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https://hackaday.com/2014/05/29/phoenard-arduino-phone-as-small-as-an-arduino-mega/ | Phoenard: Arduino Phone As Small As An Arduino Mega | Mike Szczys | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Cellphone Hacks",
"Featured"
] | [
"Atmel",
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"cellphone",
"hero contest",
"phoenard",
"phone",
"self balancing"
] | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hXgwTRqwRU&w=580]
Hanging out at one side of the Atmel booth at Maker Faire was [Pamungkas Sumasta] who was showing off his
Arduino cellphone called Phoenard
. We really like the form-factor but its hackability is where it really shines. [Sumasta] showed off the menu system which is quite snappy and makes it simple for you to add your own applications. Software isn’t the only thing you can customize, as there’s a connector at the bottom of the phone. He showed off a breadboard attachment which was hosting LEDs of various colors. Their intensity can be altered using a simple slider app on the touchscreen. But there’s more power if want it. Also on exhibit was a self-balancing robot body which has a connector at the top for the phone.
[Sumasta]
won the Atmel Hero contest
and we assume that’s how he made it all the way to San Francisco from The Netherlands for Maker Faire. You can learn a few
more technical details about Phoenard
on the Facebook page. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1528896",
"author": "FRBAP",
"timestamp": "2014-05-29T18:10:07",
"content": "This is actually hella cool, and I’m kind of amazed at how snappy that UI looks.Normally I’m not a fan of most Arduino posts because most the things people make out of them seem really uncreative but this i... | 1,760,376,187.638859 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/29/super-simple-gimbal-for-multi-rotor-aircraft-laughs-in-the-face-of-complexity/ | Super Simple Gimbal For Multi-Rotor Aircraft Laughs In The Face Of Complexity | Rich Bremer | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"camera gimbal",
"gimbal",
"quad copter"
] | After the first flight of your newly built multi-copter, you will immediately want to add a camera. This sequence of events follows the laws of physics and is as predictable as gravity. Just strapping a camera on by way of a fixed bracket may technically solve that problem, but it creates another. A multi-copter tilts and rolls as a result of changing flight direction. If the multi-copter tilts and rolls, so does your camera. This is where a gimbal comes in handy, it adjusts the camera in an equal and opposite direction than that of the aircraft. If the aircraft tilts forward, the gimbal tilts the camera backward the same amount. The result is a steady camera for capturing some sweet videography.
Team SSG over at rcgroups.com has come up with what they are calling the
Super Simple Gimbal
. Their vision was a gimbal that would be inexpensive, easy to build and add minimal weight to the aircraft. On a normal gimbal, there are two motors or servos, each one specifically controls a single axis of movement. On the SSG, there are 2 servos but they do not move independently from one another. The camera is mounted to a plate that is supported on one end by a piece of silicone tube which becomes a fulcrum for the system. The other side of this plate is supported by 2 linkages (also made of silicone tube) that are themselves connected to the servos. If both servos move up, the camera is tilted down. If the right servo moves up and the left down, the camera is tilted to the left.
So how do the servos know what to do and when to do it? Some multi-rotor flight control boards have outputs for connecting the servos directly. The control board uses the on-board gyroscopes and accelerometers to sense the movement of the aircraft and determine how much to move the camera.
If you are interested in making one of these for yourself head over to the above link to find everything you need. Thanks goes out to Team SSG for documenting this project so well. If a fancy brushless motor gimbal is more your style, check out
this one you can print
with your 3D Printer. | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1528335",
"author": "gregkennedy",
"timestamp": "2014-05-29T14:16:29",
"content": "Why do you need a motorized gimbal at all? Couldn’t you just hang the camera off the quadcopter with string? You couldn’t fly it upside down, but…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,376,187.756889 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/29/man-builds-concrete-3d-printer-in-his-garage/ | Man Builds Concrete 3D Printer In His Garage | Adam Fabio | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"Concrete Printer"
] | [Andrey Rudenko] is building a house in his garage. Not with nails and lumber, but with
concrete extruded by his 3D printer
. We’ve seen
concrete 3D printers
in the past, but unlike those projects, [Andrey] isn’t part of a of a university or corporation. He’s just a contractor with a dream. His printer is directly derived from the RepRap project. It’s even commanded by
Pronterface
.
[Andrey] started with an Arduino Mega 2560 based
RepRap RAMPS
style controller. His big printer needed big NEMA34 stepper motors, far beyond the current capacity of the stock RAMPS stepper drivers. [Andrey] got in touch with [James] at MassMind who helped him with an
open source THB6064AH
based driver. [James] even came up with an adaptor cable and PCB which makes the new drivers a drop-in replacement.
Now that his printer was moving, [Andrey] needed a material to print. Concrete chemistry is a science all its own. There are many specialty blends of concrete with specific strength and drying times. Trucking in custom mixtures can get expensive. [Andrey] has come up with his own mixture based on bags of regular concrete mix, sand, and some additives. [Andrey’s] special sauce doesn’t cure especially quickly, but it is viscous enough to print with.
Every piece of [Andrey’s] printer had to be designed and refined, including the nozzle. The concrete printer works somewhat like a
frostruder
, extruding concrete in 20mm wide by 5mm tall layers. He’s even managed to print overhanging layers and arches exactly like a giant RepRap Mendel.
The printer’s great unveiling will be this summer. [Andrey] plans to print a playhouse sized castle over the course of a week. He’s looking to collaborate with architects, builders, and other like-minded folks. We’d suggest uploading the project to
Hackaday.io
!
An example of the printer’s output:
[Andrey’s] printer today:
One of [Andrey’s] early prototypes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43boVGpYBpI | 97 | 36 | [
{
"comment_id": "1527892",
"author": "Justin K.",
"timestamp": "2014-05-29T11:19:07",
"content": "This is a really cool project, but how sturdy could those pieces possibly be? I can’t imagine the concrete is very strong when printed in layers like that. Unless he plans on filling the spaces in betwe... | 1,760,376,187.94476 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/29/physical-keys-not-just-for-doors-anymore-now-available-for-windows/ | Physical Keys Not Just For Doors Anymore, Now Available For Windows | Rich Bremer | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"Arduino Leonardo",
"lock",
"windows"
] | If you have ever forgotten your computer password after a long weekend or maybe you can remember it but just can’t seem to type it correctly, [Thomas] has a project for you. It’s a
physical key
that locks and unlocks your PC.
So how does it work? The heart of the project is an Arduino
Leonardo
. You may recall that this board is a bit different from the preceding Arduinos as it can enumerate on a host computer as a Human Interface Device (
HID
), such as a keyboard or mouse. The Arduino sketch continually reads an input pin using an internal pull-up resistor to make it logic high with the key switch connecting the signal to ground. When the Arduino sees the pin change from high to low, it sends out a keyboard command consisting of the Windows Key and “L”, which is the keyboard shortcut for locking the computer.
When the physical key is turned again, the Arduino sees the pin change back to a high state and it again emulates a keyboard but this time enters your password. You do have to include your password in the Arduino sketch for this to work. In addition, there are two LED’s wired up to show if the computer is locked or not, but you’ll be able to tell pretty quick when trying to get back to work.
The Arduino sketch and Frtitzing diagram are available at the above link in case you would like to make one yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBPy88_ZFAY | 21 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1527409",
"author": "Galane",
"timestamp": "2014-05-29T08:32:44",
"content": "Whatever happened to just having an actual key lock on the front of the computer that blocked the keyboard from working?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,376,187.583615 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/28/e-reader-becomes-sailplane-and-paraglider-computer/ | E-reader Becomes Sailplane And Paraglider Computer | Brian Benchoff | [
"Android Hacks"
] | [
"e-reader",
"flight computer",
"hang gliding",
"paragliding",
"sailplane",
"XCSoar"
] | [Tweepy] flies unpowered aircraft, and he’d like to use the XCSoar flight computer app for gliders, sailplanes, and paragliders, but couldn’t find any hardware. XCSoar is an amazing app that can keep track of terrain, route, thermals, and a whole bunch of other variables that make flying more enjoyable, but running it on a device useful for a hang glider pilot is a challenge.
He eventually found a nearly perfect device in the Kobo mini e-reader. It’s e-ink, so it’s sunlight readable, uses a glove-compatible resistive touchscreen, runs Android, and is dirt cheap. The only thing lacking was a GPS receiver. What was [Tweepy] to do?
Mod an e-reader, of course
.
The electronic portion of the mod was simple enough; serial GPS units can be found just about everywhere, and the Kobo has a serial headers on the board. The case, however,
required a bit of thingiverseing
, and the completed case mod looks fairly professional.
With a few software updates, new maps, and of course the phenomenal
XCSoar app
, [Tweepy] had an awesome flight computer for under 100 Euro. The only thing missing is an integrated variometer, but
a Game Boy will work
in a pinch. | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1527005",
"author": "JLO",
"timestamp": "2014-05-29T05:16:55",
"content": "What a great application for e-ink. A true “ah ha” moment!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1527025",
"author": "thommm",
"timestamp": "2014-05-29... | 1,760,376,188.016604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/28/the-lightgame-project-a-multiplayer-arduino-game/ | The Lightgame Project: A Multiplayer Arduino Game | Nick Conn | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"children",
"game",
"i2c",
"kids",
"reflex",
"reflex game",
"student",
"tft",
"TFT LCD",
"toy"
] | Summer is upon us. The
Lightgame Project
is a multiplayer reaction time based game built around the Arduino. It’s a perfect rainy day project for those restless kids (and adults!). Designed by two undergraduate students [Efstathios] and [Thodoris] for a semester long project, all the hard work has already been done for you.
There are tons of reasons we love
games
that you can
build yourself
. For one, it’s an amazing way to get children interested in hobby electronics, making, and hacking. Especially when they can play the game with (and show off to) their friends. Another reason is that it is a perfect way to share your project with friends and family, showcasing what you have been learning. The game is based on your reaction time and whether or not you press your button when another players color is shown. The project is built around two Arduinos connected
via I2C
. The master handles the mechanics of the game, while the slave handles the
TFT LCD
and playing music through a buzzer.
I2C is a great communication protocol to be familiar with and this is a great project to give it a try. [Efstathios] and [Thodoris] did a great job writing up their post, plus they included all the code and schematics needed to build your own. It would be great to see more university professors foster open source hardware and software with their students. A special thanks goes out to [Dr. Dasygenis] for
submitting
his student’s work to us! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1526875",
"author": "dave",
"timestamp": "2014-05-29T04:12:34",
"content": "wouldn’t you think that they would design it so that a no answer be the max counts instead of zero…? just a thought…i didn’t look at the code but i think it would be an easy fix for people that want to buil... | 1,760,376,187.689308 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/28/blinding-shades-hide-wearers-four-eyes/ | Blinding Shades Hide Wearer’s Four Eyes | Mike Szczys | [
"Featured",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"frame",
"glasses",
"hinge",
"led",
"rgb",
"ws2812b"
] | We ran into [Garrett Mace] at Maker Faire. He wasn’t exhibiting, but in keeping with the fun he made something to show off. This
pair of RGB LED Shades was assembled the night before
. They may have been hacked together, but they were in no way a hack. Especially of interest to us is the hinge design which is made of PCB substrate and a few machine screws.
Our video above does a pretty good job of showing off the blinky patterns he coded. What’s surprising to us is that the wearer is almost no view of the light the specs are emitting. The slots aren’t that hard to see out of either, and they hide [Garrett’s] prescription glasses quite nicely. This pair steps up from
the single color version
we saw a couple of years back. That set was also on display, but you really do need to get a closer look at the newer design. Luckily it took us so long to get this video edited that
the Macetech blog now has complete details
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1526099",
"author": "Douggie",
"timestamp": "2014-05-29T00:00:05",
"content": "My immediate thought:http://0-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/a/image/1333/25/1333250409212.jpg",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1526191",
"author... | 1,760,376,187.804825 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/28/10000-hackers/ | 10,000 Hackers | Mike Szczys | [
"News"
] | [] | Our little community might not be so very little. Today the 10,000th Hacker registered an account on
Hackaday.io
! You may remember that we just launched our project hosting site at
The Gathering
on January 21st and
made it public
in February. There were a few pre-Alpha testers already registered, but still, that’s 10k people in four months. Why? Because hacking is awesome and it’s made better if you show off what you do!
Of course we’re not anywhere near done yet (technically we’re still in Alpha). We want help shaping the existing features and developing new ones. Share your ideas as comments on
the Feedback project
; we read those.
Hackaday.io is also the gathering point for
The Hackaday Prize
. Give the interface a whirl, contribute to open hardware, and win a trip into space or hundreds of other prizes. What are you waiting for?
Oh, one last thing, if you’re wondering what 10,000 Hackers looks like, we have a Jolly Wrencher for every one of you after the break. | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1526766",
"author": "xobmo",
"timestamp": "2014-05-29T03:36:45",
"content": "Hackaday is the reason my F5 key no longer has “F5” written on it. Keep it up!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1526791",
"author": "oorspron... | 1,760,376,188.110678 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/28/sense-spray-air-freshener-says-cheese/ | Sense & Spray Air Freshener Says Cheese | James Hobson | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"remote shutter release",
"shutter release"
] | What happens when you take a remote controlled tarantula, an automatic air freshener, some PVC tube and a mechanical trigger release for a camera? Well, it’s definitely a hack, that’s for sure — you get a
remote camera shutter release!
[Michael] loves his Panasonic LX7, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have a trigger release! It does however except a hot shoe adapter to use with a manual release. All [Michael] had to do now was make it remote controlled.
If you’ve ever taken apart an automatic air freshener you know that they are a treasure trove of parts, ripe for the hacking. Specifically, they have a very nice linear actuator which can be used for all kinds of fun things. In this case, it works great for pressing the manual shutter release cable. The next step is controlling it. To do this, [Michael] found a cheap RC toy, a $10 stuffed tarantula oddly enough — By taking it apart he was able to make use of its controller to turn on the air freshener, effectively turning his contraption into a remote controlled shutter release.
This has been done before using a
different style of air freshener
— who knew they were so useful!
[Thanks Jeremy!] | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1525683",
"author": "Jeremy Cook",
"timestamp": "2014-05-28T21:00:14",
"content": "Thanks for writing this up James! I’m definitely a big fan of alternate air freshener uses!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1525755",
"autho... | 1,760,376,188.059891 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/27/using-state-machines-in-your-projects/ | Using State Machines In Your Projects | Will Sweatman | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino"
] | [Tony] has developed a method of using a
state machine
to validate keypad inputs. His method checks the commands character by character as they are entered in by a 16 button keypad. State machines are often used to break down complex problems into sequential tasks, making code development easier. While [Tony’s] example uses the keypad, Arduino Uno, and a character LCD, the theory can be applied to numerous projects, such as
this Dahlander motor switch
.
As you see, state machines can be very versatile. Stick around after the break as we take a look at [Tony’s] state machine and provide a brief explanation of how it all works.
The goal is to ensure a command is entered in to a system correctly – in this case it is being validated character by character with each key press. A
state machine
is used to achieve this goal. The command is:
XX@HH:MM#
Where:
XX = 1-99
HH = 0-24
MM = 00-59
# = Execute
Each value is considered a state. When the value is entered, it moves to the next state. So:
Be sure to check out [Tony’s] project for more details and learn how he implements the above state machine in code. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1521635",
"author": "TrickyRicky",
"timestamp": "2014-05-27T20:17:02",
"content": "State machines are the bomb(I know, I know….stuck in the 90’s) in certain situations. While I worked for a certain french tire maker that starts with “M”, we had a french tool called grafcet that was ... | 1,760,376,187.50948 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/27/developed-on-hackaday-front-panels-and-beta-testers-program/ | Developed On Hackaday: Front Panels And Beta Testers Program | Mathieu Stephan | [
"Featured",
"Hackaday Columns",
"hardware"
] | [
"developed on hackaday",
"front panel",
"hardware development",
"mooltipass",
"serigraphy",
"smartcard"
] | We’re pretty sure that most of our readers already know it by now, but we’ll tell you anyway: the Hackaday community (writers
and
readers) is currently developing an offline password keeper, the
Mooltipass
. As it has been more than two weeks since we wrote an article about our progress, today’s will be about the Mooltipass front panels and our beta testers program.
At the end of our
mechanical design rundown article
we showed that we were originally planning to put a slightly tinted acrylic panel on top of our device. We however could still make out the Mooltipass’ insides, which wasn’t in line with the nice professional look we wanted. We then designed another front panel, one which was transparent above the OLED screen/LEDs and opaque (black) on top of the rest. To our surprise the result still wasn’t as good as we had hoped, as the contrast between the front panel and the screens/LEDs was too big. We finally came up with the panel shown above (see
GitHub repository folder
) which combines the two techniques previously described. As it is still in China, we’ll show you the final result when we get it in our hands.
We launched around 10 case prototypes in production, they will soon be shipped to our current contributors/advisers together with the
smart cards chosen by Hackaday readers
. In the meantime we sent our official call for beta testers to our
mailing list
recipients and
hackaday.io
followers, in which we asked them to fill a
small form
that will allow us to know them a bit better. We asked about their home/work computer setup, their level of expertise, their willingness to contribute to the prototype cost and finally specifics about who would use the Mooltipass they’d receive. We are targeting a broad range of users but also testers that will provide us with detailed feedback and clear bug reports.
We also spent quite a while searching for cheaper alternate parts that could be sourced in relatively big quantities. This is usually an overlooked aspect of a project so we preferred to tackle this as soon as possible. In a few weeks the contributors and I will receive all the components required to assemble our final prototype (front panels / case / top & bottom PCBs / smart cards) and it will be time to write a new update. Want to stay informed? You can join the official
Mooltipass Google Group
or follow us on
Hackaday Projects
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1521851",
"author": "Liam Jackson",
"timestamp": "2014-05-27T21:43:02",
"content": "Where do you get front panels like that made? Is there a service like for PCBs and Stencils?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1521890",
... | 1,760,376,188.214877 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/27/plotterbot-drawing-daleks/ | Plotterbot Drawing Daleks | Mike Szczys | [
"cnc hacks",
"cons",
"Featured"
] | [
"arduino mega",
"plotter",
"plotterbot",
"stepper",
"string"
] | Two strings, two motors, and some very creative software. That’s the magic behind the Plotterbot, which was
drawing Daleks when we crossed its
path at Maker Faire. This is the Mark II, which was built after cannibalizing
Mark I
. Unfortunately we can’t tell you what the difference is between the two.
The machine itself is a pretty nice little package. There is a box that hangs on the wall with a motor/spool combination at each end. In the middle of those two is an Arduino Mega with a custom driver shield. It takes an SD card with the drawing files on it. There is also a small touchscreen display which allowed for easy selection of what you’d like drawn on that paper taped to the wall below the unit.
Back when we were running the Trinket contest [Jay] used the Plotterbot to draw a Skull and Wrenches made out of a multitude of smaller Skull and Wrenches. He was nice enough bring
that piece of art
and present it to us at the Faire. Thanks [Jay]! | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1521363",
"author": "Gdogg",
"timestamp": "2014-05-27T18:36:51",
"content": "Looks like he’s a few years behind sprite_mhttp://spritesmods.com/?art=whiteboard",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1522047",
"author": "Z00111111",
... | 1,760,376,188.377833 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/27/an-audio-based-usb-oscilloscope-and-signal-generator-for-20/ | An Audio Based USB Oscilloscope And Signal Generator For $20 | Nick Conn | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"oscilloscope",
"signal generator",
"souncard oscilloscope",
"sound card",
"soundcard",
"usb audio",
"usb audio card"
] | Are you interested in building a
20kHz 2-channel oscilloscope and a 2-channel signal generator
for only $20 with minimal effort? Be sure to check out [Jana Marie’s] Instructable that goes over how to build this awesome tool from a cheap USB audio card.
We have featured
tons
and
tons
of DIY oscilloscopes in the past, but this effort resulted in something very well put together while remaining very simple to understand and easy to build. You don’t even need to modify the USB audio card at all. One of the coolest parts of this build is that you can unplug your probe assembly from your USB audio card, and bring it wherever your hacking takes you. After the build, all you need is
[Christian Zeitnitz’s] Soundcard Oscilloscope
program and you are good to go. One of the major downsides that is often overlooked when using an audio based oscilloscope, is that it is “AC coupled”. This means you cannot measure low-frequencies (including DC signals) using a sound card. Be sure to heed [Jana’s] advice and do not use your built in audio card as an oscilloscope. With no protection circuitry, it is a sure fire way to fry your computer.
What
analog projects
have you built around an audio interface? We have seen such an interface used for many different applications, including a few fun
medical
related
hacks
(be sure to keep safety your first priority). Write in and let us know! | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1520657",
"author": "Anonymous Coward",
"timestamp": "2014-05-27T14:10:48",
"content": "Inb4 someone says you can buy a clone for 12 bucks, congratulations on missing the entire point.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1520659",
... | 1,760,376,189.20334 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/27/the-electrostatic-theory-of-metal-whiskers/ | The Electrostatic Theory Of Metal Whiskers | Brian Benchoff | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"solder",
"tin whisker",
"whiskers"
] | Thanks to that wonderful ROHS stuff the EU passed more than a decade ago, we should be seeing a few high-profile failures of electronic components due to tin whiskers. These tiny hair-like extrusions of metal found most commonly in lead-free solder have
destroyed billion dollar satellites
and
shut down nuclear reactors
, despite no one knowing exactly how these whiskers form.
