that can be used for Augmented Reality, or even robots. It was built with C++ and utilized the OpenCV library to translate marker notations within a single frame.
The program started out by focusing in on one object at a time. This method was chosen to eliminate the creation of additional arrays that contained information of all of the blobs inside the image; which could cause some problems.
Although this implementation did not track marker information through multiple frames, it did provide a nice foundation for integrating pattern recognition into computer systems. The tutorial was straightforward and easy to ready. The entire program and source code can be found on
Github
which comes with a ZERO license so that anyone can use it. A video of the program comes up after the break: | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1747704",
"author": "carcanhol",
"timestamp": "2014-08-25T02:14:18",
"content": "i used to use openspace 3d for making a ball maze by tilting a book with markers and it used opencv i think.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "174796... | 1,760,376,090.781948 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/24/hackaday-links-august-24-2014/ | Hackaday Links: August 24, 2014 | Brian Benchoff | [
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"arcade",
"emulation",
"microview",
"pdp-11",
"Phone network",
"RetroPi",
"SIMH",
"telecom",
"toorcamp",
"vetinari"
] | Remember those ‘cocktail’ arcade cabinets? The Ikea Lack table has existed for years, so
why not make one into an arcade table
? Raspberry Pi with RetroPie as the brains, and an ancient 4:3 monitor as the display.
Old Unixes! Running on PDPs, Novas, and IBMs! Thanks to
Simh
, you can emulate these old machines.
[Matt] put up a guide to getting Simh running on a Pi
that includes running Unix V5 on an emulated PDP-11.
Ever wanted to run your own telecom?
The folks at Toorcamp did just that
, 50 lines, 10,000 feet of 1-pair, and 1,500 feet of 2-pair. There’s
a facebook album
of all the pics.
Remember last week when Sparkfun said they shipped 2000 Microviews without a bootloader?
Make interviewed [Marcus Schappi]
, the guy behind the MicroView. There’s
also a tutorial
on how to fix the issue.
Barbie needs an exorcism
.
Remember
the [Lord Vetinari] clock
from way back when? It’s a clock that ticks 86400 times a day, but the interval between each second is just slightly random and enough to drive people insane.
Here’s a kit on Tindie
that makes it pretty easy to build a Ventinari clock, or a variety of other clocks that are sufficiently weird. There’s also a martian clock that’s 39 minutes and 36 seconds longer than normal,
perfect for the folks at JPL
.
0x1f 0x000 IZO EMESS 1407981609 | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1747121",
"author": "cr0sh",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T23:19:42",
"content": "That Lack table cabinet was a pretty nice idea; I might have to try it in the future!If I did – I don’t think I would enclose the legs, instead I would try to cut the monitor area out in such a manner to al... | 1,760,376,090.850614 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/24/a-geiger-counter-for-an-off-road-apocalypse-vehicle/ | A Geiger Counter For An Off-Road Apocalypse Vehicle | Matt Terndrup | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"can-bus",
"geiger counter",
"optocoupler"
] | If the world comes to an end, it’s good to be prepared. And let’s say that the apocalypse is triggered by a series of nuclear explosions. If that is the case, then having a Geiger counter is a must, plus having a nice transport vehicle would be helpful too. So [Kristian] combined the two ideas and created his own
Geiger counter for automotive use
just on the off chance that he might need it one day.
It all started with a homemade counter that was fashioned together. Then a display module with a built-in graphics controller that was implemented to show all kinds of information in the vehicle. This was done using a couple of optocouplers as inputs. In addition, a CAN bus interface was put in place. As an earlier post suggests, the display circuit was based on a Microchip 18F4680 microcontroller. After that, things kind of got a little out of control and the counter evolved into more of a mobile communications center; mostly just because [Kristian] wanted to learn how those systems worked. Sounds like a fun learning experience! Later the CPU and gauge was redesigned to use low-quiescent regulators. A filtering board was also made that could kill transients and noise if needed.
The full project can be seen on
[Kristian]’s blog
. | 33 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1746660",
"author": "RandyKC",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T20:06:25",
"content": "Finally, something I need.I’ve built my flux capacitor and really need something to track radiation levels until I can get my Mr Fusion.Honest, very nice build. Beautiful UI. You might be setting a new st... | 1,760,376,091.029702 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/24/recognizing-speech-from-gyroscope-signals/ | Phone Gyroscope Signals Can Eavesdrop On Your Conversations | Mathieu Stephan | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"gyroscope",
"MEMS",
"speech recognition"
] | A gyroscope is a device made for measuring orientation and can typically be found in modern smartphones or tablet PCs to enable rich user experience. A team from Stanford managed to
recognize
simple words from
only analyzing gyroscope signals
(PDF warning). The
complex inner workings
of MEMS based gyroscopes (which use the Coriolis effect) and Android software limitations only allowed the team to only sniff frequencies under 200Hz. This may therefore explain the average 12% word recognition rate that was achieved with custom recognition algorithms. It may however still be enough to make you reconsider installing an app that don’t necessarily need access to the on-board sensors to work. Interestingly, the paper also states that STMicroelectronics currently have a 80% market share for smartphone / Tablet PCs gyroscopes.
On the same topic, you may be interested to check out a
gyroscope-based smartphone keylogging attack
we featured a couple of years ago. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1746337",
"author": "bthy",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T17:23:57",
"content": "very good paper, interesting read.STM might be the biggest player in the smartphone market, but i bet InvenSense is preferred for stabilization and IMU applications in multirotors and RC helicopters and the ... | 1,760,376,091.418812 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/24/the-counter-strike-airsoft-robot/ | The Counter-Strike Airsoft Robot | Matt Terndrup | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"airsoft gun",
"arduino",
"raspberry pi",
"robot",
"treads",
"turret"
] | [Jon] and his brother converted an
RC car into a robot that can fire airsoft pellets
into the air. The little motorized vehicle was disassembled and a handheld was attached to the top. A pulling mechanism was put in place and a safety procedure was added to make sure no accidents occurred.
The chassis stand was created to hold the handle. The setup was then tested at this point, and a Raspberry Pi server was configured to have a camera that would act as the eyes for the robot. Once everything was in place, the wheels hit the ground and the vehicle was able to move around, positioning itself to aim the servos at a designated target. Footage was transmitted via the web showing what the robot was looking at.
A video of the remote-controlled counter-strike robot can be seen after the break. You could consider this your toy army. That
makes this one your toy air force
. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1745981",
"author": "gopa",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T14:21:26",
"content": "And the purpose of this POS is…?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1746017",
"author": "pcf11",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T14:45:13",
... | 1,760,376,091.22829 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/24/fpga-with-open-source-propeller-1-running-spin/ | FPGA With Open Source Propeller 1 Running Spin | Mike Szczys | [
"FPGA",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"bemicro",
"emulation",
"fpga",
"open source",
"p8x32a",
"parallax",
"propeller",
"spin"
] | Open Sourcing something doesn’t actually acquire meaning until someone actually uses what has been unleashed in the wild. We’re happy to see
a working example of Propeller 1 on an FPGA dev board
. That link takes you to a short description and some remapping of the pins to work with
a BeMicro CV board
. But you’ll want to watch the video below, or rather listen to it, for a bit more explanation of what [Sylwester] did to get this working.
You’ll remember that
Parallax released the Propeller 1 as Verilog code
a few weeks back. This project first loads the code onto the FPGA, then proves it works by running
SIDcog
, the Commodore 64 sound emulation program written in Spin for p8x32a processors.
