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https://hackaday.com/2014/03/06/fail-of-the-week-ws2811-pixel-failure-on-fled/ | Fail Of The Week: WS2811 Pixel Failure On FLED | Mike Szczys | [
"Fail of the Week",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"fled",
"led",
"ws2811"
] | This Fail of the Week project comes from one of Hackaday’s own. [Ben] took on
the FLED data visualization project
as a way to make the SupplyFrame decor a lot more fun. He had quite a bit of help soldering the 96 WS2811 pixels into their custom made 6’x4′ enclosure and the results are really awesome. In addition to showing server load and playing games, FLED has become something of a job interview. Sit the prospective employee down at a terminal and give them an hour to code the most interesting visualization they are capable of.
But two weeks ago [Ben] staggered into the office and
found the display was dead
. Did he try turning it off and back on again? Yes, but to no avail. The power supply wasn’t the issue and there was no option but to pull the display off the wall and crack it open for a look at all those pixels. Since every one of them had 4 solder joints on either side he figured the problem was with a broken connection. But not so. He resorted to a binary search for the offending pixel by cutting the strand in half, and testing each portion. He tracked it down to the pixel whose underside was blackened as you can see above.
[Ben] thinks one of the capacitors inside the sealed enclosure blew, but isn’t certain. Feel free to tell us what you think failed in this component. But the thing we’d really like to know is if there is a more clever way to sniff out the offensive pixel without cutting the connections? Four hours on the floor with this thing (and no knee-pads) and [Ben] has sworn off sourcing pixels from random Chinese suppliers. He might go with pre-assembled strings next time. We chuckle; this is the high-tech equivalent of trying to get old strands of Christmas lights to work.
If you haven’t seen FLED in action, check it out after the break. It amazing how LED intensity and quality diffuser material can make a perfect grid of LEDs seem to dance in waves and color curves.
Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which runs every Wednesday. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and
sending us a link to the story
— or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels. | 36 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1241283",
"author": "Mike Lu",
"timestamp": "2014-03-06T18:28:25",
"content": "Connect a bench power supply and then see which one is getting excessively hot.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1241300",
"author": "Ben De... | 1,760,376,284.591654 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/05/hackaday-68k-blinking-a-led/ | Hackaday 68k: Blinking An LED | Brian Benchoff | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"68000",
"Hackaday-68k",
"hackaday-projects",
"retro"
] | Time for another update for the
Hackaday 68k
, the 16-bit retrocomputer developed on Hackaday to show off both our love for vintage hardware and
our new project hosting site
. There’s still invites to be had, people. Get ’em while they’re hot.
This post is going to cover exactly how complex a simple 68000 system is. The answer is, “not very.” A simple 68k system is at least as simple to design than some other homebrew systems we’ve seen around here. Yes, a 16-bit data bus means there’s more wires going everywhere, but like she said, just because it’s bigger doesn’t mean it’s harder.
There is some progress to report on the construction of the Hackaday 68k. The processor has been verified as working with a blinking LED. It’s the ‘Hello World’ of computer design, and it’s at least as complex as blinking a LED with an Arduino.
You’re gonna want to click that ‘Read more’ link.
The Journal Of Simple 68000 Systems
At least half of the purpose for this project is to demonstrate the 68000 is well suited – simple, even – for a homebrew computer project. The homebrew systems that infrequently hit the Hackaday tip line are usually based around the 6502 CPU, or at the very least something in that family. Now, how do we compare a simple 6502 and 68000 system? How about describing a simple system with both chips?
Building a simple 6502 system
For a simple 6502 system, you’ll want the 6502 itself, some RAM, and an EEPROM. Let’s just say we’ll use a 62256 SRAM for the RAM, and a 28256 EEPROM for the ROM. Wire up the RAM starting at $0000 and make sure you have some of the EEPROM at $FFFF. A few NAND gates will do for the logic glue. Ground the A14 pin of the RAM, and you’ll have a basic system with 16k RAM, 32k ROM, and a lot of space to put in any peripherals.
Throw in a 6551 ACIA and you have a serial port. With a little bit of glue logic and a MAX232 chip, you can make a simple 6502 system that’ll run BASIC. Put a pin header on the 16 address and 8 data lines and you have an extensible system using seven chips:
6502 CPU
28256 EEPROM
62256 SRAM
6551 ACIA
MAX232 serial thingy
74HC04 and 74HC00 logic ‘glue’
Wiring these up involves using the address lines for decoding, the
R/W
and
Phi2
lines for memory control, and shoving a clock signal and reset circuit in there somewhere. You’ll need a crystal, some caps , a few resistors, and a reset button, but there you have it: a simple 6502 system. You can build this on a breadboard in a weekend. No. Big. Deal.
Building a simple 68000 system
The pinout for the 68k. You don’t even need most of these pins.
“But the 68000 is so much more complex!”, you cry, “There’s more pins! Sixteen of them, and that’s just the data lines! What the hell is BGACK?” I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I do choose to ignore you. It’s actually very easy to construct a simple 68000 system, if you know what pins to ignore:
/DTACK
&
/BERR
DTACK
is a product of very small and slow memories available in the late 70s. The idea behind
DTACK
was to have the RAM (or ROM, or whatever) acknowledge it got the required data off the data bus. If the RAM (or whatever) didn’t put this pin low in time, the CPU would enter a ‘wait state’; basically the 68000 would just sit there until the RAM caught up.
Now, with fast, huge SRAMs and modern components, you don’t have to worry about this. Ground
DTACK
and you’ll be fine. Do your calculations for the timings, but you’ll be fine.
BERR
is the Bus Error pin, telling the CPU something is wrong with a MMU, there’s a “non-responding device”, or something else sufficiently complex that it shouldn’t be included in a minimal system. Tie this pin to +5 V.
Bus Arbitration Control;
/BR
,
/BG
, &
/BGACK
These pins are for DMA. We’re doing a
simple
system here, so no DMA. Tie
BGACK
and
BR
to +5 V, and ignore
BG
. Done.
Interrupt Control;
/IPL0
,
/IPL1
, &
/IPL2
Interrupts? Again, we’re doing a simple system with some RAM, ROM, and a serial port. Tie these to +5.
M6800 Peripheral Control;
E
,
/VPA
, &
/VMA
The old Moto engineers that designed the 68000 were extremely cool and gave 68000 system designers a way to interface the old 6800-series parts – ACIAs, display processors, the RIOT, PIAs, floppy disk controllers – to the 68000. These pins are how you do it. Are we using any of these parts? No? Good. Tie
/VPA
to +5 and ignore
/VMA
and
E.
Processor Status Pins;
FC0
,
FC1
, &
FC2
These pins tell the rest of the system if the CPU is currently in user or supervisor mode, the kind of stuff that would be handy for an MMU to have. Are we using an MMU? Then ignore these pins.
So, where does that leave us? We have 16 data pins, 23 address pins,, and a few others: We can tie
Reset
and
Halt
together. The asynchronous bus control pins,
/AS
,
/UDS
,
/LDS
, &
R/W
are all that’s needed to do a proper memory decoding and control.
How does that compare to a 6502? With the 8-bit chip, you’ll need to use the
R/W
pin to tell if you’re reading or writing, and the
Phi2
pin on the 65xx is analogous to the
/AS
pin on the 68k. Really, if you design something with a 68000, the only real difference between it and an 8-bit chip are the
/UDS
, &
/LDS
pins, and they’re only there for accessing either D0-D7 or D8-D15.
A chip count for the 68000? You’ll need a CPU, two 8-bit RAM chips, two 8-bit EEPROMs, some sort of ACIA, and a bit of glue logic. You can do that in a dozen chips, max. It’s a lot more wires or traces between chips, but that’s neither here nor there.
So there you go. A reasonable case for the 68000
not
being overly complex for a homebrew project.
Blinking A LED
The ‘Hello World’ of computer design is freerunning the processor. All this means is to get the CPU cycling around its address space with an instruction hardwired onto the data pins, attaching an LED to one of the higher address pins, and turning it on. The LED will blink depending on the clock speed and what pin the LED is wired up to. Here’s the video:
That’s the 68000 with the all the data pins tied to ground, the
/AS
,
/UDS
,
/LDS
, &
R/W
pins ignored, and a
Maxim DS1813
reset chip to handle the power-on and push button reset. I’m running it with a 4MHz oscillator. Anyone care to guess what address pin that LED is tied to?
I would like to note that since the 68000 has 68,000 transistors, it’s still possible I’m using fewer transistors to blink a LED than I would with an Arduino. If anyone from Atmel has a more precise count for the number of transistors on an ATMega, drop a note in the comments.
What’s Next
Unfortunately there’s a rather large gulf between blinking an LED and the next, “look what I did!” post. There’s a lot of thought that goes into address decoding for the RAM, ROM, and peripherals, and a shocking amount of work that goes into wirewrapping these chips together. Here’s the current state of the RAM board:
That’s eight 512k x 8 SRAM chips, with the data and address lines all wired up. Blue is data, green is address. I’m not quite sure how long it took me to wrap all those pins, as I’m measuring the time in units of
Deep Space Nine
episodes. I can tell you that wirewrapping, DS9, and a six-pack is the closest I’ve come to bliss.
For the next post, I’m going to go over the address decoding and memory control logic for the RAM, ROM, whatever I’ll be using for a serial port, as well as the bus transceivers. Then I’ll actually have to wrap all these circuits up; not a quick job. A little code burned onto an EEPROM, and then I’ll actually have something to show off. It’ll be awesome.
Until then, you can check up on my progress
on Hackaday Projects
. | 47 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1239105",
"author": "ChalkBored",
"timestamp": "2014-03-05T18:17:44",
"content": "All that work to blink a LED when you could have just used a 555.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1239136",
"author": "elchavodelocio",
... | 1,760,376,284.519083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/05/a-low-cost-arduino-fpga-shield/ | A Low Cost Arduino FPGA Shield | Adam Fabio | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"altium",
"arduino",
"fpga"
] | [technolomaniac] is kicking butt over at Hackaday Projects. He’s creating a
low cost Arduino based FPGA shield
. We’ve
seen this pairing before
, but never with a bill of materials in the $25 to $30 range. [technolomaniac’s]
FPGA
of choice is a Xilinx
Spartan 6
. He’s also including SDRAM, as well as an SPI Flash for configuration. Even though the Spartan 6 LX9 is a relatively small FPGA, it can pack enough punch that the Arduino almost becomes a peripheral. The main interconnect between the two will be the Arduino’s ability to program the Spartan via SPI. Thanks to the shared I/O pins though, the sky is the limit for parallel workflow.
[technolomaniac] spent quite a bit of time on his decoupling schematic. Even on a relatively small FPGA power decoupling is a big issue, especially when high speed signals come into play. Thankfully Xilinx provides guides for this task. We have to mention the two excellent videos [technolomaniac] created to explain his design. Documenting a project doesn’t have to be hours of endless writing. Sometimes it’s just easier to run a screen capture utility and click record. As of this writing, the schematic has just been overhauled, and [technolomaniac] is looking for feedback before he enters the all important layout stage. The design is up on
his github repository
in
Altium
format. Due to its high cost, Altium isn’t our first pick for Open Hardware designs. There are free viewers available, but [technolomaniac] makes it simple by putting up his schematic in
PDF format
(PDF link). Why not head over to projects and help him out? | 46 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "1238877",
"author": "Squirrel",
"timestamp": "2014-03-05T15:38:43",
"content": "ooooooooooohhhh. I’m a big fan of FPGAs.Nice thing about this one is it’s small enough to be used by Xilinx’s free version of their synthesis software.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,376,284.782314 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/05/make-your-electronics-lab-in-a-box/ | Make Your Electronics Lab In A Box | James Hobson | [
"how-to",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"electronics lab",
"portable lab",
"portable workshop"
] | Unless your lucky enough to have a big personal workshop where you can have dedicated stations for all kinds of different tools, you’re probably like most of us here at Hack a Day — lots of projects, but never enough space.
[McLovinGyver] lives in a small flat, and finds setup and cleanup time often take longer than the project itself — so he’s come up with this handy dandy
Electronics-Lab-in-a-Box
(trademark pending).
The guide is really more of a series of pictures of his process of building the portable lab, but he shows off some great ideas of things you might want to include in your own personal version of it. The first step is deciding what tools you need in the lab. In general, your power supply unit, soldering iron, hot air re-flow and fume exhaustion are going to dictate the general size and shape of your lab — from there, it’s just a matter of filling in the gaps with the rest of your small tools.
One of our favorite features of this portable workstation is his clever wire management system — he’s added a compartment to hold all his wire and solder — everything is fed through small openings, allowing for easy access to whatever you need — without fumbling with a spool!
So, are you going to build one? Let us know in the comments, and if you make a really nice one, don’t forget to send it in through the
Tips Line! | 27 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1238562",
"author": "pcf11",
"timestamp": "2014-03-05T12:23:17",
"content": "I thought about something like this when it came time for me to setup an electronics workbench. In the end I setup a dedicated workbench on a desk. One has to have their priorities straight in life you know... | 1,760,376,284.944475 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/05/monster-100w-led-flashlight-for-under-10/ | Monster 100W LED Flashlight For Under $10! | James Hobson | [
"LED Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"100W LED light",
"led light"
] | What would you do if you came across a 100W, 7500 lumen LED diode for under $10? Probably something
like this.
It’s actually quite amazing how cheap LEDs are getting. [Julian Ilett] found this 2″ x 2″ LED on eBay for only £4.79 (<$10 USD). It’s rated for 32-34V with a current draw of 3000mA, which works out to about 100W. Its brightness? 7500 lumens. That’s brighter than most home theater setups.
At that price, [Julian] had to try playing with one. The problem with these higher power LEDs is that they typically need a rather expensive LED driver, due to the less common voltages they operate at — and of course, the concern of over-driving them and burning them out. Not interested in finding a suitable driver, [Julian] decided to try something a bit less conventional — wiring a pair of 18V drill batteries in series.
Unfortunately, fully charged drill batteries tend to hover around 20V, not 18V, which when doubled is quite a bit over the recommended voltage range for the LED. The good news is that since the LED draws so much current, there’s a good chance the voltage will drop right down to the “sweet spot” for the LED. So like any good hacker, [Julian] decides to throw caution to the wind and just try it.
As luck would have it, it worked! He darn near fried his camera sensor looking at it though! Satisfied with his test he’s gone on to make the world’s cheapest — and perhaps ugliest — 100W LED flashlight.
And upgraded it since.
And if you don’t need that much brightness, you could always recycle your lithium batteries into
some awesome PVC flashlights!
[via
Hacked Gadgets
] | 63 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1238390",
"author": "Galane",
"timestamp": "2014-03-05T10:19:23",
"content": "Is one of these powerful enough to replace a projector or rear projection TV bulb?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1238422",
"author": "Kaij... | 1,760,376,284.375963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/04/russian-man-builds-a-chainsaw-out-of-a-grinder/ | Russian Man Builds A Chainsaw Out Of A Grinder | James Hobson | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"chainsaw",
"chainsaw grinder",
"chainsaw hack",
"grinder",
"grinder hack"
] | Ready for another ill-advised tool hack we definitely
do not
recommend you try at home? Why not take a gander at this man’s home-made chainsaw…
made out of a grinder!
(
translated
)
What this (Russian?) man has done is modified his large electric grinder — into a chainsaw. He’s added a weld plate, some mounting locations, and now it can accept either grinding wheels, or after a few minutes of assembly, a full length chainsaw blade attachment. He’s probably pretty proud of himself, but we really hope he doesn’t end up losing a finger… or worse.
Anyway, we’re not even going to point out the lack of safety guarding in this video, because it is such an obvious bad idea in general. That being said, it actually works in the demonstration!