Now there’s a new theory of metal whisker formation
(abstract, unless you have access to APS) that actually has predictive power.
Here’s the free version of the paper
[V. G. Karpov] from the University of Toledo suggest these whiskers are formed by differences in charge induced by metallurgical anomalies – contamination, differences in the grain of the solder, and oxides. Because of the difference in charge, the whiskers are extruded, for lack of a better word, out from the surface of the solder.
The theory of whisker growth is generally consistent with observed rates of whisker growth and other properties. With this theory, it should even be possible to grow tin whiskers. Why anyone would want to do that other than, ‘because it’s cool’ is anyone’s guess, but there you go. | 90 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "1520119",
"author": "lja",
"timestamp": "2014-05-27T11:26:51",
"content": "Even when soldering with lead based solder vs tin based solder you can tell the lead solder is far better",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1531003",
... | 1,760,376,189.008547 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/27/running-minecraft-on-two-routers/ | Running Minecraft On Two Routers | Brian Benchoff | [
"cnc hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"AVR",
"cnc",
"CNC router",
"minecraft",
"router"
] | [CNLohr] is no stranger to running Minecraft on some weird hardware. Earlier,
he built this Linux powered microscope slide… thing
to toggle LEDs with redstone levers in Minecraft. Figuring if Minecraft could run on an AVR, he
decided to try the same thing on a router
, a TP-LINK TL-WR841N to be specific. Like the microscope slide running Linux, this proved to be an easy task. [CNLohr] had another router he could run Minecraft on, and this one could also punch wood. There really was only one thing for him to do.
Like the microscope slide and the wireless router, [CNLohr]’s CNC router is now running a Minecraft server. The phrase, “because it’s there” comes to mind. When connected to the CNC server, the player controls a snow golem (a snowman with a jack ‘o lantern head) with a carrot. Wherever the snow golem goes, the tool head follows, allowing him to carve objects in the world, and on a sheet of MDF secured in the CNC machine.
It’s certainly an odd build, but [CNLohr] was able to carve out a pixeley, blocky Hackaday logo with the snow golem controlled CNC machine. Code
here
, video below. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1519599",
"author": "nicohood",
"timestamp": "2014-05-27T08:17:08",
"content": "hahaha i like that guy :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1519623",
"author": "delmadord",
"timestamp": "2014-05-27T08:25:24",
... | 1,760,376,188.612179 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/26/internet-controlled-led-necktie-lights-up-the-party/ | Internet Controlled LED Necktie Lights Up The Party | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"LED necktie",
"LED tie",
"Pinoccio"
] | Wearable devices are all the rage in certain circles — looking for a project of his own, [Hector Urtubia] decided to give it a shot with
this six-LED necktie.
It used to be pretty hard to make an Internet connected device without spending all your time and effort on making the Internet connection possible — until the
Pinoccio
came along. It’s a tiny Arduino compatible board which has wireless Internet connectivity built right in. It even comes with a rechargeable battery. If you have experience with Arduino programming, this little guy is a cinch to get running.
The tie itself makes use of six NeoPixels, which are chainable, addressable and current regulating RGB LEDs, which means the entire chain of LEDs only requires 1 digital pin-out on the Pinoccio! [Hector] has even
written a library
that will extend the Pinoccio’s scripting environment so that the pixels can interact directly from the web or API.
To demonstrate the tie, he decided to hook it up to his MIDI keyboard — enjoy:
For more wearables,
an LED dress certainly makes an impression! | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1519285",
"author": "hjuh",
"timestamp": "2014-05-27T06:48:00",
"content": "o.ONew most useless stuff :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1519349",
"author": "repkid",
"timestamp": "2014-05-27T07:06:06",
"content": "N... | 1,760,376,188.658143 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/28/interview-inventing-the-unix-sudo-command/ | Interview: Inventing The Unix “sudo” Command | Aleksandar Bradic | [
"Featured",
"Interviews",
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"bob coggeshall",
"sudo"
] | It was just one of these nights. We were sitting at the O’Neil’s San Mateo Pub, taking a break after a long day at the Maker Faire. Hackaday was hosting an informal drink-up and a steady stream of colorful characters has just started flowing in. That’s when we met [Robert Coggeshall].
[
xkcd, 149
]
It started off as a normal discussion – he runs
Small Batch Assembly
and does a lot of interesting things in the maker space. Then he brought up a fascinating detail – “Oh, did you know I also co-invented sudo back in the 80’s?”
If you ever did as much as touch a Unix system, you’ll know this is a big deal. What came as an even bigger surprise was that something like sudo had to be “invented” in the first place. When thinking about the base Unix toolkit, there is always this feeling that it all emerged from some primordial soup of ideas deep inside of Bell Labs, brought to life by the infinite wisdom of [Ken Thompson] and the rest of the gang. Turns out that wasn’t always the case. We couldn’t miss asking [Bob] for an interview, and he told us how it all came about…
The Hack
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaAwl3HN5ds&w=580]
The story itself is a fairly common one – it starts with a problem and ends with a hack. [Bob] and his colleague [Cliff Spencer] were working at
SUNY/Buffalo
at the time, and [Bob] was in charge of administration of their Unix infrastructure. Since Unix was a multiuser system from the very beginnings, being a sysadmin meant executing a lot of commands as a superuser. The standard way of doing so was using the “su” command, which enabled user to switch to a superuser mode. While this generally did the trick, it opened a lot of opportunities for human error – it was just too easy to forget you’re in a “root” mode and end up causing inadvertent damage to the system. [Bob] and [Cliff] thought of a better way – instead of constantly switching, why not simply create a tool that enables executing individual commands as a superuser, without changing the actual user id in the shell. They quickly whipped up a hack that combined two standard Posix system calls –
setuid()
and
execvp()
in order to achieve such functionality. The command was named “
sudo
“, short for superuser-do ([Bob] insists that correct pronunciation is /ˈsuːduː/, not /ˈsuːdoʊ/).
Going Open Source
After proving to be an indispensable tool in the sysadmin arsenal at SUNY, sudo slowly began to make its way into other research groups and was formally “open sourced” in 1985. In those days Open Source was not yet all the rage (Richard Stallman had just come out with his GNU Manifesto the same year), so the act of “open sourcing” essentially meant posting the source code on the Usenet. And on December 15th, 1985 that’s what they did. [Bob] helped us track down
the original message posted to the
net.sources
group
.
There be trolls
Another fascinating historical artifact that can be found in
the thread following the original post
is an early example of the Internet Troll species:
--
isn't this the same as saying:
su -f root -c "some commands here"
why reinvent the wheel? plus this doens't have to be recompiled when
there is a new root passwd.
i find that most unix programs get written again and again and again,
when the one you wanted was already there in the first place.
tom
--
Though it is true that sudo didn’t invent anything fundamentally new, it did something better – it provided an efficient solution to a real problem. And because [Bob] and [Cliff] cared enough to share it with the world, other people happily adopted it and continued to improve. Today sudo counts 9944 lines of code (up from 153 lines in the original release) and is maintained by [Todd C. Miller]. Over 30 years in age, it still continues to receive code contributions and regularly issues new releases. | 114 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "1525050",
"author": "demon256",
"timestamp": "2014-05-28T17:04:50",
"content": "“[Bob] insists that correct pronunciation is /ˈsuːduː/, not /ˈsuːdoʊ/”Seriously ? This crap again ? This is on the same level as “nerd vs geek”, and the only people who give a toss about it don’t belong ... | 1,760,376,189.447159 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/28/openexposer-the-diy-sla-printer/ | OpenExposer, The DIY SLA Printer | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Laser Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"3d printer",
"laser",
"laser printer",
"pcb",
"sla",
"SLA printer",
"uv laser"
] | Precisely applied ultraviolet light is an amazing thing. You can expose PCBs, print 3D objects, and even make a laser light show. Over on the Projects site, [Mario] is building a machine that does all of these things.
It’s called the OpenExposer
, and even if it doesn’t win the Hackaday Prize, it’s a great example of how far you can go with some salvaged electronics and a 3D printer.
The basic plan of the OpenExposer is a 3D printer with a small slit cut into the bed, and a build platform that moves in the Z axis. The bed contains a small UV laser and a polygon mirror ripped from a dead tree laser printer. By moving the bed in the Y direction, [Mario] shoot his laser anywhere on an XY plane. Put a tank filled with UV curing resin on the bed, and he has an SLA printer. Put a mounting bracket on the bed, and double-sided PCBs are a cinch.
The frame is made of 3D printed parts and standard RepRap rods, with the only hard to source component being the polygonal mirror. These can be sourced from scrounged laser printers, but there’s probably some company in China that will sell them bulk. The age of cheap SLA printers is dawning, friends. Video below,
github here
. | 25 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1524564",
"author": "Isaac S.",
"timestamp": "2014-05-28T14:25:02",
"content": "Awesome build. Looking forwards to the day I see a working homebrew sintering printer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1524567",
"author": "Harv... | 1,760,376,189.079315 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/28/a-smart-clothes-dryer/ | A Smart Clothes Dryer | Brian Benchoff | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"clothes dryer",
"dht-11",
"dht11",
"dryer",
"humidity",
"humidity sensor"
] | Here’s a question that will rack your brain: does your clothes dryer stop when the clothes are dry? It seems if you have a machine that guzzles power for one single purpose, you’d like it to stop when its job is done, or for the sake of convenience, keep going until the clothes are dry. Temperature and humidity sensors are cheap, and if you don’t have an auto sensing clothes dryer,
a DIY smart clothes dryer
seems both efficient and convenient. [Editor from the future: link rot,
seems to be here now
.]
[Andy] figured when clothes are dry, they stop emitting moisture. Based on that premise, he could monitor the operation of a clothes dryer and either shut off the machine or send a message that it’s time to take the clothes out. It’s a simple enough idea, and with an Arduino and a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, it was pretty easy to put together.
The clothes dryer used for this experiment was a self-ventilating model that doesn’t vent to the outside. Instead, it condenses the water in your towels and jeans into a tub to be emptied by hand later. This might introduce a little error into tests, but [Andy] did come up with a way to mount the temperature sensor without modifying his dryer in any way. From the initial data, the ventless dryer might be introducing a little experimental error, but it’s still too good of an idea to not try out with a traditional dryer that vents to the outside.
Here’s the code
should you want to try this yourself. | 52 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "1524112",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-05-28T11:48:39",
"content": "Wow you can replace everything with an arduino nowadays, even 10′ of line.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1524116",
"author": "Blue Foot... | 1,760,376,188.881325 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/28/mechanical-clock-relies-on-marbles-to-tick/ | Mechanical Clock Relies On Marbles To Tick | James Hobson | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"mechanical clock",
"rolling ball clock"
] | As fun as micro-controllers and RTCs are, sometimes it’s truly fascinating to see a completely mechanical clock. Using only gravity this
Pendulum Marble Clock
(
German version
) by [Turnvater Janosch] runs for 12 hours at a time and has an accuracy error of less than one second per day!
It works by raising a 2.5kg weight which sinks approximately 1 meter during that 12 hours. A series of steel ball bearings count the minutes, 5 minute increments, and hours. Every minute one ball is released on the track — when the track fills up, trap doors open releasing the balls to the next level. The first level is minutes, the second, 5 minutes, and the third, hours.
The entire thing is made out of wood, plastic gears, brass and steel wire, and an old flat iron (although we’re really not too sure what that’s used for…)
If you happen to have a pair of stereoscopic goggles (
you can make your own
), he’s also uploaded a gallery of images of his clock
in stereoscopic 3D. | 25 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1523561",
"author": "Bensch",
"timestamp": "2014-05-28T08:16:12",
"content": "The flaut Iron is the weight!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1523562",
"author": "Erik Johnson",
"timestamp": "2014-05-28T08:16:14",
"con... | 1,760,376,189.520408 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/27/a-huge-lightweight-wooden-quadrotor/ | A Huge, Lightweight Wooden Quadrotor | Brian Benchoff | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"laser cut",
"laser cutter",
"quadcopter",
"quadcopter frame"
] | [Robert] once built a quadcopter frame by sawing laminate floor tile. It worked, we’re taking the lack of pictures of this build as evidence of how ugly it was.
His latest design
used a much better looking material – laser cut plywood – and the finished product is very strong and lightweight, even compared to commercial frames made with glass or carbon fiber and epoxy.
Although the design went smoothly thanks to some Solidworks skills, actually cutting the frame from 3mm birch ply resulted in a few issues. The cheap laser cutter used for cutting include some bottom of the line software called LaserWorksV5. There is a kerf compensation feature, called ‘sew compensation’ in the software’s native Chinglish. The software would always crash whenever it tried to calculate the compensation for circles. [Robert] spent two hours figuring this problem out, and in the end needed to break out a piece of sand paper to get a nice interlocking fit.
The completed frame bolts together without any glue at all, and the best part about it is the weight – only 167 grams. Compare that to a similarly sized glass fiber frame, and [Robert]’s shaved at least 200 grams off his finished build. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1523096",
"author": "Waterjet",
"timestamp": "2014-05-28T05:06:40",
"content": "What about waterjet cut epoxy infused carbon fiber or fiberglass? Would that give more strength with less weight?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajV8Xh8XtMwAbout 1:00 in.",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,376,189.137531 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/27/overkill-phone-charger-because-well-why-not/ | Overkill Phone Charger, Because, Well, Why Not? | Rich Bremer | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"atx power supply",
"power supply",
"PowerSupply"
] | There are times in a tinkerer’s existence where it is convenient to have the ability to plug in and power a lot of USB devices. Sure, you could use a USB hub but this may not be satisfactory if your devices require a lot of current. A computer may work but is not really a stand alone solution.
[Jeff] and the crew over at Make Lehigh Valley ran into this predicament. They were putting on an Adafruit Trinket class and needed a USB power supply to power all of the Trinkets that were going to be used. As any makerspace would do, they built their own
USB Power Station
, and the final product is certainly overkill for what they needed (that’s not a bad thing).
An old ATX computer power supply is a logical component to use for this type of project. These power supplies are usually available in abundance and will provide all the amperage any reasonable amount of 5v USB devices can ask for. The 5v output from the ATX power supply was wired to 8 USB jacks. Keeping up with the project’s resourcefulness, those USB jacks were scavenged from a couple of old PCI-slot USB hub panels. Not satisfied with only USB outputs, the guys also wired up some banana jacks so that 3.3, 5 and 12 volts were available for whatever project was being worked on. A 3D printed enclosure keeps everything neat and tidy.
This project used a bunch of recycled parts and solved a problem faced by the group. If you’re interested in using an ATX power supply to make a more bench-top style power supply then check out
this build
. | 26 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1522579",
"author": "jcwren",
"timestamp": "2014-05-28T02:07:05",
"content": "If you don’t want to build your own, I highly recommend these as an alternative. Or if you want something a little smaller, or more polished looking (to use in a meeting or somesuch).http://www.amazon.com/... | 1,760,376,189.611047 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/27/lenore-eviscerates-her-racing-snail/ | [Lenore] Eviscerates Her Racing Snail | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"bristlebot",
"emsl",
"lenore",
"racing snail",
"snail"
] | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzymwuPdQp4&w=580]
You may have walked past [Lenore’s] unassuming card table at Maker Faire this year. But we’re really glad we stopped for a little chat. She went so far as to
pull the working parts out of her racing snail
to show them to us!
Wait, wait… racing snail? Yeah, this is a pretty
neat one from a few years ago
. The snail is a relatively large version of a bristlebot (incidentally, we believe
bristlebots were originated by EMSL
). The thing that’s missing here are the bristles. Instead of using a scrub-brush for this large version, [Lenore] discovered that velvet has a somewhat uni-directional grain. But using a piece of mouse-pad cut to the same footprint as the velvet she was able to get the flat-footed snail to move in a forward direction purely through the jiggle of a vibrating motor.
If this sparked your interest there are tons of other bristlebot variations to be found around here. One of our favorites is still
this abomination which shifts weight to add steering
. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1522224",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-05-28T00:08:17",
"content": "What did the snail on the turtles back say? “Weeeeeee!”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1522493",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2014... | 1,760,376,189.684351 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/25/a-wireless-computer-remote-that-emulates-a-usb-keyboard/ | A Wireless Computer Remote That Emulates A USB Keyboard | Nick Conn | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"keyboard",
"Radiohead",
"remote control",
"usb keyboard",
"virtualwire",
"VUSB",
"wireless"
] | If you are anything like [Antoine], you would love to be able to control your PC with a simple hand-held remote control from anywhere in your house. [Antoine] wrote in to tell us about his
wireless computer remote
that emulates a USB keyboard, making it suitable for any device that uses a USB keyboard.
His blog post is very well written and contains a ton of design information and background on the project. He initially wanting to easily control his PC’s music from anywhere in his house without needing to be within line of sight of his computer. The end result is a very handy remote that can be used to change music, video, and even launch applications on his computer. The system consists of a base station for his remote that connects to the computer and acts as a USB keyboard, and the remote itself. The base station uses
V-USB
on an Arduino to interface with the computer, and
VirtualWire
to handle the wireless protocol for the remote. For those of you who don’t know about VirtualWire (now superseded by
RadioHead
), it is a very cool Arduino library that lets you easily use raw wireless interfaces (also called
vanilla wireless interfaces
).
Without going into too much detail here (be sure to see the actual post for more information), the remote itself was redesigned after the initial proof of concept to maximize battery life. The final power consumption is very impressive, resulting in a battery life of more than two years! This remote system is very well put together and contains many aspects that can easily be reused for other projects. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1514770",
"author": "danieljlouw",
"timestamp": "2014-05-26T05:59:07",
"content": "See, not everything on this website must be ugly hacks as demanded by some of it’s readers! If you have so much pride in your work that even when you take on a personal project you make sure it looks ... | 1,760,376,189.745468 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/25/ikea-desk-laser-cutter-combo/ | Ikea Desk Laser Cutter Combo | Rich Bremer | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"co2 laser",
"diy laser cutter",
"laser cutter"
] | Craigslist can be a good source for finding someone else’s abandoned projects. Besides being extremely jealous, you’ll agree that [Mike’s] find is atypical of the normal Craigslist listings. He scored a 75% complete group of laser cutter parts for $500. That included the XY frame, stepper motors, Gecko motor drivers, optics, and 40 watt CO2 laser tube. He paired the laser parts with another Craigslist find, a $15 desk. A few more parts and 3 weeks of tinkering later, [Mike] had a working DIY mutant
Ikea Desk Laser Cutter
.
The laser cutter has a 23 x 14 inch work envelope and is controlled via Mach3. The X Axis of the frame had a little bit of wobble in it so [Mike] added a THK linear rail and bearing to stiffen it up. To add a little bit of mistake proofing to the laser, [Mike] put a water flow sensor in the laser tube cooling system. The laser will not turn on unless water is pumping to cool the laser tube. Wrecking your laser tube by accident would be a total bummer!
There was no Z-Axis assembly included with the online score. [Mike] made his own with a few lead screws, acme nuts, sprockets and chain. A manual crank resides below the desk, turning it raises and lowers the honeycomb bed. It is necessary to adjust the height of the work piece to ensure that it is the correct distance away from the laser. The optics should focus the laser beam at a point inside of the material being cut or at the surface of the material being engraved.
[Mike] tallies up all of his expenses for the project to be about $900. You can’t deny that having your own laser cutter is pretty cool and saving these abandoned parts to make said laser cutter is pretty cool too.
[Thanks Peter] | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1514622",
"author": "duckythescientist",
"timestamp": "2014-05-26T05:14:48",
"content": "Heh, I actually got my laser cutter off of Craigslist. I haggled down to $900, but that was for the full (almost) working unit.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,376,189.799257 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/25/hackaday-links-may-25-2014/ | Hackaday Links: May 25, 2014 | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"floppy drive",
"light sabre",
"smt",
"watchdog",
"zx81"
] | [Matt] wanted his own light saber. You could argue that
this is nearly as dangerous
since you can’t see the beam and it doesn’t end a few feet past the business end of the grip. Plus there’s that who “not actually a Jedi” thing.
We don’t know if retro computing fans
are going to love or hate this
(
translated
). On the one hand it’s pretty cool to see a ZX81 clone up and running. On the other hand, an Amiga 600 case was sacrificed to serve as the body for the hack. [Thanks Juan]
Watchdog timer. If you know what that is your mind immediately says “good idea” when you hear the word. If you don’t know, you need to learn. Watchdogs are reset timers that are built into most microcontrollers. If your firmware gets stuck and doesn’t maintain the timer’s counter at a regular interval the watchdog it will perform a hardware reset and hopefully your hardware will start functioning again. Here’s
a guide for using the watchdog in an Arduino
, but the concepts are pretty much universal.
We see all kinds of stepper-motor based music machines. One of our favorites was
this recent floppy drive jukebox
. But not every song is going to sound good on this type of hardware. One that does sound especially neat is
the Doctor Who theme on an array of 8 drives
.