We do find this to be an interesting first step. But we’re still waiting to see what type of hacks are made possible because of the newly available Verilog code. If you have a proof of concept working on other hardware, certainly tell us about it below. If you’ve been hacking on it and have something you want to show off,
what are you waiting for
? | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1746057",
"author": "localroger",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T14:59:58",
"content": "While it might not seem very useful to emulate a $8 chip with a $50 FPGA, it’s a neat demo and a bit reassuring that even if something happens to Parallax there will be a way to move Propeller based le... | 1,760,376,091.375078 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/24/why-are-we-limited-to-just-c-clamps/ | Why Are We Limited To Just C-Clamps? | James Hobson | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"alphabet clamps",
"c-clamp"
] | For decades, nay, centuries, we have been limited to the C-clamp, one of the most versatile, useful and perhaps most recognized tool. But why does C get all the glory? What of
the other 25 letters?
People of my generation, my father’s generation, and my grandfather’s generations have clamped with one letter, and one letter only. But why C? And why now?
Here at Clamp-Co we thought we needed a change. So we set out to develop an entire line of Alphabet Clamps.
[Robb Godshaw] is the mastermind behind this revolution in clamping technology. Designed to German standards (
DIN 1451
), and made in America, the Alphabet Clamp set provides unrivaled clamping functionality for work in the industry, at the shop, or even at home. Perhaps the most functional previously unheard-of clamp is the U-Clamp, providing a deep throat for those extra hard to reach parts.
Our personal favorites though have to be the I, L and T clamps which provide unmatched usability and style. | 59 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "1745350",
"author": "ram41662",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T08:04:32",
"content": "Did I sleep too long…is it April 1 already?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1745364",
"author": "Zac",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T08... | 1,760,376,091.320601 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/23/lucid-dreaming-with-plastic-milk-cartons/ | Lucid Dreaming With Plastic Milk Cartons | Matt Terndrup | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"lucid dreaming",
"lucid scribe",
"rem cycles",
"wbtb"
] | Being aware that oneself is in a dream can be a difficult moment to accomplish. But as [Rob] showed on his blog, monitoring the lucid experience once it happens doesn’t have to be costly. Instead, household items can be fashioned together to make a
mask that senses REM sleep cycles
. We were tipped off to the project by [Michael Paul Coder] who developed an algorithm to
communicate inside a dream
.
[Rob] cut up plastic milk cartons for this ‘DreamJacker’ project and attached a webcam to produce a simple way to detect eye movements. A standard game adapter with a triangular array of white LED’s was added to the plastic cover in order to provide the necessary illumination needed for the camera. After testing it out, he switched to red light to balance sensitivity issues. Another iteration later and [Rob] attempted to create hypnagogic imagery during the drowsiness state that occurs right before falling asleep. He did this by fitting a single tri-color LED that he scrapped from Christmas lights that were dumped on his street.
The mask is tied to the back of the head with shoelaces, and acts like an eye patch during Wake Back to Bed sessions (
WBTB
). The end result produces an eerie looking graph of eye twitching taken throughout the night. We would be interested confirming that this setup helps the user experience a lucid dream, so it might be time to make our own.
Since writing his post, [Rob] has since adapted a mouse for use inside the mask cup to integrate with the LucidScribe REM FIELD-mouse plugin developed by [Michael Paul Coder]. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1745123",
"author": "bobfeg",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T05:44:00",
"content": "A very cool project.Good use of cast-off materials he had at hand :-)A scrounger….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1746571",
"author": "defa... | 1,760,376,091.180705 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/23/hackaday-retro-edition-browser-wars-on-solaris/ | Hackaday Retro Edition: Browser Wars On Solaris | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"hackaday retro edition",
"retro edition"
] | After seeing an earlier Hackaday post on old, old Unix systems loading up
our retro edition
, [Eugenio] decided he would play out the late 90s browser wars on a few machines of his own. Yes, it’s Internet Explorer vs. Netscape in a fight to the death. No <blink> or <marquee> tags were involved, but a Sun Ultra 5
was.
We’re looking at the peak of the workstation world circa 1999 here, and only one browser would emerge victorious (it’s neither IE nor Netscape, btw).
The Solaris 9 system [Eugenio] has supports both Internet Explorer 5 and
shipped
with Netscape 4. Compared to the functionality of modern browsers, both IE5 and Netscape 4 are ancient and terrible. Remember kids, even the scroll wheel on a mouse is a relatively new invention.
Our retro edition doesn’t have any CSS, Javascript, or any of the new Web weirdness, so everything loaded as it should. One interesting problem [Eugenio] encountered was an inverse color desktop when the IE5 window was in focus. Bringing another window into focus returned the desktop to the right color. I guess Netscape wins the Solaris browser war.
[Eugenio] also dug out an old VT320 terminal and connected it to a Vaio x505 (the same approximate vintage as the Sun Ultra 5). This worked beautifully in both 80 and 132 column mode.
We’re always looking for new submissions of old computers loading up
our retro site
. We haven’t had many minicomputers loading the site, so dig out those Vaxxen and send something in. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1744749",
"author": "nobody",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T02:07:33",
"content": "It is a beautiful site.I really miss Sun.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1744972",
"author": "FrankenPC",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T... | 1,760,376,091.484406 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/23/krugers-zippo-remote/ | Kruger’s Zippo Remote | Matt Terndrup | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"lighter",
"rf module"
] | Inspired by the detonator in the Captain America: The First Avenger movie, [Jon]
modified a normal Zippo lighter to activate a relay on a receiver module
. His instructables shows how to create such a device by adjusting the insert in such a way that if someone flipped it open, all they would see would be a flint wheel, flint, wick, and all that stuff; nothing would be abnormal. In order to do this, the components would have to be perfectly concealed.
To acquire a remote signal, [Jon] used the whole metal case as an antenna instead of replacing the wick with one. An antenna pin on an RF module was attached to the insert to get the necessary effect. The flint wheel was then turned into a button and a notification LED was installed. Once the code was uploaded and a receiver module was fashioned together, the end product produced a flash of sparks on the other end.
This hack was made for educational use, and is only meant for demonstration purposes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA4NecjrWyQ | 25 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1744390",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-08-23T23:09:11",
"content": "So what your saying is if I see someone suspicious with a zippo I should just shoot him? Gotcha!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1744659",
... | 1,760,376,091.609073 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/23/defcon-side-trip-pololu-and-robots/ | Defcon Side Trip: Pololu And Robots | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware",
"Interviews"
] | [
"LV Bots",
"pololu",
"robot",
"robot builders club"
] | During our trip out to Vegas for Defcon, we were lucky enough to catch up with a few of the companies that should be of interest to Hackaday readers. One of the companies based out of the area is
Pololu
, makers and purveyors of fine electronics and robots. In an incredible bit of lucky scheduling,
LV Bots
, the Las Vegas area robot builders club, was having an event the same weekend we were there. A maze challenge, no less, where builders would compete to build the best robot and write the best code to get a pile of motors and electronics through a line-following maze in the fastest amount of time.
The Bots
The LV Bots events are held in the same building as Pololu, and unsurprisingly there were quite a few Pololu employees making a go at taking the stuff they developed and getting it to run through a maze. At least one bot was based on the
Zumo kit
, and a few based on the
3pi platform
. Interestingly, the Raspberry Pi Model B+ was the brains of quite a few robots; not extremely surprising, but evidence that the LV Bots people take their line-following mazes
seriously
and are constantly improving their builds.
Each robot and builder ‘team’ was given three runs. For each team, the first run is basically dedicated to mapping the entire maze. A carefully programmed algorithm tries to send the robot around the entire maze, storing all the intersections in memory. For the second and third runs, the bot should – ideally – make it to the end in a very short amount of time. This is the ideal situation and was only representative of one team for that weekend’s event.