Stick around — don’t sweat too much though, no one gets hurt. There is one thing that can be said about this project though… It’s most definitely a hack.
http://www.yapfiles.ru/show/813669/a33302b05a995fd69e221a7b48be2b2d.flv
For a slightly safer home power tool conversion, there’s always the
Scrappy Lil’ Circular Saw. | 67 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "1237965",
"author": "henry",
"timestamp": "2014-03-05T06:08:15",
"content": "Clever, but you can buy an electric chainsaw with all the features for <$100 these days.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1237978",
"author": ... | 1,760,376,284.879216 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/04/diy-bell-for-your-trains-of-lionel/ | DIY Bell For Your Trains Of Lionel | Kristina Panos | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"555",
"doorbell",
"lionel",
"train crossing bell"
] | [Peter]’s dad recently rekindled his love for Lionel trains and wanted a bell to keep the crossings safe for O gauge drivers and pedestrians. Using parts he had lying around and a doorbell from the hardware store, [Peter] concocted this
DIY train crossing bell
at his dad’s request.
The idea was to make the bell chime about once per second. To achieve this, [Peter] used a non-repeating electro-mechanical doorbell that emits a single note on continuous press. You could also roll your own bell with a spring-loaded solenoid and something bell-like for it to strike.
[Peter]’s three-stage design uses a full-wave bridge rectifier to convert the AC from the train transformer to DC. He drops it to 5V and sends it through a 555 and some resistors to set the frequency and duty cycle. His output section translates the voltage back up to match the input desired by the doorbell. [Peter] included a 1N4002 as a back EMF snubber to keep feedback from damaging the power MOSFET. Stick around for his demonstration video after the jump. | 4 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "1237952",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2014-03-05T06:03:43",
"content": "A solid brass bell and cast frame with adjustable screw! I would like to go to that store. Probably pre-war.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1238... | 1,760,376,284.701353 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/04/interrupt-free-v-usb/ | Interrupt Free V-USB | Nick Conn | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"attiny",
"AVR",
"micronucleus",
"usb",
"V-USB"
] | [Tim’s] new version of Micronucleus,
Micronucleus 2.0
, improves upon V-USB by removing the need for interrupts. The original
Micronucleus
was a very small implementation of V-USB that took up only 2KB. Removing the need for interrupts is a big leap forward for V-USB.
For those of you that do not know, “
V-USB
is a software-only implementation of a low-speed USB device for Atmel’s AVR® microcontrollers, making it possible to build USB hardware with almost any AVR® microcontroller, not requiring any additional chip.” One tricky aspect of using V-USB is that the bootloader requires interrupts, which can lead to messy problems within the user program. By removing the need for interrupts, Micronucleus 2.0 reduces the complexity of the bootloader by removing the need to patch the interrupt vector for the user program.
With the added benefit of speeding up the V-USB data transmission, Micronucleus 2.0 is very exciting for those
minimal embedded platforms
based on V-USB. Go ahead and try out Micronucleus 2.0! Leave a comment and let us know what you think. | 24 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1237348",
"author": "bobfeg",
"timestamp": "2014-03-05T00:09:52",
"content": "Very nice!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1237573",
"author": "tekkieneet",
"timestamp": "2014-03-05T02:45:15",
"content": "Good to know ... | 1,760,376,284.653502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/03/remote-control-anything-with-a-ps3-controller/ | Remote Control Anything With A PS3 Controller | Brian Benchoff | [
"Playstation Hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"dual shock",
"playstation",
"ps3",
"remote control",
"zigbee"
] | When looking for a remote control for your next project, you might want to look in your living room. Wii controllers are a hacker’s favorite, but wagging an electronic wand around isn’t the greatest for remote control planes, cars, tanks, and multicopters. What you need for this is dual analog controls, something every playstation since the 90s has included.
[Marcel]
created a replacement electronics board
for the Sony DualShock 3 controller for just this purpose. With this board, an XBee, and an old controller, it’s easy to add dual analog control and a whole lot of buttons to any project using an XBee receiver.
The replacement board is based on the ATMega328p uC, includes a Lipo charge circuit and power supply, and inputs for the analog sticks and all the button boards inside the DualShock controller.
Yes, we have seen
an earlier version of [Marcel]’s project before
, but this time he’s added a few new features – the rumble now works and thanks to multiple people unable or unwilling to spin a few boards, [Marcel] has put up an Indiegogo campaign.
Video below. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1235287",
"author": "fm`",
"timestamp": "2014-03-04T00:16:33",
"content": "For extra range, throw in an openLRS module:http://www.flytron.com/open-source-hardwares/210-openbee-100mw-telemetry-module.htmlI was planning to do this with the dfrobot gamepad.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,376,284.427254 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/03/atomic-powered-robots-and-records-played-with-optics/ | Atomic Powered Robots And Records Played With Optics | Adam Fabio | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"Classic Toys",
"phonograph",
"robot",
"Tomy"
] | If you were a child of the 80’s or early 90’s you probably remember Magic Mike. He went by many names, but he always said the same thing “I am the atomic powered robot. Please give my best wishes to everybody!”
[Oona’s] version of Mike
had been malfunctioning for a few years. He’d stopped talking! She decided he needed more input, so she disassembled Mike to reveal the flesh colored plastic box in the center of his chest. This talkbox was used as a sound module in
several toys
. Before the days of cheap digital playback devices, sounds were recorded in a decidedly analog fashion. [Oona] found that Mike’s voice and sound effects were recorded on a tiny phonograph record in his chest. The phonograph was spun up by an electric motor, but the playback and amplification system was all mechanical, consisting of a needle coupled to a small plastic loudspeaker. The system was very similar to the early
phonograph
designs.
Mike’s record contained two interwoven spiral tracks. Interwoven tracks is a technique that has
been used before
, albeit rarely on commercial albums. One track contained Mike’s voice, the other the sound of his laser gun. The track to be played would be chosen at random depending upon where the needle and record stopped after the previous play. The record completely sidetracked [Oona’s] repair work. She decided to try to read the record optically. She started with a
high resolution image
(image link) of the record, and wrote some Perl code to interpolate a spiral around the grooves. The result was rather noisy, and contained quite a bit of crosstalk. [Oona]
tried again with laser illumination
using a Lego train set. Unfortunately the Lego train / laser system wasn’t smooth enough to get a good image. In the end she used a bit of
Gimp
magic and was able to pull better audio from her original image. We never did find out if she put poor Mike back together though. | 28 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "1235085",
"author": "supershwa",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T21:11:34",
"content": "I had one of these as a kid…didn’t it also blow smoke from its head? It’s been a while. :oP",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1235310",
"... | 1,760,376,284.275564 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/03/hot-or-not-find-out-how-to-calculate-component-heat-and-why-you-should/ | Hot Or Not? Find Out How To Calculate Component Heat And Why You Should | Mike Szczys | [
"Featured",
"how-to"
] | [
"bil herd",
"electronics",
"heat",
"herd-hacks",
"theta"
] | How hot are your key components getting? There’s a good chance you’ve built a project and thought: “Well I guess I better slap a heat sink in there to be safe”. But when working on a more refined build you really need to calculate heat dissipation to ensure reliability. This is actually not tough at all. The numbers are right there in the datasheet. Yes, that datasheet packed with number, figures, tables, graphs, slogans, marketing statements, order numbers… you know right where to look, don’t you?
Hackaday has you covered on this one. In under 10 minutes [Bil Herd] will not only
show how easy these calculations are
, he’ll tell you where to look in the datasheets to get the info you need quickly.
Above, [Bil] used his bench as a whiteboard to illustrate the thermal resistance equation. In this case each resistor symbol represents part of the heat dissipation. You must consider all places where heat can be transferred: (from left to right) the component die (junction) to the component case, the component case to a heat sink, and the heat sink to ambient air. He illustrates each of these dissipation points in the video.
Calculate thermal resistance – Theta Junction to Case Tjc
An example of the junction-to-case is shown to the right. This is a TO-3 case which has had the lid cut off. It’s a much simpler way to look at a chip die than trying to decap a component with a plastic case.
Make with the Math Already!
Okay, okay, we’re getting there. The math is not hard… just multiplication and addition, so hang on a minute more.
Gather the following values: maximum power you plan to use with this component, maximum heat rating of the part, maximum ambient air temperature in which this component will be used, and the theta values from the datasheets. Theta, which is a measure of degrees per watt, is often listed as a symbol: Θ Multiply theta by the max wattage and you will know how much temperature to add to your equation
Datasheets: Finding Θ and Temperature
Because [Bil] does such a great job in the video we’re giving you the quick version here. Temperature generating components will include a maximum operating temperature like the one shown below (click through for full datasheet) which is for a linear regulator:
The theta for “Juntion-to-Case” is found a bit further down the same datasheet in the Electrical Characteristics table. Datasheets will also provide a “Junction-to-Ambient” value (also shown below but not used in our calculations) used to calculate how much power you can use without any type of active or passive cooling. This answers the question of: “do I need a heat sink?”.
Finally, you want to look at values from the heat sink being used. [Bil] looks at the datasheet of a heat sink which lists a thermal resistance of 25.8Θ with the chart below on the left showing how that number may be altered with moving air (a fan). The chart to the right covers the use of interface agents like thermal grease, and a mica pad (for electrical insulation) with thermal grease. Both of those values are circled but only one will be used in the calculation.
Putting It All Together
If we assume an ambient air temperature of 38 C (100 F) and a maximum power of 2 W all of the numbers we need have been collected.
Max Temp = Junction + Mica/Grease + Heat Sink + Ambient
Max Temp = (4Θ * 2W)º + (0.4Θ * 2W)º + (25Θ * 2W)º + 38º
Max Temp = 8º + 0.8º + 50º + 38º
Max Temp = 96.8º
The maximum temperature rating for this part is 125 C, which means that this part is being properly cooled. [Bil] goes one step further in the video, showing how to calculate how much more reliable the properly cooled part will be.
Resources
Texas Instruments LM317-N Datasheet (
PDF
)
Texas Instruments App Bulletin for mounting TO-3 packages (
PDF
)
AAVID THERMALLOY
7173DG heat sink example | 44 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1234962",
"author": "fartface",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T19:23:41",
"content": "If in doubt, double the heatsink area.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1234964",
"author": "pcf11",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T19:2... | 1,760,376,285.031964 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/03/3d-printed-zipper-saves-the-day/ | 3D Printed Zipper Saves The Day! | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed zipper",
"zipper repair"
] | [Amr] recently built a 3D printer and came across his first practical application for it —
his jacket’s zipper broke!
What we like about this project is [Amr] goes through the entire design process to finished product in his video. He starts by showing us the failed zipper, explaining where and why it failed, and then identifies the design features he needs to keep in order to make a functional replacement. To help accomplish this he checks out the Wikipedia
article on zippers
which shows an excellent animation of what happens inside of the zipper.
Now confident in his knowledge of all things zipper, he begins to model his replacement using SolidWorks, which is an industry standard among 3D CAD packages — for more information on how to use SolidWorks, we’ve been covering it in our
3D Printering articles!
Once satisfied with his 3D model, he tries to print it, but since it’s so small it pops off the bed mid-print. He adds a brim feature to the part and then it prints perfectly, in just over 30 minutes. We’re not sure if it was his first design iteration, but the zipper works on his jacket first try!
Of course we know he
could
have gone into town and bought a replacement zipper — but where’s the fun in that? Have you ever repaired something trivial just because? Let us know in the comments! | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1234624",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T15:05:26",
"content": "Last week a zipper pull on my 34 year old snowmobile suit broke, I expected it to last longer than that!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1234626",
... | 1,760,376,285.190367 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/03/gritz-an-open-source-speed-reading-tool/ | Gritz: An Open Source Speed Reading Tool | Eric Evenchick | [
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"gritz",
"open source",
"perl",
"speed reading",
"spritz"
] | Here’s a hack to help you increase your reading speed.
Gritz
is an open source text file reader, which reduces the need to look around the screen. Words pop up one at a time, but at a configurable pace.
[Peter Feuerer] got the idea for Gritz from
Spritz
, a commercial product for speed reading. The creators of Spritz took three years to develop their software, and recently released a demo. They claim people can read at 1000 WPM using this technology. Spritz is taking applications for access to their APIs, which will allow developers to integrate the software into their own applications. However, a fully open source version with no restrictions would be even better.
Using Gritz, [Peter] claims to have read a book with a 75% improvement in his reading speed. He admits it’s not perfect, and there’s still much development to do. Gritz is written in Perl, uses Gtk2 for its GUI, and comes with instructions for running on Linux, OS X, and Windows. It’s released under the GPL, so you can clone the Github repo and start playing around with accelerated reading. | 43 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1234389",
"author": "Thopter",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T12:37:24",
"content": "The main problem I see with reading this way is how to account for interruptions. I tried out the Spritz demo, and had to look away once while it was running. It’s quite easy to miss a lot of words if you... | 1,760,376,285.43405 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/03/searching-for-makers-in-washington-dc/ | Searching For Makers In Washington DC | Brian Benchoff | [
"Featured",
"News"
] | [
"dc",
"MakeDC",
"NoVA",
"Washington DC"
] | Despite there being an inordinate amount of techies and tech companies in the Washington, DC/Northern Virginia area, there aren’t really that many hacker/makerspaces, or really anywhere else for tinkering, building, and generally futzing around with a soldering iron. [Zach] thought it was time for a change and is now
organizing the second Make DC
an informal get together to show off your latest projects and builds. Here’s the best part: Hackaday is coming, and we’re bringing some sweet swag.
Right now [Matt] has two talks lined up focused on bringing APIs into the physical world. There’s space for plenty more speakers, so if you have something to show off be sure to sign up.
The event is scheduled for Wednesday, March 19, 6:30 PM, half a block away from the Dupont Circle Metro station. Be there. You’ll get a sticker at least. | 25 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1234557",
"author": "Jelle",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T14:22:07",
"content": "Jay a sticker! ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1234615",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T15:00:44",
"content": "I imagine real... | 1,760,376,285.354775 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/03/hacking-dell-laptop-charger-identification/ | Hacking Dell Laptop Charger Identification | Eric Evenchick | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"1-wire",
"charger",
"dell",
"reverse engineering",
"spoof"
] | If you’ve ever had a laptop charger die, you know that they can be expensive to replace. Many laptops require you to use a ‘genuine’ charger, and refuse to boot when a knock off model is used. Genuine chargers communicate with the laptop and give information such as the power, current, and voltage ratings of the device. While this is a good safety measure, ensuring that a compatible charger is used, it also allows the manufacturers to increase the price of their chargers.
[Xuan] built a device that spoofs this identification information for Dell chargers. In the four-part series (
1
,
2
,
3
,
4
), the details of reverse engineering the communications and building the spoofer are covered.
Dell uses the
1-Wire
protocol to communicate with the charger, and [Xuan] sniffed the communication using a MSP430. After reading the data and verifying the CRC, it could be examined to find the fields that specify power, voltage, and current.
Next, a custom PCB was made with two Dell DC jacks and an MSP430. This passes power through the board, but uses the MSP430 to send fake data to the computer. The demo shows off a 90 W adapter pretending to run at 65 W. With this working, you could power the laptop from any supply that can meet the requirements for current and voltage. | 99 | 38 | [
{
"comment_id": "1234067",
"author": "jasgio",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T09:24:45",
"content": "That’s why i hate laptops, only good computer is a desktop computer!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1236468",
"author": "Benjamin Ingeborg ... | 1,760,376,285.773193 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/02/usb-keyboard-and-mouse-for-the-ps4/ | USB Keyboard And Mouse For The PS4 | Brian Benchoff | [
"Playstation Hacks"
] | [
"ps4",
"usb",
"USBXlater"
] | If you’d like to play BattleCallSpaceMarine on the Playstation 4 with a keyboard and mouse – and have an unfair advantage over everyone else playing on a console – you’d normally be out of luck. Sony implemented a fair bit of software to make sure only officially licensed controllers are able to talk to the console. It took a while, but [Frank Zhao]
has figured out why keyboard and mouse doesn’t work on PS4
, and created a device to enable these superior input devices.