And finally, if you’re struggling with surface mount soldering we recommend grabbing two soldering irons. But in a pinch just grab some heavy gauge copper wire and wrap it around your soldering iron tip. It ends up being
a two-point soldering iron
set for the size of specific components such as 0805 resistors. [Thanks Rupert] | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1513426",
"author": "PodeCoet",
"timestamp": "2014-05-25T23:35:25",
"content": "Regarding the Light Saber – It’s actually a plasma cutter and not a laser, so there’s no invisible “beam” per se, just a freakin hot ‘electric flame’ ArcAlso – That poor Amiga 600!",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,376,189.89195 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/25/introducing-the-flux-buggy-a-serious-electric-dune-buggy-conversion/ | Introducing The Flux Buggy — A Serious Electric Dune Buggy Conversion | James Hobson | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"dune buggy",
"electric dune buggy",
"electric go cart",
"electric go kart",
"go-kart"
] | Believe it or not, the writers here at Hack a Day do their own projects too, we don’t just write about yours! I’ve just started a new project, and I want your advice! A few friends and I are
converting a custom-made dune buggy — to electric.
The project will be chronicled over on Hackaday.io, with (
hopefully
) weekly updates on our progress. If you’ve been perusing Projects, you may have noticed my
Electric Car conversion
from a few years ago. First year of my engineering degree, my friend and I converted a 1993 Honda Del Sol to electric, using the guts of an electric forklift.
We got it going over 100km/h on used batteries our school donated to us. Unfortunately, there was a bit too much red tape and bureaucracy for us to get it on the road legally. That and we were poor university students who couldn’t afford new batteries, or the ridiculous amount insurance companies wanted to put it on the road. The project got scrapped after sitting in the backyard for a few years.
Fast forward to today, and we’ve both graduated and are working our “cushy” engineering jobs, and for the first time in our lives, we have some disposable income. We needed a new project to work on.
Introducing the Flux Buggy. We found this dune buggy / go kart on Kijiji for $1,500. It was actually custom made for the guy selling it, and we’re impressed at the build quality. The whole thing is made of 1-1/4″ steel tubing, all the bearings and pivot points have grease fittings, there’s aluminum tread plate siding, and some good quality brakes! We’d be hard pressed to even be able to buy the parts for that price!
It originally came with a 13HP Honda engine, which could get it going around 50km/h — slow acceleration though since it was direct drive — no transmission. We sold the engine for $300 and brought it home… on
top
of a truck!
This was about a month ago. Since then we’ve bought half a dozen marine grade 12V lead-acid batteries, started machining the gearbox, and fabricating battery mounts off the side of the buggy. I’ve been taking videos along the way and will try to release new ones on a weekly basis. Take a look and let me know what you think!
Now — this is where we need your help! Suggest things you want to see — we don’t care how crazy they are!
The Name:
We need a better name for this. We thought about calling it something silly, like a person’s name –like Sven. But the only way I’m willing to do that is if SVEN is actually a clever acronym for the vehicle.
Upgrades:
We’re planning on having two sets of tires for this bad boy. 17″ knobby truck tires for off-roading (it will look like a giant RC car with those proportions), and slick regular tires for the track.It will have two gear ratios for now. High speed, and high torque. We’re expecting about 111km/h for the high speed version (we’ll need seat belts) and only about 60km/h for low-speed — but will it ever go! What do you want to see? Paintball gun turrets? LED flood lights? Sound system? Auto-pilot? Flight mode? A turbo button? Let us know!
The Videos:
Be honest — were they boring? I’m working on cutting things down as much as possible to keep it entertaining, and interesting. What do you want to see more of? What do you want to see less of?
I think that’s all for now. We hope you like it! Don’t forget to follow it on Hackaday Projects — the next time it hits the front page probably won’t be until we test drive it! | 61 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "1513032",
"author": "Kristoffer S",
"timestamp": "2014-05-25T21:06:21",
"content": "First things first; Scrap that lead-acid and go for li-ion.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1513807",
"author": "mauswerkz",
"... | 1,760,376,190.679032 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/25/pvc-percussion-pipe-organ-sounds-surprisingly-good/ | PVC Percussion Pipe Organ Sounds Surprisingly Good! | James Hobson | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"diy instrument",
"instrument",
"pvc instrument"
] | Using over 20′ feet of PVC pipe, a whole bunch of 2 x 4’s and a few nuts and bolts, [Jeremy] and his cousin put together a rather unique
percussion pipe organ.
[Jackson], his cousin who is a musician is always looking for different ways to make music. They had a rough idea of what they wanted to do with a few sketches, but after a day of tinkering, they ended up with something completely different — but it sounds awesome.
The frame is made of a combination of 2 x 6’s and 2 x 4’s which hold the PVC tubes in place. PVC elbows and varying lengths of pipe create a wide range of rather deep bass notes. It can be played with just your hands, or even a pair of sandals for better effect. You’d be surprised how good it sounds.
For other non-intentional uses for PVC…
how about a child’s roller-freaking-coaster? | 31 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1512474",
"author": "Ralph",
"timestamp": "2014-05-25T17:27:51",
"content": "First comment about Blue Man Group goes here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1513015",
"author": "barry99705",
"timestamp": "2014-05... | 1,760,376,190.471291 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/25/adding-copper-wire-to-a-3d-print/ | Adding Copper Wire To A 3D Print | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"pcb",
"printed PCB",
"wire"
] | Conductive filaments and printing solder are one thing, but what if you could spice up your 3D prints by embedding wire right inside the filament?
That’s what [Bas] is doing
, paving the way for printable electronics, PCBs, coils, and odd-shaped antenna.
The general idea of [Bas]’ technique of embedding thin copper wire inside a single layer of a print is to lay the wire down in front of the nozzle, effectively turning bare wire into insulated wire in whatever shape you can imagine. The trick, however, is figuring out how to put wire down in front of a nozzle. [Baz] accomplished this with a slew ring turned by a stepper motor connected to a 5th axis on the control board.
There are a few things this prototype doesn’t cover – cutting the wire, connecting the wire to components, fine-tuning, and a host of other things that prevent [Bas]’ machine from building real functional circuits. Despite these limitations, the machine could probably fabricate the secondary for a tesla coil
right now
, something that’s really annoying to make unless you have a lathe.
Video demo below. | 24 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1511963",
"author": "medix",
"timestamp": "2014-05-25T14:09:50",
"content": "“Despite these limitations, the machine could probably fabricate the secondary for a tesla coil right now, something that’s really annoying to make unless you have a lathe.”Not likely. You need significantl... | 1,760,376,190.386937 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/25/arduino-garage-door-opener-is-security-minded/ | Arduino Garage Door Opener Is Security Minded | Rick Osgood | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"garage door opener",
"handshake",
"python",
"script",
"security",
"sl4a"
] | Do it yourself garage door openers must be all the rage nowadays. We just got word of
another take
on this popular idea. [Giles] was commissioned by his friend to find a way to control the friend’s garage door using a smart phone. The request was understandable, considering the costly garage door remote and the fact that the buttons on the expensive remote tended to fail after a while. The inspiration for this project came from some YouTube videos of other similar projects. Those projects all paired an Arduino with a Bluetooth headset in order to control the door from a mobile phone. [Giles] understood that while this would get the job done, it wouldn’t be very secure. Bluetooth headsets typically connect to mobile phones using a four digit PIN. Many of them have known default PINs and even if the default is changed, it wouldn’t take very long to guess a four digit PIN. [Giles] knew he had to find a more secure way.
While WiFi was an option, [Giles] decided that having the garage door hooked up to the internet would likely be a security risk, even if it did offer some potential interesting use cases. He therefore opted to stick with Bluetooth, but decided to use the Seedstudio Bluetooth shield instead of a basic headset. The electronics are relatively simple. [Giles] simply plugged the Bluetooth shield into an Arduino Uno. [Giles] did have one problem with the Bluetooth shield though. The Bluetooth module did not accept many standard AT commands. He needed a way to force a disconnect of a mobile device if it failed authentication. After digging around, he discovered that the module had some extra exposed pads that he could likely use to accomplish that goal. The only problem was that they were expecting a 3.3V signal, and the Arduino works at 5V. The solution was simple. He setup a basic voltage divider using two resistors. This lowered the 5V signal from the Arduino to the required 3.3V. This provides the communication functionality to the mobile phone. He then realized that he could use a simple 12V automotive relay to control the garage door. To control the relay, he used the Freetronics relay control shield. The end result is a relatively simple stack of shields hooked up to a relay.
For the smart phone interface, [Giles] started out by trying to write a native Android application. Having little experience in Android development, he soon realized that it was going to take him longer than anticipated to get anything usable this way. He then decided to use
SL4A
. SL4A provides a scripting environment for Android and supports several different scripting languages. [Giles] was then able to write a Python script that can be executed on the smart phone. Many people would be tempted to write a really simple script that would just open the door and connect without any real thought about security. After all, this is a one-off obscure garage door opener. Security through obscurity! [Giles] is smarter than that.
He instead implemented a challenge handshake authentication mechanism between the Python script and the Arduino. This would ensure that users are authenticated before permitting commands to be executed, and also help prevent replay attacks. The process works like this. First the smart phone connects to the Arduino. The Arduino then generates a pseudo-random string and calculates the expected response, based on a pre-shared key. The phone then receives the string and sends back the appropriate response. If it doesn’t match, the Arduino disconnects the phone. If it does match, the phone then sends back a request for a different pseudo-random command challenge string. Once the phone receives this new string, it is able to use that string in conjunction with a second pre-shared key to generate a one-time use command. Assuming it was calculated correctly, the Arduino will then run the command to open or close the door. If it doesn’t match the phone gets disconnected. All of this is to help prevent replay attacks. Any attacker watching the airwaves would not be able to simply record the signals or commands and play them back. This is because every time the authentication and commands are transmitted, they must be different based on the pseudo-random seed.
While everything seems to work mostly fine, the Arduino tends to crash after about six door cycles. [Giles] believes this may be caused by the MD5 library he is using but has so far been unsuccessful in trying to fix this bug. He also thinks his Python script is messy and somewhat unstable. He’s decided to publish his programs to the internet in hopes that someone else may have the time and drive to figure out what’s going on. | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1511574",
"author": "lwatcdr (@lwatcdr)",
"timestamp": "2014-05-25T11:38:55",
"content": "Seems like a good job for a pi, pogo plug, or one of many hackable routers available. Get a USB bluetooth dongle and you are good to go. As to putting it on the internet? Well using SSH with a ... | 1,760,376,190.319908 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/26/ancient-tv-remote-becomes-a-cnc-pendant/ | Ancient TV Remote Becomes A CNC Pendant | James Hobson | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc pendant",
"diy cnc pendant"
] | Needing a control pendant for his CNC machine, [Bob Davis] took to his scrap bin and started looking for parts. What
he came up with
is pretty cool — that’s a rather old Zenith TV remote providing the enclosure!
When building a homemade CNC machine, many people overlook one of the most handy components — the control pendant. On a commercial machine, they can get pretty pricey — on a homemade machine, most people just use the computer to control it, but if you’ve used a pendant before you know how handy they are for manual operations!
So what should you do? Well, you could make a
second dedicated keyboard for your CNC machine
(arguably not much of a hack, but rather clever) — or you could build a pendant from scratch like [Bob] did. It’s pretty simple; he’s using a 555 timer, a few momentary toggle switches, an LED, and plans to add a potentiometer in the future for speed control. It’s all housed in the old TV remote, and seems to do the trick just fine — take a look in the following video:
[via
Hacked Gadgets
] | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1519164",
"author": "Biomed",
"timestamp": "2014-05-27T06:00:26",
"content": "Whom is it that has a penchant for this pendant? Keeps coming up on top here in my browser.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1519435",
"author": ... | 1,760,376,190.126201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/26/connecting-inexpensive-ph-probes-with-ease/ | Connecting Inexpensive PH Probes With Ease | Mike Szczys | [
"chemistry hacks",
"cons",
"Featured"
] | [
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"pH",
"probe",
"sparkys widgets"
] | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKigsN8046k&w=580]
We’ve mentioned that it’s hard to find someone not selling or crowd funding something at Maker Faire. Despite the fact that [Ryan Edwards] is selling his boards, we still got the feeling that he’s a hacker who is selling just to make sure the idea he had is available for other hackers to use. He showed us
his interface boards for inexpensive pH probes
.
Since we’re always looking for more chemistry hacks to run, it was nice to hear [Ryan’s] description on how these probes (which can be had for around $9 on eBay) actually work. It turns out it’s all about salt. When it comes to the electronics, the board provides a connector for the probe on one edge, and pins for voltage, ground, and I2C on another. Rig this up with your microcontroller of choice and you’ll be building your own automatic pool doser, fish tank minder, or one of a multitude of food-related hacks.
Head on over to Sparky’s Widgets to see
a few other demo applications
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1518476",
"author": "the gambler",
"timestamp": "2014-05-27T02:12:37",
"content": "crazy i ran across his site recently. interesting stuff over there gotta give him some props and definitely worth checking out",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,376,190.528512 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/26/ken-shirriff-explains-the-tl431/ | [Ken Shirriff] Explains The TL431 | Adam Fabio | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"Bandgap Voltage Reference",
"Semiconductor Physics",
"tl431"
] | [Ken Shirriff] had to get down into a bit of semiconductor physics to give us an
explanation of the TL431
, which he calls “the most common chip you’ve never heard of”. [Ken] may well be right about the TL431. Even Texas Instruments can’t nail down a single name for it. Their page for the part calls it a “Adjustable Precision Shunt Regulator”, yet the datasheet is titled “Precision Programmable Reference”. You’d think they’d have figured this out by now, considering the TL431 was launched in 1978.
TL431’s can most often be found hiding in switching power supplies. The Apple II switcher had one, and many current ATX supplies have 3. Uninformed parts scroungers may miss them, as they often hide in TO-92 or SOT-23 packages. The TL431 is no transistor though. The TL431’s operation is actually pretty simple. When the voltage at the reference pin is above 2.5V, the output transistor conducts. When the reference voltage falls below 2.5V, the device stops conducting. In a power supply, this operation would help the control electronics maintain a stable output voltage.
The real subject of [Ken’s] article is the layout of the TL431 on its silicon die. Rather than bust out the fuming nitric acid himself, [Ken] uses some of
[Zeptobars’] decapped chip images
. Inside the TL431, [Ken] discovers that transistors aren’t made up of the three layer NPN or PNP sandwich we’ve come to know and love. In fact, the base isn’t even in the middle. Transistors, including the BJT’s used in the TL431, can be assembled in a nearly infinite number of ways.
[Ken] moves on to the resistors and capacitors of the TL431. The capacitors are formed two different ways, one as a reverse biased diode, and the other as a more traditional plate style capacitor. The resistors include fuses which can be blown to slightly increase the resistance values.
The takeaway from all this is that once you get down to the silicon level, it’s a whole new ball game. Chip layout may look a bit like PCB layout, but the rules are completely different. [Ken] mentions that in a future blog he’ll go into further detail on the operation of the TL431’s
bandgap voltage reference
. We’ll be watching for that one, [Ken]! | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1517480",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2014-05-26T20:30:24",
"content": "I had one providing an I/O voltage on the last board I did…It’s a shunt regulator, so it’s only useful for known loads or cases where the current draw is minimal and unimportant, but it intrinsically provides... | 1,760,376,191.060399 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/26/the-design-and-fabrication-of-a-digital-clock/ | The Design And Fabrication Of A Digital Clock | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks",
"clock hacks"
] | [
"7400",
"7490",
"74xx",
"clock",
"decade counter",
"line frequency",
"logic chip"
] | This clock
is the first thing that [Kevin] ever made, way back before the Arduinofication of making, and long before the open hardware community exploded, and before the advent of cheap, custom PCBs. It’s an elegant design, with six seven-segment displays, a time base derived from line frequency, controlled entirely by 74-series logic chips. There was only one problem with it: it kinda sucked. Every so often, noise would become a factor and the time would be displayed as 97:30. The project was thrown in the back of the closet, a few revisions were completed, and 13 years later, [Kevin] wanted to fix his first clock.
The redesign used the same 1Hz timebase to control the circuitry, but now the timebase is controlled by a DS3231 RTC with an ATtiny85. The bridge rectifier was thrown out in favor of a much simpler 7805 regulator, and a new board was designed and sent off to OSHPark. Oh, how times have changed.
With the new circuitry, [Kevin]
decided to construct a new case
. The beautiful Hammond-esque enclosure was replaced with the latest and greatest of DIY case material – laser cut acrylic. Before, [Kevin] would put a jumper on the 1Hz timebase derived from the line frequency to set the clock – a task that makes plugging a clock in exactly at midnight a much simpler solution. Now, the clock has buttons to set the hours and minutes. Much improved, but still an amazing look at how far DIY electronics have come in a little over a decade. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1517170",
"author": "tekkieneet",
"timestamp": "2014-05-26T18:29:52",
"content": ">The bridge rectifier was thrown out in favor of a much simpler 7805 regulator7805 can rectify AC into DC!?Seriously could use some proof reading.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,376,190.795498 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/26/flappy-bird-mon-am/ | Vector Graphic Flappy Bird Harder Than It Should Be | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"Asteroids",
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"crt",
"Flappy Bird",
"STM32F4",
"vector display"
] | The dark room at Maker Faire was loud, after all it’s where Arc Attack was set up plus several other displays that had music. But if you braved the audio, and managed not to experience a seizure or migraine from all the blinking you were greeted with these
sharply glowing vector displays on exhibit at the TubeTime booth
. We did the best we could with the camera work, but the sharpness of the lines, and contrast of the phosphorescent images against the black screen still seems to pop more if viewed in person.
This isn’t [Eric’s] first attempt at driving high-voltage tube displays. We previously covered
his dekatron kitchen timer
. But we’d say he certainly stepped things up several notches in the years between then and now. He
blogged about Asteroids
, which is running on the same hardware as the Flappy Bird demo from our video above. An STM32F4 Discovery board is running a 6502 emulator to push the game to [Eric’s] CRT vector driver hardware.
Just before we were done at the booth, [Eric] turned to us with a twinkle in his eye. He confessed his delight in purposely leaving out any button debounce from the Flappy Bird demo. As if it wasn’t hard enough it tends to glitch after passing just a few of the pipe gates. Muhuhahaha! | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1516378",
"author": "svofski",
"timestamp": "2014-05-26T14:15:06",
"content": "Cool. Veccy Bird (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=62787) says hi.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1517235",
"author": "kristian",
"timest... | 1,760,376,190.570082 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/26/achievement-unlocked-drill-a-square-hole-with-a-rotary-broach/ | Achievement Unlocked: Drill A Square Hole With A Rotary Broach | Kristina Panos | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bridgeport mill",
"manliness",
"rotary broach",
"wobble drive"
] | There are times in a man’s life when he needs to drill a square hole through an 8mm thick piece of steel. If that man doesn’t have one or two thousand dollars to spend on commercial tooling to do this, he might just shrug his shoulders and make do with round holes. But if that man is [Chris], he rolls up his sleeves and
makes his own tool to drill square holes with a rotary broach
.
This tool that [Chris] has named the Wobble Drive drills a square hole by applying force to each of the corners of a square bit one a time. How, you might ask, did he achieve this? With a two-part tool and the power of offset driving. He took a cylindrical chunk of steel and bored a little cup for a ball bearing to move around in. He didn’t have one rolling around his tool box, so he liberated one from a 2209 double row self-aligning cylindrical bore with a screwdriver. Then he hammered a square rod of steel into a hole in the other end and made the rod’s bottom a little bit concave on the grinding wheel. He also took a little off the sides to aid the weeble wobble action. A second steel cylinder with a ball bearing cup sits in the chuck of his Bridgeport mill and wobbles the tool bit through the power of a 1/4″ offset.
[Chris] tested it on the same sacrificial plate he used to demonstrate the awesome power of
Lil’ Screwy
, his 100-ton homebrew press. He drilled a 3/8″ round pilot hole and then went to work with the Wobble Drive. The tool bit side proved to be too long to provide the requisite stroke, so he cut it down by about half. Once the tool has chewed through the steel, the tool bit decouples at the ball bearing and [Chris] has himself a square hole and that much more hacking cred.
[Delightfully coarse language ahead!] | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1515991",
"author": "w",
"timestamp": "2014-05-26T11:57:50",
"content": "Nicely done.For those interested in this kind of tooling, rotary broaches can also be used as a stationary tool in a lathe. Often useful for boring holes in things like allen bolts or pentalobe bolts etc…They ... | 1,760,376,190.731892 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/26/servo-stock-the-future-of-3d-printers/ | Servo Stock, The Future Of 3D Printers | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"control electronics",
"delta bot",
"pic",
"reprap",
"servo"
] | If you think about it, the RepRaps and other commercial 3D printers we have today are nothing like the printers that will be found in the workshops of the future. They’re more expensive than they need to be, and despite the RepRap project being around for a few years now, no one has cracked the nut of closed loop control yet. [mad hephaestus], [Alex], and [Will] over on the Hackaday Projects site are working on the future of 3D printing
with the Servo Stock
, a delta printer using servos and closed loop control to build a printer for about a quarter of the price as a traditional 3D printer.
The printer itself is a Kossel derivative that is highly modified to show off some interesting tech. Instead of steppers, the printer has three axes controlled by servos. On each axis is a small board containing a magnetic encoder, and a continuous rotation servo. With this setup, the guys are able to get 4096 steps per revolution with closed loop control that can drive the servo to with ±2 ticks.