The worst case scenario is a bot that doesn’t quite have the proper mapping algorithm down. For example:
If, however, a robot can figure out all the nodes in the line following map, the second and third runs can go by pretty quick:
The folks at LV Bots put together a recap of the entire competition as well:
Pololu
Although I did arrive a bit after normal working hours, [Ryan] and [Kevin] were kind enough to take me around their shop for a small tour of the joint. It’s more or less what you would expect: one giant room with pick and place machines, giant ovens, solder paste dispensers, enough equipment for all the testing and rework, and a giant wall of filled with all their products. One of the more interesting pieces of equipment was a soldering robot. Yes, as in a robot with a soldering iron. Here are the pics:
Being after hours, the machines were not running. [Kevin] did send me a video of the manufacturing process of their
A-Star 32U4 Micro
, shown below:
In addition to their huge manufacturing room, the guys took me up to their dev lab where they come up with the design of all their products. Lego abound, surprisingly in already built configuration. I’ll let the picture galleries speak for themselves, shown below.
The Bots
The maze
Setting up for a run
Blinky again
LV Bots
PacBot
Blinky
Pololu
The ‘wall of samples’
Shop floor
Truly, important stuff happens in the design lab
“The” Pololu
Hundreds of steppers
Thousands of dollars in pogo pins | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1744237",
"author": "aztraph",
"timestamp": "2014-08-23T21:51:22",
"content": "turn left!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1744868",
"author": "Matt",
"timestamp": "2014-08-24T03:07:53",
"content": "The ... | 1,760,376,091.669684 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/23/smartphone-vr-viewer-roundup/ | Smartphone VR Viewer Roundup | Matt Terndrup | [
"Roundup",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"craig dalton",
"dodocase",
"durovis dive",
"fov2go",
"google cardboard",
"hasbro my3d",
"mark bolas",
"nvis",
"palmer luckey",
"vr2go",
"vrase",
"vrla"
] | In June 2014, Google revealed a
low-cost Smartphone Adapter and VR SDK
at their annual software developer conference in San Francisco, California. During the event, Google handed out 6,000 cardboard kits and released a tutorial online, which prompted homemade versions to surface on the web within three hours. This then sparked an iPad case manufacturer to fashion together their own cardboard VR kit that could be bought for $25. After a week, Google gained over 50,000 downloads of
their cardboard Android app
.
Although the popularity of this VR viewer skyrocketed extremely fast, the idea for a cheap VR solution is nothing new. Developers have been experimenting with these types of objects for years. In fact, a group of Cupertino high school sophomores
debuted a similar device called ‘Face Box’
at an entertainment and technology conference at Stanford University on June 17, more than a week before Google’s I/O presentation. A few months earlier, researchers at the Mixed Reality Research Lab (MxR) at USC
launched an open source DIY VR website
that showed how to create virtual reality headsets with a 3D printer. The smartphone enabled head-mounted display had schematics for both Android and iPhone. The MxR lab was where [Palmer Luckey] worked at as an engineer before founding Oculus (the company that Facebook eventually acquired for approximately $2 billion). So when [Palmer] saw that Google released their cardboard kit, he vocalized his opinion by calling it a clone of his colleagues’ research
on Reddit
.
Since virtual reality has exploded over the last year or so, we rounded up as many easy-to-make solutions as possible to see what is available on the market, with a focus on portability. Here is what we found:
DODOcase
DODOcase was the first to market with a cardboard VR toolkit. Their cutout viewer was released so fast that Google barely had enough time to splice images of the DODOcase kit into their presentation at Google I/O. For a mere $25, anyone with a smartphone can purchase the toolkit and begin peering into the internet-connected metaverse. This has positioned DODOcase to become one of the quickest companies to capitalize on the exploding virtual reality trend. With this easily accessible device, the growth of the VR movement is bound to take off soon.
I interviewed [Craig Dalton], co-founder and CEO of DODOcase, at the biggest virtual reality event in Southern California’s history to date about the rise in the DIY VR developer community. This mini-conference was hosted by a local meetup group called
VRLA
and attracted over 600 people with a variety of virtual reality demos and presentations. I wrote about the whole event on
Virtual Reality Reviewer’s website
. [Craig] was happy to speak with us about how he thinks “
the next million people to experience VR are going to experience it through one of these
.” After seeing their kit and hearing what he had to say, we agree; especially if large corporations purchase a lot of them and hand them out to their employees and/or community members.
VR2GO
In the MxR Lab (where [Palmer Luckey] spun out of) a team of researchers led by [Mark Bolas] developed a lost-cost virtual reality solution that utilized the capabilities of a smartphone to allow the user to gaze into 3D generated worlds. On their website, they state that “
these low-cost, lightweight systems can be used to create portable virtual reality applications for training, education, health and fitness, entertainment and more.
”
The idea stemmed from an early
foam board prototype
called the FOV2GO, which was created in 2012. This was the device that [Palmer Luckey] was referring to when he called out Google on Reddit. I visited the legendary lab at the 2nd VRLA event a while ago and interviewed [Mark Bolas] about the role that technology has on the education of inner city kids. The first part of the video (1 of 4) can be seen embedded below. In it, [Mark] picks up one of the 3D printed VR2GO headsets. He also talks about how he wanted to have a Radioshack open 24/7, and now this lab is essentially that.
Interview with Virtual Reality pioneer Mark...
by
hackertrips
Other Smartphone Enabled Devices
In Google’s VR presentation, they showcased some of the inspiration behind their cardboard design. Of those referenced was
vrAse
which raised over £66,000 on Kickstarter and went on to become a world leader in smartphone visualization devices. Hasbro even entered the virtual ring with their elongated,
plastic 3D viewer
specialized for the iPhone and iPod touch. A similar device called
Nvis
(which isn’t a smartphone viewer but has 2 hi-res microdisplays instead), a gaming-based viewer named
Durovious Dive
, and the FOV2GO were depicted as well.
Homemade Virtual Reality Goggles
[Marcus] fashioned together a simple headset by 3D printing an enclosure and using two 50mm focal lenses. His design looks to have been created sometime in 2013, based on the link’s provide on his website (including a reference to the FOV2GO MxR device). The goggles are a little bit rough around the edges, which should be expected because of the time in which he was working. There were not a lot of readily available tutorials or materials then, so he had to make his own
DIY 3D virtual reality goggles
.
Going back even further, we found this
head-mounted computer
made of cardboard which we covered all the way back in 2009. This is probably the earliest iteration of a cardboard smartphone enabled VR viewer. The creator was named [Andrew] and managed to develop the device with a HTC Magic handset and a few dollars worth of ‘Harbor Freight crap.’ Of course fast forward to Google Cardboard and it only took about a week to see
a DIY version of it
.
Recently, Gadgetsin documented a way to produce a
more durable virtual reality headset
using Polycarbonate, which is also based on the Google cardboard design.
Conclusion
Despite the initial spark of virtual reality in the 1990’s, then it’s sudden decline, followed by the recent rise again, VR is here to stay. It shows no signs of slowing down. And with cheap, smartphone virtual reality toolkits like these, millions of early adopters will begin to explore the possibilities surrounding VR. The rapid growth of VR content will come from developers trying out their work on items similar to cardboard cutouts. The price is so low now that consumers will also start purchasing kits just to see what virtual reality is like.
For more information about the mobile VR viewer that brought virtual reality into the main stream, check out
Google’s cardboard developer website
and be sure to watch the full video below of them presenting the idea at I/O 2014.