Sony engineers decided – or were told – that the PS4 shouldn’t be able to connect to any old USB device. To that end, they made the console issue challenges to a DualShock controller to make sure the official controller is always connected over Bluetooth.
[Frank]’s device solves this problem by taking the USB output from a keyboard and mouse, doing the CRC calculations, and sending them out over Bluetooth. Because the PS4 constantly issues challenges and responses of the authentication procedure, a real DualShock controller needs to be connected to the device at all times. Still, if you want a keyboard and mouse on the PS4, this is the way to do it.
All the sources and layouts
are up on [Frank]’s github
where you’re free to create your own. This isn’t a finished product quite yet; [Frank] still needs to do a redesign of the circuit. Judging from the response of
his earlier attempt at keyboards and mice on the PS4
, though, this may be a successful product in the works. | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1233887",
"author": "Sven",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T07:25:25",
"content": "It’s always a good idea to spend a lot of time and effort to make your product less usable. At least if your employer calls itself Sony.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,376,285.285533 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/02/the-stepper-driver-driver/ | The Stepper Driver Driver | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"pololu",
"reprap",
"stepper motor",
"stepstick"
] | The Stepstick and Pololu motor drivers are the heart of just about every Reprap electronics board, but
they can go bad.
The usual way of testing these things is to rig up a microcontroller on a breadboard, grab some cables, and wire something up.
[Ken]’s Easy Stepper Motor Controller
is a much simpler solution to the problem of testing these drivers and could, with a bit of practice, be constructed on a single-sided homebrew PCB.
The Easy Stepper Motor Controller is a very simple board with connections to a motor, a power supply, and headers for a single Pololu or Stepstick motor driver. Two buttons and a pot control the rotation of the motor with the help of an ATtiny10, and jumpers for up to 16x microstepping are right there on the board.
There’s a video after the break showing what this stepper motor driver driver can do. It’s not much, but if you’re just testing a driver, it’s all you need. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1233458",
"author": "pcf11",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T03:13:03",
"content": "To who what? Rig up a microcontroller on a breadboard? All you need to test a stepper driver is a clock signal to the step input. Oh and powering the thing up too. A 555 timer circuit does just fine. Why do... | 1,760,376,286.282619 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/02/hackaday-links-march-3-2014/ | Hackaday Links: March 3, 2014 | Brian Benchoff | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"9v",
"flexible",
"game boy",
"game boy micro",
"google glass",
"lithium",
"resin",
"robot",
"UV resin"
] | If you’re playing along with
Twitch Plays Pokemon
, you might as well do it the right way: with the smallest Game Boy ever, the Game Boy Micro. [Anton] needed a battery replacement for this awesome, discontinued, and still inexplicably expensive console and
found one in a rechargeable 9V Lithium battery
. You get two replacement cells out of each 9V battery, and a bit more capacity as well.
Every garden needs garden lights, right? What does every garden light need?
A robot, of course.
These quadruped “Toro-bots” react to passersby by brightening the light or moving out of the way. It’s supposed to be for a garden that takes care of itself, but we’re struggling to figure out how lights will do that.
Flexiable 3D prints are all the rage
and now resin 3D printers are joining the fray
. The folks at Maker Juice have introduced SubFlex, a flexible UV-curing resin. The usual resins, while very strong, are rock solid. The new SubFlex flexible resins are very bendable in thin sections and in thicker pieces something like hard rubber. We’re thinking custom tank treads.
Remember
this post
where car thieves were using a mysterious black box to unlock cars? Looks like those black boxes
have moved from LA to Chicago
, and there’s still no idea how they work.
Have a Google Glass? Can you get us on the list? [Noé] and [Pedro]
made a 3D printed Google Glass adapter
for those of us with four eyes. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1233258",
"author": "danielwgk",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T01:15:28",
"content": "I’m on the list, but I don’t have the $1500",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1234012",
"author": "daigakusei",
"timestamp": "2014-03-03T08:4... | 1,760,376,285.641053 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/02/making-oleds-in-the-kitchen-sink/ | Making OLEDs In The Kitchen Sink | Brian Benchoff | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"Chemistry",
"ITO",
"ITO glass",
"led",
"oled"
] | When [Ian] first set out to create a homebrew OLED, he found chemical suppliers that wouldn’t take his money, manufacturers that wouldn’t talk to him, and researchers that would actively discourage him. Luckily for us, he powered through all these obstructions and
created his own organic LED.
Since at least one conductor in an OLED must be transparent, [Ian] settled on ITO – indium tin oxide – for the anode. This clear coating is deposited on glass, allowing it to conduct electricity and you can buy it
through a few interesting suppliers
. For the cathode, [Ian] is using a gallium-indium-tin eutectic, an alloy with a very low melting point that allowed him to deposit a small puddle in his OLED stack.
With the anode and cathode taken care of, the only thing left was the actual LED. For this, [Ian] had some success with
MEH-PPV
, a polymer that is capable of electroluminescence. On top of this is a film of
PEDOT:PPS
, another polymer that serves to block electrons.
The resulting yellow-green blob of an OLED actually works, and is at least as good as some of the other homebrew semiconductor illumination projects we’ve seen around here. This is only a start, though, and [Ian] plans on putting a whole lot more time into his explorations of organic LEDs. | 27 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1232927",
"author": "lloyd",
"timestamp": "2014-03-02T21:12:22",
"content": "Why would researchers try to stop him?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1232944",
"author": "supershwa",
"timestamp": "2014-03-02T21:2... | 1,760,376,286.222605 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/02/reverse-engineering-candle-flicker-leds-again/ | Reverse Engineering Candle Flicker LEDs, Again | Brian Benchoff | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"candle",
"flicker",
"led"
] | Flickering candle LEDs are seemingly everywhere these days, and like all fads, someone has to
take a very close look at the engineering behind them
.
[cpldcpu] had earlier taken a look at the controller chip in these candle flicker LEDs by measuring the current used and developing a statistical model of how these LEDs flicker. That’s math, of course, and much more fun can be had by decapsulating one of these flicker LED controller chips. It’s not very advanced tech; the LED controller is using a 1 or 2um process and a pair of RC oscillators, but it appears there could be a hardware random number generator in the silicon of this chip.
Earlier, [Cpldcpu] had taken a look at the tiny controller in these flickering LEDs and determined they used a
linear feedback shift register
to generate pseudorandom LED intensities. The new teardown seems to confirm that a linear feedback shift register is being used to drive the flickering LED.
Custom chips are only one way to skin a cat, or flicker a LED, and PICatout used the
the tiniest PIC microcontroller
(French,
translation
) to create his own flickering LED. Seems like making a few custom flickering LED throwies shouldn’t be too hard. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1232707",
"author": "Joey",
"timestamp": "2014-03-02T18:22:32",
"content": "To be honest. Not all candlelight leds are that complex. I’ve once seen a LED that’s flickered by substituting the speaker with a LED in one of those musical cards.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,376,285.592122 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/02/this-desktop-air-conditioner-is-really-cool/ | This Desktop Air Conditioner Is Really Cool! | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"air conditioner",
"CPU fan",
"sweet light-up rocker switch"
] | [Mike] works in a 50+ year old building with unreliable air conditioning. It often reaches 80°F inside during the summer, and he once measured it at 98°F. Rather than burn sick days, he became the envy of the office when he built
this awesome desktop air conditioner
.
The problem with knocking holes in the office walls and installing window units is that they must vent heat somewhere. [Mike] has overcome adversity and harnessed the power of the heatsink, only in reverse. His desktop a/c unit is made from two 28oz cans plus a 20oz can for the ice bucket. [Mike] used a side-vented CPU fan, which is vital to his design. He secured the heatsink to the base of one 28oz can with a self-tapping screw. This can is the upper chamber. [Mike] made a base from the other 28oz can, drilling holes for the CPU fan wires, the power cord, and a sweet light-up rocker switch. He used Gorilla Glue to affix the CPU fan to the base can.
Hot, stale office air is drawn through the ice in the 20oz can, which is nestled in aluminum foil to maximize heat transfer to the heatsink. The heat in the air gets absorbed by the heatsink, and the CPU fan kicks out cool air in 20-30 seconds. | 96 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "1232496",
"author": "Dax",
"timestamp": "2014-03-02T15:37:37",
"content": "“I can’t wait for the ice to melt outside and the heat to start just so I can test this puppy out. ”Ice has a cooling capacity of 333 kJ per kilogram. He’s going to be sorely dissapointed.A kilo of ice can of... | 1,760,376,285.902112 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/02/software-usb-on-the-stm8/ | Software USB On The STM8 | Brian Benchoff | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"Software USB",
"stm8",
"usb",
"V-USB"
] | Thanks to V-USB, software-based USB is all the rage now, with a lot of uses for very small and low power microcontrollers.[ZiB] wondered if it would be possible to implement
a USB controller on the STM8 microcontroller
(Google
translation
) in software and succeeded.
The STM8 is a bit of a change from the usual 8-bit micros we see like AVRs and PICs. [ZiB] chose the STM8S103F3, although any chip in the STM8 family will work with this project when a 12MHz crystal is attached.
The build began by generating USB signals with the help of a whole lot of NOPs. This code doesn’t take up much space – only 300 bytes,
and the receiving code
(Google
translation
) is similarly sized.
The code isn’t quite there yet, but [ZiB] has proven a software-based USB implementation on the STM8 is possible. All the code is available for download (comments in Russian) and a video demoing the project available below. If anyone cares to translate this project to English, we’ll post a link to your work here. | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1232336",
"author": "cpldcpu",
"timestamp": "2014-03-02T13:11:59",
"content": "Insanity, I love it! I have also been itching to do software USB on ARM. A lot of the newer devices have advanced timers that could help with bit-destuffing and other stuff.On the other hand, there are so... | 1,760,376,285.9599 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/06/ti-launches-connected-launchpad/ | TI Launches “Connected LaunchPad” | Eric Evenchick | [
"Microcontrollers",
"News"
] | [
"ethernet",
"internet of things",
"launchpad",
"ti"
] | TI’s LaunchPad boards have a history of being both low cost and fully featured. There’s a board for each of TI’s major processor lines, and all of them support the same “BoosterPack” interface for additional functionality. Today, TI has announced a new LaunchPad based on their new Tiva C ARM processors, which is designed for connectivity.
The Tiva C Series Connected LaunchPad is based on the
TM4C129x
processor family. These provide an ethernet MAC and PHY on chip, so the only external parts required are magnetics and a jack. This makes the Connected LaunchPad an easy way to hop onto ethernet and build designs that require internet connections.
This development board is focused on the “Internet of Things,” which it seems like every silicon manufacturer is focusing on nowadays. However, the real news here is a low cost board with tons of connectivity, including ethernet, two CANs, 8 UARTs, 10 I2Cs, and 4 QSPIs. This is enough IO to allow for two BoosterPack connectors that are fully independent.
For the launch, TI has partnered with
Exosite
to provide easy access to the LaunchPad from the internet. A pre-loaded demo application will allow you to toggle LEDs, read button states, and measure temperature over the internet using Exosite. Unlike some past LaunchPads, this one is designed for easy breadboarding, with all MCU pins broken out to a breadboard compatible header.
Finally, the price is very right. The board will be release at $19.99 USD.
This is less than half the price of other ethernet-ready development boards out there. This makes it an attractive solution for hackers who want to put a device on a wired network, or need a gateway between various devices and a network. | 56 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "1240974",
"author": "J.C. Wren",
"timestamp": "2014-03-06T15:10:15",
"content": "Not having any luck finding anything except their $199.99 board. Got a link for this $19.99 board?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1240977",
... | 1,760,376,286.751735 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/06/the-flaming-yinlips/ | The Flaming Yinlips | Adam Fabio | [
"Android Hacks"
] | [
"flash",
"Furan",
"nand",
"NAND flash",
"u-boot",
"Yinlips"
] | No, that’s not a Playstation Vita up there, it’s a “Yinlips YDPG18A” portable game system. [Ian] found that his Yinlips was lacking in the flash memory department,
so he fired up his soldering iron.
The Yinlips is based on an
Allwinner Sunxi
series processor, and uses a standard TSOP48 footprint flash. There is some standardization in flash pin out and packages, so [Ian] picked up the largest pin compatible chips he could find – a pair of 256 gigabit (32 gigabyte) chips from Micron. Desoldering the existing flash proved to be a bit of an adventure as the flash was glued down. [Ian] also didn’t have his hot air gun handy, making things even more interesting. Careful work with a razor blade broke the glue bond.
It turns out that the soldering was the easy part. All flash chips have geometry, die count, page size, block count, sector size, etc. The geometry is similar to the geometry in a hard drive. In fact, just like in modern hard drives, a system will read some basic information before accessing the full storage array. In the case of NAND flash, the processor can access the first page of memory, and query the flash for its part number. Once the part number is known, the geometry can be determined via a lookup table. [Ian] checked the
NAND table on github
, so he knew going in that his flash chips were not supported. Due to the
complexities of booting Allwinner processors into Linux or Android
, the table and the NAND driver that uses it exist in several places. The bootloader’s axf file, U-Boot, and several flash application binaries sent from the PC based LiveSuit flash app all required modification. Most of these files were packed into a single flash image. [Ian] used imgrepacker to unpack the image, then opened the hex files. The fact that he knew what the original flash parameter tables looked like was key. He searched for an existing Micron flash table entry, and replaced the parameters with those of his new chips.
With all the files modified, [Ian] re-packed his flash image and sent it over. The Yinlips rewarded his hard work by continually resetting in a bootloop. [Ian] wasn’t going to give up though. He wired into the boot console, and discovered that a CRC check failure on one of his modified files was causing the reset. He then disassembled binary issuing the reset. Changing the return value of the CRC to always pass fixed the issue. [Ian’s] now has a collagen infused Yinlips with 58GB of internal storage. Pretty good for a device that only started with 2GB. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1240777",
"author": "v00",
"timestamp": "2014-03-06T12:24:58",
"content": "“Due to the complexities of booting Allwinner processors into Linux or Android”Implying that booting Allwinner devices is in any way difficult…Still, nice hack! I’ve wanted to do this before myself on occasio... | 1,760,376,286.123515 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/06/make-a-plastic-bender-using-stuff-you-already-have/ | Make A Plastic Bender Using Stuff You Already Have | James Hobson | [
"how-to"
] | [
"bending plastic",
"plastic bender",
"plastic bending"
] | The team over at [2PrintBeta] found they needed some unique plastic profiles for their 3D printer the Printupy. Unable to find a supplier with what they needed, they decided to try building their own
inexpensive bending station
, using stuff they already had.
Not too concerned with the longevity of the system (or perhaps the flammability?) they’ve taken a wooden board and routed a straight groove through the center of it. Using a power supply and some Nichrome wire — it’s done.
They admit it’s really not the most durable and that it requires constant supervision in case of flames — but it cost next to nothing to make, and actually works quite well! What we like about the following video is they also show us the design process, the laser cutting, and bending to create the final product.
A simple way to upgrade this unit is to add a metal U-channel in the groove to reduce the fire hazard — like this
acrylic bender
we featured last year! | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1240731",
"author": "pcf11",
"timestamp": "2014-03-06T11:52:53",
"content": "They had to use a laser cutter for that? You can make a plastic cutting hook out of a piece of scrap metal with snips and a file.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"c... | 1,760,376,286.872388 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/05/heres-the-dirt-on-printing-with-pollution/ | Here’s The Dirt On Printing With Pollution | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"pollution",
"print head",
"Soot"
] | [Anirudh] and his friends were sitting around reminiscing about India. In particular, they recalled riding around in auto-rickshaws in stifling heat, watching their skin turn black from the exhaust. They started thinking about all of the soot and pollution in crowded cities the world over and wondered whether the stuff could be re-purposed for something like printer ink. That’s how they came up with
their soot/pollution printer
.