The electronics and firmware are a clean sheet redesign of the usual 3D printer loadout. The motherboard uses a Pic32 running at 80MHz. Even the communication between the host and printer has been completely redesigned. Instead of Gcode, the team is using
the Bowler protocol
, a system of sending packets over serial, TCP/IP, or just about any other communications protocol you can think of.
Below is a video of the ServoStock interpreting Gcode on a computer and sending the codes and kinematics to the printer. It seems to work well, and using cheap servos and cut down electronics means this project might just be the first to break the $200 barrier for a ready to run 3D printer. | 101 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "1515242",
"author": "atheros",
"timestamp": "2014-05-26T08:27:11",
"content": "3d printer for $200 or less is a noble goal. I hope it will be reached soon!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1515257",
"author": "medix",
"ti... | 1,760,376,190.945949 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/25/synergizer-the-emergency-key-turn-barbot/ | Synergizer: The Emergency Key-Turn Barbot | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"barbot",
"bartendro",
"beaglebone black",
"drink dispenser",
"synergizer"
] | It’s been a rough day at the office. You need a break. But by yourself? No, what you need is to be Synergized!
This Barbot
only works if all four keys are inserted and turned — kind of like a nuclear launch procedure — only then will it dispense four perfectly sized drinks to make your day better.
The Synergizer uses an Arduino to control a belt driven linear actuator which moves the spout from cup to cup. A series of reed switches along the length provide feedback to the system for positional control. The machine makes use of a peristaltic pump, called the Bartendro Dispenser, which pumps an exact volume of your liquid of choice into each cup. The cool thing with peristaltic pumps is they are self priming,and capable of pumping an exact volume of liquid every time.
[Nick Poole], the designer, also included a CPU fan and heat-sink paired up with a peltier plate in order to also chill the liquid as it is being pumped. To make it even more interesting, he added a four key override, so the Synergizer can only be used if all four unique keys are inserted.
For a multi-liquid barbot, you have to check out
this slick build
by [Sean Carney] — it even has web access for control via any device! | 10 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1510980",
"author": "BlahkHat",
"timestamp": "2014-05-25T08:21:37",
"content": "Make something more useful in life, don’t waste your energy on something that can’t really better man kind for the future, otherwise its just rubbish.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,376,191.162768 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/24/the-automated-pickup-winding-machine/ | The Automated Pickup Winding Machine | Brian Benchoff | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"coil winder",
"guitar pickup",
"pickup"
] | Back when electric guitars were a new thing, winding pickups was a very labor intensive and error-prone process. The number of windings could easily vary by a few hundred turns of wire, making the resulting pickup either anemic or much more powerful than the other pickups in the guitar. [Davide] is starting to wind his own pickups, and desiring a little more precision than simply guessing how many winds are on a coil
he built an AVR coil winding machine
.
The machine uses a DC gear motor running at 1200 RPM. A magnet is glued onto the motor shaft, and a hall effect sensor connected to an ATMega8 keeps track of how many windings are on the coil.
The interface is simple, using character LCD to display a wind counter, motor direction, and current motor speed. There are some useful features in this machine; slow start-up and automatic stop makes winding pickups much easier than the traditional home method of winding pickups with a sewing machine. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1510673",
"author": "Trevor",
"timestamp": "2014-05-25T06:45:13",
"content": "Excellent work. It would be nice to see a video of it actually winding a coil.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1512382",
"author": "notabena... | 1,760,376,191.020824 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/24/vocore-the-tiny-internet-of-things-thing/ | VoCore, The Tiny Internet Of Things Thing | Brian Benchoff | [
"ARM"
] | [
"802.11n",
"arm",
"openwrt",
"router",
"VoCore"
] | With tiny Linux boards popping up like dandelions, it was only a matter of time before someone came out with a
really tiny
Linux board.
This is it
. It’s a tiny board less than an inch on each side with an 802.11n System on Chip running OpenWrt on Linux. The best part? You can pick one up for $20 USD.
The VoCore isn’t so much as a cut down ARM dev board as it is a cut down router capable of running
OpenWrt
. It’s not a power house by any means with 8MB of Flash, 32MB of SDRAM, and a 360MHz CPU, but if you ever need something that’s less than an inch square, you probably don’t need
that
much power.
The VoCore features interfaces for 100M Ethernet, USB host and device, UART, SPI, I2C, I2S, and 20 GPIOs for blinking LEDs and listening to sensors. There’s also a dock that breaks out the Ethernet and USB ports, available as a kit or already assembled.
It’s a pretty cool device, and with low current draw (about 200mA) and being able to accept +5V power, we can easily see this tiny board popping up in a few projects. | 40 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1509540",
"author": "Dmitry Grinberg",
"timestamp": "2014-05-25T02:12:56",
"content": "very cool, but i would question if 200mA @ 5V is really “low power”. That *is* a whole watt after all.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "151... | 1,760,376,191.258554 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/24/smile-meter-reacts-to-your-expressions-with-pharrells-happy/ | Smile Meter Reacts To Your Expressions With Pharrell’s Happy | James Hobson | [
"computer hacks",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"happy",
"mit media lab",
"smile detection",
"smile meter"
] | Here’s a clever use of a webcam and some facial recognition software — They call it
Happy ++
and it will DJ [Pharrell’s] Happy according to how much you’re smiling (or not at all!).
It’s another project to come out of MIT’s Media Lab for a spring event this year by [Rob, Dan & Javier]. The facial tracking software was re-used from an older project, the
MIT Mood Meter
, which was a clever installation that had several zones on campus tracking the apparent “happiness” of the students walking by.
To create the program they’ve split up the song Happy into its various components. Drums, vocals, band, and the full mix. As the webcam recognizes a smile, it records the intensity, which in turn turns up the vocals and band. If no smiling is present there is only a drum beat.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this project is its interaction with a group — even if people weren’t paying attention, it was still tracking their expressions, and reacting to their “mood”.
If the group erupted in laughter and began smiling, the technology immediately followed suit and the music became more resplendent. It was almost as though the technology was in tune with the effective contours of the conversation and had the ability to react just like everyone else, albeit in a language of its own. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1508846",
"author": "Whatnot",
"timestamp": "2014-05-24T23:56:44",
"content": "It would be more interesting to have a system that plays dramatic music from an orchestra as it saw people look grim and tight jawed.Or if they had a drawn gun. Then install it at airports and checkpoints... | 1,760,376,191.111886 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/24/the-hour-of-the-3d-printed-clock-draws-nigh/ | The Hour Of The 3D Printed Clock Draws Nigh | Adam Fabio | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"clock hacks"
] | [
"3D printed clock",
"anchor escapement",
"escapement",
"mechanical clock",
"reprap"
] | Many have tried, but [Christoph Laimer] has succeeded in designing a working, (relatively) accurate
clock nearly completely from 3D printed parts
. Every gear, pulley, wheel and hand of [Christoph’s] clock is printed. Only a few screws, axles, a weight, and a string are non-printed. Even the crank to wind the clock is a 3D printed part.
[Christoph] designed his clock in Blender. It took quite a bit of design work to create parts that would work and be printable. Even more work was involved in printing over 100 failed prototype parts.
One might think that [Christoph] is using the latest printers from the likes of Makerbot or Utimaker to achieve this feat. It turns out he’s using a discontinued
Rapman 3.2
printer. Further proof that even “older” printers are capable of great things! [Christoph] does run his printer rather slowly. Printing a single gear with 0.125 mm layers and a 0.4 mm nozzle takes him 2 or 3 hours.
Mechanically, the clock is gravity powered with an
anchor escapement
. Rather than a pendulum, [Christoph] chose to use a
balance wheel
and
hairspring
assembly to govern the escapement. Even the spring is printed from standard PLA. The weight is suspended from a pulley block. The clock isn’t particularly efficient. 70cm of height will run the clock for only 2 hours.
[Christoph’s] clock has proven to be accurate to within 1/4 second per hour. He hasn’t provided temperature stability data – but being PLA, we’d suggest not getting it too hot!
Thanks [Jotham] and [Kyence]! | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1508029",
"author": "repkid",
"timestamp": "2014-05-24T20:13:57",
"content": "Amazing design, love it.It’s a miracle he was able to print all that on a Rapman 3.2. It must be a heavily modded printer though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,376,191.538465 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/24/the-most-random-electronic-dice-yet/ | The Most Random Electronic Dice Yet | Brian Benchoff | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"atmega",
"Atmel",
"attiny",
"entropy",
"entropy library",
"random",
"random number",
"random number generator"
] | If you’ve written a great library to generate random numbers with a microcontroller, what’s the first thing you would do?
Build an electronic pair of dice, of course
.
[Walter] created
the entropy library
for AVRs for a reliable source of true random numbers. It works by using the watchdog timer’s natural jitter; not fast by any means but most sources of entropy aren’t that fast anyway. By sampling a whole lot of AVR chips and doing a few statistical tests, it turns out this library
is actually a pretty good source of randomness
, at least as good as a pair of dice.
The circuit itself uses two 8×8 LED matrices from Adafruit, an Arduino, and a pair of buttons. The supported modes are 2d6, 2d4, 2d8, 2d10, 1d12, 1d20, a deck of cards, a single hex number, a single 8-bit binary number, or an eight character alphanumeric password. It’s more than enough for D&D or when you
really
need an unguessable password. Video demo below. | 26 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1507353",
"author": "w",
"timestamp": "2014-05-24T17:09:28",
"content": "yada yada … State of sin…. yada yada…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1507478",
"author": "planofuji",
"timestamp": "2014-05-24T17:42:05"... | 1,760,376,191.721824 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/24/this-sassy-art-installation-is-like-the-stanley-parable-for-the-telephone/ | This Sassy Art Installation Is Like The Stanley Parable For The Telephone | Rick Osgood | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"glados",
"telephone",
"the stanley parable",
"wave shield"
] | Imagine this. A phone on a nearby desk starts ringing. No one is around to pick it up, so you decide that you will be a good Samaritan and answer the phone. You are greeted by a
slightly
creepy robotic female voice asking you to complete a simple survey. Having nothing else to do, you go ahead and run through the telephone survey. As you start answering the questions, things start to get a bit…
weird
. The robot voice doesn’t like your answers. She actually disagrees with you, and she does NOT like being interrupted. Now she’s getting sassy with you! What is going on here?
Most likely you are the latest victim of
Insert Customer Feedback Here
, [Charles’] art installation. You see, that is no ordinary telephone. [Charles] actually removed the guts of an old telephone and replaced them with an Arduino. The Arduino periodically rings the phone, waiting for someone to answer. Once the phone is off the hook, the Arduino uses a Wave shield to start playing back the scripted audio files. All of the text-to-speech files and the various hold music files are played back with the wave shield. The Arduino is also hooked up to the 1, 2, 3, and # keys of the telephone keypad in order to read back the user’s responses.
From here on out the program acts as a sort of “choose your own adventure” game. The program takes different paths and responds in different ways depending on how the user answers the questions. Generally speaking, it will get more “irritated” towards the user if it doesn’t “like” your answers, otherwise it will get less irritated. The hold music will even change to become more or less aggressive.
It’s easy to draw comparisons to
Portal’s GLaDOS
due to the robotic female voice and to the narrator from
The Stanley Parable
for the “choose your own adventure” feeling. In fact, if GLaDOS and The Stanley Parable had offspring, this would surely be it. This project brings that same type of silly sarcastic humor to a different medium and it does it well. Be sure to watch the video of the system in action below. It really starts to get interesting around the 1:15 mark. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1506882",
"author": "DainBramage1991",
"timestamp": "2014-05-24T14:58:08",
"content": "I like this. It reminds me not only of Portal’s GLaDOS and the Stanley Parable, but also of the old programs back in the day that would give smart-alec answers to command line entries.",
"pare... | 1,760,376,191.586992 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/23/homemade-liquid-nitrogen/ | Homemade Liquid Nitrogen | Brian Benchoff | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"compressor",
"cryogenic",
"cryonic",
"dewar",
"liquid nitrogen",
"LN2",
"nitrogen"
] | As far as DIY cryogenics are concerned, dry ice is easy mode. You can get frozen carbon dioxide at WalMart, or from a nozzle that screws onto a CO2 tank. It’s all very ordinary, and not really special at all. Want to know what’s cool?
Making liquid nitrogen at home
.
[imsmooth] is getting his nitrogen from a standard tank, sending the gas through a CO2 and H2O scrubber, compressing it, putting the compressed gas in an ice bath, and slowly diffusing the compressed, cooled gas into a vacuum reservoir. When the cold compressed gas is released into the reservoir, Boyle’s law happens and liquid nitrogen condenses in a flask.
As far as materials and equipment are concerned, [imsmooth] is using a PVC tower filled with zeolite to filter out the CO2 and H2O, a SCUBA compressor (no oil), and an almost absurd amount of stainless steel tubing for the precooler and regenerative cooling tower. Except for a few expensive valves, dewar, and the SCUBA compressor, it’s all stuff you could easily scrounge up from the usual home improvement stores.
[imsmooth] is producing about 350cc/hr of liquid nitrogen, or more than enough for anyone who isn’t running an industrial process in their garage. Check out the video of the build below. | 38 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1501115",
"author": "cc",
"timestamp": "2014-05-23T14:03:03",
"content": "If he scrub out the c02 and h20 could he just use normal air? instead from a tank?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1501165",
"author": "Jason",
... | 1,760,376,191.658167 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/23/the-pi-cnc-controller/ | The Pi CNC Controller | Brian Benchoff | [
"cnc hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"alamode",
"cnc",
"CNC shield",
"grbl",
"grbl shield",
"raspberry pi"
] | Back in the olden days, the latest and greatest CNC machines had minicomputers bolted onto their frames, replete with paper tape readers and seven segment displays. For the home CNC machinist of today, these hulking electronic brains are replaced with something a little more modern – desktop computers with parallel ports. Having a box filled with computers and motor drivers is just too cool though, and
this tiny Raspberry Pi CNC controller
fits the bill quite nicely.
The controller uses a Raspberry Pi as the brains of the device, but there aren’t too many options out there for stepper motor control in Pi land. There are, however, dozens of CNC shields or the Arduino.
The Pi AlaMode
board is able to provide voltage level conversion between the CNC shield and the pi, and also has the nice bonus of a battery-backed real time clock.
With some proper connectors, lighted buttons, and a beautiful cable sleeving job, this Pi CNC controller would be well suited for any of the desktop CNC or engraving builds we see from time to time. | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1500844",
"author": "Mike S",
"timestamp": "2014-05-23T12:51:21",
"content": "I have to say that this is EXTREMELY well done. While there are some minor issues this CNC controller looks like it was designed and built by a large company.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,376,191.788454 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/23/castar-and-holographic-print-preview-for-3d-printers/ | CastAR And Holographic Print Preview For 3D Printers! | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"augmented reality",
"castAR",
"holograms",
"virtual reality"
] | Google glasses this, Oculus rift that, CastAR… With all these new vision devices coming out, the world of augmented reality is fast becoming, well, a reality!
Here’s a really cool concept [Ryan Smith] came up for
3D printing.
Using [Jeri Ellsworth’s] CastAR, [Ryan Smith] has created a really cool technical illusion to demonstrate visual prototyping on his Makerbot. Using a laser cutter he’s perforated the front plastic panel of the Makerbot, which allows a semi-transparent overlay that when you use the CastAR’s projector it gives you a holographic visual effect.
The glasses track the reference object (in this case, the gear) and then project interfacing gears in an animation over-top of the existing part. [Ryan] sees this as the next step in 3D printing for artists and makers because it can help give you a 3D preview of your part, for example if you’re not fully sure what scale you want it to print at, you could actually put a mating object, or your hand, behind the screen and visually see the interface!
[Thanks Spacedog!] | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1499700",
"author": "Galane",
"timestamp": "2014-05-23T08:09:02",
"content": "I want an AR star chart app for Android that overlays accurately positioned data onto the view from the camera so I can point the phone at the sky and have the actual stars, planets etc with labels.",
... | 1,760,376,191.84706 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/22/canadian-space-robot-will-repair-itself/ | Canadian Space Robot Will Repair Itself | Rick Osgood | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"canadarm",
"canadarm2",
"dextre",
"heal",
"international space station",
"iss",
"robot",
"self-repair"
] | The video above shows an animation of what the Canadian Space Agency hopes will be the first successful self-repair of the
Mobile Servicing System
aboard the ISS. The mobile servicing system is basically a group of several complicated robots that can either perform complicated tasks on their own, or be combined into a larger unit to extend the dexterity of the system as a whole.
The most recent addition to the servicing system is the
Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator
, otherwise known as Dextre. Dextre is somewhat reminiscent of a human torso with two enormous arms. It is just one of the Canadian Space Agency’s contributions to the station. It was installed on the station in 2008 to perform activities that would normally require space walks. Dextre’s very first official assignment was successfully completed in 2011 when the robot was used to unpack two pieces for the Kounotori 2 transfer vehicle while the human crew on board the ISS was sleeping.
Dextre is constructed in such a way that it can be grabbed by the Canadarm2 robot and moved to various work sites around the Space Station. Dextre can then operate from the maintenance site on its own while the Canadarm2 can be used for other functions. Dextre can also be operated while mounted to the end of Canadarm2, essentially combining the two robots into one bigger and more dexterous robot.
One of the more critical camera’s on the Canadarm2 has started transmitting hazy images. To fix it, the Canadarm2 will grab onto Dextre, forming a sort of “super robot”. Dextre will then be positioned in such a way that it can remove the faulty camera. The hazy camera will then be mounted to the mobile base component of the Mobile Servicing System. This will give the ISS crew a new vantage point of a less critical location. The station’s human crew will then place a new camera module in Japan’s Kibo module’s transfer airlock. Dextre will be able to reach this new camera and then mount it on the Canadarm2 to replace the original faulty unit. If successful, this mission will prove that the Mobile Servicing System has the capability to repair itself under certain conditions, opening the door for further self-repair missions in the future. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1499932",
"author": "Kaijuu",
"timestamp": "2014-05-23T09:03:54",
"content": "Great stuff. :) So we can state that the ISS is armed.The name Canadarm2 induced a chuckle to my Dutch brain, though: in the Dutch language, the word “darm” means intestine.",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,376,192.010929 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/22/bunnie-talks-to-us-about-novena-open-hardware-laptop/ | Bunnie Talks To Us About Novena Open Hardware Laptop | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"Crowd Funding",
"Featured",
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"bunnie",
"Novena",
"open hardware"
] | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9mjDt-4XIM&w=580]
We made a point to stop by the Freescale booth at Maker Faire where [Bunnie Huang] was
showing off the Novena laptop
. His past accolades (
Wikipedia page
) and the rabid success of
the crowd funding round
— which nearly tripled its goal — meant we had to make multiple attempts to speak with him. But the third time’s a charm and it was worth the wait!
Several things struck me about seeing the hardware in person. First off, I like that there’s a little bit of room inside but the case is still reasonably small. This really is a laptop aimed at hardware hacking; I would anticipate that the majority of backers intend to roll their own hardware for it. Second, [Bunnie] showed off several expansion boards as examples which use a standard 80-pin header to get at the onboard components. The example of a man-in-the-middle attack for the flash chip on a thumb drive was extremely tasty. But it was also interesting to hear about an SDR board which will ship to original backers since the campaign made its stretch goals.
If you don’t know much about this project, you can get some background from
our post when the crowd funding went live
. Open design info is available from
the Novena page
. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1498250",
"author": "OpenglMan",
"timestamp": "2014-05-23T02:16:05",
"content": "I can’t watch the video.Is a private video ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1498285",
"author": "Mike Szczys",
"timestamp": "201... | 1,760,376,191.898427 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/22/high-altitude-glider-will-be-dropped-from-a-balloon/ | High Altitude Glider Will Be Dropped From A Balloon! | James Hobson | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"glider",
"high altitude balloon",
"remote control"
] | [House4Hack] and [HABEX] have teamed up to design and build a glider system that can be taken up 30-40km via a weather balloon, dropped, and
flown home via FPV
.
Of course, this has been
done before
, but you know what, it’s such a cool experiment, and so few people have done it… who cares! The goal is to hit at least 20km altitude, hope for 30km, and if possible — 40km would break records. For reference, the one we linked made it 33km up.
The plane is a Mini-talon V-tail, which was donated to them by their local hobby shop as a sponsorship. It features an ArduPlane Autopilot module, a 1.2GHz video transmitter, a long range 433MHz receiver for the control signal, and a telemetry data link at 433MHz connected to the ArduPlane. Two GoPro cameras make up its eyes, and it also has a custom release mechanism for letting go of the weather balloon.
They’ve performed a few tests so far on the system, including freezing the electronics using dry ice (-74
°
C), a release test, a maiden flight, and they plan on also testing the video range link, and a higher drop test (100m).
The big day is scheduled for June 14, in Klerksdorp, South Africa. | 29 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1497510",
"author": "static",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T23:26:25",
"content": "Comment USA centric, because I live here. The lift balloon & glider are an UAV of sorts, but the glider, but when released will the status of the glider change? Will it become a remotely controlled model... | 1,760,376,191.961139 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/22/home-depot-brand-boat-costs-29-18/ | Home Depot Brand Boat Costs $29.18 | Rich Bremer | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"boat",
"boatbuilding",
"sailboat"
] | It is a common belief (or fact, depending who you talk to) that boats are money pits. Surely, it is a fun past time even for the lucky person flipping the bill, but what if you could
build a boat
from locally found and purchased items. [Bill] did just this and he did it for a mere $30. His creation is affectionately called
Thunder Bucket
.