[Thanks to William Correa for filming the interview with Mark Bolas!] | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1744014",
"author": "Ralph Doncaster (Nerd Ralph)",
"timestamp": "2014-08-23T19:41:41",
"content": "$25 for some cardboard, velcro, & plastic lenses? For something low-tech that costs less than $5 to manufacture, a retail price of $25 is a rip-off.",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,376,091.549484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/23/rfid-audio-book-reader-for-the-visually-impaired/ | RFID Audio Book Reader For The Visually Impaired | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"accessibility",
"audio book",
"DVD cases",
"raspberry pi",
"rfid",
"rfid reader"
] | When [Willem] visited home last year, he stopped in at his grandparents’ house and found that his very active 93-year-old grandfather had recently gone almost completely blind and was passing the days just sitting in a chair. [Willem] suggested that he listen to audio books, but his grandfather wasn’t receptive to the idea until [Willem] convinced him that the well-narrated ones can be very gripping and entertaining. Once his grandfather was on board, [Willem] knew that he needed a much more accessible solution than a tiny device with tiny controls, so he built
an RFID audio reader using a Raspberry Pi
.
[Willem] has posted
the build details
at his personal site. Essentially, the box you see above contains a Raspi and an RFID reader. He created different ‘books’ by placing RFID cards inside of DVD boxes, which makes them more tangible and accessible. When a book is placed on the box, the RFID reader tells the Pi which mp3 files to load. The large colored buttons let the user pause, rewind 20 seconds, and control the volume.
We love to see this kind of build. It’s simple, effective, and greatly enhances the user’s quality of life. [Willem]’s grandfather loves it and uses it every day. | 14 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1743527",
"author": "John Neyland",
"timestamp": "2014-08-23T15:40:21",
"content": "Outstanding project and usecase Willem! Congratulations for being able to develop such a practical and yet so much needed application, device and user-interface. Its apparent that you successfully ... | 1,760,376,091.750598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/23/disabling-tap-to-pay-debit-cards/ | Disabling Tap To Pay Debit Cards | James Hobson | [
"how-to"
] | [
"ct scanner",
"rfid",
"RFID card",
"xray"
] | Some people aren’t too crazy about the rush of RFID enabled credit & debit cards, and the problem is, you don’t really have a choice what card you get if the bank sends you a new one! Well if you really don’t like this on your card for whatever reason,
it’s pretty easy to disable.
[James Williamson] recently got a new debit card with RFID technology — the problem is it was messing with his access card at work, the readers would beep twice, and sometimes not work. He decided to disable it because of this and that he didn’t really use the tap to pay feature, nor was he completely convinced it was as secure as the bank said.
Since these RFID chips use antennas made of copper wire, he could have just started slicing his card with a knife to break the antenna — but, since he has access to a CT scanner, he thought he’d scan it to figure out where everything was.
Simply make a small notch in the edge of your card, or snip off one of the corners. This breaks the antenna and prevents power to the chip when held near a reader — though if you don’t have access to a CT scanner you might want to double-check next time you buy something!
Now there is another side to this — maybe you actually like the whole tap to pay thing, well, if you wanted to you could get a supplemental card,
dissolve it in acetone
, and then install the
RFID chip into a finger ring
for Jedi-like purchasing powers! | 85 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "1742971",
"author": "Stаn (@diyftw)",
"timestamp": "2014-08-23T11:21:15",
"content": "A couple seconds in a microwave oven works great too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1743011",
"author": "pikuorguk",
"time... | 1,760,376,092.027493 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/23/converting-cigarette-butts-to-batteries/ | Converting Cigarette Butts Into Batteries | Matt Terndrup | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"cigarettes",
"pyrolysis",
"south korea"
] | Trillions of cigarettes are smoked every year, leaving behind discarded filters containing non-biodegradable materials that can be recycled into carbon-based products for electrochemical components. This was discovered by a team of South Korean scientists who presented their
unique energy storage solution
in IOP Publishing’s journal of Nanotechnology.
The materials inside the cigarette filters offered up better performance than commercially bought carbon, graphene and carbon nanotubes at the time. They hoped to coat electrodes of supercapacitors with the material to be inserted into computers, handheld devices, and electric vehicles. A simple one-step burning process called
pyrolysis
reduced the filters down into a carbon-based byproduct with tiny pores. The leftover porous substance ensured higher power densities for supercapacitors. This was then tested out to see how well the material absorbed electrolyte ions and discharged them. It did better than expected and stored higher amounts of electrical energy than other commercially available options.
The full paper is linked at the bottom of their article but it’s behind a paywall. If you have a subscription and the time to look it over, please let us know if you think there’s potential for this unorthodox material source or if they’re just blowing smoke.
[Thanks for the tip Ryoku!] | 28 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1742576",
"author": "Galane",
"timestamp": "2014-08-23T08:14:28",
"content": "Any commercial implementation would just use the clean, freshly manufactured filter material and avoid the expense of collecting used butts, which would need to be processed to remove leftover paper and to... | 1,760,376,091.911551 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/22/stewart-platform-ball-bearing-balancer/ | Stewart Platform Ball Bearing Balancer | Edward Becker | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"6dof",
"arduino",
"kinematics",
"pid control",
"senior project",
"servo",
"Stewart platform"
] | For their Mechanical Engineering senior design project at San Jose State University, [Tyler Kroymann] and [Robert Dee]
designed and built a racing motion simulator
. Which is slightly out of the budget of most hackers, so before they went full-scale, a more affordable Arduino powered Stewart platform proof of concept was built. Stewart platforms typically use six electric or hydraulic linear actuators to provide motion in six degrees of freedom (6 DOF), surge (X), sway (Y), heave (Z), pitch, roll, and yaw. With a simple software translation matrix, to account for the angular displacement of the servo arm, you can transform the needed linear motions into PWM signals for standard hobby servos.
The 6 DOF platform, with the addition of a resistive touch screen, also doubled as a side project for their mechatronic control systems class. However, in this configuration the platform was constrained to just pitch and roll. The Arduino reads the resistive touch screen and registers the ball bearing’s location. Then a PID compares this to the target location generating an error vector. The error vector is used to find an
inverse kinematic solution
which causes the actuators to move the ball towards the target location. This whole process is repeated 50 times a second. The target location can be a pre-programmed or controlled using the analog stick on a Wii nunchuck.
Watch the ball bearing seek the target location after the break.
Thanks to [Toby] for sending in this tip.
We at Hackaday look forward to the real life implementation of
Marble Madness
!
Need help
Demystifying PID Control
? Or perhaps you would like to build your own
Stewart Platform
? | 23 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1742383",
"author": "spiritoffeedback",
"timestamp": "2014-08-23T06:33:00",
"content": "That is ridonkulously awesome! Mind blown even though I know we can do seriously amazing feedback stuff nowadays.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,376,092.1931 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/22/introducing-hat-a-day-not-to-be-confused-with-the-real-had-of-course/ | Introducing Hat A Day! Not To Be Confused With The Real HaD Of Course… | James Hobson | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"fabadashery",
"hat a day",
"Pi Hat",
"Pi Hats",
"Raspberry Pi B+",
"raspberry pi hat"
] | With the release of the Raspberry Pi B+ model comes a whole slew of extra GPIO connectors, a whopping 40 of them in fact — Almost double the original B model! A HAT stands for Hardware Attached on Top, and Adafruit is celebrating by trying to create
a new hat, every day
.
A HAT
is a rectangular board measuring 65x56mm with mounting holes for the Raspberry Pi B+ and a 40 pin GPIO header. That doesn’t sound too special by itself, but two of the header pins are reserved for a special auto-configuration system that allows your Pi to have automatic GPIO and driver setup! Now we’re talking!