They created a soot-catching pump which they demonstrate with a burning candle. The pump mixes the soot particles with rubbing alcohol and an oil substrate and sends the ink to an HP C6602 inkjet cartridge. They used
[Nicolas C Lewis]’s print head driver shield for Arduino
to interface with the cartridge, turning it into a 96dpi printing head that uses only five pins.
[Anirudh] and his friends plan to design a carbon separator using charged plates to capture the soot particles from pollution sources and filter out dust. Be sure to check out their demonstration video after the jump.
Update:
In response to [
Hirudinea
]’s comment about mining the carbon from cars,
[
Anirudh] is now looking for collaborators (tinkerers, filmmakers, DIY enthusiasts) to move forward with the idea of re-purposing carbon. Email him at
anirudhs@mit.edu
. | 34 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1240286",
"author": "Grant Elliott (@gelliott181)",
"timestamp": "2014-03-06T06:43:08",
"content": "Now that’s a hack.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1240325",
"author": "Anton Fosselius (@MaidenOne)",
"timestamp": "201... | 1,760,376,286.589821 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/05/from-wireless-soundbar-to-portable-boombox/ | From Wireless Soundbar To Portable Boombox | James Hobson | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"portable boombox",
"wireless amp"
] | [Frank] had wanted a portable Bluetooth boombox for a while, but when he did some price comparisons he found that they are pretty expensive. He decided to take matters into his own hands and modify two products he already had —
into what he wanted.
The guts of his Frankenstein-boombox come from a Toshiba 3D Soundbar — a great product, but not as durable or portable as he needed. He then took an old mini guitar amp and started hacking the two together.
The soundbar features 4 speakers and a sub woofer — plus the amp and wireless capabilities of course — so [Frank] opted to just use the case of the guitar amp with the soundbar’s innards. He took some measurements and then built up a wooden support for the speakers inside the amp. He’s also sealed off the tweeters sound cavity from the main SUB to keep the sound nice and clear.
In addition to the Bluetooth control — the unit also comes with a remote. Can you spot his cleverly hidden IR sensor?
What we also like about this project is his colorful narrative as he explains his process — it kind of reminds us of [Arduinoversusevil’s] video on his
Accurate-ish Pneumatic Cylinder Positioning
. You can just tell he had an absolute blast hacking this together.
For another unorthodox Bluetooth boombox —
have you seen this potato cannon? | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1240008",
"author": "Z00111111",
"timestamp": "2014-03-06T03:41:09",
"content": "Next step making the knobs on the front control the inards via a microcontroller?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1240432",
"author": "sp... | 1,760,376,286.46702 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/05/hackaday-scouts-for-hacks-at-sxsw/ | Hackaday Scouts For Hacks At SXSW | Mike Szczys | [
"Featured"
] | [
"#HaD_SXSW",
"swag",
"sxsw"
] | It seems like everyone is going to
South by Southwest
this year. We even heard about it on
The Today Show
this week. But we still have hope that there’s awesomeness to be found. A few of our crew will be there this year and they’re on the lookout for something special. The festival starts on Friday and runs more than a week to the following Sunday but our guys will be on the ground Sunday, March 9th through Tuesday the 11th.
Sure, we’ll take a gander at the interactive hardware areas, but preliminary research tells us these may be watered down to the lowest common denominator. What we really want to see is if a Burning-Man-like culture is beginning to coalesce around SXSW. Are you carrying around your own hacked hardware at this year’s event? Do you roll up in a custom party-mobile and spend the week trying to keep the 24-hour tailgate alive with your fold out pig roaster and awning-based entertainment system? We’d like to check that out.
[
Eren
], [
Alek
], and [
Ivan
] are handling coverage of the event. They’ve been killing themselves making
Hackaday Projects
an awesome place to share and interact. What they wanted was a bit of down time, but handing out T-shirts and Stickers in exchange for a look at your hacks doesn’t get in the way of that. Connect with them on Twitter using the hash tag
#HaD_SXSW
. They’ll be using it to tweet their activities but of course it works both ways. Your best bet of just crashing into these guys is to
check out [Alek’s] talk on StageTwo
.
[Background
Image Source
] | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1239921",
"author": "Biomed",
"timestamp": "2014-03-06T02:44:24",
"content": "Excuse me… Excuse me… I just wanted to ask a question. What does God need with a starship?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1240910",
"author... | 1,760,376,286.510186 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/05/bench-power-supply-constant-current-ez-set/ | Bench Power Supply Constant Current EZ-SET | Todd Harrison | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Tech Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"constant current",
"current set",
"mod",
"power supply"
] | Here is a nice hack you may find very useful if you have a cheaper bench power supply that supports constant current limit protection (CC mode) and the only way to set or check your max current limit is to disconnect your circuit, short the power supply outputs and then check or set your limit. Yes, what a pain! [Ian Johnson] was enduring this pain with a couple of Circuit Specialist bench power supplies and decided to do something about it. After finding a download of the circuit diagram for his CSI3003X-5 supply he was able to reverse engineer a
hack that lets you press a new button and dial-in the max current setting
. Your first guess is that he simply added a momentary button to short the power supply outputs, but you would be wrong. [Ian’s] solution does not require you to remove the load, plus the load can continue running while you set your current limit. He does this by switching the current display readout from using 0–3 volts off an output shunt resistor to using the 0-3 volts output from a digital potentiometer which is normally used to set the power supplies’ constant current limit anyway. So simple it’s baffling why the designers didn’t include this feature.
Granted this is a simple modification anybody can implement, however [Ian] still wasn’t happy. A comment by [Gerry Sweeney] set him on the path to eliminate the tedious multi-button pressing by implementing a 555 momentary signal to switch the circuit from current load readout to current set readout. This 2nd mod means you just start pressing your up-down CC set buttons and it momentarily switches over the display to read your chosen max current and a few moments later the display switches back to reading actual load current. Brilliant! Just like the expensive big boy toys.
[Ian] doesn’t stop with a simple one-off hack job either. He designed up a proper PCB with cabling and connectors, making an easy to install kit that’s almost a plug-in conversion kit for Circuit Specialist bench power supplies (CSI3003X-5, CSI3005X5, CSI3003X3, CSI3005XIII). It is not a 100% plug-in kit because you do have to solder 3 wires to existing circuit points for signal and ground, but the video covering that task seemed trivial.
This hack could very well work with many other power supplies on the market being Circuit Specialist is just rebadging these units. For now, only the models listed after the break are known to work with this hack. If you find others please list in the comments.
After the break we will link to all three progressive mod videos incase you want to learn how to mod your own power supply or you could just
order a prebuilt kit
from [Ian].
Adding off-load constant current setting.
Replacing the front panel push-button switch with a 555 chip & relay
New pcb for the CC modification.
Single variable output 0-30VDC 0-3A Bench Power Supply
#CSI3003X-5
Single variable output 0-30VDC 0-5A Bench Power Supply
#CSI3005X5
Dual variable output 0-30VDC 0-3A Bench Power Supply
#CSI3003X3
Dual variable output 0-30VDC 0-5A Bench Power Supply
#CSI3005XIII | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1239403",
"author": "oigja",
"timestamp": "2014-03-05T21:20:24",
"content": "Great job! Now you’ve voided your PSU warranty and created a major fire hazard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1239835",
"author": "sparkygs... | 1,760,376,286.649941 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/04/public-transportation-display/ | Public Transportation Display | Abe Connelly | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"atmega328p",
"dot matrix display",
"public transportation",
"TL-MR3020"
] | [Adrian] and [Obelix] wanted to have an easy way to know when to expect the public transportation, so they hacked an LED dot matrix display to
show arrival times for stops near their dorm
.
They found the display on Ebay with a defective controller which they replaced with an ATmega328p. They connected the display to the internet by adding a small TP-Link MR3020 router and connecting it to the ATmega328p via a serial line. Their local transportation office’s
web page is polled to gather wait times
for the stops of interest. All rendering of the final image to display to the dot matrix display is done on their PC, which then gets pushed through to the MR3020, which in turn pushes it out to the ATmega328p for final display.
[Adrian] and [Obelix] warn about setting proper watchdog timers on the display driver to make sure bugs in the controller don’t fry the dot matrix elements. Their ATmega328p dot matrix driver code can be found on [Adrian]’s
GitHub
page.
Check out a video of the display in action after the jump. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1237126",
"author": "einballimwasser",
"timestamp": "2014-03-04T21:07:02",
"content": "Sup fellow Karlsruher students!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1237127",
"author": "einballimwasser",
"timestamp": "2014-0... | 1,760,376,286.812498 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/04/retrotechtacular-lighting-the-way-for-talkie-pictures-with-optical-sound-recording/ | Retrotechtacular: Lighting The Way For Talkie Pictures With Optical Sound Recording | Kristina Panos | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"halloween",
"light valve",
"optical sound reproduction"
] | This week’s Retrotechtacular is a 1943 Encyclopædia Britannica film focusing on
optical sound reproduction for motion pictures
. Both the sound and the images are recorded on film, which is only affected by light. Therefore, the sound waves must be converted to changes in light.
This is done the way you might expect: the sound waves hit a microphone and the changes in current are amplified and used to control the intensity of light falling on the film. Three types of soundtracks are described and wonderfully demonstrated at the end of the film.
All three types are made from a series of thin bars of light, and the corresponding current value is represented by changes in either their length or their width. In the Unilateral Variable Area recording, the bars extend from the right side of the sound track. Bilateral Variable Area recorded bars emanate uniformly toward the edges from the center. In Variable Density recording, all of the bars extend from the left to right extremes, but their thickness varies.
Variable Density recording is done with a
light valve
, which contains a pair of delicate metallic ribbons in a magnetic field that move like shutters when the sound current flows through them. The light coming through to the film is varied by the slot created in the space between the ribbons. The light patterns are changed back to sound through a photoelectric cell, which converts the variations in light back to changing current. These changes are amplified and run through a loudspeaker. Be sure to watch to the end to catch a demonstration of the recording methods, set to what we’re pretty sure is Camille Saint-Saëns’
Danse Macabre
.
[Thanks Thomas]
Retrotechtacular is a weekly column featuring hacks, technology, and kitsch from ages of yore. Help keep it fresh by
sending in your ideas for future installments
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1236935",
"author": "gajoi",
"timestamp": "2014-03-04T18:50:18",
"content": "1. Make a giant x-ray machine2. Focus it on a Vatican3. Record Pope on the toilet4 ???5. PROFIT!New Pope is the best Pope!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,376,286.927274 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/04/woodhouse-controls-your-house-avoids-danger-zone/ | Woodhouse Controls Your House, Avoids Danger Zone | Adam Fabio | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"Archer",
"Bearclaws",
"home automation",
"raspberry pi"
] | [Pat] may not be the world’s most dangerous secret agent, but he does have
Woodhouse taking care of his home
. [Pat] has been upgrading his
sonic screwdriver home automation system
these past few months. Waking up to a chilly room led him to start hacking a thermostat interface. [Pat] found that his furnace only needed one 24VAC wire to be shorted to a common during a call for heat. [Pat] was lucky in that his thermostat was low voltage. While researching a thermostat hack, we made the painful discovery that our thermostat is 120VAC, so watch for that if you try this one at home.
[Pat] connected his thermostat leads to a relay controlled by a Raspberry Pi. The Pi would read a temperature sensor and set the relay accordingly. That was fine for a quick hack, but opening an SSH window to change the temperature isn’t the most convenient thing in the world. Enter an old Asus Transformer Prime tablet. [Pat] coded up an Android Holo style interface using AJAX along with HTML/CSS/jQuery and PHP.
OpenMic+
constantly listens for voice commands, and fires them off to
Tasker
tasks as needed. He calls the results Woodhouse, and the interface is very slick. The tablet controls and graphs temperature, [Pat’s] media center, and his lights. Woodhouse is even [Pat’s]
right hand
man when getting ready for those intimate moments. We can’t wait to see what [Pat] comes up with next.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZBQMjsl-aQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myBJAMBUPX4 | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1236650",
"author": "Gizmos",
"timestamp": "2014-03-04T15:25:01",
"content": "Lana",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1236652",
"author": "Gizmos",
"timestamp": "2014-03-04T15:25:33",
"content": "Lana.",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,376,286.99157 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/04/tdoa-time-difference-of-arrival-directional-antenna/ | TDOA (Time Difference Of Arrival) Directional Antenna | Todd Harrison | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"directional",
"Fox Hunting",
"ham",
"radio",
"TDOA",
"transmitter hunting",
"yagi"
] | We have posted articles in the past on directional antennas such as Yagi antennas used for transmitter hunting otherwise known as fox hunting. Those types of antennas and reception suffer from one major drawback, which is as you get close to the transmitter the S meter will go full scale. At which time the transmitted signal appears to be coming from all directions. To correct for this problem you need to use clever signal attenuators or change to a poor receiving antenna as well as tuning off frequency effectively making your receiver hard of hearing so that only the direct path to the transmitter is loudest.
There is another popular type of antenna that you can build yourself called a TDOA which stands for Time Difference of Arrival. [Byon Garrabrant N6BG] shared a short video
tutorial on the functionality of his home built TDOA antenna
. Effectively this is an active antenna that uses a 555 chip or, in [Byon’s] case, a PIC chip to quickly shift between two receiving dipole antennas at either end of a shortened yardstick. In his explanation you learn that as the antenna ends move closer or farther from the source a 640 Hz generated audio tone will go from loud to very soft as the antennas become equal distance from the source. This type of directional reception is not affected by signal strength. This means you can be very close to a powerful transmitter and it will still function as a good directional antenna.
The current circuit diagram, BOM and source code are all available on
[Byon’s] TDOA page
.
The reason [Byon] used a programmable PIC instead of the 555 for his design is because he wants to add a few more modifications such as feeding back the audio output to the PIC in order to programmatically turn on a left or right LED indicating the direction of the transmitter. Furthermore, he plans on adding a third antenna in a triangular configuration to programmatically control a circle of 6 LEDs indicating the exact direction of the signal. When he finishes the final modifications he can drive around with the antenna array on his vehicle and the circle of LEDs inside indicating the exact direction to navigate.
We look forward to seeing the rest of the development which might even become a kit someday. You can watch [Byon’s] TDOA video after the break. | 34 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1236395",
"author": "Oodain",
"timestamp": "2014-03-04T12:19:39",
"content": "very nice and interesting build, would love to see the improvements once they are finished.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1236396",
"author": "T... | 1,760,376,287.068219 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/04/rfid-jacket-flashes-the-crowd-at-make-fashion-2014/ | RFID Jacket Flashes The Crowd At Make Fashion 2014 | Adam Fabio | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"fashion",
"jacket",
"led",
"RADLab",
"wearable"
] | The [RADLab team] has created an
eye-opening RFID jacket
for
Make Fashion 2014
. For this project, [Dan Damron, Chris Zaal, and Ben Reed] of RADLab teamed up with designer [Laura Dempsey] to create a jacket which responded both to a dancer on the runway and the audience itself. RADLab stands for Radio Frequency Identification Application Development Lab, so you can probably guess that RFID was their weapon of choice for interaction. We’ve got
a bit of RFID experience
here at Hackaday, having recently used it at
The Gathering in LA
. The [RADLab team] didn’t skimp on processing power for this jacket. A BeagleBone Black running Debian controls the show. The BeagleBone receives data from a
Thingmagic M6e 4 port UHF RFID Reader
. The M6e is connected to 4 directional antennas. The BeagleBone responds differently depending on which RFID card is read, and which antenna reads it. With the data processed, the BeagleBone then issues commands to a teensy 3.0, which controls WS2811 “Neopixel” addressable RGB LEDs sewn into the jacket.