The overall design is a pontoon-based sail boat. You’ll notice from the photo that the pontoons are made from many 5 gallon buckets attached together. The wood frame and deck come courtesy of old pallets that were taken apart. The mast is a fence post and a standard blue tarp rounds out the resourcefulness as it is used for the sail.
Admittedly, this may not be the coolest boat on the waterways but it is a boat, it’s made from non-boat-like items and it works. Believe it or not [Bill] is a professional boat builder. Sometimes ‘why not?’ is the best reason to do something. | 26 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1496684",
"author": "Edak",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T20:15:24",
"content": "I think this is somewhat misleading, it might only cost this much of you already have most of the materials. 14 x 5 gal buckets plus a tarp and fasteners would cost more when if the pallets were free.Notice ... | 1,760,376,193.991736 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/24/makerbot-files-patents-internet-goes-crazy/ | MakerBot Files Patents, Internet Goes Crazy | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"News"
] | [
"bed leveling",
"extruder",
"makerbot",
"patent application",
"patents"
] | In the past month, a few patent applications from MakerBot were published, and like everything tangentially related to the prodigal son of the 3D printer world, the Internet arose in a clamor that would be comparable only to news that grumpy cat has died. That’s just an analogy, by the way. Grumpy cat is fine.
The first patent, titled,
Three-dimensional printer with force detection
was filed on October 29th, 2013. It describes a 3D printer with a sensor coupled to the hot end able to sense a contact force between the nozzle and build plate. It’s a rather clever idea that will allow any 3D printer to perform software calibration of the build plate, ensuring everything is printed on a nice, level surface. Interestingly, [Steve Graber]
posted an extremely similar design of a bed leveling probe
on October 6th, 2013. In
[Steve]’s video
, you can see his bed level probe doing just about everything the MakerBot patent claims, all while being uploaded to YouTube before the patent application.
When it rains it pours, and the
Quick-release extruder patent application
, filed on October 28, 2013, bears this out. It claims an extruder that includes, “a bistable lever including a mechanical linkage to the bearing, the bearing engaged with the drive gear when the bistable lever is in a first position and the bearing disengaged from the drive gear when the bistable lever is in a second position.” Simple enough, a lever with two positions, where one presses a bearing against a drive gear, and the other position disengages the bearing from a drive gear.
Here’s something that was published on Thingiverse in 2011
that does the same thing. Hugely famous RepRap contributor [whosawhatsis]
has weighed in on this
as well.
It is important to note that these are patent
applications
. Nothing has been patented yet. The US Patent and Trademark Office does seem to have a lot of rubber stamps these days, so what is the average Internet denizen to do? Here are easy to follow,
step-by-step instructions on how to notify the USPTO of prior art
. Remember, just because prior art does not completely invalidate a patent application’s claims doesn’t mean you shouldn’t send it in. It is a patent examiner’s job to review the prior art.
So there you go. MakerBot applies for patents, people complain, but not to the USPTO. Highly relevant video and transcription below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54X28qSbKf4
Annelise
:
Annilise here again with episode three of the second season of MakeBot TV. So, one of the things you’ve probably heard us talk about before here at MakerBot is the power of sharing. But what exactly do we mean by that? Well, at MakerBot we follow a production model called open source. In the open source world, developers share the backend knowledge of their product with the public. And if anyone in the community makes an improvement upon that work, that progress gets folded back into production. And what happens when everyone is sharing in that sort of way is that improvements happen at a much faster rate. Because we’re all working on it together. Simple and beautiful. I talked to Bre a bit about how he got into open source.
Bre:
For me personally, I got into open source by being a teacher. I would take my lesson plans and put them up on Geocities back in the day and other teachers would do the same thing. Because we were sharing, it lightened the load for everybody. If you had a lesson I hadn’t done yet, I could start where you left off, and use your curriculum as a basis for by curriculum. And it meant that we saved time and built a community.
When we started MakerBot, we knew we were going to be open source hardware. We were inspired by Arduino, and we were open source software nerds. So, we knew the idea if we could make it and share it, we’d get more back from it. And I think this is something we learned as kids, that sharing is good, that if you share something you get more back from it, but we forget this as adults. So, with open source hardware we’re back to that. When you get a MakerBot, you’re not just getting a machine, you’re getting the knowledge of how it works. You’re getting the information about everything that puts it together. So if you want to modify it, or if you just want to learn about it, if you want to hack it, you can do it.
When you build on open source hardware, you’re standing on the shoulders of giants. And then you’re letting other people stand on your shoulders. And then, if you want, you can stand on those people’s shoulders. So it’s kind of a standing on the shoulders of giants Möbius strip if we all participate.
We’re at an interesting time where if you want to build this future, if you wan to solidify the future where open source is the norm, you have to support open source by participating. You have to get into it, you have to support companies that do open source, cause I want to live in that future where we share things and the world is a better place for it.
Annelise:
And that’s a wrap for this week. Let me know what you guys think about open source by tweeting to @makerbotTV. And don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube or iTunes. Next week, we’re heading up to Boston to meet with a group of students who have been frosting cupcakes with our MakerBot. Until then, keep it awesome. | 100 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "1506129",
"author": "Nitpicker Smartyass",
"timestamp": "2014-05-24T11:08:45",
"content": "I am not a fan or even a friend of MakerBot, my contacts with them have been very discouraging.That having said, I do not see any evil in their approach of applying for patents. Maybe – I repe... | 1,760,376,194.517589 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/24/never-miss-a-thing-with-this-programmable-vacuum-fluorescent-display-ticker/ | Never Miss A Thing With This Programmable Vacuum Fluorescent Display Ticker | Rick Osgood | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"bitcoin",
"Rasperry Pi",
"Raspi",
"ticker",
"vacuum fluorescent display",
"vfd"
] | [Coyt] wanted a
more convenient way
to keep up to date with the ever-changing Bitcoin exchange rates, as well as weather and other useful information. He realized that the
vacuum fluorescent display
(VFD) he had purchased a couple of years ago would be perfect to display small amounts of information.
[Coyt] discovered that the VFD had a serial interface. The problem was that the VFD was looking for a 12V serial signal but the Raspberry Pi he wanted to use runs at a 3.3V. Upon closer inspection [Coyt] discovered that the VFD actually ran at lower levels as well, but it had a level converter chip installed in front of the main connector. He simply bypassed the level converter and was then able to get the RasPi speaking directly to the VFD.
The brain running this display is a Raspberry Pi. The Pi runs a Python script that pulls down all of the relevant information from the internet and displays it on the VFD. [Coyt] didn’t stop there, though. He knew that having the screen on all of the time would be somewhat of a waste, so he hooked up a PIR sensor to automatically turn on the display only when needed. The PIR sensor can detect motion in the room and will disable the display after a set period of inactivity. Most of this is powered by an LM7805 voltage regulator. While [Coyt] admits a linear regulator is not his ideal solution, it does get the job done. The metal stand acts as a nice heat sink for the regulator.
[Coyt] also wanted his project to have a certain aesthetic. He started by bending a metal plate into a stand for the electronics. He then mounted the VFD on the front of the stand and the RasPi on the back. He also mounted green LEDs between the two plates to light up the edges for a little extra pizzazz. [Coyt] believes he can use the RasPi to PWM the LEDs but this has not yet been implemented. This would allow him to pulse the light for added effect.
Since the whole thing is run by a Python script, it would be trivial to modify it to display other kinds of information. What would you do if you had a motion sensitive automatic ticker? | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1505522",
"author": "onebiozz",
"timestamp": "2014-05-24T08:22:34",
"content": "That is deceptively big",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1505764",
"author": "Galane",
"timestamp": "2014-05-24T09:27:26",
"content": "A ... | 1,760,376,194.312608 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/23/dodgy-hotel-beer-and-a-wwii-era-tube-receiver/ | Dodgy Hotel, Beer And A WWII Era Tube Receiver | Will Sweatman | [
"classic hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"reciever"
] | In the luxurious accommodations provided by Motel 8 and armed only with a few tools and a six pack – a pair of amateur radio enthusiasts
attempted the repair
of an old WWII era BC-224E receiver. They picked up the
boat anchor
antique receiver, which was in unknown condition, from a flea market while in town for the
Dayton Hamvention
, brought it back to their hotel and got to work.
The BC-224E came in two parts – the receiver and the power supply. The speaker for the system, which is actually located in the power supply, is driven by a large inductor. Apparently when the receiver was constructed, the permanent magnets of the day were not powerful enough to drive a speaker.
Fortunately, the receiver also came with some schematics, allowing [Gregory] and his fellow radio enthusiast to reverse engineer the power supply. After a few tweaks and cap swaps, they crossed their fingers and plugged it in. Stay tuned to see what happened next.
[youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g0dFVFTujw&w=560&h=315%5D | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1504817",
"author": "Figureitout",
"timestamp": "2014-05-24T05:20:50",
"content": "They can’t even wait til they get home lol. Way to go guys! Got an old radio I need to fix still, and yeah it can kill me if plugged in…RE it will be a pain as it’s a lot of “air-board” and old comp... | 1,760,376,194.373975 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/23/discovering-a-wifi-enabled-10mhz-oscilloscope/ | Discovering A Wifi Enabled 10MHz Oscilloscope | Mathieu Stephan | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Tablet Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"oscilloscope",
"velleman",
"wifi"
] | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEqWtKGJhFQ&w=580]
As most of our readers know, [Mike] was visiting Bay Area Maker Faire last weekend with a big Jolly Wrencher on his back. During his tour
he encountered the neat oscilloscope shown in the video above
, made by the Belgian company Velleman. Even though it only has a 10MS/s
sampling rate
and a 10MHz bandwidth, our guess is that it may still be useful for some hobbyists out there as it can communicate with any PC/smartphone/tablet using its Wifi interface.
Inside the black box is a 3.7V 1800mAh Li-ion battery with a USB port to recharge it or update the oscilloscope’s firmware. As seen in the video, the tablet’s touchscreens may enable more natural interaction with the user interface. The protocol used to export the acquired samples is open, which may allow users to create their own analysis program. The oscilloscope uses an 8 bit analog to digital converter and a 4K samples buffer. | 17 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1504169",
"author": "JIm B",
"timestamp": "2014-05-24T02:18:36",
"content": "As well all know form the nyquist theorem, one can’t reconstruct a signal with a bandwidth of more than N/2 Hz when sampling at N Hz. Having an input amplifier with more than 5 MHz (more like 3 MHz) would ... | 1,760,376,194.040234 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/23/electromagnetic-boots-for-all-your-upside-down-needs/ | Electromagnetic Boots For All Your Upside Down Needs! | James Hobson | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"days of future past",
"electromagnet boots",
"magnet boots",
"magneto",
"microwave magnet",
"X-Men: Days of Future Past"
] | X-Men: Days of Future Past is making its way to theaters around the world, and [Mr. Furze] has released his second X-Men related hack —
Magneto Boots.
In case you missed it, [Colin Furze] has made
three projects
to celebrate geekdom and a mastery of fabrication for all the comic book fans out there. He started with the
fully functional pneumatic Wolverine Claws
, and now he’s tackling Magneto’s powers. The third project isn’t out quite yet, but we can’t wait to see the final installment!
Now the problem with Magneto is his powers are a wee bit too… magical? Without special effects, you can’t really replicate his mutant abilities (please prove us wrong if you can!), so [Colin] decided to do the next best thing. Magnetize himself — well, his shoes.
Not wanting to spend too much money on this project, he needed electromagnets — but where do you get cheap electromagnets? The answer? Microwave ovens. By salvaging the transformers out of microwave ovens, you can easily cut them in half, remove the secondary coils, and bam, you’ve got a bunch of giant electromagnets.
Some steel plates later, a bit of TIG welding, and he put together a pair of strap-on electro-magnetic boots. Each electromagnet is capable of lifting over 80kg off of a 12V car battery — conveniently more than enough to support [Colin’s] weight. His next challenge was learning how to walk upside down.
And of course, the final product. | 43 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1503421",
"author": "Someone",
"timestamp": "2014-05-23T23:20:07",
"content": "Anyone else find his videos obnoxious at times?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1503470",
"author": "Slegiar",
"timestamp": "2014-0... | 1,760,376,193.79421 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/23/repairing-a-nikon-d3/ | Repairing A Nikon D3 | Adam Fabio | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"Camera Repair",
"D3",
"Nikon D3"
] | There are few products out there as electronically and mechanically complex as a modern DSLR. Between the sensor, shutter, various LCD screens, and Flexible Printed Circuit boards (FPC) running everywhere, it’s enough to make even the most organized DIY repair person quake in fear. [TiN] over at the EEVblog forums wasn’t scared off though, as
he bought a broken Nikon D3
on eBay in hopes of repairing it.
The
D3
was Nikon’s top of the line professional camera in 2008. With a 12 Megapixel Full frame sensor and a host of other features, used models still command a good portion of the original $5000 USD price. [TiN’s] camera was described as having been dropped, and was dead on arrival, exactly as it had been described on eBay. The battery door was destroyed, so [TiN] connected an external supply. The camera was still dead, so it was time to dig in. Thanks to the internet, [TiN] was able to find a service manual for the camera. He decided to check the power supply board next. A TO225 package transistor with an obvious hole blown in the front was a good starting point.
[TiN] replaced the transistor and the camera sprang to life. The main LCD showed the live sensor view, and it would take pictures. All was not perfect though, as the two auxiliary LCDs were still dead, and the D3’s mirror would get stuck every other shot, leading to an error display.
Click past the break for the rest of [TiN’s] story.
The dead LCDs turned out to be another easy fix. The D3 has quite a number of interwoven FPCs traveling throughout the body. The drop must have dislodged one, as removing and reconnecting everything brought the auxiliary LCDs back.
To fix the mirror issue, [TiN] had to gut the camera down to its bare frame. In doing so, he found a camera owner’s worst nightmare – cracks in the magnesium frame around the lens mount. Forum members suggested glue, bracing and other repair methods. However, [TiN] left them in. He plans to use the camera as a high resolution time-lapse capture device, so the lens mount will not see a lot of abuse or heavy lenses.
With the entire shutter assembly gutted, [TiN] found a tiny spring labeled 262 had been jarred loose by the drop. This
spring was keeping the mirror from popping back up. Once the spring was re-positioned, [TiN] was able to re-assemble the camera. It worked well enough to take a picture of all the screws he had left over. The camera is now working great, and is employed taking stunning 4K time-lapse videos such as the one seen below. | 43 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1502608",
"author": "peterlarson233",
"timestamp": "2014-05-23T20:12:55",
"content": "I would love a high res version of that top picture for a wallpaper",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1502727",
"author": "Adam Fabio"... | 1,760,376,193.877294 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/23/ben-krasnow-and-his-ruby-laser/ | [Ben Krasnow] And His 8 KJ Ruby Laser | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"ben krasnow",
"ruby laser"
] | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUevWmUViJM&w=580]
We were again pleased to find another person who attended Maker Faire just to show off the awesome and not to hawk some goods. In our mind [Ben Krasnow] represents the highest echelon of hardware hacking (apparently Google[x] agrees because they just snatched him up) . But [Ben] always makes a point to explain how he does what he does so that others may learn and someday achieve a similar type of greatness. This time around it’s
a functional ruby laser
which is backed by a capacitor bank that stores a whopping 8 kilojoules of energy. This is what allows the laser to cut through steel plate. He sure has come a long way since he
first showed off the project in January
.
Unfortunately we didn’t get to [Ben’s] booth until late on Sunday. His previous demonstrations burned through some seals and left him with a non-functional laser. But he’s a trustworthy guy so we believe him and look forward to him posting a video about the laser and hopefully about the failure. He also mentions that he may make an attempt at lunar laser ranging with this device; bouncing the laser off of reflectors on the moon and measuring the delay. This can then be used to calculate the distance to the moon.
By the way, it was super difficult not to crack a joke when he says the words “
Ruby Rod
“. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1501939",
"author": "krazer",
"timestamp": "2014-05-23T17:18:14",
"content": "Looks like a neat project, although I should point to the editors out that lasers are customarily specified by OUTPUT power/energy, which is probably in the 10-100J range for this system, with peak powers ... | 1,760,376,193.929065 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/22/mini-molder-injection-molder-scratch-built-by-single-hacker/ | Mini-Molder: Blow Molder Scratch-Built By Single Hacker | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"hardware"
] | [
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"injection molding",
"mold-a-rama",
"plastic"
] | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P7MaZUrSQQ&w=580]
We caught up with [James Durand] at Maker Faire. He was one of the rare Makers (no mention of selling or future crowd funding) that had a booth at Maker Faire — he was
exhibiting a blow molding machine
that he built from scratch.
The fabrication process is 100% [James]. Every custom part was designed and milled by him. All of the assembly techniques were his to learn along the way. And we didn’t see anything that isn’t production ready. We’re both impressed and envious.
About three years ago he got the itch to build the mini-molder after learning about
the Mold-A-Rama machine
— a blow-molding vending machine that was popular a half century ago. A bit of his journey is documented as
a molding category on his blog
. For the most part it sounds like 1.5 years spent on the CAD design really paid off. He did share one element that required redesign. The initial prototype had a problem with the molds being pushed up when they came together. He tweaked the mechanism to close with a downward motion by flipping the hinge design. This seems to hold everything in place while the drinking fountain chiller and water pump cool the mold and the plastic model within. | 24 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1495801",
"author": "silverbyte",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T17:05:12",
"content": "wheres the video, instant private!?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1495831",
"author": "Mike Szczys",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T... | 1,760,376,194.213387 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/22/oculus-rift-and-wii-balance-board-make-hoverboards-a-virtual-reality/ | Oculus Rift And Wii Balance Board Make Hoverboards A (Virtual) Reality | Rick Osgood | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"back to the future",
"balance board",
"hoverboard",
"Kinect",
"oculus rift",
"virtual reality",
"wii fit"
] | It’s almost 2015 and still don’t have the futuristic technology promised to us by
Back to the Future Part II
. Where are the flying cars, Mr. Fusions, or 19
Jaws
movies? Most importantly, where are our hoverboards?
[cratesmith] got tired of waiting around and decided to take matters into
his own hands
. He combined the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset with the Wii Fit Balance Board to create a virtual hoverboard experience. He used the Unity3D engine (a favorite among Rift developers) to program the game engine. It’s a very rough demo right now, but the game comes complete with a simulated town to float around in and of course includes a model DeLorean.
Before you try to play this demo, you should know that it’s not without its faults. The primary problem [cratesmith] has experienced is with simulation sickness. His virtual reality system has no way to track body motion, which means that leaning back and forth on the Wii Fit board does not get translated to the equivalent virtual movement. The game must assume that the player stands straight up at all times, which is not an intuitive way to control something similar to a skateboard. The result is an off-putting experience that can break immersion and lead to a feeling of nausea.
A possible solution to this problem would be to use a camera style motion detector like the Microsoft Kinect. In fact, another
Reddit user
has recently posted a
teaser video
of another hoverboard simulator that uses the Oculus Rift, Wii Fit Board, and Kinect. Not much information is available about this second project, but we look forward to seeing updates in the future.
[createsmith] has not published the code for his demo because it’s still in the very early stages, but he has stated that he’s been giving it out to anyone who
goes out of their way
to ask. The hoverboard is probably the most coveted fictional technology from the 1989 adventure film. We know this because we’ve seen
multiple projects
over the
years
that were inspired by the movie. We’re excited to see it come to fruition in any form.
[via
Reddit
] | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1495082",
"author": "Evotistical",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T14:21:41",
"content": "Besides the back to the future theme, the blue glowing underneath the board, the barely working balance board interface; Whats the difference between this and tony hawks pro skater? Is there any info ... | 1,760,376,194.262819 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/22/5-gallon-5-piece-electronic-drum-set/ | 5-Gallon 5-Piece Electronic Drum Set | Rich Bremer | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"drums",
"drumset",
"electronic drum"
] | Who hasn’t wanted to rock out on some drums in the middle of the night? If you have anything that resembles neighbors then a midnight jam session is out of the question. That is unless a set of electronic drums is available… but alas, those are expensive. If you don’t have the spare cash burning a hole in your pocket, then be like [Mike] and
build a complete 5 piece e-drum set.
[Mike] started off with 5 gallon buckets that would become the drum shells. On a real drum set, all of the drums are different sizes in order to produce different notes. Drum size doesn’t matter with an electronic drum as a drum module creates the note and sound. Even so, to make this set a little more realistic, each drum was sectioned and pulled back together to change the diameter. A homemade circle cutting jig and a wood router were used to cut top and bottom rim hoops out of 3/4″ plywood. The inner diameter of these hoops were made just a hair larger than the outer diameter of the 5 gallon bucket shells. The bottom of the top hoop was then routed to produce a groove which would allow a standard mesh drum head to fit inside.