So far Adafruit has made
a handful of prototype HATs
including the Perma-proto HAT, a GPS HAT, a TFT HAT, an Arcade HAT and even a Servo HAT. But they’re looking for more! We think they’ve slipped up on the one a day record though…
We’re excited to see more integrated projects with the B+ since it’s so much more friendly for add-on hardware than the original — What kind of hardware would you like to see in HAT form? Do you like the idea of HATs? | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1741993",
"author": "Indyaner",
"timestamp": "2014-08-23T03:24:44",
"content": "I find this whole Hat/Cylinder thing pretty tacky. Its like the Fedora-Stigmata all over again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1743478",
... | 1,760,376,092.250292 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/22/the-hackaday-prize-unofficial-statistics/ | The Hackaday Prize: Unofficial Statistics | Brian Benchoff | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"the hackaday prize"
] | Hackaday Prize entries over time. You people really know how to procrastinate. Click to embiggen.
What is the Hackaday crew doing this weekend? Judging Hackaday Prize entries, of course! We need to pare down the hundreds of entries we received to 50 primo entries for the quarterfinals round. We’re going to be slammed the entire weekend, so don’t expect any news on who’s in and who’s out of the competition until Monday.
Each of us has about 15 hours of video to go through (multiply the number of entries by two minutes. It’s a lot), and of course we need to read each entry and rate them. We’re literally looking at more than a man-month of work here, and yes, we’ve all read the book.
Until then,
here’s some totally unofficial statistics
, courtesy of [Greg Kennedy] and his web scraping skills. The graph above shows the number of Hackday Prize entries over time, from the first announcement of the contest to the cutoff time. You people really,
really
like to procrastinate. The day with the most entries was August 20th, the deadline to get your project in. The day with the most validated entries (i.e. meeting the requirements of a video and four project logs) was August 19th. Needless to say, it’s been a busy week on Hackaday.io.
As a side note, the rules for THP say you must upload a video to qualify for the quarterfinals. This video may be uploaded to YouTube or Youku.
Only one project uploaded a video to Youku
. Now you know what to do
next
time to get some free publicity.
It’s highly unlikely we’re going to publish this many
official
stats, especially now that [Greg] has it pretty much covered. We’ll get the list of all the quarterfinalists out on Monday. Until then you can entertain yourself by watching nearly 15 hours of Hackaday Prize entry videos, all embedded below. | 22 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1741426",
"author": "Stacks Armstrong",
"timestamp": "2014-08-22T23:15:50",
"content": "Can I submit a project now?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1741449",
"author": "Brian Benchoff",
"timestamp": "2014-08-22... | 1,760,376,092.308474 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/22/hacklet-12-last-minute-hackaday-prize-submissions/ | Hacklet #12 – Last Minute Hackaday Prize Submissions | Adam Fabio | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"hackaday",
"Hackaday Prize",
"hacklet",
"Procrastination",
"the hackaday prize",
"The Hacklet"
] | If hackers and engineers are notorious for anything, it’s for procrastinating. Many of us wait until the absolute last-minute to get things done.
The Hackaday Prize
has proved to be no exception to that. Anyone watching the newest projects could see the entries fly in the last few days. Let’s take a quick look at a few.
[Cyrus Tabrizi] submitted
Handuino
just a few short hours before the deadline. Handuino is an Arduino based human interface device. You can use it to control anything from R/C cars to 3D printers, to robots to Drones. Input is through the joystick, switches, and buttons, and output through the on-board 2.2″ LCD. Projects can interface to the Handuino via a USB port, or an XBEE radio. Nice Work [Cyrus].
[txyz.info] wants to make us more human than human with
Bionic Yourself
, an implantable device to make you a bionic superhero. [txyz] plans to use sensors such as an electromagnetic field sensor, accelerometers, and Electromyography (EMG) muscle activity detectors. The idea is to not only sense the implanted wearer, but the world around them. The wearer can then use an embedded Bluetooth radio to send commands. The entire system runs on the Arduino platform, so updating your firmware will be easy. Not everyone has a charging port, so [txyz] has included wireless battery charging in the system.
[Laurens Weyn] wants to wake us all up with
Overtime: the internet connected alarm clock
. Overtime is a Raspberry PI powered clock with a tower of 7 segment displays. The prototype displays were sourced from an old exchange rate sign. Overtime does all the normal clock things, such as display the time, and date. It even allows you to set and clear alarms. The display is incredible – there are enough pixels there to play Tetris. Overtime is currently running on an Arduino Mega, but [Laurens] plans to move to a Raspberry PI and hook into the internet for information such as Google calender events.
We’re going to cut things a bit short this week. Your work is done (for now) but for the Hackaday staff, the work is just beginning. We’re already on task, reviewing the entries, and picking which submissions will move on to the next round. Good luck to everyone who entered.
As always, See you in next week’s Hacklet. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of
Hackaday.io
! | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1741064",
"author": "CodeRed",
"timestamp": "2014-08-22T20:12:54",
"content": "So how and when do we learn if we made it to the next round? The anxiety is killing me already.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1741182",
"... | 1,760,376,092.354224 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/22/plan-b-an-open-source-powder-based-3d-printer/ | Plan B: An Open Source Powder Based 3D Printer | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3DP",
"plan B",
"powder based 3D printer"
] | 3D printers come in all shapes and sizes. Most widely known is the FDM (fused deposition modeling) style, which was the easiest to adapt to a consumer grade machine. We’re still waiting for widespread availability of some of the more advanced 3D printing technologies — so you can guess how excited we were when [Yvo de Haas] dropped us a line on his
open-source powder based 3D printer!
Powder based 3D printing is one of the most economic and easy to use technologies in the commercial industry because of one wonderful thing — no support material required! They work by laying down fine layers of powder which can then be bonded together either by laser sintering, or by using a binding agent applied by something similar to an inkjet head. Because of this, the surrounding powder acts as a support for any complex geometry you might need — you can quite literally print anything on this style of machine.
[Yvo] has just finished his own version of this style of 3D printer, called the
Plan B
. Mechanically similar to a regular 3D printer, his is capable of laying down fine powders, and then binding them together using a hacked HP inkjet cartridge. Check it out after the break.
And if you happen to have a laser cutter or engraver, you might be able to
make your own SLS machine as well! | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1740699",
"author": "blabla",
"timestamp": "2014-08-22T17:30:51",
"content": "Nice project! Could this be built using mostly parts from a printer? Just like this:http://hackaday.com/2010/06/06/how-to-diydtg/Any downsides to this approach?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,376,092.412149 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/22/fear-and-loathing-at-defcon-2014/ | Fear And Loathing At DEFCON 22 | Aleksandar Bradic | [
"cons",
"Featured"
] | [
"adventure",
"defcon 22",
"meta",
"party"
] | Nothing says “Welcome to Vegas” like a massive turbulence on a plane full of drunk people who, instead of holding on to their seats, frantically laugh and shout “we’re all going to die!” At 105 Fahrenheit outside, the heat was getting into everyone’s head. After a bumpy touchdown, the in-flight entertainment system rebooted, and a black terminal screen flashed onto everyone’s face:
RedBoot(tm) bootstrap and debug environment [RAM]
(MAS eFX) release, version ("540060-212" v "0.1.02") - built 12:00:35,
Nov 19 2004
Now, that was a beautiful sight – an IFE system that hadn’t been updated for almost a decade. For people who didn’t come here to participate in a big zero-sum game that is Vegas, this was a sign.
DEFCON was waiting for us right outside of that front cabin door.
It was Friday afternoon, and I was already late for the party. [Mike] and [Brian] had been on the ground for more than 24 hours and kept sending us messages on how awesome everything was. I was jealous and simply had to come. Our buddy [Chris Gammell] felt the same way and flew in all the way from Cleveland. The two of us met at Terminal 1 and hailed a taxi.