During the fashion show, the jacket wearer danced with a second model who had RFID tags sewn into his t-shirt. The LED clusters on the front, back and sleeves of the jacket would light up, and change color and flash frequency based upon which tag and antenna got a read. Once the performance was over, the audience was encouraged to pick up tags and interact with the jacket themselves. The software was still very much beta, so the [RADLab team] monitored everything via WiFi and restarted the software when necessary. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1237023",
"author": "Shakipu",
"timestamp": "2014-03-04T19:53:18",
"content": "I used to work on these devices. ThingMagic is a really good manufacturer. Too bad, UHF RFID is too expensive to be on everyone’s maker-room.By the way, good use of (unkilled) RFID tags we can found on ou... | 1,760,376,287.125365 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/03/coolant-hose-grippers-keep-your-components-in-place/ | Coolant Hose Grippers Keep Your Components In Place | James Hobson | [
"how-to"
] | [
"helping hand",
"third hand"
] | Whether you have shaky hands when working on tiny components, or just need more control and flexibility, we think this
“third hand” gripper using coolant hose
is an ingenious solution compared to the little metal ones you can buy.
Not surprisingly this isn’t an original idea. In fact, Sparkfun actually
sells it as a kit
.
That being said… it’s rather expensive — especially when you can build [Frank Zhao’s] version for less than $15.
He’s using a cutting board, three machinery style coolant hoses, and a handful of fasteners from the hardware store. You can use the accessories from a regular metal
third hand
, but [Frank] also shows us how to recreate them using a few washers, some steel strapping, and a wing nut and bolt.
[Mr. Zhao] is no stranger to Hack a Day either — we’d almost call him an inadvertent contributor we’ve shared so many of his hacks! Just take a look at his
tiny USB business card
, his awesome
LED pocket watch
,
a detailed reflow oven build
, or even his
IR based augmented reality
setup.
[Thanks Keith!] | 26 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1235912",
"author": "Biomed",
"timestamp": "2014-03-04T06:56:20",
"content": "Ancient",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1236333",
"author": "Eirinn",
"timestamp": "2014-03-04T11:37:35",
"content": "That’s... | 1,760,376,287.199461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/03/forget-stopping-bullets-vest-warms-you-while-stopping-taser/ | Forget Stopping Bullets – Vest Warms You While Stopping Taser | Mike Szczys | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"carbon",
"carbon ribbon",
"carbon tape",
"heating element",
"stun gun",
"taser",
"vest"
] | [Bruce Wayne]
[Shenzhen] wanted a garment that would protect him from a jolt, while keeping him toasty in the cold weather. Well that’s not it at all, these are merely two of his projects using the same material in different ways.
We’re going to start with the infrared image on the right. This is a vest with chest and back pieces made of carbon tape totaling two meters of the material swirled on each side. Hook it to a power source and
the carbon tape warms the wearer
. Portability is something of an issue as each “element” takes 36 W of power (3A at 12V). Click through for advice on how to interface the tape with the power source.
Onto the main event…
avoiding electrical shock
when you get all up in the grill of that mall cop you’re hated for years. [Shenzhen’s] jacket is really just an ordinary long-sleeved coat. But he separated the lining at the bottom seam and used fusible material to hold the carbon tape in place. The carbon tape provides a better conductor than your skin, preventing the shock from stunning you as it was intended. This really is the thing of superheroes, or
former editors who should have known better
. | 40 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1235582",
"author": "fdsa",
"timestamp": "2014-03-04T03:17:26",
"content": "Lets test it!! A volunteer please :}",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1235629",
"author": "supershwa",
"timestamp": "2014-03-04T03:55:4... | 1,760,376,287.317124 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/02/microcontroller-speech-synthesis-lets-your-project-be-heard/ | Microcontroller Speech Synthesis Lets Your Project Be Heard | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ATmega128",
"AVR",
"speech synthesis"
] | [Aditya] had a project that called for spoken output. He admits that he could have built a PC-based solution, but he found that
adding speech by using a microcontroller
was not only a cheap and portable alternative, it was also a fun and easy build.
His design uses an ATMega128. Many microcontrollers would work, but his major requirements were PWM generation and plenty of memory to store the file(s). The output is cleaned up in a simple low pass filter before going to the 8Ω speaker.
[Aditya] lays his tracks in WAV format and then compresses it to 8-bit/8kHz. He found a C++ function that converts the track data into a huge arrays and then digitizes it. He uses two timers, one to generate the waveform and second one to time the square wave. [Aditya] has a zip of samples available on his site that will speak the digits 0-9. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1232319",
"author": "JKnot",
"timestamp": "2014-03-02T13:02:30",
"content": "The subject is completely misleading.This has absolutely nothing to do with speech synthesis…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1232534",
"auth... | 1,760,376,287.38072 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/01/turning-a-tiny-crt-into-a-monitor/ | Turning A Tiny CRT Into A Monitor | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware"
] | [
"cathode ray tube",
"composite",
"crt",
"monitor"
] | [GK] picked up a few tiny 2″ CRTs a while back and for the longest time they’ve been sitting in a box somewhere in the lab.
The itch to build something with these old tubes has finally been scratched
, with a beautiful circuit with Manhattan style construction.
[GK] has a bit of a fetish for old oscilloscopes, and since he’s using an old ‘scope tube, the design was rather simple for him; there aren’t any schematics here, just what he could put together off the top of his head.
Still, some of [GK]’s earlier projects helped him along the way in turning this CRT into a monitor. The high voltage came from a variable output PSU he had originally designed for photomultiplier tubes. Since this is a monochrome display, the chrominance was discarded with an old Sony Y/C module found in a part drawer.
It’s a great piece of work that, in the words of someone we highly respect is, “worth more than a gazillion lame Hackaday posts where someone connected an Arduino to something, or left a breadboard in a supposedly “finished” project.” Love ya, [Mike]. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1231869",
"author": "JJ",
"timestamp": "2014-03-02T06:16:57",
"content": "dat face",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1232544",
"author": "Greenaum",
"timestamp": "2014-03-02T16:11:38",
"content": "His nam... | 1,760,376,287.550956 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/01/photosphereing-made-easy-and-cheap/ | Photosphere’ing Made Easy And Cheap | James Hobson | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"photo sphere tripod",
"photosphere"
] | Android phones have a cool function called Photo Sphere — unfortunately, unless you’re very steady and can manipulate the phone around its camera’s axis… the results aren’t that amazing. Unless you make a cheap
360 degree panorama head for your tripod
that is!
[Oliver Krohn] designed this super simple adapter which you can mount on any tripod. It’s a U-shaped bent piece of aluminum, a bottle cap with a 1/4-20 nut, a thick piece of wire, and a cellphone case. The wire is bent with a notch to sit just below the camera’s lens on the cellphone — it is also placed directly above the tripods panning axis. This puts the nodal point in the perfect place, which allows for a great photo sphere every time.
To see how it works (and the amazing results!) stick around for the following video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BJBmH_FRgI
Looking to record video in 360 degrees? You’re going to need
a second camera… | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1231610",
"author": "J.C. Wren",
"timestamp": "2014-03-02T03:05:32",
"content": "Clearly this calls for some servos and a processor!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1231654",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "201... | 1,760,376,287.734595 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/01/hackaday-retro-edition-appletalk/ | Hackaday Retro Edition: AppleTalk | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"AppleTalk",
"PhoneNet",
"retro edition",
"retro roundup"
] | If you do a survey of what makes and models of classic computers manage to pull off a Retro Success by loading
our Web 1.0 retro site
, you’ll notice a disproportionate number of classic Macintosh computers, the cute, small all-in-one boxes with a nine-inch black or white screen. Part of this is the nigh indestructible nature of these boxes, and part of this is the networking built into every classic Mac –
AppleTalk
.
The physical connections for AppleTalk is just a small breakout box with two Mini-DIN connectors (or RJ11 phone jacks for PhoneNet) attached to one of the serial ports on the Mac. This isn’t just a null modem connection, though. An AppleTalk network can support up to 32 nodes, file transfer, networked printers, and in later updates booting an Apple IIGS from a networked drive. Whenever you have a few classic Macs in one room, an AppleTalk network is bound to appear at some point, especially considering the limitations of an 800kB disk drive for sneakernetting and the fact the AppleTalk software is supplied with every version of the operating system.
[Chris] had an old dual disk Macintosh SE
he had brought back from the dead
, but his modern expectations of Internet On Every Computer meant this cute little compy was severely lacking. Yes, SCSI to Ethernet adapters exist, but they’re surprisingly expensive. Modems are right out because of landlines. How did he solve this problem?
With AppleTalk, of course.
After picking up a pair of PhoneNet adapters, [Chris] plugged one into a PowerPC mac running OS 9. MacTCP, the Apple TCP/IP control panel for classic Mac operating systems, is able to encapsulate IP traffic into AppleTalk Packets. After turning the PowerPC mac into a router, [Chris] managed to get his all-in-one SE on the internet.
The only problem with this setup is the browser. NCSA Mosaic doesn’t have the ability to send traffic to a proxy server, but another classic Mac browser, MacWeb 2.0c does. This allowed him to
load up our retro site
using forgotten and long unsupported technologies.
If you have an old computer sitting around, try to load
our retro site
with it. Take a few pictures, and we’ll put it up in one of our Retro Roundups | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1231377",
"author": "Brandon Vincent",
"timestamp": "2014-03-02T00:22:29",
"content": "Here is a couple of mine. All were hooked up via Ethernet without any tunneling.80286 under MS-DOS, 80386 under IBM PC-DOS, Compaq Tru64 UNIX 4.0F on Alpha, and Solaris 2.X.http://imgur.com/a/v89U... | 1,760,376,287.611806 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/01/pocket-dartspitball-gun-for-wetdry-combat/ | Pocket Dart/Spitball Gun For Wet/Dry Combat | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"007 hacks",
"darts",
"TSA"
] | What can you do with needles, disposable syringes, superglue, cotton swabs, and scissors? If you answered ‘get hassled by TSA agents’, you’d be right, but you could also do what [Mski] did and
make a pocket dart gun
!
[Mski] used a 10mL syringe and a clear BiC pen body. He glued the pen barrel to the needle adapter on the syringe to make the chamber. He made the darts by cutting cotton swabs in half and inserting glue-covered needles. If you’ve never cut a cotton swab in half, they are hollow inside. What he has there are actually straight pins, which are cheaper than needles and come in larger quantities. The good news is you can make a bandolier of darts without breaking the bank.
Load your gun by shoving spitballs and/or darts up the chamber with a thin wooden stick, like a bamboo skewer. If you use your wife’s knitting needle, we recommend putting it back where you found it.
Do you prefer flaming projectiles and find clothespins easier to come by? Are you a hemophiliac or needle-phobic? Make
this mini matchstick gun
instead. | 19 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1231243",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2014-03-01T22:07:58",
"content": "There are some stupid things HAD should show some editorial gumption and just outright reject the submission. This is one of them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,376,287.669509 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/01/atmel-announces-smartconnect-wifi-modules/ | Atmel Announces SmartConnect WiFi Modules | Eric Evenchick | [
"Network Hacks",
"News",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"Atmel",
"CC3000",
"internet of things",
"smartconnect"
] | This week we talked with Atmel about their new
WiFi solutions targeting Internet of Things applications
. Back in 2012, Atmel acquired Ozmo, a company focused on point-to-point WiFi solutions using
WiFi Direct
. These devices are known as
SmartDirect
, and have been available for some time.
Atmel has just announced a new product line: SmartConnect. This moves beyond the point-to-point nature of WiFi Direct, and enables connections to standard access points. The SmartConnect series is designed for embedding in low cost devices that need to connect to a network.
The first devices in the SmartConnect line will be modules based on two chips: an Atmel SAMD21 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller and an Ozmo 3000 WiFi System on Chip. There’s also an on-board antenna and RF shielding can. It’s a drop in WiFi module, which is certified by the FCC. You can hook up your microcontroller to this device over SPI, and have a fully certified design that supports WiFi.
There’s two ways to use the module. The first is as an add-on, which is similar to existing modules. A host microcontroller communicates with the module over SPI and utilizes its command set. The second method uses the module as a standalone device, with application code running on the internal SAMD21 microcontroller. Atmel has said that the standalone option will only be available on a case to case basis, but we’re hoping this opens up to everyone. If the Arduino toolchain could target this microcontroller, it could be a great development platform for cheap WiFi devices.
The Add-On and Standalone Architectures
At first glance, this module looks very similar to other WiFi modules, including the CC3000 which we’ve
discussed in the past
. However there are some notable differences. One major feature is the built in support for TLS and HTTPS, which makes it easier to build devices with secure connections. This is critical when deploying devices that are connected over the internet.
Atmel is claiming improvements in power management as well. The module can run straight from a battery at 1.8 V to 3.3 V without external regulation, and has a deep sleep current of 5 nA. Obviously the operating power will be much higher, but this will greatly assist devices that sporadically connect to the internet. They also hinted at the pricing, saying the modules will come close to halving the current price of similar WiFi solutions. SmartConnect is targeting a launch date of June 15, so we hope to learn more this summer.
We’re always excited to see better connectivity solutions. If Atmel comes through with a device allowing for cheaper and more secure WiFi modules, it will be a great part for building Internet of Things devices. With a projected 50 billion IoT devices by 2020, we expect to see a lot of progress in this space from silicon companies trying to grab market share. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1230959",
"author": "Squonk42",
"timestamp": "2014-03-01T18:23:47",
"content": "The CC300 is at $22.68 in single quantity and $13.29/1.2k on DigiKey…Halving the price should bring the Atmel module to $11.34 and to $6.65/1.2k, respectively.This is to compare with the cheapest Chinese... | 1,760,376,287.797294 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/01/stop-motion-water-droplets/ | Stop Motion Water Droplets | Brian Benchoff | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"stop motion",
"water droplet"
] | The folks at Physalia studio were asked by a company called IdN to produce a little bit of video with a logo. After tossing a few ideas around, they hit upon the concept of projecting the IdN logo
inside a falling water droplet
. CGI would never get this idea right,
so the finished product
is the result of stop-motion animation created inside several thousand falling drops of water.
Taking a picture of a falling water droplet was relatively easy; a small drip, a laser pointer and photodiode, and a flash trigger were all that was needed to freeze a drop of water in time. The impressive part of the build is a motion control system for the camera. This system moves the camera along the vertical axis very slowly, capturing one water droplet at a time.
Behind the droplet is a an animation that’s seemingly inspired by a Rorschach test, ending on the IdN logo. The frames for these animations were printed out and placed inside the test chamber/studio upside down to account for the optical effects of a sphere of water.
The end result is a product of over 20,000 pictures taken, all edited down into a single 30-second shot. An amazing amount of work for such a short video but as you can see in the videos below, it’s well worth the effort. | 22 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1230768",
"author": "Abhimanyu Kumar",
"timestamp": "2014-03-01T15:44:07",
"content": "Im sure this could have been done with CGI but then where is the fun in that ??Awesome projece",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1230825",
... | 1,760,376,287.860887 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/01/the-credit-card-sized-gameboy/ | The Credit Card Sized GameBoy | Brian Benchoff | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"hardware"
] | [
"Arduboy",
"pcb",
"PCB milling"
] | Think you’ve seen every possible type of Arduino based hand held video game? [Kevin] managed to coax something new out of the theme with
a very clever credit card sized console
that uses some very interesting construction techniques.