Electronic Drums use a sensor to measure the force of the drum stick strike. Most DIY Drums use a piezo element (think buzzer from your 1980’s Tiger hand-held game). These piezos are cheap and even available locally at Radio Shack. Due to
Piezoelectricity
, these elements produce electricity when they are exposed to force or stress, such as the impact of a drumstick. The voltage output is proportional to the force.
Foam sanding blocks were cut down and the material used to transfer the energy from the drum head to the piezo element because a direct strike to the piezo from a drum stick would damage the sensor. The output leads of the piezo are connected directly to a 1/4″ audio jack mounted in the shell of the drum. A patch cable connects each drum to a drum module that is responsible for generating the actual sounds.
Once the individual drums were finished [Mike] made a wooden frame to hold the drums in position. Overall, this is a resourceful build and the results aren’t too shabby for a minimal amount of money and a little bit of time. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1494420",
"author": "Trav",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T12:00:38",
"content": "I like the way the woodwork matches the moulding in the house. Makes it look more like a piece of furniture.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1494919",
... | 1,760,376,194.563571 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/22/electric-go-kart-made-from-off-the-shelf-components/ | Electric Go-Kart Made From Off The Shelf Components | James Hobson | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"electric go kart",
"go cart",
"turnigy"
] | What would you do with a catalog of parts and a nice budget? [Ben Rothschild] decided to
build an electric go-kart
from scratch, for a contest he’s trying to win.
He designed the entire go-kart in 3D CAD using off the shelf components to speed up assembly. The frame is made of aluminum extrusion with t-bolt brackets, and he’s using modified FIRST Robotics wheels with standard #25 chain and sprockets.
Two 1850W Turnigy SK3 brushless motors make up the drive system, equivalent to almost a 5HP engine — except with a constant torque profile, meaning it’ll have no problem going up hills at 3km/h or 30km/h, no gearing necessary! To power the beast he’s using four hard-shell LiPo batteries (4S1P), which are rated for 14.8V and 5Ah. Two el cheap-o 24V 500W speed controllers (slightly concerning) provide the control system, which he may plan to upgrade in the near future.
The test drive video is a bit short, but it looks like with a bit more work this go-kart could have a lot of potential!
If you think he should win the contest, head on over to
Misumi’s Facebook page and vote!
For more electric vehicles — how about an
electric go-trike? | 56 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1493415",
"author": "Bradley",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T08:12:45",
"content": "looks interesting buthttp://youtu.be/Bt9zSfinwFA",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1493516",
"author": "davedarko",
"timestamp": "201... | 1,760,376,194.817563 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/popmaskinen-an-electromechanical-one-man-band/ | Popmaskinen — An Electromechanical One Man Band | James Hobson | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"maker faire",
"mechanical band",
"mini maker faire"
] | The Stockholm Mini Maker Faire 2014 has just finished up, and [Johnny Eriksson] was awarded the Maker of the Year award for his very impressive
electromechanical one man band.
As a musician/electrician/furniture carpenter, [Johnny] has quite a few skills — and he wanted to try putting them altogether for a project. He calls it the Popmaskinen (the pop machine).
Using MIDI keyboards, buttons, and knobs, the Popmaskinen translates digital outputs to physical instruments controlled by various electromechanical components. One of our favorite parts is the guitars, which use solenoids to strum, and even more solenoids to squeeze various cords on the pair of guitars.
Perhaps one of the other most interesting parts of this build is the “taktverket” or pace-keeper. It’s a large metal cylinder with adjustable protrusions which actually trigger the individual instruments — it’s kind of like how a music box works. By playing with some of the adjustable switches he can turn individual instruments on and off, which will play music according to the taktverket’s pattern.
For more information you can check out [Johnny’s]
Facebook page, Popmaskinen.
[Thanks Jens!] | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1492831",
"author": "Nova",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T05:44:16",
"content": "A music hack that sounds pretty nice, props!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1493379",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T08:03:53",
... | 1,760,376,194.667276 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/live-look-at-taktia-augmented-power-tool-and-carbide-3d-mill/ | Live Look At Taktia Augmented Power Tool And Carbide 3D Mill | Mike Szczys | [
"cnc hacks",
"cons",
"Crowd Funding",
"Featured"
] | [
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"carbide 3d",
"mill",
"router",
"taktia"
] | There were so many things to see at Maker Faire that the booths spilled out of the buildings and into various tents on the grounds. One of the most interesting tents was packed with tables showing off CNC machines and that’s where
we ran into two that are familiar, and still amazing
.
First up is
the handheld CNC router
which we saw all the way back in 2012. It’s a spectacular piece of tech that adds a base to a handheld router. The base gives the tool a touchscreen system, the ability to precisely track it’s location, and adjustment motors to move the cutting bit in order to correct for imperfections in operator movements. It’s really amazing and we are happy to see
they have formed a company called Taktia
around the concept and are heading for crowd funding soon.
The second half of the video shows off the Nomad CNC mill which
we covered at the end of April
.
Carbide 3D
had a hugely successful (more than 10x the goal) Kickstarter that they tried to blame on the support of Hackaday readers. It’s a no-brainer that this machine is the one to watch, as even our hacked camera work doesn’t lose the fact that it can produce rock-solid results. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1492117",
"author": "Drake",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T02:21:49",
"content": "What is the takita using as a spindle?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1492159",
"author": "lee",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T02:35:53",... | 1,760,376,194.720184 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/isoscel-ease-drawing-robot-is-mesmerizing/ | Isoscel-Ease Drawing Robot Is Mesmerizing | James Hobson | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"drawing bot",
"drawing robot",
"isoscel-ease drawing robot"
] | Drawing is difficult for a lot of people… So, why not build a robot to do it for you? [Darcy] had an idea for a rather unique drawing robot — he calls it the
Isoscel-Ease.
Instead of using a boring XY gantry, a deltabot, or using a
scissor linkage
(actually that one is pretty cool!), [Darcy] decided to try harnessing of the power of triangle geometry! As you can probably guess, the linkage forms an isosceles triangle, hence the name. A pair of stepper motors increases and decreases the odd side of the triangle, allowing for a full range of continuous inky movement (there’s no pen actuator) over the page.
It’s a very cool little drawing robot, and it was completely designed in SketchUp — He has lots of photos of the build process and example drawings on his site — But don’t forget to stick around after the break to see a video of it in action!
For another unique drawing robot, who could forget the
robotic Etch-a-Sketch? | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1491629",
"author": "jumpingmonkey739",
"timestamp": "2014-05-22T00:29:22",
"content": "Great robot. Seems to be accurate and isn’t to bulky.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1492013",
"author": "JIm B",
"timestamp": "201... | 1,760,376,194.86411 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/ask-hackaday-can-battery-free-bluetooth-item-locating-tags-exist/ | Ask Hackaday: Can Battery-Free Bluetooth Item Locating Tags Exist? | Mathieu Stephan | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"Crowd Funding",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"bluetooth low energy"
] | [Vishak] tipped us about the
iFind Kickstarter campaign
, a 1.25×1.06×0.09″ (32x27x2.4mm) tag meant to be attached to anything you may lose in your daily life. This device communicates with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) enabled smartphones, has a 200ft (60m) detection range and a loud alarm. What is interesting to mention is that this device
doesn’t need any battery
to operate as it
recycles electromagnetic energy and stores it in a unique power bank.
As you can guess, this particular claim intrigued the Hackaday team given that we never featured so small energy harvesting devices. The ‘closest’ thing that comes to our minds is the
Allsee project
, a simple gesture recognition device that uses existing wireless signals (TV and RFID transmissions) to extract any movement that occur in front of it. However the antenna was quite big and very little power was extracted.
A quick Google search
let us know that Bluetooth Low Energy solutions usually consume an idle current of around 10uA @ ~3V. The (very) successful
Sticknfind campaign
which promoted the same battery-enabled product claimed a one year autonomy with a CR2016 battery and a 100ft range, leading to a ~90mAh/24/30.5/12 = 10.2uA idle current. As we’re not expert on the subject, we would like to ask our readers if they ever came across such energy harvesting performances (3V*10.2uA = 30uW) in a normal home environment. Our very bad maths indicate that if one would like to extract power from a typical Wifi router located 2 meters from you emitting 0.5Watts of power (in a perfect vacuum environment) with a 32*27mm = 864mm = 0.000864m² tag you’d only be able to get 0.5 * (0.000864/(4*pi*2*2)) =
8.6uW
.
It is therefore too bad that we can’t see in the presentation video what is inside the iFind, nor more details about the patent pending technologies involved. We hope that our dear readers will enlighten us in the comments section below. | 220 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "1490614",
"author": "Yarr",
"timestamp": "2014-05-21T20:03:22",
"content": "Lose. The word you are looking for is “lose”. Anything you may LOSE.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1490622",
"author": "Mathieu Stephan",
... | 1,760,376,195.886108 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/arduino-zero-hardware-is-not-just-for-beginners/ | Arduino Zero Hardware Is Not Just For Beginners | Mike Szczys | [
"Android Hacks",
"cons",
"Featured"
] | [
"Arduino Zero",
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"d21",
"sam"
] | We stopped by the Atmel booth at Maker Faire
to gawk at the pre-production Arduino Zero boards
they were showing off. [Bob] gave us a rundown of everything the new board offers, and it’s better than we imagined when we
heard about it last week
.
I may be an odd egg in that I don’t like to use an IDE when developing uC firmware. Generally I rock the text editor and a makefile for 8-bit, adding OpenOCD and GDB when working with ARM. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that there is already OpenOCD support (and by extension GDB support) for the Arduino Zero. In fact, that’s how the Arduino IDE flashes the board. This should have been obvious since the board is really just a breakout for the SAM D21 chip which is already supported.
Riffing on the thought of this being a breakout board, we think they did a pretty good job. There are two USB connectors; one let you access the board as a device or a host while the other connects the debugging hardware. If you’ve never used an On Chip Debugger before it’ll change your life so do give it a try. When you do move past the initial prototyping phase of your project you can still use the Zero as a debugging tool. There’s an unpopulated 10-pin header (not sure if the small pitch header comes with it or not) which can be used to interface with a target board. [Bob] also spent some time talking about the configurable 6-pin header which allows you to choose from a range of hardware protocols (SPI, TWI, etc.).
Unfortunately we still don’t have info on the availability timeframe or pricing information. There was one hiccup with this pre-production run (two signals were swapped on the PCB) and they need to spin another board, populate, and QA before they can green-light the final product.
Editorial Note:
Atmel advertises on Hackaday but this video and post are not a product of that relationship. Hackaday doesn’t post paid content. | 72 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "1489989",
"author": "Mr. Cruz",
"timestamp": "2014-05-21T17:14:50",
"content": "I wonder how many people here remember about the Tiva/Stellaris Launchpad that launched at $5, and is now sitting at $13, and has had an OnChip Debugger since it’s inception. I wonder how aggressively th... | 1,760,376,195.419164 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/sinclair-zx-spectrum-2-slims-down/ | Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2A Slims Down | Adam Fabio | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"sinclair",
"Spectrum +2A",
"ZX Spectrum"
] | [Carl] got his hands on a dead Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2A. He decided he wasn’t just going to fix it, he was going to improve it!
The ZX Spectrum Compact
is literally a “sawn-off” Spectrum +2A. [Carl’s] inspiration came from a similar mod at the
Old Machinery blog
.
Amstrad seems to have had a habit of bolting on additions to their products. In the case of the
Spectrum +2
A, it was a tape drive. Tapes weren’t a great storage method in the 80’s, and today they’re downright annoying. [Carl] didn’t need the tape interface, as he’s using a
DiVide
ATA interface.
The modification is rather straight forward. [Carl] broke out the hacksaw and cut the right end cap away from the tape drive. He then cut the entire tape drive away. The motherboard wasn’t safe from the saw treatment either, as the printer interface was cut off. Thankfully there were no components on the printer interface. Apparently [Carl] didn’t short any traces as he went to town with his saw.
With the motherboard modified to fit the abbreviated case, [Carl] was ready to begin reconstruction. He glued the cap onto the sawn-off case with Grip Fill glue, which also served to fill any gaps. Some sanding, priming, and painting later, The ZX Spectrum Compact was finished. This isn’t a perfect mod, as the gap is still slightly visible under the paint – but it’s good enough for [Carl]. Hey, it’s good enough for us, too – we can’t all be
[Ben Heck]
! | 37 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "1489411",
"author": "fartface",
"timestamp": "2014-05-21T14:29:51",
"content": "Actually you can be ben heck, instead of glue you can heat weld ABS plastic like that quite well. even low end Harbor Freight sells a plastic welding kit that can do fantastic plastic welds that if the... | 1,760,376,196.304904 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/candle-powered-fan-keeps-you-cool-using-a-thermoelectric-generator/ | Candle Powered Fan Keeps You Cool Using A Thermoelectric Generator | James Hobson | [
"how-to",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"TEC",
"thermoelectric",
"thermoelectric fan"
] | This is a great example of using a thermoelectric generator for a project. [Joohansson] made both a functional, and aesthetically beautiful fan
using components from a computer.
Thermoelectric generators (TEGs for high temperatures, and cheaper TECs for lower temperatures) are also called peltier elements, which look like small square pieces of ceramic with two wires sticking out of them. If you supply power to it, one side will become hot, and the other cold. The TECs [Joohansson] is using want a temperature difference of 68C between either sides. They are typically used for cooling electronics and even some of those cheap mini-fridges will make use of one with a giant heat sink on the hot side.
In addition, they can be used as an electric generator, thanks to the
seebeck effect
. If you can create a temperature differential between the two sides, you can generate electricity. Using a CPU heatsink, cooler, and fan, [Joohansson] was able to power a small DC fan using only a candle. It’s a brilliant demonstration of the seebeck effect.
TECs are great for getting
power to remote areas
— we’ve even seen someone manage to put one into a “
glowing life ring
” that harvests body heat to light a tiny LED!
[via
Hackedgadgets
] | 62 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "1488606",
"author": "Nitpicker Smartyass",
"timestamp": "2014-05-21T11:05:49",
"content": "A) It looks cool.B) I did get that right? He is using a FLAME, heating up the room, to drive a FAN to “cool” the room (basically moving the hot air from the flame into the room), right?C) Sugg... | 1,760,376,195.641414 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/a-levered-light-switch-even-fido-can-operate/ | A Levered Light Switch Even Fido Can Operate | James Hobson | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"dog light switch",
"light switch"
] | We love hacks that make a difference in people’s lives. Service dogs can make a huge difference in a physically disabled person’s life, and while they can do a lot of things, dogs aren’t the greatest at flipping light switches. So a team of industrial design students from Ghent, Belgium
decided to try finding a solution.
Their case study was for a young woman named [Heleen Bartsoen]. She has a very smart white golden retriever named [Gyproc] who is very good at picking up commands, and is a very careful and cautious service dog. She has an IKEA lamp with a foot switch that neither she or her dog can press.
The team quickly got to work and decided to design a lever to give the dog (or Heleen!) some mechanical advantage to actuate the switch. Having access to a laser cutter, they designed the lever to be cut out of plywood for easy assembly. It pivots around a wooden dowel, and they’ve filled a compartment of the base with cement to keep it stationary when being used.
It’s not a very complicated project, but it’s a great feel-good project and we hope it inspires you to make something to help someone!
Speaking of projects to help people — remember the
Self-stabilizing Parkinsons spoon? | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1488050",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2014-05-21T08:34:45",
"content": "Umm … why not simply replace the switch with something else? There are plenty of large rocker switches available and it could be fairly easily mounted higher up to be reachable by both her and her dog. This i... | 1,760,376,195.224748 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/20/capacitive-sensing-and-old-ibm-keyboards/ | Capacitive Sensing And Old IBM Keyboards | Brian Benchoff | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"capacitive sensing",
"capsense",
"ibm",
"keyboard",
"mechanical keyboard",
"Model M"
] | The pen is mightier than the sword, but the IBM Model M keyboard, properly applied, can knock teeth in. There are a few more IBM keyboards even better suited to blunt force trauma – the extremely vintage beam spring keyboards made for terminals and desktop publishers. Being so very old, there’s no easy way to connect these keyboards to a modern system, so when [xwhatsit] wanted to make his work,
he needed to build his own controller
.
The beam spring keyboards use capacitive switches, and with 122 keys, the usual method of reading capacitance – putting a capacitor in an oscillator – would be far too slow to be of any use in a keyboard. There is another method of reading capacitance: measuring the current going through the capacitive switch. This can easily be accomplished with an LM339 comparator.
[xwhatsit]’s keyboard controller uses this capacitive sensing circuit to read the four rows of keys, with a few shift registers taking care of the columns. An ATMega32u2 is the brains of the outfit, running LUFA to translate the key presses to USB.
If you’re lucky enough to have one of these ancient keyboards, [xwhatsit] is selling a few over on the usual mechanical keyboard forums. There’s also a controller for the Model F keyboard using the same basic circuit. If you need one just drop him a line or grab the gerbers and roll your own. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1487521",
"author": "BotherSaidPooh",
"timestamp": "2014-05-21T06:00:44",
"content": "Would this work with similar keyboards such as ones from old 520’s?I have one here someplace, seems a shame to waste it.Also relevant, this same circuit can be used to read an array of thermally se... | 1,760,376,195.275928 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/20/barobot-serves-cocktails-while-using-open-design-the-right-way/ | Barobot Serves Cocktails While Using Open Design The Right Way | Mike Szczys | [
"cooking hacks",
"Crowd Funding"
] | [
"barbot",
"cocktail",
"kickstarter",
"open design"
] | Oh for the day when we can stop repeatedly looking up our favorite drink recipes on Wikipedia. Those may be just around the corner and you’ll have your choice of single-click delivery or toiling away in the workshop for a scratch build. That’s because
Barobot
is satisfying both the consumer market and our thirst for open hardware goodness. They’re running a Kickstarter but to our delight, the
software and mechanical design files are already posted
. Before you dig into the design files there’s a really good look at the constituent parts in the
assembly manual
(PDF) — that’s a lot of pieces! — and a tiny bit on the
tech-stuff page
.
This remind us of
the Drinkmo
we saw earlier in the year. That one cames complete with the high-pitched whine of stepper motors. We didn’t get to hear Barobot’s ambient noise in the promo vid after the break. But one place this desing really shines is a swiveling caddy that allows for a double-row of bottles in a similar footprint. One thing we’d be interesting in finding out is the cleaning procedure. If anyone know what goes into cleaning something like this let us know in the comments.
If you were wondering...
that favorite drink recipe
.
[via
TechCrunch
]
If you were wondering…
that favorite drink recipe
.
[via
TechCrunch
] | 30 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1487072",
"author": "Waterjet",
"timestamp": "2014-05-21T03:32:58",
"content": "Alcohol (Ethanol) is kind of a disinfectant, right?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1487150",
"author": "Mike Szczys",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,376,196.164509 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/20/neo-geo-gets-line-doubled/ | Neo Geo Gets Line Doubled | Adam Fabio | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"deinterlace",
"interlace",
"Line Doubler",
"neo geo",
"Scan converter",
"Scan Doubler"
] | We love old video games, but we hate the way analog interlaced video looks on our new LCD monitors. [Michael] feels the same way, so he’s created
NeoVGA,
A Neo Geo Line Doubler in VHDL. Neo Geo, like many classic consoles,
didn’t use the full resolution
of an analog TV. In
NTSC
mode, it ran at 320×224 pixels.
PAL
users got an extra 32 vertical pixels for 320×256 pixels. The system ran with an approximately 15kHz horizontal sync and ~60Hz vertical sync.
This is not exactly a VGA compatible signal, so it would be relegated to composite or
S-Video
capable displays. The signals looked pretty good on a CRT, but on an LCD, they tend to look crummy. Modern LCDs don’t natively handle interlaced and/or low resolution input signals. The TV’s controller performs the magic of buffering, interpolating, and transforming the input signal to be compatible with the LCD panel. As [Michael] explains, most of these algorithms are optimized for TV video signals with lots of motion. They perform poorly on static high contrast images such as the background of a fighting game. TV controllers also add lag to the signal chain. Not much of a problem when watching movies, but it’s a big problem when you’re trying to pull off that triple hit combo.
Click past the break for more on [Michael’s] creation.
There are commercial solutions out there such as the
XRGB-3
, though they are expensive and hard to obtain. [Michael’s] solution is a classic one: line doubling. As each line is clocked in from the source, it is output twice. This doubles the horizontal scan rate to 30kHz, a frequency compatible with VGA. Since the video is output in lock step with the input, there is little or no lag created by the line doubling process.
The circuit was originally implemented on a borrowed Altera DE2 board, though [Michael] eventually switched things over to a Xilinx Virtex 2 Pro devboard. He’s still working on a few stability issues, but we’re excited at the progress.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEA6anvHBEA | 26 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1486020",
"author": "charliex",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T23:05:50",
"content": "very nice, time to dig out the neogeo",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1486072",
"author": "Genki",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T23:24:10",
"... | 1,760,376,195.956404 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/20/sealed-system-bucket-loader-cleans-messes-in-dangerous-places/ | Sealed-System Bucket Loader Cleans Messes In Dangerous Places | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"bucket loader",
"electric conversion",
"remote control",
"roebl"
] | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjHJ71SVop4&w=580]
Cleaning up after a disaster is hard and dangerous. But the ROEBL project is trying to make it substantially safer by removing the human operator from harm’s way. The Remote Operated Electric Bucket Loader had a big double-fenced, cement barrier play area set up at Maker Faire and [Justin Gray] walked us through the project which concluded with a demonstration of the hardware.