“You have to be careful at events like this,” [Chris] said as the driver lady was speeding through the desert. ” I heard that last year someone spoofed the cell tower and hijacked lots of passwords.” He offered me access to his OpenVPN instance somewhere in England as a way to protect myself.
“Sure,” I reasoned, “It’s fair to assume that all the traffic can be intercepted, but as long as you use SSL, you should be all right.” I felt good about the fact that only a couple of days ago, we had finally pushed HTTPS on Hackaday.io. Losing that one-password-to-rule-them-all would result in a world of pain for me.
“The real concern is keylogging,” I continued. “If someone was to capture your keystrokes, all that fancy transport-level security might not be of much help.” We pondered on this for a bit, and the driver finally pulled in front of the Palms lobby.
As she was opening the trunk, I saw her turn around and ask: “So how would you do keylogging on a voice-controlled smartphone?”
I guess everyone cares about computer security around here.
An hour later, we were standing on the floor of Palms, admiring the casino layout. A perfectly crafted maze, with no right angles, optimized to prevent the brain from making decisions, as [Chris] explained. Relatively new to Vegas, I found this fascinating. “So it’s like AB testing on the Web… but in real life?”
I guess once the whole “Internet of Things” goes mainstream, this is how the entire world is going to look — like a big fat Vegas casino.
Oh well, I better start getting used to it.
Before long, Hackaday’s finest have arrived. [Mike] was completely spaced out, with a blissful smile on his face, high on all the raving feedback his blinky hat got at the show that day.
[Brian] was in his usual mood.
“Bitcoin is broken,” that’s the first thing he said to me, “I met this guy, and there’s stuff…” His voice slowly faded out, and eyes began to wander in an indeterminate direction.
One thing to know about [Brian]; sometimes, he says crazy things, and when that happens, you don’t want to be the rational guy that tells him it’s not true. It would mean missing out on so much fun that goes inside that weird mind of his. And that night, I really wanted in.
“What happened? Something that would disincentivize the miners pehaps?” For entertainment sake, I assumed that, of course, there *is* a guy and that, Bitcoin *was* in fact “broken.” There’s proof, pictures I hear.
Sadly, he wasn’t in the mood and changed the subject. No apocalyptic visions for me this time.
–
Somewhere around 10PM we finally headed out to DEFCON central – Hotel Rio. We knew it was too late for us to pick up conference badges now, but figured out we’d still get in somehow.
First lesson you learn at DEFCON – knowing the right people helps. [Chris] called up his friend [
dragorn
] from KismetWireless, one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, and he pleaded for us in front of DEFCON’s puzzle master supreme – [LosT], aka [
1o57
]. Next thing you know, we were on the inside, sipping our drinks and talking shop with the hackers at the
BlackPhone
party.
“Have you heard about a guy walking around the floor all day today hacking Pineapples?” someone asked. The Hak5 guys have just released the
Mark V version of their Pineapple
WiFi network auditing tool at DEFCON, and everyone and their mother rushed to buy one. Completely sold out.
“Well, it turned out that there was a zero-day exploit in the latest firmware, and someone wanted to make a point by spending all day bricking these brand new devices that kept popping up on the network.”
I guess that lesson was worth $99.99 to all the proud new product owners out there. Pentest and be pentested. Fortunately, the Hak5 guys issued a firmware update that fixes this, so it was just a playful little annoyance altogether.
After a fantastic DJ set, the Blackphone party started to cool down, so we decided to move on. [Mike’s] blinky hat was a total attention grabber, and it quickly got us a lot of new friends in the DEFCON’s busy hallways. Finally, we ended up in the big hall where
MC Frontalot
was just finishing his show.
Not my thing, but I hear this “nerdcore” stuff is quite popular these days.
Then came something that only an 80’s kid can appreciate –
Anamanaguchi
, the chiptunes extravaganza. [Brian] started jumping all over the place, and it was infectious. Next thing you know, we were all doing it.
What better way to end your first night at a hacker conference than lamenting over a more elegant age, when 8 bits was enough and owning a computer still made you feel special.
–
DEFCON waits for no one, hung over or not. Saturday is the busiest day, and we had to get up early if we were to hear some talks. Save all the sleeping for when we’re back home.
The first talk I went to had a title you simply couldn’t resist: “
Hacking 911: Adventures in Disruption, Destruction, and Death.
” Speakers gave a chilling inside view of 911’s archaic dispatch system and how easy it can be exploited to launch Swatting attacks and mischiefs alike. I always enjoy a good adversarial take on the world and was genuinely excited to hear what’s next.
However, for the next couple of hours, I simply couldn’t find a single talk I liked. Everything was either too trivial, self-promotional, or someone was trying to sell something.
I started to lose faith when I came into the Wireless Village where [Jared Boone] was giving a talk called “
PortaPack: Is that a HackRF In your pocket?
” and I loved it! It had everything – great product, things to learn about SDR, some old tricks for FPU approximation using integer arithmetics… It felt good. There are still talks worth listening to. (We did get the chance to
interview [Jared] about the PortaPack
)
As we were walking out of the room, we met [dragorn] again, and he seemed seriously bummed out.
“Some kid has been running around DEFCON saying he hacked the BlackPhone,” he said.
We had already seen it all over the news that morning. The real story, he told us, wasn’t as big of a deal as the media presented.
The guy claimed he found three security flaws: the first one was a vulnerability that has already been fixed in the latest firmware update, but his phone was still running an old version. The second one was an issue with core Android code and technically not a BlackPhone thing. The third one was just the ability to enable the Android Debug Bridge, which has been disabled by default. From what we can understand, this was left out as an actual “feature,” so also not really a bug.
Still, nobody cared to hear any of this. “Unhackable phone gets hacked at DEFCON” makes for a much better news story anyway, so it kept spreading all over the Interwebs.
It’s a shame, but it’s not like the BlackPhone expected applause from this crowd. After all, everyone needs their 15 minutes of fame.
[Brian] hacking on an SDR, [Mike] hacking on the conference badge, and [Eric Evenchick] talking to [Chris] and [Alek] (both out of frame)
We, on the other hand, couldn’t wait for [Mike’s] hat to be cracked, yet there were still no takers. Our biggest fear coming into DEFCON was that this little OpenWrt box sitting on top of [Mike’s] head would not survive for more than 10 minutes. Yet, there we were, two days in and still waiting. Most likely because not enough people cared, but also because the ones that did seemed to have been solving way too many of [LostBoY’s] puzzles and were overthinking the hat problem big time.
“I have indexed all the content on the Dune Wiki and am trying a dictionary attack against the hashes,” one of the guys said, assuming that usernames from Herbert’s masterpiece were somehow a clue.
“Just brute force it,” [Mike] had to give a hint, slightly embarrassed but happy that people were trying.
Later that day, we ended up in the
Whiskey Pirates
room. This one was #1031 in one of Rio’s towers, and it looked like everything you ever dreamed of as a teenager — a hotel room packed with weird looking people, arcade machines, phone booth and a big electronic microscope in the bathroom. Everyone was building something, sharing knowledge and simply being awesome. We’ll be giving this one it’s own post soon.
If this room were the only reason DEFCON existed, it would be totally worth it.
That night,
The Orb
played at the main stage, and the whole place had an irresistible school “reunion” feel to it.
I came to realize that, in a way, this is what DEFCON is all about – a big party, started 22 years ago, which has yet to end.