The inspiration for this project began when [Kevin] dropped an SMD resistor into a drill hole on a PCB. This resistor fell right through the hole, giving him the idea creating a PCB with milled cutouts made to fit SMD components. With a little experimentation, [Kevin] found he could fit a TQFP32 ATMega328p – the same microcontroller in the Arduino – in a custom square cutout. The rest of the components including a CR2016 battery and OLED display use the same trick.
The rest of the design involved taking Adafruit and Sparkfun breakout boards, and modifying the individual circuits until something broke. Then, off to Eagle to create a PCB.
[Kevin]’s experiment in extremely unusual PCB design worked, resulting in a credit-card sized “Game Boy” that’s only 1.6 millimeters thick. The controls are capacitive touch sensors and he already has an easter egg hidden in the code; enter the Konami code and the Hackaday logo pops up to the tune of [Rick Astley]’s magnum opus.
Now [Kevin] is in a bit of a bind. He’d like to take this prototype and turn it into a crowd sourced campaign. In our opinion, this “Game Boy in a wallet” would probably do well on a site like Tindie, but any sort of large scale manufacturing is going to be a rather large pain. If you have any wishes, advice, of complaints for [Kevin] he’s got a few links at the bottom of his project page. | 60 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1230525",
"author": "Steven",
"timestamp": "2014-03-01T12:11:52",
"content": "It’s not a GameBoy. The title is misleading.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1230929",
"author": "zosh",
"timestamp": "2014-03-01T17... | 1,760,376,287.95516 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/01/design-your-own-processor-with-verilog/ | Design Your Own Processor With Verilog | Adam Fabio | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"fpga",
"microprocessor",
"verilog",
"vhdl"
] | Designing a computer from scratch is one of the holy grails of hardware design. For programmable logic,
designing your own processor
is a huge accomplishment. That’s exactly what [zhemao] has done. He created EZ8, an 8 bit processor is written in
Verilog
. EZ8 has a 3 stage pipeline, which makes design very interesting.
Instruction set pipelines
have been used in processors for many years. They speed up operation by allowing the processor to execute more than one instruction in parallel. The idea is similar to washing, drying and folding laundry. Most people pipeline their laundry. One load is in the washer, another in the dryer, and a third is being folded. Pipelines aren’t a free lunch though – there are
hazards
. If one instruction requires the result of an instruction which is still being executed in parallel, there’s a problem. In our laundry analogy this would be like having one sock on the folding table while its mate is still in the dryer. The folding operation must wait for the drying operation to complete before the socks can be paired. This is exactly how assemblers handle the situation – they insert NOPs between known hazard instructions.
[zhemao] didn’t just give us a processor and no support though. He also included an assembler written in OCaml, and an emulator written in C. Several test assembly programs are also up on
[zhemao’s] github repo
to verify operation. [zhemao] has tested his processor with
Altera Cyclone 5
series
FPGAs
, but it should be possible to port it to other FPGA manufacturers. If you want more information, [zhemao] also has a discussion going on in the
ECE subreddit
.
[Thanks for the tip LongHornEngineer!]
[Image courtesy of
intel
] | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1230322",
"author": "agejio",
"timestamp": "2014-03-01T09:08:17",
"content": "Can it run MS-DOS?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1230324",
"author": "whitequark",
"timestamp": "2014-03-01T09:10:15",
"content": "> Thi... | 1,760,376,288.569483 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/28/the-catweazle-mini-a-super-small-arm-based-embedded-platform/ | The Catweazle Mini: A Super Small ARM Based Embedded Platform | Nick Conn | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"arm",
"Catweazle Mini",
"Femtoduino",
"lpc810",
"mini",
"nxp",
"small",
"Trinket"
] | There has been a recent trend in miniaturizing embedded platforms. [Jan] wrote in to tell us about his very tiny ARM based embedded platform,
the Catweazle Mini
. Who knew that an ARM based system could be so simple and so small?!?
With the success of the
Trinket
and
Femtoduino
(miniature Arduino compatible boards) and many other KickStarter campaigns, it is only natural for there to be a mini platform based on the ARM architecture. Built around the NXP
LPC810
ARM Cortex M0+ MCU at 30MHz (which only costs slightly more than $1, by the way), this small embedded platform packs some pretty impressive processing power. The board contains a simple linear regulator, and can be programmed via UART. [Jan’s] development environment of choice is the mbed compiler, which is free and requires no installation. If you need some help getting started Adafruit has a nice
guide for the LPC810
.
Do you need some more processing power for your next
wearable project
? Be sure to use the Catweazle Mini. | 25 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1230250",
"author": "Trui",
"timestamp": "2014-03-01T07:57:46",
"content": "ARM based systems have been this simple for years. The only new thing is the DIP8 package.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1230274",
"author":... | 1,760,376,288.023969 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/28/smart-thermostats-for-an-old-club-house/ | Smart Thermostats For An Old Club House | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"furnace automation",
"home automationf"
] | [Michael] is a Scout Leader in the Netherlands, where they have a great clubhouse—a “Landhuis.” The only problem? It’s old, and
it’s not an efficient place to heat!
The building currently has two furnaces to cope with its many nooks and crannies, with individual thermostats in each of the five rooms. If a thermostat was activated in one of the rooms, it would control a valve in the furnace responsible for that room. Depending on which valve the furnace is attached to, a furnace would start. As you can imagine, this is an extremely inefficient system if you are heating two different rooms (and using two different furnaces!) It’s all on or off with no in-between.
As true scouts, they try to adhere to the simple principle of “why buy it when you can build it?” Commercial systems are expensive, and besides, they needed a project to work on! They’ve designed a smart(er) system using an Arduino Mega 2560 with five DS18B20 temperature sensors set up in each room, and even threw together a nice enclosure for it! They’ve included the source code on
GitHub
(in Dutch), so if you’re interested in setting up something similar you can check it out.
[Michael] will be around in the comments section, so if you have any feedback or questions, let him know! | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1230191",
"author": "rexxar",
"timestamp": "2014-03-01T07:23:12",
"content": "Am I missing something? They didn’t appear to solve the problem of both furnaces turning on for one room each. I would have put both systems in parallel (probably replacing the two pumps with one bigger on... | 1,760,376,288.14165 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/28/pcb-antenna-reference-designs/ | PCB Antenna Reference Designs | Nick Conn | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"2.4ghz antenna",
"antenna",
"pcb antenna",
"sub-1ghz antenna",
"texas instruments",
"wireless"
] | Have you ever built a wireless project and weren’t sure how to make one of those awesome (and cheap!) PCB antennas? “What low-cost solutions does our Antenna Board #referencedesign contain?” said Texas Instruments (TI) recently via
Twitter
. This older
reference design
contains some comprehensive designs for sub-1 GHz and 2.4 GHz antennas.
While TI’s documentation can be difficult to navigate, there are many hidden gems, and this is one of them. While TI created these designs for use with their wireless products, they will work on any device which utilizes the same wireless base frequency. For example, you could use any of the 2.4 GHz antennas with any Bluetooth, WiFi (2.4 GHz), or Bluetooth Low Energy chips. Simply open up their
Antenna Selection Quick Guide
document and navigate to the specific design for whichever antenna you would like to build.
For a more detailed overview of what goes into designing and testing a PCB antenna,
check out this hack which we featured back in 2010
. With the internet of things coming into its own, wireless projects will become more and more prolific, making PCB antennas more important than ever. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1229653",
"author": "justice099",
"timestamp": "2014-03-01T00:38:22",
"content": "Stumbled on this:http://shutterfreak.net/blogs/olivier-biot/2010-06-13/eagle-library-245ghz-planar-inverted-f-antenna-pifaMight be handy for Eagle users.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,376,288.200163 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/28/raspberry-pi-gpu-goes-open-source-10000-bounty-for-quake-3/ | Raspberry Pi GPU Goes Open Source! $10,000 Bounty For Quake 3 | Adam Fabio | [
"News"
] | [
"broadcom",
"raspberry pi"
] | One of the thorns in the side of the Raspberry Pi crowd has been the closed source GPU. Today that all changes. [Eben Upton] reports that
Broadcom is opening the source
to the VideoCore® IV 3D graphics subsystem. In Broadcom’s own words:
The VideoCore driver stack, which includes a complete standards-compliant compiler for the OpenGL® ES Shading Language, is provided under a 3-clause BSD license; the source release is accompanied by complete register-level documentation for the graphics engine
Full documentation is available on Broadcom’s support site
. To celebrate this, The Raspberry Pi Foundation is offering
$10,000 to the first person
to run Quake III at a playable frame rate on Raspberry Pi with open source drivers. The competition is worldwide.
Full rules available here
.
This release doesn’t cover everything, as there are still parts of the Pi’s BCM2835 which are hiding behind the blob files. However, it is a very big step for open source. Congrats to the Raspberry Pi Team, and good luck to all the entrants. | 48 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "1229375",
"author": "Liam Jackson",
"timestamp": "2014-02-28T21:21:20",
"content": "Wow. I never thought this would happen! Very cool, I wonder what the extent of what can be done with it is?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1229... | 1,760,376,288.319137 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/28/computers-playing-flappy-bird-skynet-imminent-humans-flapping-arms/ | Computers Playing Flappy Bird. Skynet Imminent. Humans Flapping Arms. | Adam Fabio | [
"Android Hacks",
"Arduino Hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"Flappy Bird",
"Kinect",
"processing"
] | After viral popularity, developer rage quits, and crazy eBay auctions, the world at large is just about done with Flappy Bird. Here at Hackaday, we can’t let it go without showcasing two more hacks. The first is the one that we’ve all been waiting for: a robot that will
play the damn game for us
. Your eyes don’t deceive you in that title image. The Flappy Bird bot is up to 147 points and going strong. [Shi Xuekun] and [Liu Yang], two hackers from China, have taken full responsibility for this hack. They used OpenCV with a webcam on Ubuntu to determine the position of both the bird and the pipes. Once positions are known, the computer calculates the next move. When it’s time to flap, a signal is sent to an Arduino Mega 2560. The genius of this hack is the actuator. Most servos or motors would have been too slow for this application. [Shi] and [Liu] used the Arduino and a motor driver to activate a hard drive voice coil. The voice coil was fast enough to touch the screen at exactly the right time, but not so powerful as to smash their tablet.
If you would like to make flapping a bit more of a physical affair, [Jérémie] created
Flappy Bird with Kinect.
He wrote a quick Processing sketch which uses the Microsoft Kinect to look for humans flapping their arms. If flapping is detected, a command is sent to an Android tablet. [Jérémie] initially wanted to use Android Debug Bridge (ADB) to send the touch commands, but found it was too laggy for this sort of hardcore gaming. The workaround is to use a serial connected Arduino as a mouse. The Processing sketch sends a ‘#’ to the Arduino via serial. The Arduino then sends a mouse click to the computer, which is running
hidclient.
Hidclient finally sends Bluetooth mouse clicks to the tablet. Admittedly, this is a bit of a Rube Goldberg approach, but it does
add an Arduino to a Flappy Bird hack
, which
we think is a perfect pairing
.
[Thanks Parker!] | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1229148",
"author": "wretch",
"timestamp": "2014-02-28T18:22:04",
"content": "Oh, how did Microsoft miss this when they introduced kinect? This is an excellent family fun! (c:",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1229174",
"aut... | 1,760,376,289.180765 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/27/fail-of-the-week-reset-issues-with-595-and-hd44780/ | Fail Of The Week: Reset Issues With 595 And HD44780 | Mike Szczys | [
"Fail of the Week",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"595",
"character lcd",
"fail of the week",
"hd44780",
"reset",
"shift register"
] | We really like to see hardware hackers stepping out of the safe and polished boundaries of available Arduino libraries. One example of this is a project which [Matteo] thought worked:
using a shift register to drive a character LCD
. This can be a desirable way to do things, because it takes the GPIO usage down from six to just three connections. If you don’t remember seeing that one earlier this month take another look. The gist of it is that [Matteo] hacked one function in the LiquidCrystal library to make it happen.
What makes this a truly great fail is that the problem was not immediately apparent, and is difficult to reliably reproduce.
The LCD is unstable depending on how the Arduino board is reset
. When connecting the Arduino to a computer the screen doesn’t work until you press the reset button. But press the reset button repeatedly and you get a non-functional screen plus the gibberish seen above.
There’s not much to go on here, but we think it’ll be a lot of fun to state your theory on the malfunction and suggesting for testing/fixing the issue. This could be a lot of things, the controller on the display getting mixed-up, the 595 missing an edge (or something along those lines). Do you fix this with hardware (ie: capacitor to avoid voltage dip), a software issue (need a longer delay after startup), or a combination of the two?
Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which runs every Wednesday. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and
sending us a link to the story
— or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels. | 36 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "1227201",
"author": "AllenKll",
"timestamp": "2014-02-27T18:11:51",
"content": "Sounds like a grounding issue to me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1228381",
"author": "Garbz",
"timestamp": "2014-02-28T08:33:3... | 1,760,376,291.197674 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/27/mini-go-kart-built-in-a-day/ | Mini Go Kart Built In A Day | Brian Benchoff | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"electric vehicle",
"go-kart"
] | The crew at the MIT student-run shop MITERS love their go karts, and when sitting around a pile of parts in the middle of the night on Saturday, there was only one thing to do:
build a mini electric go kart in a day
.
The parts for this were all taken from the jumble of parts lying around the shop: a few scooter wheels, some aluminum tubing, a 1×4″ piece of extrusion, a huge motor, and a ton of A123 cells were enough to ge tthe project started. They began by bolting the back wheel and motor to the aluminum extrusion and machining a simple steering mechanism.
The real fun began when they realized they could fill the aluminum extrusion with batteries, creating a 6S5P pack with the balance connectors and – after a few tries – the proper insulation. Combine all the parts with a Kelly motor controller and an old Brooks saddle, and the MITERS have a fairly light mini go kart that can cruise around the halls at about 15mph. Not much, but it was built in a single sleep-deprived night.
Video of the kart in action below. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1226953",
"author": "Martin",
"timestamp": "2014-02-27T15:31:04",
"content": "15 mph? You wish…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1229838",
"author": "Patrick Dent",
"timestamp": "2014-03-01T03:14:59",
"c... | 1,760,376,291.31996 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/27/taste-o-vision-is-now-a-thing/ | Taste-O-Vision Is Now A Thing | Brian Benchoff | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"taste",
"taste-o-vision",
"tongue"
] | Not satisfied with late 1950s concepts of Smell-O-Vision [Nimesha] has created something extraordinary:
A digital taste sensor
, capable of representing taste with a little bit of heat, electricity, and an Arduino
The device purportedly works by via thermal and electrical stimulation of the tongue using silver electrodes. According to
this video
, different tastes are created with different currents and temperatures. For example, a sour taste is produced on the electrodes by varying the current from 60uA to 180uA and increasing the temperature up to 30 degrees C. Mint is produced by simply decreasing the temperature from 22C to 19C.
The control electronics include an Arduino, a motor controller, and a heat sink attached to one of the silver electrodes. Communication is done through USB, and
of course
there’s a mobile app for it
, more specifically a protocol called Taste Over IP. This allows anyone to send a taste to anyone with one of these devices.
Videos below, and before you laugh, we’d really like to try one of these out.
Thanks [Jess] for the tip. | 26 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1226710",
"author": "trandi",
"timestamp": "2014-02-27T12:08:31",
"content": "Most of the taste buds and hence the sensation comes from the back of the tongue, so I really don’t see how it can work when they just touch the tip of their tongues…They definitely need a Kickstarter for ... | 1,760,376,291.261348 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/27/rfid-keepsake-box-is-sweet-and-secure/ | RFID Keepsake Box Is Sweet And Secure | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"keep sake box",
"keepsake box",
"RFID box",
"rfid lock box"
] | [Mike Buss] wanted to make his girlfriend something unique for her upcoming birthday — she had mentioned she wanted something to keep small mementos in, but [Mike] decided to
step it up a notch on the awesomeness scale.