For now the operator does need to be on site to see what the loader is doing, but a first-person video setup is planned for the future. Still, removing the operator from the jarring experience of riding inside is an improvement. And the sealed nature of the electric and hydraulic systems mean that it can operate in areas inundated with liquids like water or oil.
The video above has a 90 second demonstration at the end (while we all laugh like children at what really was a giddy display of power being thrown about by a handheld controller). The ROEBL website has
a gallery where you can see the conversion process
that started with a standard diesel machine. | 23 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1485502",
"author": "Phil",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T20:19:28",
"content": "This is a robot wars I would watch!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1485605",
"author": "surfingtheether",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T20:52:44",
... | 1,760,376,196.084745 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/20/retrotechtacular-once-upon-a-punched-card/ | Retrotechtacular: Once Upon A Punched Card | Brian Benchoff | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"ibm",
"Punched Card"
] | Ah, the heady days of the early 60s, where companies gave their salesmen exquisitely produced documentaries, filled with incidental music written by the best composers of the era, and a voice actor that is so unabashedly ordinary you would swear you’ve heard him a hundred times before. It’s a lot better than any PowerPoint presentation anyone could come up, and lucky for us, these 16mm films are preserved on YouTube for everyone to enjoy.
This one was sent out to IBM sales reps
pushing a strange technology called a ‘punched card’, a system so efficient it will save your company tens of thousands of dollars in just a few short years.
Like most explanations of what a punched card does, this IBM documercial begins with the history of the Jacquard loom that used punched cards for storing patterns for textile weaving. In a rare bit of historical context befitting IBM, this film also covers the 1880 US census, an important part in the evolution of punched cards being used not as instructions for a loom, but data that could be tabulated and calculated.
The United States takes a census every ten years. The tenth census of 1880 took so long to compile into the data – seven years – it was feared the next census of 1890 wouldn’t be complete until the turn of the century. This problem
was solved by [Herman Hollerith]
and his system of encoding census data onto punched cards for tabulation. [Hollerith] would later go on to found the Tabulating Machine Company that would later merge with two other companies to form IBM. Isn’t it great that IBM chose to include that little nugget in their film.
As a point of interest, the film does contain a short pitch for IBM punched card writers, sorters, and calculators – the backbone of IBM’s medium to large size business sales. At the time this film was produced (1964) IBM was ready to announce the System/360, what would become the de facto mainframe for businesses of all sizes. Yes, the /360 also used punched cards, but we wonder how many angry phone calls the sales reps received months after showing this film. | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1485161",
"author": "Jude",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T18:31:48",
"content": "Ahh the joy of the Dup key, the sweet anticipation of the operator loading (will the deck be dropped), the adrenalin rush of reassembling the deck on the lunch room tables in a race against deadline, the she... | 1,760,376,196.022779 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/20/oh-the-people-youll-meet-at-maker-faire/ | Oh, The People You’ll Meet! (at Maker Faire) | Mike Szczys | [
"cons"
] | [
"adafruit",
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"ben heck",
"caleb kraft",
"ian lesnet",
"jeremy blum",
"microview"
] | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_MTmhPrQgw&w=580]
I might argue that the best thing about Maker Faire isn’t the booths at all, but the people you’ll run into. To that end, I spliced together a series of these impromptu run-ins that I thoroughly enjoyed. What’s remarkable to me is that these people of not weren’t themselves attracting a crowd. If you want to meet the hackers who you respect in the hacking world, you can still have a casual and friendly conversation with them!
First up is [Jeremy Blum] who is a long-time friend of Hackaday, author
Exploring Arduino
,
and one-year member of the Google[x] team. We ran into him along with [Marcus Schappi], CEO of
Little Bird Electronics
in Australia. [Marcus’] crew recently saw a successful crowd-funding run with
the Micro-view
.
Next up is [Ben Heck] of
The Ben Heck Show
. He talks a bit about his recent hack of a pair of texting radios using the
eRIC radio modules
and he riffed on his past robotic luggage project as well.
The rest of the video is devoted to Hackaday alum. I ran into [Caleb Kraft] who recently started as
Community Editor over at MAKE
, and [Phil Burgess] who now
builds gnarly projects for Adafruit
. The clip wraps up with [Ian] from Dangerous Prototypes. He’s fresh off of
his Hacker Camp in Shenzhen
which covered everything from reballing BGA components by hand, to finding good deals on custom wardrobe, and making sound gastronomic choices while in China.
We talked to a horde of people over two days. Perhaps it was
the foam Jolly Wrencher
that I wore around? But the point is that everyone at an event like this is interesting to talk to, approachable, and well worth the cost of entry. If you haven’t been to a hacking convention it’s time to start looking around for the one nearest you! | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1484401",
"author": "Dan Fruzzetti",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T14:37:45",
"content": "Which maker faire?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1484428",
"author": "Caleb Kraft",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T14:45:21",
... | 1,760,376,196.35608 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/20/turning-lego-into-a-groove-machine/ | Turning Lego Into A Groove Machine | Brian Benchoff | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"lego",
"opencv",
"sequencer"
] | Last weekend wasn’t just about Maker Faire; in Stockholm there was another DIY festival celebrating the protocols that make electronic music possible. It’s MIDI Hack 2014, and [Kristian], [Michael], [Bram], and [Tobias] put together something really cool:
a Lego sequencer
The system is set up on a translucent Lego base plate, suspended above a webcam that feeds into some OpenCV and Python goodness. From there, data is sent to Native Instruments Maschine. There’s a step sequencer using normal Lego bricks, a fader controlling beat delay, and a rotary encoder for reverb.
Despite being limited to studs and pegs, the short demo in the video below actually sounds good, with a lot of precision found in the faders and block-based rotary encoder. [Kristian] will be putting up the code and a few more details shortly. Hopefully there will be enough information to use different colored blocks in the step sequencer part of the build for different notes. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1483791",
"author": "Yarr",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T11:24:01",
"content": "There was a MIDI festival here in Stockholm and I didn’t know about it?! Son of a…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1483903",
"author": "Tomasito",
... | 1,760,376,196.217963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/20/the-solafide-forbes-nash-organ/ | The Solafide Forbes Nash Organ | Brian Benchoff | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"analog synth",
"analog synthesizer",
"intonation",
"just intonation",
"music theory"
] | A few years ago, [Chad] wanted to build a musical instrument. Not just any musical instrument, mind you, but one with just intonation. Where modern western music maps 12 semitones onto a logarithmic scale per octave, just temperament uses ratios or fractions to represent notes on a scale. For formal, academic music, it’s quite odd especially if you’re building an analog synth for this temperament. In a remarkable three-part write up (parts
one
,
two
, and
three
), [Chad] goes over the creation of this extremely strange musical instrument.
The idea was for this synth to produce sine waves for each of the tones on the just intonated scale. [Chad]’s initial experiments led him down the path of using strings and magnetic pickups to produce these sine waves. These ideas were initially discarded for producing sine waves electronically on dozens of different homemade PCBs, one for each tone.
The keys are an extremely interesting design, working on the principle of light from an LED shining on a photodetector, blocked by a shutter on a spring-loaded key made on a laser cutter. The glyphs on the keys seen above actually have meaning; each one describes the ratio of the interval that key plays, encoded in some schema that isn’t quite clear.
What does it sound like? There’s three videos below, but because this synth isn’t tuned to the scale you’re used to, it doesn’t sound like anything else you’ve heard before. | 31 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "1483200",
"author": "Matt",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T08:09:37",
"content": "Random. I love it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1483436",
"author": "Galane",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T09:26:17",
"content": "Bunch of sc... | 1,760,376,196.432418 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/19/wake-on-lan-with-a-dev-board/ | Wake On LAN With A Dev Board | Brian Benchoff | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"arm",
"dev board",
"Sitara",
"wake on lan",
"WOL"
] | At home, [Daniel] has an extremely powerful dual quad-core Xeon system with ECC RAM that he uses for heavy lifting tasks – compiling, CUDA processing, and actual
computing
. Of course the electric bill for running this box all the time would be crazy, so Wake on LAN it is. There’s only one problem: for some reason, the BIOS doesn’t have Wake on LAN. The solution, of course, was a microcontroller system that would listen for the magic WoL packet and turn the computer on when it was received.
This project eventually turned into a great case mod
with an integrated LCD that powers the computer up over Ethernet, shows the current running processes, CPU and memory usage, and is an excellent use of a TI dev board.
The dev board in question is a
TI Sitara AM355x starter kit
that runs Linux, has two Ethernet ports and a touch sensitive LCD, and more than enough power to handle something as simple as a system monitor. To power on his monster computer from the dev board, [Daniel] is using a LED on the board, an inverter, a ULN2003 driver chip, and a relay connected to the computer’s power button. It’s not exactly a masterpiece of craftsmanship, but the dev board looks good mounted in the case, and from the videos below, it’s a great way to get system information embedded right into a computer case. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1482760",
"author": "PodeCoet",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T05:34:54",
"content": "Hahaha this is a brilliant example of the ‘feature creep’ bug that we all suffer from – Kudos on being able to finish the design with all those additional features, It looks fantastic!",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,376,196.612441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/19/catching-drops-of-water-with-leds/ | Catching Drops Of Water With LEDs | James Hobson | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"air gap",
"optointerrupter"
] | Ever wonder how they
capture seemingly perfectly timed photographs of water droplets?
Most of the time it’s done by using an optointerrupter whereby it detects the droplet falling and then triggers a light source a few milliseconds later with your camera ready and waiting.
This is typically done with something called an
air gap flash
, which is usually
rather expensive
or
difficult to make
, but [Michal’s] figured out another easier way suitable for some applications — using an array of LEDs to illuminate the scene.
He’s got a IR diode, a photo-resistor, a few spacers, some plastic and a bunch of hot glue to make up his optointerrupter. When the droplet passes through the IR beam it breaks the signal from the photo-resistor which then triggers his ATmega48P. It waits 80 milliseconds (he timed it out) and then turns on the LEDs for approximately 50
micro
seconds. Meanwhile his camera is watching the whole event with a shutter-speed of a few seconds.
This works because LEDs have rise and fall times that are much shorter than a traditional camera flash — normal flashes light up for 1-2 milliseconds, as opposed to this 50 microsecond LED flash. Just take a look at some of the pictures! | 21 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "1482170",
"author": "notabena4us",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T02:24:51",
"content": "+1 ~ the perfect beholding moment too!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1482290",
"author": "Eugene",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T03:02:36"... | 1,760,376,196.99049 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/19/arc-attack-shows-off-tesla-backpack-which-is-certainly-not-a-weapon/ | Arc Attack Shows Off Tesla Backpack Which Is Certainly Not A Weapon | Mike Szczys | [
"cons"
] | [
"arc attack",
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"tesla coil"
] | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc5SFMxTzyI&w=580]
[Steve Ward] showed us his Tesla coil project which looks very much like a video game weapon. The hand-crafted masterpiece really packs a punch, able to throw off fat white arcs or a bit less threatening bolts of purple plasma. The video above is noisy and dark, but the look at the electronics in the backpack (holy huge capacitors batman!) and the quick functional demo are both more than worth posting. Unfortunately we didn’t get audio of the gun in action so you’ll have to image those sound effects.
The rig is powered by a 5Ah lithium battery which provides the 60V that gets boosted to 400V. The giant caps already mentioned store about 2k Joules (we love it how [Steve] can’t say that 2,000 Joule figure without beaming with joy). This project is the most advanced version of
the prototype we saw a few years ago in Kansas
. If you want to see more of what these guys are up to
head over to their homepage
. | 23 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1481981",
"author": "ScottishCaptain",
"timestamp": "2014-05-20T01:36:28",
"content": "I used to think Westwood was just being silly with the whole Tesla Tower and Tesla Trooper thing in Red Alert and RA2. Now I’m not so sure…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,376,197.055878 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/19/mikey-the-robot-that-charges-itself/ | Mikey, The Robot That Charges Itself | Adam Fabio | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"autonomous",
"Pixy",
"robotics",
"vision"
] | Mikey is
[Mike’s] autonomous robot
. Like any good father, he’s given the robot his name. Mikey is an Arduino based robot, which uses a Pixy camera for vision.
[Mike] started with a common 4WD robot platform. He added an Arduino Uno, a motor controller, and a
Pixy
. The Pixy sends directions to the Arduino via a serial link. Mikey’s original task was driving around and finding frogs on the floor. Since then, [Mike] has found a higher calling for Mikey:
self charging
.
One of the most basic features of life is eating. In the case of autonomous robots, that means self charging. [Mike] gave Mikey the ability to self charge by training the Pixy to detect a green square. The green square identifies Mikey’s charging station. Probes mounted on 3D printed brackets hold the positive leads while springs on the base of the station make contact with conductive tape on Mikey’s belly. Once the circuit is complete, Mike stops moving and starts charging. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1480977",
"author": "sangwiss",
"timestamp": "2014-05-19T20:47:13",
"content": "I was considering a similar system, but i don’t like the idea of having the battery wires out in the air. I guess that a diode will do, in that regard, in order to prevent a short circuit from the batter... | 1,760,376,196.749537 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/19/youthful-destruction-at-maker-faire/ | Youthful Destruction At Maker Faire | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"News",
"Teardown"
] | [
"Bay Area Maker Faire 2014",
"recycling",
"takeitapart"
] | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLmHTfi13dM&w=580]
Who didn’t get in trouble for taking things apart as a kid? The TakeItApart booth at the 2014 Maker Faire was among my favorite. It let anyone (especially the kids) grab a piece of electronics headed for recycling and
crack it open just to see what is inside
. The good news being that you didn’t need to be able to put it back together again since it’s just going to be ground up for its constituent materials anyway.
There’s something cathartic about watching a 7-year-old stabbing at a Walkman radio with a slotted screwdriver (those plastic cases are more robust than you might think). I asked if anyone had managed to slice open their hand
back-to-the-future style
in the process and thankfully the answer was no. But there was at least one instance of “free daycare” where the parents wandered off — there are plenty of distractions at MF — much to the chagrin of their progeny.
Seeing this made me think of
this recent interview with [Bunnie Huang]
in which he mentions taking chips out of their sockets on an Apple II when he was a kid. He would pull them and replace them backwards to see what effect it would have. Ha! If you have a similar childhood experience to share we’d love to hear about it in the comments. If you just want to see the guts of a bunch of stuff head of to
TakeItApart
. | 28 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1480407",
"author": "supershwa",
"timestamp": "2014-05-19T17:28:05",
"content": "I’m glad they had a booth like this for everyone (especially the kids.) I’ve been taking things apart for as long as I can remember. As a matter of fact, I have an iPhone 5s on my ESD mat that I’m abo... | 1,760,376,196.9221 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/19/an-experiment-to-test-radioactive-decay-varying-over-time/ | An Experiment To Test Radioactive Decay Varying Over Time | Brian Benchoff | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"radioactive",
"radioactive decay",
"Tritium"
] | Here’s a hypothesis for you: radioactive decay varies over time, possibly with a yearly cycle. [Panteltje]
decided to test this hypothesis
, and so far has two year’s worth of data to comb over.
Radioactive decay can be easily detected with a photomultiplier tube, but these tubes are sensitive to magnetic fields and cosmic rays that would easily fly through just about any shielding [Pantelje] could come up with. Instead, the radiation in this setup is detected with simple photo detectors, pressed right up against a tritium-filled glass ampoule, a somewhat common lighting solution for fishing lures, watch faces, and compasses.
The experimental setup records the photo detectors, a temperature sensor, and a voltage reference, recording all the data to an EEPROM once an hour. All the important electronics are stuffed into a heatsinked, insulated, light-proof box, while the control electronics reside on a larger board with battery backup, alarm, indicator LEDs, and an RS232 connection.
After one year, [Pantelje] recorded the data and reset the experiment for another year. There are now two years worth of data available, ready for anyone to analyze. Of course, evidence that radioactive decay changes over the course of a few years would turn just about every scientific discipline on its head, so at the very least [Panteltje] has a great record of the output of tritium lights against the expected half-life. | 64 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "1479994",
"author": "repkid",
"timestamp": "2014-05-19T14:30:39",
"content": "Bloody brilliant!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1480042",
"author": "Daniel Roseman",
"timestamp": "2014-05-19T14:49:11",
"content": "Wo... | 1,760,376,197.161261 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/19/pokemon-artificial-intelligence-is-smarter-than-you/ | Pokemon Artificial Intelligence Is Smarter Than You | Rich Bremer | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"game boy",
"game boy advance",
"gameboy"
] | Who out there hasn’t angrily thrown a game controller across the room after continually getting killed by some stupid game-controlled villain? That is such a bummer! You probably wished there was some way to ‘just get past that point’. To take a step in that direction, [Ben] created an
Artificial Intelligence program that will win at Pokemon
Blue for Game Boy Advance.
The game is run in a Game Boy Advance emulator known as Visual Boy Tracer, which itself is a modified version of the most common GBA emulator, Visual Boy Advance. What sets Visual Boy Advance apart from the rest is that it has a memory dump feature which allows the user to send both the RAM and the ROM out of the emulator. The RAM holds all values currently needed by the emulator, this includes everything from text arrow flash times to details about currently battling Pokemon to the players position in the currently loaded map. The memory dump feature is key to allow the AI to understand what is happening in the game.
The AI code is written in python and uses the pywin32 add-on that includes the Win32 API. The Win32 API allows the programs to interface with Windows, specifically simulating key presses. The AI uses these simulated key presses to interact with the emulator rather than building the emulator into the AI code. The
AI Agent
has two key goals: navigate the map to each new trainer and defeat each trainer with out loosing a Pokemon. These goals require separate modes, a ‘search’ mode and a ‘battle’ mode.
The search mode is the most basic form of AI, it’s a Reaction Agent. Reaction Agents simply react to what they can see at that particular time. In this case the agent is programmed to find the location next to the trainer. By knowing where it is and where it needs to go, the AI sends a simulated keystroke to move the player to the appropriate position. When in position, the AI will ‘challenge’ the trainer.
When in battle mode, the AI has a little bit more work to do. It starts by calculating the potential battle damage for all combinations of opposition Pokemons VS each of its own Pokemon. The AI then runs through a decision tree that dictates what decisions to make. For example, the decisions relating to health are higher in the decision tree and the AI will decide to heal a weak Pokemon before assessing any attacks. This ensures that no Pokemons are defeated.
Even if you are not a Pokemon fan you have to agree that this is an amazing exercise in DIY Artificial Intelligence. Check out the video to see this project in action. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1479452",
"author": "JE Carter II",
"timestamp": "2014-05-19T11:09:23",
"content": "T-100 starter kit?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1479500",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2014-05-19T11:28:01",
"content": "“Poke... | 1,760,376,197.698562 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/19/driving-1000-neopixels-with-1k-of-arduino-ram/ | Driving 1000 NeoPixels With 1k Of Arduino RAM | Brian Benchoff | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"led",
"neopixel",
"RGB LED",
"ws2811",
"ws2812"
] | NeoPixels, or WS2812 RGB LEDs, are the display device du jour for impressive and blinding lighting projects. Commonly known for very tight timing requirements,
[Josh] discovered this is, in fact, usually unnecessary
. The timing requirements for NeoPixels aren’t as bad as they seem, once you get to know them.
The official WS2812 timing specs give values that are fairly constraining for anyone writing a library to drive these RGB LED pixels, but simplifying the timing diagram by assuming a 50% duty cycle on the data lines and ignoring the longer maximum times results in a surprising conclusion: the only tight timing parameter for NeoPixel signaling is the maximum width of the 0-bit pulse.
Realizing this, [Josh] wrote a simple demo program to drive over 1000 NeoPixels – an 11 meter long strip – using 1K of RAM on an Arduino. The trick comes by simply delaying the bitbanging a set number of cycles. No obtuse assembly required.
There is only one problem with [Josh]’s method of driving a nearly unlimited amount of NeoPixels – building a display where every NeoPixel is an element in a larger image, such as in a video display, is impossible on systems with limited amounts of RAM.
The code
writes values to the NeoPixel strip algorithmically, so if you can’t build your animation with for loops, you’re out of luck. Still, Driving this many NeoPixels is a migraine trigger, and we have to give [Josh] credit for doing this with 1K of RAM.
Check out the video of [Josh]’s extreme NeoPixel strip below. | 36 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1479060",
"author": "Bogdan",
"timestamp": "2014-05-19T08:52:14",
"content": "I was really waiting for someone to try this as I didn’t have time myself. Thanks @Josh.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1479285",
"author": "fart... | 1,760,376,197.250907 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/17/live-from-maker-faire-hadmf/ | Live From Maker Faire #hadmf | Mike Szczys | [
"Featured",
"Major Tom"
] | [
"live",
"maker faire",
"twitter"
] | Want to see what kind of shenanigans we’re up to at Maker Faire Bay Area? We’ll be tweeting all weekend. Use
#hadmf
and follow this
list for the Hackaday Crew
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1471695",
"author": "Herbert",
"timestamp": "2014-05-17T18:22:41",
"content": "#HACKADAYMOTHERFUCKER",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1474048",
"author": "k",
"timestamp": "2014-05-18T04:52:12",
"content": "Heya! Sorr... | 1,760,376,197.544364 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/17/breaking-open-the-quirky-nimbus/ | Breaking Open The Quirky Nimbus | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware"
] | [
"analog gauge",
"Electric Imp",
"Nmbus",
"pic"
] | The Nimbus is a little Internet-connected device put out by a company called Quirky. It features four analog dials, each with graphic LCDs, with WiFi connectivity to show you how many tweets you’ve made in the past day. You know, in case you forgot, or something.