The next morning, [Mike’s]
hat finally got hacked
. | 13 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1740544",
"author": "boot",
"timestamp": "2014-08-22T16:24:19",
"content": "nice post, thnx. did anything except the hat get hacked?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1751760",
"author": "true",
"timestamp": "201... | 1,760,376,092.467068 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/22/disabled-chiahuahua-gets-new-outlook-on-life-with-3d-printed-cart/ | Disabled Chiahuahua Gets New Outlook On Life With 3D Printed Cart | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D printed dog cart",
"turboroo"
] | [Turbo] is a disabled Chiahuahua who has brought in
quite a bit of media interest
after [Mark Deadrick] designed and 3D printed some new wheels for the pup.
He was born without his front legs due to a genetic defect and quickly became the runt of the litter, as the other pups prevented him from getting much food — at 4 weeks old he only weighed 10 ounces! The couple owning the dogs didn’t want to give up on the little guy but weren’t sure what to do — most veterinarian clinics they visited didn’t offer much support, until they found [Amy Birk] at the Downtown Veterinarian in Indianapolis.
[Amy], the manager of the clinic, had little [Turbo] examined and determined that the there was nothing physically wrong with the puppy, other than his missing legs — this meant [Turbo] could still have a full and happy life — with the help of some extra wheels. The only problem? Dog carts are generally built for their canine users when they stop growing — not much available for puppies — nor would it be cheap.
In a rush to get [Turbo] something to use, the employees at the clinic were able to hack together a makeshift dog cart using the wheels from a Fisher-Price toy helicopter, a few copper pipes and a ferret harness:
It worked okay but wasn’t the greatest — lucky for them, the original
news story
got shared so much, [Mark Deadrick] heard about the predicament and started designing his own 3D printed cart for [Turbo]. Since he wasn’t local he made some estimations about [Turbo’s] size, and mailed the clinic two prototypes for [Turbo] to try out. They both worked quite well but still didn’t fit the dog just right. The clinic is now working on getting a cast mold of [Turbo] to send back to [Mark] for further revisions.
With all the media attention [Turbo] has received, the clinic is hoping to start up a charity for other disabled dogs in need — similar to
E-nable group
for people, it’s hoped that they can make a difference for handicapped animals too.
[Thanks Bryant!] | 86 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "1739840",
"author": "Jim Turner",
"timestamp": "2014-08-22T11:09:56",
"content": "dammit hackaday, its too early in the morning for feels.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1739967",
"author": "genki",
"timestamp... | 1,760,376,092.63271 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/22/halo-style-paintball/ | Halo-style Paintball | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"attiny",
"buggy",
"i2c",
"paintball",
"paintball gun",
"Paintball marker"
] | It seems as though [Nathan] has taken some serious inspiration from the Warthog. The iconic armored buggy from Halo video games has a turret mounted to the roof. Although [Nathan]’s buggy only
shoots paintballs from its turret
.
Mounting paintball markers (guns) to various objects such as vehicles, robots, or other machines isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems. Vibrations from anything can transfer through a clamping system and cause paintballs to break. This, of course, inhibits the functionality of the marker and is a messy cleanup to boot. Then there has to be a way to fire the paintballs, which is usually handled by soldering to the electrical connections in the marker. And the entire rig has to stand up to the normal jostling and sudden turns from the buggy.
[Nathan] has solved these problems first by creating a custom fast-change mount that allows any malfunctioning markers to be changed rapidly. The electronic firing mechanism is handled by an ATtiny microcontroller and there is a custom electrical connection that is automatically made when the marker is bolted to the mount.
The new system allows markers to be changed in about 30 seconds, much better than any other system. Maybe in the future [Nathan] can upgrade the buggy’s turret to accommodate a
paintball minigun
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1739529",
"author": "ScottishCaptain",
"timestamp": "2014-08-22T08:30:09",
"content": "Oh, you mean the minigun build that had a bunch of useless spinning barrels with a hacked up gun in the centre which is where the balls really came from? That “minigun”?Yeah, he totally needs one ... | 1,760,376,092.514667 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/21/hacking-out-of-necessity-fixing-your-own-cpap-machine/ | Hacking Out Of Necessity — Fixing Your Own CPAP Machine | James Hobson | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"cpap hack",
"cpap machine",
"sleep apnea"
] | One of our avid readers named [Felix] suffers from sleep apnea, and needs a CPAP machine in order to not suffocate while he sleeps — After a recent power-outage, his machine broke,
so he decided to try his hand at fixing it.
A CPAP (
Continuous Positive Airway Pressure
) machine ensures people suffering from sleep apnea breath throughout the night, by preventing their throats from closing. As a medical device, they tend to be super expensive, which is why [Felix] wanted to try fixing his (at least until he gets a new machine covered by insurance).
Upon opening up the machine, it was easy to see the problem: the circuit board was completely fried. Luckily, the machine is pretty simple. It has a brushless DC motor (12V), and two chambers with air filters, along with an air pressure sensor. Since the motor is brushless, it’s not quite as simple as just hooking it up to a power supply. It had a whopping 8 separate leads.
To figure out which was which he shorted the various leads together. If the motor still spun by hand it meant he was shorting a hall effect sensor cable — if he found the two wires going to the motors coils (which he did) shorting them would cause the motor to resist being spun (known as “plug braking” a motor).
Once he identified the various wires, he grabbed an 15A turnigy motor, an Arduino, and quickly found a sketch online to program it. It doesn’t have pressure control, or ramp up times, but it does the trick and allows [Felix] to sleep again. | 45 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "1739001",
"author": "Waterjet",
"timestamp": "2014-08-22T05:07:29",
"content": "Why does a several thousand dollar medical device NOT come with basic voltage protection circuitry? Poly resettable fuses, AC voltage limiters, a quality AC/DC converter, etc? One would think the FIRST t... | 1,760,376,092.710509 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/21/jacobs-ladder-using-a-10kv-oil-transformer/ | Jacob’s Ladder Using A 10kV Oil Transformer | James Hobson | [
"how-to"
] | [
"high voltage",
"high voltage traveling arc",
"jacob's ladder",
"oil furnace transformer",
"transformer"
] | Jacob’s Ladders are a staple experiment in any self-respecting mad scientist’s lair — err, a hacker’s workshop. And why not? High voltage, arcing electricity, likely more than enough to kill you even — brilliant! But in all their awesomeness, Jacob’s ladders
really aren’t that complex.
In [Kevin Darrah’s] latest tutorial he shows us how to make one out of a transformer taken from an oil furnace. Why exactly does an oil furnace even have a high voltage transformer in the first place? They’re actually used as the ignition source, like a pilot light!
The one [Kevin] has is a 110VAC to 10,000VAC transformer, which puts out about 20mA (probably enough to kill you). And to turn it into a Jacob’s Ladder, you’ll just need a two long stiff wires (copper is a good candidate). The wires are closest at the bottom where the transformer can easily arc — this arc then ionizes and heats the air causing it to rise, carrying the arc with it. As the arc continues up the ladder it gets longer and longer as the wires become farther apart, becoming more and more unstable until it breaks. When this happens the arc forms again at the lowest point of resistance — the bottom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oojFfstnVoU
It’s certainly a fun experiment when done properly, just make sure you are being safe when working with any high voltage equipment — not like this guy who used a similar transformer
to electrify some home-made wolverine claws. | 21 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1738583",
"author": "SYNTRONIKS",
"timestamp": "2014-08-22T02:10:49",
"content": "I’m working on one of these right now. The enclosure is really what makes it. I have an ancient western electric box mine is going into. A friend suggested a safety screen since this will be a prop for... | 1,760,376,092.769782 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/21/hat-hash-hacking-at-defcon/ | Hat Hash Hacking At DEFCON | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"defcon",
"hash",
"hat",
"password"
] | You probably remember that
for DEFCON I built a hat
that was turned into a game. In addition to scrolling messages on an LED marquee there was a WiFi router hidden inside the hat. Get on the AP, load any webpage, and you would be confronted with a scoreboard, as well as a list of usernames and their accompanying password hashes. Crack a hash and you can put yourself on the scoreboard as well as push custom messages to the hat itself.