You see, a few years ago [Mike] read about the
Reverse Geocache Puzzle
by [Mikal Hart], which is an awesome box that gives you feedback as to how far away you are from the “secret” location that the box will open at — To raise the stakes however, if you ask for the distance more than 20 times it locks itself forever! Now, unfortunately, a memento box wouldn’t be very useful if you had to go to a secret place every time you wanted to open it… so [Mike] decided to secure it another way, using RFID!
It makes use of an Arduino, a Parallax RFID Reader, a micro servo, a button, an RGB LED, and a cleverly designed latch made of a metal eye hook and small copper rod. Since the box is battery powered, [Mike] has added an extremely clever fail safe mechanism. The 9V battery inside includes two extra contacts to the outside of the box via small screws. Completely inconspicuous, but if the battery is dead, simply hold a new 9V to the screws with the RFID card in place, and bam, the box opens!
We’re pretty sure she’s going to like it — check it out after the break! | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1226563",
"author": "Eirinn",
"timestamp": "2014-02-27T09:50:37",
"content": "I like the 9v recovery option with the screws :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1226847",
"author": "SB",
"timestamp": "2014-02-27T14:06:03",... | 1,760,376,291.511169 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/26/giant-tetris-adds-some-retro-to-your-room/ | Giant Tetris Adds Some Retro To Your Room | James Hobson | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"giant tetris",
"myRIO",
"tetris"
] | [Sam] just finished off this awesome
6 foot tall Tetris game
using National Instruments
myRIO with FPGA.
The build makes use of a 10 x 20 grid of RGB LEDs controlled by the myRIO. It’s played by using a web interface on any device, as long as you have
WebSockets
support. [Sam] had originally built it using an Arduino at the heart, but wanted a stand-alone device to do everything — no extra computer or Raspberry Pi for the web interface. That’s when he discovered the myRIO — it’s a pretty cool piece of hardware that we haven’t seen too much of yet, other than the recent
Picasso with a Paintball gun project…
Don’t forget to watch the following video to see the game in action!
While it’s certainly an impressive sized game of Tetris, we’ve gotta point out the
largest we’ve seen
, put on by MIT! Or what about the
tiniest game of Tetris?
Oh and where did they get the T-Rex? | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1226459",
"author": "oz",
"timestamp": "2014-02-27T08:53:49",
"content": "Are these myRIO projects just ads? I’m confused.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1227059",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2014-02-27T16:... | 1,760,376,291.037536 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/26/twitch-plays-pokemon-better-than-prime-time-tv/ | Twitch Plays Pokémon: Better Than Prime Time TV | Adam Fabio | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"emulator",
"gameboy",
"pokemon",
"python",
"twitch",
"twitch plays pokemon"
] | What do you get when you put together a classic Game Boy game, some glue code, a streaming video website and 1 internet?
Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP)
, a social experiment where thousands of people “cooperatively” play a game of Pokémon Red/Blue. TPP was created by an anonymous Australian programmer who enjoyed the
SaltyBet
interactive channel on
twitch.tv
. Rather than use SaltyBet’s method of having users interact via an external website, [TPP’s creator] decided to use twitch’s own IRC based chat servers. Starting with
VisualBoyAdvance,
a popular C/C++ based Game Boy emulator, [TPP’s creator] began building the system. [TPP’s creator] went with python to create the web-to-emulator interface. A JavaScript app displays the live moves on the right side of the screen.
Gameplay is simple – users type their command (Up, Down, A, B) into their IRC or web client. In the original configuration, commands were processed in the order they arrived at the game. The system worked until the whole thing went viral. With thousands of people entering commands at any given time, poor “RED” would often be found spinning in place, or doing other odd things. The effect is so compelling that even [Randal Munroe] has
written an XKCD entry about it
. To help the players get through some of the tricky parts of the game, [TPP’s creator] added a game mode selection. Users can play in “Democracy” where the system takes votes for several seconds, then issues the highest voted command. The original anything goes game mode was renamed “Anarchy”. Switching from one mode to the other is determined by the users themselves in real-time.
[Devon], one of our readers, has been busy as well. He’s written up a
tutorial on turning a Raspberry Pi into a dedicated TPP viewer
. We’d love to see a TPP
battlestation
– a Game Boy modified to display TPP, as well as send commands to the IRC servers when buttons are pressed. Who will be the first reader to knock that hack out? | 27 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1225972",
"author": "Greg Kennedy",
"timestamp": "2014-02-27T03:13:40",
"content": "Do also check out this channel:http://www.twitch.tv/xkeeper_It was, previously, funneling input from TwitchPlaysPokemon into a simultaneous Tetris game. Now it appears to be playing Pokemon Puzzle C... | 1,760,376,291.638758 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/26/hackaday-68k-enclosure-backplane-and-power/ | Hackaday 68k: Enclosure, Backplane, And Power | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"68000",
"Hackaday-68k",
"hackaday-projects",
"retro"
] | It’s about time for an update for Hackaday’s latest project – a modern retrocomputer based on the Motorola 68000 CPU. In this update, we’ll be taking a look at the enclosure, the backplane itself, and how we’re going to power this thing.
This is only an update to the project; you can check out the current status over on
Hackaday Projects
. It’s Hackaday’s new collaborative project hosting site where you (and your friends) can design, build, or document anything you have in mind.
Request an invite
for the alpha release of Hackaday Projects and you can give this project a skull! Seriously, this project is only the third ‘most skulled’ one on Hackaday Projects.
Now that the completely transparent pitch for Hackaday Projects is over with, we can get on to the update for the Hackaday 68k. Click that ‘Read More…’ link.
You don’t build a house by starting with the kitchen cabinets, and like any project this computer needs a good foundation. This means picking out a nice enclosure, figuring out some way to power the thing, and constructing the backplane that will connect all the different cards I’ll be designing and building.
The Enclosure
Having a good-looking enclosure shouldn’t be a primary goal for what is really simply a prototype, hacked-together homebrew project, but I have a few special considerations for this project. Firstly, I’ll eventually be lugging this around to hackerspaces, meetups, and Maker Faires. It needs to be secure. Secondly, a lot of people are already following this project on Hackaday and on Hackaday Projects. It needs to look good.
The enclosure I’ve picked out is a
beautiful steel instrument enclosure
from Hammond. Specifically, the 1458VD4B enclosure, measuring 8x8x4 inches. I love Hammond enclosures, and when I put the top on and screw everything together, it really looks like something from the early 80s.
The Power
In the world of backplanes and retrocomputers, power supplies are a bit of a problem. There are very old S-100 bus systems that used huge linear power supplies, with transformers and caps big enough to kill an elephant. That’s not something I want – or could even fit – in an eight-inch square case. Linear supplies are old tech, though. The Apple II and the Digital VT100 terminal – contemporaries of the 68000 – had switching power supplies, but unfortunately they were also huge.
This is the power supply for a VT100 terminal. Galaxy SIII for scale
A much better option for providing power to the backplane would be to take a normal PC power supply, add a 24-pin ATX header, and plug everything in. It’s a great idea, but even the smallest computer power supply would eat up a ton of volume in my enclosure.
Here is the solution
. It’s called the picoPSU, and it’s barely larger than a standard 20-pin ATX power supply connector. It’ll provide 6A of 5V, and also has 12V, 3.3V, and -12V should I need that in the future. It’ll also power a hard drive,
all without requiring any load
. This is, by far, the easiest and cheapest way for me to power this computer.
The Backplane
Now we come to the important part of this update. The backplane. The board I’m going to plug the CPU, ROM, RAM, Video, and Ethernet cards into. If the CPU is the brain of a computer, the backplane is the brainstem. If this doesn’t work, nothing will.
First things first. The backplane needs power. On the left, you’ll see a 20-pin ATX power supply plug, the picoPSU, a switch, and a LED. Care to make a guess what the switch and LED do?
Next up are seven Eurocard connectors. These are 64-pin Eurocard connectors, despite there being 96 pins. Only rows A and C (row B is the middle) have pins soldered to the backplane. There’s no logic here, just simple solder traces from one pin to another. If you’re extremely clever, you might be asking yourself why not use 96-pin sockets. I’m going to answer that with another question.
Using two different colored lines, connect all the red dots together, all the green dots together, and all the blue dots together. Make sure lines of the same color do not cross.
That’s the problem I faced when trying to design a two-layer 96-pin backplane. Why a two layer backplane? Because it’s cheaper. I’m also pretty sure it’s mathematically impossible. Proofs are welcome.
Either way, I don’t
need
96 pins on this backplane. 64 pins are enough, once you know what you can safely ignore when designing something with the 68000. I’ll get to that in the next update.
With only seven card connectors, this isn’t a very large backplane. When you consider I’m doing the CPU on one card, RAM on another, ROM on a third, two more for Ethernet and video output, I don’t have much room to work with. From everything you’ve seen so far, there’s not even space for a cool ‘switches and blinkenlights’ front panel
But Wait, There’s More
There’s the front and the back of the backplane showing off a neat little feature I snuck in. I call it a ‘frontplane’, but basically all it does is break out all the signals to a female 0.1″ header socket graciously supplied by
Samtec
‘s amazing sample request order form. They’re low-profile 0.1″ headers, meaning I can barely squeeze in an additional board between the backplane and the front panel of the enclosure.
What’s that green board, you ask? That’s my first attempt at making an external power switch, power LED, and reset button. Mechanically, this design did not work.The space between the backplane and the front panel of the enclosure is just too tight. This isn’t really a necessary part of the build – I have power and reset switches and buttons on the backplane and CPU board – but it does make it look nice. Right now, the ‘external’ controls for this project have been pushed back to the very end of this project. Or when I get stuck on something. I don’t know.
Other Electronic Considerations
In the first post for this project
, a few people asked me how I would be terminating the backplane. Until I get the RAM and ROM working, I don’t know if I
need
to. I found
this app note
for RC terminator networks saying the 68000 usually doesn’t need termination on the data, address, or control busses. Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to be taking a scope to this when everything is wired up, but even if I do need termination, I’ll only need a few one dollar parts. It’ll also be a great use for the frontplane.
That’s All For Now
This is the most boring part of the project, I know. Still, it needed to be documented. The next update will more than make up for it. I’ll be going over the 68000 CPU itself, showing off what you can safely ignore, and telling you why designing a computer around the 68k isn’t much more difficult than designing a computer around the old 8-bit CPUs like the 6502. Really, there’s not much to it. Also, blinking LEDs. Yeah!
Here’s the link
to the entire project on Hackaday Projects. Rate, comment and subscribe, or something like that.
And yeah, that’s a silkscreen of BMO. | 46 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "1225707",
"author": "John Daragon",
"timestamp": "2014-02-27T00:19:25",
"content": "Not only are double sided 96 pin Euro Card backplanes possible, you can buy them over the counter:http://ae.rsdelivers.com/product/vero-technologies/222-2470/96-96way-double-sided-eurocard-backplane/... | 1,760,376,291.123929 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/28/cant-stand-your-noisy-fan-heres-a-plan-man/ | Can’t Stand Your Noisy Fan? Here’s A Plan, Man | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino mini",
"heatsink",
"mcp9803",
"sanity savers",
"temperature controller"
] | [Brian] adores his GW Instek GPC-1850D power supply, but it’s annoyingly loud and disruptive to his audio projects. The thing works great, so he decided to
regulate the fan’s speed based on usage level
to save his sanity.
Once [Brian] got under the hood, he found that it actually has four separate heatsinks: one for the bridge rectifiers and one for each power transistor on the three output channels. The heatsinks are electrically and thermally isolated from each other and change temperature based on the channel being used.
[Brian] and his associates had several
Microchip MCP9803
temperature sensors kicking around the lab from previous projects, so they put one on each heatsink. The great thing about these is their address selection pins which let all four of them sit together on the I²C bus to Arduinoville. Each sensor is insulated and clamped to its heatsink with a piece of meccano and a dab of thermal paste.
[Brian] used an Arduino Mini and built the circuit on stripboard. The fan runs at 24V, so he’s sharing that with the Arduino through a 7805. He controls the speed of the fan with PWM from the Arduino fed through a MOSFET. The Arduino reads from each sensor and determines which one is hottest. [Brian] wanted the fan to run at all times, so he set a base speed of 20%. When the heatsinks reach 30°C/86°F, the fan speed is increased to 40%. After that, the speed increases at 5°C/9°F intervals until it reaches max speed at 65°C/149°F.
You can grab the code and schematic from
[Brian]’s repo
. If you want to study your heatsinks, build
this heatsink tester
first. | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1228908",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2014-02-28T15:28:02",
"content": "Unfortunately most fans stall when the speed is below 30% – even if it spins currently now at 20% there’s a high chance that wear and tear will cause it to spin down and eventually stall at some point.From ... | 1,760,376,291.450048 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/28/homebrew-phase-laser-rangefinder/ | Homebrew Phase Laser Rangefinder | Brian Benchoff | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"arm",
"laser",
"laser rangefinder",
"rangefinder",
"STM32F4"
] | Just when you thought ARM micros couldn’t get any cooler, another project comes along to blow you away. [Ilia]
created a phase laser rangefinder
(.ru,
Google translatitron
) using nothing but a laser diode, a pair of magnifying glasses, a few components and an STM32F4 Discovery dev board.
The theory behind this build is using a laser’s phase to determine how far away an object is. By modulating the laser diode’s output at a few hundred Mhz, the reflection from the laser can be compared, giving a fairly reasonable estimate of how far away the target is. This method has a few drawbacks; once the reflection is more than 360 degrees out of phase, the distance ‘loops around’ to being right in front of the detector.
The laser diode used does not have any modulation, of course, but by using an STM32F4 ARM chip, [Ilia]was able to modulate the amplitude of the laser with the help of a driver board hacked out of a 74HC04 chip and a few resistors. Not ideal, but it works.
The receiver for the unit uses a photodiode feeding into the same microcontroller. With an impressive amount of DMA and PLL wizardry (the STM32F4 is
really
cool, you know), the phase of both the transmission and reflection can be compared, giving a distance measurement.
It’s all an impressive amount of work with a hacked together set of optics, a cheap dev board, and a few components just lying around. For any sort of application in a robot or sensor suite this project would fall apart. As a demonstration of the theory of phase laser rangefinding, though, its top notch.
You can check out a video of [Ilia]’s rangefinder below. Be sure to full screen it and check out the distance measurement on the LCD. It’s pretty impressive.
Thanks [Володимир] for the link. | 31 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1228711",
"author": "lwatcdr (@lwatcdr)",
"timestamp": "2014-02-28T12:34:42",
"content": "Wouldn’t varying the freq prevent the loopback issue?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1228725",
"author": "Dustin",
"tim... | 1,760,376,291.38248 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/28/wireless-charging-have-a-heart/ | Wireless Charging… Have A Heart | James Hobson | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"qi charger",
"qi hack",
"wireless charger",
"wireless charging hack"
] | [Gal Naim] recently finished off an awesome Valentine’s day present for special someone. It’s a
wireless charging heart for your phone!
He already had the Qi wireless charger but wasn’t much of a fan as it “looks so boring”. So he took it apart to salvage the charging circuit for his new project. As luck would have it, the Qi is very simple on the inside — all he had to do was lengthen the power wires to the coil. He then designed his heart in SolidWorks — Don’t forget to check out our
3D Printering tutorials
on this — and printed it out in a nice candy apple red. To maximize the charging current he’s left the inductive loop on the outside so it can be as close to the phone as possible — he spray painted it red and it actually looks pretty cool!
The next step was adding the wireless charging capability to the phone, we’ve covered
how to add this to any phone before
, but for [Gal] it was as simple as cutting down the Qi Receiver card to fit in the phone.