[Edu] didn’t find the social media-oriented Nimbus very useful, but Internet connected analog gauges are just
so cool
, so
out came the screwdriver and the writing of new firmware commenced
.
Inside the Nimbus there’s an SPI Flash, PIC micro, and an Electric Imp, a tiny ARM microcontroller and WiFi adapter stuffed inside an SD card. The Imp is always tied to a cloud service, in this case, a Quirky-lined cloud, but the folks at Quirky were keen to help [Edu] in his quest for better firmware.
After figuring out all the traces, [Edu] wrote a simple firmware that can control everything there is to control – the dials, displays, two buttons, and a speaker. So far he’s put some graphics on the display and PWM’d the theme from Monkey Island. This is just scratching the surface of what the device can do – [Edu] can still make use of the WiFi connectivity, and those dials can do much more than spin around in circles.
Monkey Island video below. | 29 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1470298",
"author": "Rob Thomas",
"timestamp": "2014-05-17T11:39:07",
"content": "Wow, what a great post, and more importantly what an amazing company to unlock the device for hacking",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2618791",
... | 1,760,376,197.381944 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/17/worlds-smallest-comic-etched-onto-a-human-hair/ | World’s Smallest Comic Etched Onto A Human Hair | James Hobson | [
"cons"
] | [
"EHSM",
"FIB",
"focused ion beam",
"world's smallest comic"
] | [Sébastien Bourdeauducq] had the idea to create the
world’s smallest comic
— so he assembled a team and was able to produce a comic strip where each panel is <20um across, etched on a human hair.
They used focused ion beam (FIB) etching, where a high-speed jet of matter is generated and blasted at a hair to etch the comic. Think of it kind of like a super focused laser beam. Check out the original microscopic imagery of it
over on their GitHub.
The cool thing is they really just did this for fun — it’s purpose is to advertise the
EHSM conference
in Hamburg. The Exceptionally Hard(ware) & Soft(ware) Meeting is a massive gathering of the opensource and DIY hacking world. If you happen to live in Europe we’d recommend checking it out — just take a look at their conference talks they have lined up! The Maker Movement Meets Patent Law, Optics & Photonics with Lego Bricks, the Basics of Quantum Cryptograhy, the Principles of Mass Spectrometry… the list goes on!
Still not convinced? Take a look at
last year’s talks
and
photos
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1470041",
"author": "Faust",
"timestamp": "2014-05-17T10:27:57",
"content": "Hair is a bad comic medium.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1472328",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-05-17T21:34:31",
... | 1,760,376,197.302375 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/16/augmented-reality-with-an-fpga/ | Augmented Reality With An FPGA | Adam Fabio | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"augmented reality",
"Cornel",
"fpga"
] | [Julie Wang] has created an
augmented reality system on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)
.
Augmented reality
is nothing new – heck, these days
even your tablet can do it
. [Julie] has taken a slightly different approach though. She’s not using a processor at all. Her entire system, from capture, to image processing, to VGA signal output, is all instantiated in a FPGA.
Using the system is as simple as holding up a green square of cardboard. Viewing the world through an old camcorder, [Julie’s] project detects and tracks the green square. It then adds a 3D image of Cornell’s McGraw Tower on top of the green. The tower moves with the cardboard, appearing to be there. [Julie] injected a bit of humor into the project through the option of substituting the tower for an image of her
professor, [Bruce Land]
.
[Julie] started with an NTSC video signal. The video is captured by a
DE2-115 board with an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA
. Once the signal was inside the FPGA, [Julie’s] code performs a median filter. A color detector finds an area of green pixels which are passed to a corner follower and corner median filter. The tower or Bruce images are loaded from ROM and overlaid on the video stream, which is then output via VGA.
The amazing part is that there is no microprocessor involved in any of the processing. Logic and state machines control the show. Great work [Julie], we hope [Bruce] gives you an A! | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1469591",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2014-05-17T08:30:55",
"content": "What would happen if you went outside into the green world? Crazy!Chroma key picks the colour least likely to be in the unnatural world.FPGA, the closest thing yet on the brain.",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,376,197.505704 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/16/led-clock-looks-cool-and-tells-time/ | LED Clock Looks Cool AND Tells Time | Rich Bremer | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"clock",
"LED clock"
] | Clocks have taken many forms of the years, starting with shadow clocks and sundials in Egypt around 3500 BC. Obviously, these could only tell the time while the sun was out. Water Clocks followed which could track time in the dark. Water Clocks are basically a bowl with a hole in the bottom. This bowl was set in a container filled with water. The water entered the bowl at a consistent rate and graduations on the inside of the bowl showed how much time had passed.
Mechanical clocks followed, as did quartz and the atomic clock. We have now entered a new era in time-telling, the
Bamboo LED Clock
. [Pascal] brings us this funky fresh chronometer all the way from
Germany
.
The front face is made from a bamboo pizza plate and gives the clock some modern minimalist pizzazz. A 1-meter long LED strip is attached to the circumference of the plate and contains 60 individually assignable RGB LED’s. An Arduino and Real Time Clock are responsible for the time keeping and coordination of the LED’s.
As you can see in the photo, 2 of the LED’s colors are used. The single red LED indicates the hour. The strip of blue LED’s show the minutes. If you’d like to build one of these [Pascal] has shared the Arduino code on his Instructables page. | 7 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1468341",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2014-05-17T02:43:19",
"content": "That’s pretty cool, though I’d have only one LED lit blue for the minute, instead of all the prior ones as well. And you could have green for seconds.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,376,197.640817 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/16/wall-mounted-chess-set-lets-you-stand-and-play/ | Wall-Mounted Chess Set Lets You Stand And Play | James Hobson | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"wall chess",
"wall mounted chess"
] | Artwork on the wall is nice and all, but don’t you get bored with it sometimes? What if you could interact with it! That’s just what the [Artless Dodger] decided to do with this old Fidelity Chess Challenger he converted to a
wall-playable chess set!
The old Fidelity Chess Challenger is a fun electronic chess set that works by operating on press input. Simply move your piece, press down on its new square and then the computer knows where the piece is. The system is just begging to be hacked into a new form factor.
He’s built the new board from scratch using MDF, and then coated it with faux leather vinyl to give it a more polished look. He’s upgraded all the switches to momentary button switches and then re-soldered
all
of the connections. This was a bit of a challenge seeing as the original buttons looked like this:
After that headache was done, he also added LED notification lights to help the user see the moves and whose turn it is. A cool feature lets you double-check the computer knows where all the pieces are. Simply hold down the buttons along the bottom to reveal the supposed location of the corresponding chess piece.
He’s got a great write-up on his blog if you’re interested in seeing the rest of the build — if not, at least check out his demonstration video!
[via
HackedGadgets
] | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1467229",
"author": "Galane",
"timestamp": "2014-05-16T23:19:19",
"content": "I used to have one of those, that exact model. It would cheat on a couple of illegal moves and would never allow me to do an en passant capture with a pawn.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,376,197.592496 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/16/pneumatic-wolverine-claws-are-quite-possibly-the-best-thing-ever/ | Pneumatic Wolverine Claws Are Quite Possibly The Best Thing Ever | James Hobson | [
"Weapons Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"pneumatic wolverine claws",
"real wolverine claws",
"retractable wolverine claws",
"wolverine claws",
"working wolverine clawsr"
] | With the new X-Men movie coming out soon, [Colin Furze] decided to make some real working props from the movies — starting with some bloody brilliant
fully functional and retractable Wolverine claws.
We’ve seen
Wolverine claws before
, even
electrified Wolverine claws
, but never have we seen anyone take them to the level [Colin] has. He didn’t just want realistic Wolverine claws. He didn’t just want claws that could deploy. He wanted realistic claws that could both deploy, and retract — fast! And he wanted them to branch out just like the real deal.
He started brainstorming different ways of doing this. Motors, springs, geared racks, cables, pneumatic cylinders… nothing really fit the bill. Pneumatic power seemed the best option for performance, but the problem is he’d need a 12″ cylinder to sit behind his claws — it’d completely ruin the look — one of his main criteria for the project.
That was when he had a stroke of brilliance. What if he used o-ring seals, and turned the blades into pneumatic projectiles on a guide rail? Using a slew of awesome toys in his workshop including a TIG welder, desktop mill, grinders and more, he fabricated an awesome double-acting piston-less pneumatic cylinder which can blast his triple-bladed claws back and forth at high speeds on demand!
The only downside is he needs to carry a backpack complete with valve banks and an air tank — but as soon as you see the following videos — you’ll discover the pros quickly outweigh the cons. It’s absolutely bloody brilliant.
[Colin] is one of our favorite hackers across the pond in England, where he’s built a
jet-engine powered tea kettle
, the
world’s fastest baby carriage
, and even a jet engine…
made out of a toilet paper holder.
[Thanks Alex!] | 45 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1466368",
"author": "Gerrit Coetzee",
"timestamp": "2014-05-16T20:02:48",
"content": "This man is powered by hearing loss.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1467583",
"author": "Waterjet",
"timestamp": "2014-05-1... | 1,760,376,197.953098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/18/solar-powered-mosquito-birth-control-is-making-waves/ | Solar-Powered Mosquito Birth Control Is Making Waves | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"555",
"bubbles",
"malaria",
"mosquito",
"piezo"
] | Mosquitoes really suck. Joking aside, they spread dangerous and deadly diseases like Malaria, Dengue and West Nile. They like to breed in pools of stagnant water which can be difficult to keep up with. From egg-laying to larval development, still water is vital for breeding mosquitoes. Instructables user [Gallactronics] hypothesized that disrupting the surface tension of potential nurseries was the key to discouraging breeding, and
he built a solar-powered device for under $10 that proves his theory
.
There are a few standard ways of dealing with standing water. Someone can keep it drained or it can be sprayed with pesticides. By aerating the water, mosquito mothers are far less likely to successfully arrange their eggs on the surface. Even if the eggs take, the turbulent water surface will suffocate the larvae.
This bubbler ticks all the boxes. It starts as soon as it comes in contact with water and sounds a piezo alarm when the pool has dried or when someone removes it. It runs for 10 minutes at 10-minute intervals using a 555 timer and some transistors. The water probes are stainless steel bolts, and it runs on a 6V 450mA solar cell. Be sure to watch the demonstration below.
We love to see this kind of ingenuity and elegance in problem solving. Then again, we also like the idea of
killing them with lasers
. | 81 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "1478570",
"author": "vonskippy",
"timestamp": "2014-05-19T05:29:20",
"content": "Good Start? Maybe, but there’s a whole lot of assumptions going on there, and testing it with ONE POOL ONE TIME is not proof of anything, except that the author is clueless about the scientific method.... | 1,760,376,198.069121 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/18/emulating-touchscreens-in-python/ | Emulating Touchscreens In Python | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"python",
"touchscreen"
] | Software, especially DOS-based software meant for CNC control lasts forever, but hardware most certainly does not. When faced with aged and decrepit hardware meant for controlling a CNC machine that was slowly dying, [Oliver] needed something that would emulate 3M Microtouch touchscreen. Not wanting to go the hardware route, he decided to
emulate a touch screen in Python
.
The Python code is fairly simple, taking mouse input and translating it to the serial protocol the 3M Microtouch, and thus the old DOS CNC app, uses. Writing the Python to capture mouse clicks was only half of the problem, though. [Oliver] also needed a way to send these mouse clicks to an old DOS application. Virtualizing an old machine running DOS created a few timing problems, but a solution was eventually found with DOSBox and the
Virtual Serial Port Emulator
that can connect two applications with serial ports.
[Oliver] was finally able to get everything working, bringing this equipment back to life for at least another 30 years. Let’s just hope all the code is well documented and archived for the next guy. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1478264",
"author": "djr",
"timestamp": "2014-05-19T03:57:02",
"content": "Not sure why DOS software is so special…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1478760",
"author": "LittleFox",
"timestamp": "2014-05-19T06:4... | 1,760,376,198.122798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/18/hackaday-links-may-18-2014/ | Hackaday Links: May 18, 2014 | Brian Benchoff | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"3d printer",
"compute module",
"da vinci",
"end mill",
"firmware",
"laser",
"laser diode",
"mill",
"NFC",
"point to point",
"pong",
"raspberry pi"
] | Think the original Pong is cool? How about
point to point Pong?
[v8ltd] did it in three months, soldering all the leads directly to the chip pins. No sockets required. It’s insane, awesome, a masterpiece of craftsmanship, and surprising it works.
[Jeremy Cook] is building a servo-powered light graffiti thing and needed a laser diode. How do you control a laser pointer with a microcontroller?
Here’s how
. They’re finicky little buggers, but if you get the three-pack from Amazon like [Jeremy] did, you get three chances to get it right.
NFC tags in everything
! [Becky] at Adafruit is putting them in everything. Inside
3D printed rings
, glued onto rings, and something really clever:
glued to your thumbnail with nail polish
. Now you can unlock your phone with your thumb instead of your index finger.
Photographs capture still frames, but wouldn’t it be great if a camera could capture moving images? No, we’re not talking about video because this is the Internet where every possible emotion, reaction, and situation can be expressed with an animated GIF.
Meet OTTO
, the camera that captures animated GIFs! It’s powered by the Raspberry Pi compute module, so that’s interesting.
[Nate] was getting tired of end mills rolling around his bench. That’s a bad thing. He came up with a solution, though:
Mill a piece of plywood into a tray
to hold end mills.
The Da Vinci printer, a printer that only costs $500 because they’re banking on the Gillette model, has been cracked wide open by
resetting the DRM
,
getting rid of the proprietary host software
, and
unbricking the device
. Now there’s a concerted effort
to develop custom firmware for the Da Vinci printer
. It’s extraordinarily bare bones right now, but the pins on the microcontroller are mapped, and RepRap firmwares are extremely modular. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1477474",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-05-18T23:33:50",
"content": "v8ltd has a great career ahead of him in the 1970 electronics industry.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1477609",
"author": "Brian Bencho... | 1,760,376,198.30291 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/18/nyc-resistor-gets-a-pdp-1134/ | NYC Resistor Gets A PDP-11/34 | Adam Fabio | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"DEC",
"mainframe",
"minicomputer",
"PDP-11/34"
] | [Trammel Hudson] and NYC Resistor have gotten their hands on some
old computing iron in the form of a PDP-11/34
. The
PDP-11 is a 16 bit minicomputer
made by
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)
. Various incarnations of the PDP-11 were sold from the 1970’s all the way into the 1990’s. NYC Resistor’s model is has a
label dating it to 1983
.
The PDP was found in an old storage unit in the Bronx. Moving several racks of equipment across the city is no small feat, but NYC Resistor members have it done it so many times they’ve got it down to a science.
Once power is applied, a stock PDP won’t actually do anything until the boot loader is keyed in from the CPU front panel. Thankfully this particular PDP-11 had its boot instructions
printed on a label on the CPU
. NYCR’s machine also includes an M9312 “bootstrap / Unibus terminator” board, which allows the machine to boot at the push of a button.
The team connected the racks, terminals, and drives. Carefully following the instructions, they actually got their PDP to boot up! Their next step is to start reading in some of the old tapes that came with the machine. We’re all waiting with bated breath to see what
“digitized monkey brains”
contains. Once the machine is fully functional, we hope they get it on the internet and load up The
Hackaday Retro Edition
. | 40 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1477012",
"author": "onebiozz",
"timestamp": "2014-05-18T21:00:07",
"content": "“minicomputer” X3",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1477030",
"author": "BobWells",
"timestamp": "2014-05-18T21:05:19",
"content": "Well, ... | 1,760,376,198.205112 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/18/firmware-for-cheap-bluetooth-modules/ | Firmware For Cheap Bluetooth Modules | Brian Benchoff | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"BC417",
"BlueCore",
"bluetooth",
"firmware",
"SoC"
] | I
f you’ve ever built anything with a microcontroller, some sort of sensor, and a connection to the outside world, you’re probably wondering how those places in China can pump out cheap electronics for a mere percentage of what it costs you to pull a DIY. It’s not just volume – it’s engineering; if something has Bluetooth, you find a Bluetooth module with a built-in microcontroller so
you can write firmware to it
.
The BC417 is the System on Chip found in the very popular BlueCore4-Ext Bluetooth module featuring 8Mbits of Flash (75% of which is used for Bluetooth related stuff), somewhere around 12 kB of RAM, with everything run in a virtual machine. [pfalcon]
wrote an extremely experimental firmware for this device
that allows anyone to create a wireless sensor node for peanuts. These devices are almost as cheap as a bare ATMega, so the possibilities are interesting, to say the least.
At this point, the hardest part of putting custom firmware on these devices is programming them. For that, [Elastic Sheep] comes to the rescue
with a parallel port to SPI interface
. There’s also a
firmware dumper
and some
breakout boards available
. These modules are pretty cheap, and the pitch isn’t
too
bad, so you might be able to etch your own boards should you want to experiment a little.
Thanks [Peter] for sending this in. | 43 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1476333",
"author": "ejonesss",
"timestamp": "2014-05-18T17:12:25",
"content": "maybe should be “It’s not just volume – it’s engineering – reverse it’s engineering – it’s stolen designs”often we may see the numbers scraped off an ic so a company cant go ” hey that is our stolen des... | 1,760,376,198.438562 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/18/hacking-an-old-parallel-port-webcam-to-work-with-a-gameduino-2/ | Hacking An Old Parallel Port Webcam To Work With A Gameduino 2 | Rich Bremer | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"gameduino 2",
"webcam"
] | [Andrew] couldn’t pass up a 20ish year old parallel port based webcam he saw on the shelf at a thrift store. It’s a Connectix QuickCam and was the first webcam that did not require a separate video input card to interface with your computer. Due to this feature, the webcam was extremely popular, so popular that Logitech ended up buying Connectix and marketing the camera for themselves.
It’s tough to find a newer computer that still has a parallel port, but using an old computer wasn’t [Andrew]’s plan anyways. After thinking about it, he decided to try to get the camera’s
image to display on a Gameduino 2
.
The hardware list is fairly minimal. The cam’s parallel connector is plugged straight into STM32 Nucleo development board by way of several jumpers. The Gameduino 2 is connected to the dev board and a USB to PS/2 adapter was made to power the camera.
This is obviously not a plug and play project. [Andrew] had to write his own camera driver. He poked around the ‘net for a bit and found some pretty good documentation for the QuickCam. The camera’s max resolution is 320×240 pixels, but at that
fine
of detail only 1 frame per second is possible. The frame rate was boosted up a bit by lowering the resolution to 80×60. The FT800 processor on the Gameduino 2 takes the 80×60 bitmap and upscales it to a reasonable size. The enlarged image doesn’t look jagged or pixelated because the FT800 supports
bilinear interpolation
.
This is a great project; it interfaces old hardware with new hardware, it contains custom software, some cable hacks and a little thinking outside the box. Well done! | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1475893",
"author": "Jorj Bauer",
"timestamp": "2014-05-18T14:46:19",
"content": "Oh man, I loved those. Wired one up manually myself many years ago.http://jorj.org/techno/bikepicdex.shtml",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1475895... | 1,760,376,198.254819 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/05/18/hyperspectral-imaging-with-a-dslr/ | Hyperspectral Imaging With A DSLR | Brian Benchoff | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"hyperspectral",
"interferometer",
"spectrometer",
"spectroscopy",
"specturm"
] | It’s a relatively simple task to find evidence of helium by just looking at the sun; all you need is a prism, diffraction grating, and a web cam. DIY spectrometers have been around for ages, but most of them only produce a spectrum, not a full image complete with spectral data. Now it’s possible to
take an image of an object, complete with that objects spectra
using a DSLR, some lenses, a PVC pipe, and the same diffraction grating from your DIY interferometer.
The idea behind a hyperspectral imager is to gather the spectral data of each pixel of an image. The spectral data is then assembled into a 3D data cube, with two dimensions dedicated to the image, and the third dimension used to represent wavelength. There are a surprising number of applications for this technique, ranging from agriculture and medicine to some extremely creepy surveillance systems.
The authors of
this paper
(freakin’ huge PDF) used a piece of PVC pipe, three camera lenses, a diffraction grating, and a small paper aperture to construct their hyperspectral imager. Images are captured using a standard, multi exposure HDR method, assembling the raw data from the camera into a hyperspectral image with MATLAB.
There’s a ton of awesome info in the PDF, covering how the authors calibrated their system for different lighting conditions, interpreted the RGGB Bayer sensor in the camera, and a few examples of what kind of image can be constructed with this kind of data. That’s a recommended read, right there.
Thanks [Yannick] for the tip. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1475222",
"author": "S",
"timestamp": "2014-05-18T11:20:41",
"content": "The paper PDF is 13 MB but only 10 pages long.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1475369",
"author": "BotherSaidPooh",
"timestamp": "2014-05-18T12:08... | 1,760,376,198.352722 |
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