Choosing the complexity of these password hashes was quite a challenge. How do you make them hackable without being so simple that they would be immediately cracked? I suppose I did okay with this because one hacker (who prefers not to be named) caught me literally on my way out of the conference for the last time. He had snagged the hashes earlier in the weekend and worked feverishly to crack the code. More details on the process are available after the jump.
He and his compatriots really went all out on this. As a countermeasure against all the accounts getting hacked very quickly I made 8 different firmware images for the WR-703N router (which runs OpenWRT). To differentiate these I added themes. This first one is “Dune” but we also had Star Trek, Star Wars, and HitchHicker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Because of this, the hash crackers scraped a bunch of Dune themed website to build their own dictionary files. This turned out to be a red herring. I had tested dictionary passwords and cracked them in a matter of minutes. I didn’t think to use odd words like those from Frank Herbert’s books. That would have been a great idea.
The password generator I used was written in Python and can be
found in this project log
. I chose to use random loops to generate passwords that were 5-7 characters long and used lower case, lower case with numbers, lower case with upper case and numbers and all the punctuation on the top row of your keyboard. Even a brute force is time-consuming with 5-7 characters but limiting the character choices will get you there a lot faster. In the end, 5 of the passwords were cracked in around an hour (which was my target complexity) and about 15 more were discovered over night.
Once they had the cracked hashes they tracked me down, and without me realizing it, used ssh to get into the hat and leave their alias for the scoreboard. Furthermore they figured out that echoing to /dev/ttyUSB0 pushes messages to the hat. This means they figured out everything that could be done for this challenge. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1738894",
"author": "Gdogg",
"timestamp": "2014-08-22T04:14:47",
"content": "Good work. I wonder what he cracked on. I never ended up connecting because I only saw you in the vendor area and didn’t feel like pulling out my laptop there. If I wanted to crack it I would have probably ... | 1,760,376,092.901243 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/21/super-nice-cnc-router-build-leaves-little-to-be-desired/ | Super Nice CNC Router Build Leaves Little To Be Desired | Rich Bremer | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"bipolar",
"cnc",
"CNC router",
"motor driver"
] | [Enzo] wrote in to tell us about his recently completed
CNC Router
(
translated
). This is an excellent high-quality, all-aluminum build with no cut corners. The work envelope is a respectable 340 by 420 mm with 80 mm in the Z direction. Linear ball bearings make for smooth travel and lead screws with both axial and radial bearings give a solid foundation of accurate and repeatable movements.
We’ve had a bunch of
CNC Router projects
on Hackaday in the past, including other nicely made
aluminum ones
, but [Enzo] is the only one who spent just as much effort on his computer and machine control system as he did on the CNC machine itself. The computer, which is running Windows and Mach3, is an all-in-one style build that starts out with an old LCD screen from a broken laptop. Along with the reused screen, a very small ETX form factor motherboard was stuffed inside a custom made plexiglass enclosure. A Compact Flash card handles the storage requirements.
Underneath the monitor is another great looking custom made enclosure which houses the stepper motor drivers. There are 3 switches on the front panel to send main’s power out to the PC, spindle and an AUX for future use. On the back panel there are
D-sub
connectors for each stepper motor, the limit switches and the PC connection. Oh yeah, by the way [Enzo] designed his own
bipolar motor drivers
(
translated
) and sent the design out for fabrication. These boards use an A4989 IC and mosfets to control the motors. The schematics are on his site in case you’d like to make some yourself. | 30 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1737754",
"author": "pcf11",
"timestamp": "2014-08-21T20:06:22",
"content": "Different strokes for different folks. I have to say there is little there I care for though. I guess the table is OK.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,376,093.135951 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/21/sparkfun-ships-2000-microviews-without-bootloaders/ | Sparkfun Ships 2000 MicroViews Without Bootloaders | Adam Fabio | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News"
] | [
"arduino",
"bootloader",
"crowdfunding",
"fail of the week",
"failoftheweek",
"Hackaday Fail",
"kickstarter",
"microview",
"optiboot",
"sparkfun"
] | Everyone has a bad day right? Monday was a particularly bad day for the folks at Sparkfun. Customer support tickets started piling up, leading to the discovery that they had shipped out as many as
1,934 MicroViews without bootloaders
.
MicroView is the tiny OLED enabled, Arduino based, microcontroller system which had a
wildly successful Kickstarter campaign
earlier this year.
[Marcus Schappi]
, the project creator, partnered up with SparkFun to get the MicroViews manufactured and shipped out to backers. This wasn’t a decision made on a whim, Sparkfun had proven themselves by fulfilling over 11,000
Makey Makey
boards to backers of that campaign.
Rather than downplay the issue, Sparkfun CEO [Nathan Seidle] has taken to the company blog to explain what happened, how it happened, and what they’re going to do to make it right for their customers. This positions them as the subject of our Fail of the Week column where we commiserate instead of criticize.
First things first, anyone who receives an affected MicroView is getting a second working unit shipped out by the beginning of November. Furthermore, the bootloaderless units can be brought to life relatively easily. [Nate] provided a hex file with the correct bootloader. Anyone with an Atmel AVR In-System Programming (ISP) programmer and a steady hand can bring their MicroView to life. Several users have already done just that. The bootloader only has to be flashed via ISP once. After that, the MicroView will communicate via USB to a host PC. Sparkfun will publish a full tutorial in a few weeks.
Click past the break to read the rest of the story.
So what went wrong? The crux of the problem is a common one to manufacturing: An incomplete production test. For many of their products, Sparkfun loads a single hex file containing the production test and the optiboot bootloader. The test code proves out the functionality of the device, and the bootloader allows the customer to flash the device with their own sketches. The problem is the bootloader normally connects to a PC host via USB. Enumerating a USB connection can take up to 30 seconds. That’s way too slow for volume production.
Sparkfun opted to skip the bootloader test, since all the pins used to load firmware were electrically tested by their production test code. This has all worked fine for years – until now. The production team made a change to the test code on July 18th. The new hex file was released without the bootloader. The production test ran fine, and since no one was testing the bootloader, the problem wasn’t caught until it was out in the wild.
The Sparkfun crew are taking several steps to make sure this never happens again.They’re using a second ATmega chip on their test fixture to verify the bootloader without the slow PC enumeration step. Sparkfun will also avoid changing firmware during a production run. If firmware has to change, they’re planning to beta test before going live on the production line. Finally, Sparkfun is changing the way they approach large scale production. In [Nathan’s] own words:
Moving from low volume to mid-volume production requires a very different approach. SparkFun has made this type of mistake before (faulty firmware on a device) but it was on a smaller scale and we were agile enough to fix the problem before it became too large. As we started producing very large production runs we did not realize quality control and testing would need very different thinking. This was a painful lesson to learn but these checks and balances are needed. If it didn’t happen on Microview it would have happened on a larger production run someday in the future.
Everyone has bad days, this isn’t the first time Sparkfun has lost money due to a mistake. However, they’re doing the right thing by attacking it head on and fixing not only the immediate issue but the underlying thought process which allowed the problem to arise. | 47 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "1737375",
"author": "DainBramage1991",
"timestamp": "2014-08-21T17:07:38",
"content": "Kudos to Sparkfun. Everyone makes mistakes, but it’s good that they are stepping up, admitting the problems, and making the fixes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,376,093.216865 |
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