If you want a bit more of a challenge though you can always
make your own inductive charging loop! | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1228655",
"author": "tomvocke",
"timestamp": "2014-02-28T11:46:21",
"content": "Awesome :) Just a note of caution, the minimum distance between the charging coils on the original pad might be deliberate to keep temperatures on the phone to acceptable levels.",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,376,290.858142 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/27/ridiculously-accurate-mission-control-panel/ | Ridiculously Accurate Mission Control Panel | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"nasa",
"nasa control panel"
] | We are absolutely blown away by the level of detail that went into this
amazing mission control panel
that [Jeff Highsmith] made for his son.
His kid just started school and needed a desk to do homework on. They had recently visited the Kennedy Space Center, and his son found a new interest in all things space —
So [Jeff] took the opportunity to make the desk into this mind-boggling control panel.
We saw a
similar project recently
, but this one seems to take it to the next level. The desk itself is hand-made from MDF sheet and with oak boards making up the structural members. He’s cut out over a dozen individual control panels, added switches, LEDs and potentiometers, and printed the labels on transparencies which give the whole thing a very professional and finished look. An iPad sits in the middle which plays a curated collection of space videos.
As far as we can tell, all the buttons actually do something. He’s using an Arduino with four I/O expanders (MCP23017) to take care of all the inputs and outputs, and a Raspberry Pi to add sound effects to the simulation.
Now all he needs is a spaceship to monitor — which apparently is in the works as well!
[Thanks Nick!] | 32 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "1228237",
"author": "Amuse Bouche",
"timestamp": "2014-02-28T06:48:49",
"content": "Looks perfect for Kerbal Space Program.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1239938",
"author": "Atuday",
"timestamp": "2014-03-06... | 1,760,376,291.578528 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/27/gamebuino-a-handheld-arduino-gaming-console-ready-for-prime-time/ | Gamebuino: A Handheld Arduino Gaming Console Ready For Prime Time | Nick Conn | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"2dgames",
"arduino",
"diy handheld",
"game boy",
"game console",
"handheld"
] | [Rodot] wrote in to tell us about the
Gamebuino
, a very nicely designed and easily reproducible version of his handheld Arduino gaming console. We originally featured [Rodot’s]
Arduino based gaming console
over a year ago.
With the Gamebuino, you too can build your own games and gaming hardware around the Arduino. While there is a lot of information currently missing from the site’s Wiki, such as the layout and game code, [Rodot] plans on making everything open source. The console includes a rechargeable lithium battery, a micro SD card, and
I2C
expansion connectors. This is one project to keep an eye (and two hands) on, especially since a full game library is going to be provided, letting you easily create your own games. See what the console can do in the demo video after the break.
It would be amazing so see some old Game Boy games ported to run on the Arduino, or maybe one of our readers can make an
Game Boy emulator
for the Arduino! | 18 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1227985",
"author": "rossitron",
"timestamp": "2014-02-28T03:28:16",
"content": "“or maybe one of our readers can make an Game Boy emulator for the Arduino!”Lets see… The atmega328p in the gamebuino has 2k of sram. The gameboy has 8k of sram and 8k of video ram. The smallest cartrid... | 1,760,376,291.876492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/27/sparkfuns-avc-2014-robots-copters-and-red-balloons-of-death-oh-my/ | Sparkfun’s AVC 2014: Robots, Copters, And Red Balloons Of Death, Oh My! | Adam Fabio | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"autonomous",
"avc",
"quadcopter",
"rover",
"sparkfun"
] | Registration is open for Sparkfun’s
2014 Autonomous Vehicle Competition (AVC)
! Every year the fine folks at Sparkfun invite people to bring their robots, rovers, and drones to Colorado to see who is the king of the hill – or reservoir as the case may be. We see
plenty
of
robots
here at
Hackaday
, but precious few of them are autonomous. To us that means capable of completing complex tasks without human intervention. Sparkfun has spent the last five years working toward changing that. Each year the robots get more complex and complete increasingly difficult tasks.
The competition is essentially a race through the Boulder reservoir. Time is key, though there are multiple ways to gain bonus points. For aerial vehicles there are two classes: fixed and rotary wing. Planes fall under the fixed wing category. Helicopters, gyrocopters, tricopters, quadcopters, and beyond fall into rotary wing. We’re holding out hope that
e-volo shows up with their Octadecacopter
. Ground vehicles have a few more class options. Micro/PBR class is for robots with a build cost less than $350 total, or small enough to fit into box that’s 10″x6″x4″. The doping class is unlimited. Sparkfun even mentions costs over $1kUSD+, and weights over 25LBS. Non-Traditional Locomotion class is for walkers,
WildCats
and the like. Peloton is Sparkfun’s class for robots that don’t fit into the other classes.
Sparkfun is also making a few changes to the course this year. A white chalk line will be drawn through the course, so robots don’t have to rely on GPS alone for navigation. We’re hoping to see at least a few vision systems using that chalk line. Aerial robots will have to contend with three “Red Balloons of Death”. Robots can navigate around the balloons without penalty. The balloons can be bumped or even popped for bonus points, but the robot must do this with its own body.
Projectile weapons are not allowed.
To say we’re excited about the AVC would be an understatement. As much as we enjoy watching the big players at competitions like the
DARPA Robotics Challenge
, we love seeing individuals and small teams of hobbyists compete every year at the AVC. Click on past the break for Sparkfun’s AVC 2013 wrap up video. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1228033",
"author": "Biomed",
"timestamp": "2014-02-28T04:05:37",
"content": "This is very interesting and an area I’ve been well involved with doing fixed wing R/C since the mid 70’s, Club President, AMA, etc., yadda, yadda all boring and tedious, but included experimenting with ru... | 1,760,376,292.080685 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/27/persistence-of-vision-would-make-a-great-hud/ | Persistence Of Vision Would Make A Great HUD | James Hobson | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"persistence of vision",
"POV"
] | [Eduardo Zola] has just put the finishing touches on this awesome real-time
persistence of vision display
which displays text as you type!
It looks like the display is mounted on a small DC fan, which [Eduardo] powers using a bench top power supply. This allows him to fine tune the speed manually, without adjusting the the actual POV controller. The display receives the characters from the keyboard via a small USB RF receiver, and it has got a pretty snappy response time.
There isn’t too much more info on the project, but it certainly gives us an idea — could persistence of vision be used to create a kind of heads up display in a vehicle? What do you think?
We’ve seen tons of cool persistence of vision projects, like this awesome
wind powered clock
, to even the likes of
full color video on a large spinning display!
[via
Adafruit
] | 33 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1227483",
"author": "Kyle",
"timestamp": "2014-02-27T21:44:14",
"content": "HUD in a vehicle was the first thing I thought of after I got through the 2nd paragraph.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1227513",
"author": "er0sen... | 1,760,376,292.483078 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/26/improving-a-homebrew-ct-scanner-with-barium/ | Improving A Homebrew CT Scanner With Barium | Brian Benchoff | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"ct scanner",
"radiation",
"radioactive",
"Tomography"
] | [Peter] has been working on his homebrew CT scanner for a while, and it’s finally become something more than a spinning torus of plywood.
He’s managed to image the inside of a few pieces of produce
using an off-the-shelf radiation detector and a radioactive barium source
When we last saw [Peter]’s CT scanner
, he had finished the mechanical and electronic part of the Stargate-like device, but the radioactive source was still out of reach. He had initially planned on using either cadmium 109 or barium 133. Both of these presented a few problems for the CT scanner.
The sensor [Peter] is a silicon photodiode high energy particle detector from
Radiation Watch
this detector was calibrated for cesium with a detection threshold of around 80keV. This just wasn’t sensitive enough to detect 22keV emissions from Cd109, but a small add-on board to the sensor can recalibrate the threshold of the sensor down to the noise floor.
Still, cadmium 109 just wasn’t giving [Peter] the results he wanted, resulting in a switch to barium 133. This was a much hotter source (but still negligible in the grand scheme of radioactivity) that allowed for a much better signal to noise ratio and shorter scans.
With a good source, [Peter] started to acquire some data on the internals of some fruit around his house. It’s still a slow process with very low resolution – the avocado in the pic above has 5mm resolution with an acquisition time of over an hour – but the whole thing works, imaging the internal structure of a bell pepper surprisingly well. | 22 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1225501",
"author": "thoriumbr",
"timestamp": "2014-02-26T21:28:40",
"content": "Beware the viagra-laced hidden div on the top of the site… Looks like his site was hacked.If you visit it with the NoScript extension or something like that, you are safe…Other than that, nice build! I ... | 1,760,376,292.815132 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/26/3d-printering-making-a-thing-with-solidworks-part-ii/ | 3D Printering: Making A Thing With Solidworks, Part II | Rich Bremer | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"3D Printering",
"solidworks",
"tutorial"
] | Last week we started to
Make a Thing
in Solidworks. We got as far as sketching and extruding the base. This week we’ll make the back portion. We’ll use some of the same techniques in Part I and a few new features such as 3D filleting and the Hole Wizard.
As you know, this is not the first ‘Making a Thing’ tutorial. In case you missed them, the softwares previously covered in the 3D Printering series are:
OpenSCAD
AutoCAD Part I
AutoCAD Part II
Blender Part I
Blender Part II
SketchUp
Autodesk 123D
FreeCAD Part I
FreeCAD Part II
Solidworks Part I
Picking up where we left off, the next step is to make the back portion of the shape. To do this, start by rotating the view to see the rear face of the part. We want our sketch to be on the rear face so select the rear face by clicking on it. Once it is highlighted, select Sketch from the Sketch Tab.
Sketch
A new line will show up in the Model Tree (in this case it is called Sketch2). Right click on this and click on the Normal To icon. This will rotate the view to be perpendicular to the face the sketch will be on.
Now that we are looking at the rear face of the part, we can draw the back portion, which is basically a tombstone shape with tapered sides. Start by drawing a circle. It can be any size and any location as it will be dimensioned later. Like in Part 1, I will intentionally sketch the shape out of proportion to show how the geometry will change when adding dimensions and constraints.
The tapered lines should be tangent to circle. To do this, select the Line Tool from the Sketch Tab, start the line on one of the top corners of the rear face. Then hover over the circle near the point where the line would be tangent to the circle. A yellow box with a tangent symbol will appear. Clicking at this time will make the line tangent to the circle. Do this for the other side. Then draw the last 3 lines. Hovering over the corners of the rear face will make the lines snap to those points. On the Sketch Tab, select the Trim Tool and click on the bottom portion of the circle to delete it.
Dimension
From the sample drawing, we know that the center of the arc is 7/8″ above the top face of the portion we have already drawn and extruded. Use the Smart Dimension Tool to add a dimension from the center of the arc to the top face of the extruded part. Then enter “7/8” as the desired distance and the sketch will move to satisfy that requirement. Click on the arc to specify its radius. Enter 5/8 or 0.625.
The radius is currently not centered over the rear face. To center it, left click on the top of the rear face and select the midpoint. Then hold shift and select the center of the arc. A window will pop up, select the vertical line to make the arc centered over the rear face.
The sketch is now complete. Click Exit Sketch from the Sketch Tab.
NOTE: The 7/16″ through-hole could have been drawn on the sketch and it would have created a hole when the sketch was extruded. After that, the counterbore would still have to be added. We will create both the hole and counterbore in one step later.
Extrude
To extrude the part, select the sketch (Sketch2) on the Model Tree, then on the Features Tab, select Extruded Boss. In the Boss-Extrude dialog box, type in 0.5 or 1/2 to specify the length to extrude. Click the green check mark to make it happen.
Hole Wizard
To make the hole and counterbore we’ll try something new. Select the Hole Wizard from the Features Tab. This tool will allow us to make the hole and counterbore at the same time. In the Hole Specifications Dialog Box, select the following:
Hole Type: Legacy Hole
Type: Counterbored (adds a counterbore)
End Condition: Through All (makes the hole go through the entire part)
Enter the dimensions from the sample drawing for the Hole Diameter, Counterbore Diameter and Counterbore Depth.
NOTE: We can’t change the hole Depth because we specified “Through All” for the End Condition. If we selected “Blind” and added a depth of 2 inches, the hole would go into the part 2 inches deep.
Now that the hole and counterbore dimensions are specified, we need to determine where the hole will be. While still in the Hole Specifications dialog box, click on the Positions Tab. Then select the face of the part where the hole will be placed. Position does not mater right now.
A representation of the counterbored hole will be placed on the part. We know it is not in the correct spot. To make the hole concentric with the arc of the back portion of the part, click on the asterisk at the center of the previewed hole, then hold shift and click on the arc of the part. A little window will pop up. Clicking on the icon made of two circles will make the two selected features concentric with one another. Hit the green check mark to finish the operation.
Fillet
Remember in Part 1, we left a couple fillets off of the drawing so that we could add them later. On the Features Tab, there is a Fillet Tool. Selecting this will open a dialog box where you can enter the desired radius of the fillet. The sample drawing stated these fillets were 1/8 inch. Enter that and click on the corners that need to be radiused. Solidworks will show a preview of the fillets. Click the green check mark to accept the preview.
That’s it! Here’s the final product:
This Hackaday Column is called 3D Printering and in order to print the part, the file must be saved in .stl format. This is as easy as File-Save As. Select .stl from the file type list.
That concludes the Solidworks ‘Making A Thing’ tutorial. Happy modeling and printing!
3D Printering is a weekly column that digs deep into all things related to 3D Printing. If you have questions or ideas for future installments please
sending us your thoughts
. | 31 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1225259",
"author": "jiog",
"timestamp": "2014-02-26T18:55:26",
"content": "This is too complicated, Blender and other open-source programs are superior to this bloatware.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1225285",
"aut... | 1,760,376,292.205144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/26/wireless-ac-control-with-the-raspberry-pi/ | Wireless AC Control With The Raspberry Pi | Brian Benchoff | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"raspberry pi",
"relay",
"WeMo"
] | We’ve seen some of [Connor]’s work before, and it looks like he’s now turning to product design.
He’s come up with an adapter for the Raspberry Pi
to control a few wireless wall socket relays, allowing anyone with a Pi to control lights, coffee makers, TVs, and anything else that falls under the very broad home automation banner.
The system uses a 315MHz radio breakout board for a Raspberry Pi to control the relays in one of three wall socket adapters. There’s a script running on the Pi with a very nice GUI to turn the lights on and off.
[Connor]’s product is extremely similar to a certain WiFi-enabled wall-plug relay system controlled by a smartphone, and to that end, he’s decided to call his device the Belchin’ Emo Switch. The name might need work, but he’s selling three Raspberry Pi-controlled wall plugs for the same price of one wall plug from Brand A.
Below you’ll find [Connor]’s videos for his device. You can also check out
this reddit thread
where he shows off just how open source he can be; there are part suppliers and even how he’s packaging this system for shipment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECIjuJ-DUcY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HLtUiwbJjc | 43 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1224956",
"author": "lwatcdr (@lwatcdr)",
"timestamp": "2014-02-26T15:08:33",
"content": "Here is something I was thinking about doing that would work with this hardware.1. Check the time of day and compare to Sunrise and Sunset.2. Check if owners cell phone is on the wifi network.3... | 1,760,376,292.561847 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/26/get-your-hackerspace-a-3d-printer/ | Get Your Hackerspace A 3D Printer | Brian Benchoff | [
"News"
] | [
"giveaway",
"lulzbot",
"Lulzbot Taz"
] | LulzBot is yet again
giving away a few of their very fancy and well-reviewed 3D printers
away to a few hackerspaces.
This isn’t the first time LulzBot has given away a few of their printers; a year and a half ago, they
gave away eight AO-100 printers
and they also donated one to our ‘ol buddy [Caleb] for
TheControllerProject
, a forum to connect disabled gamers to people who have the means and ability to make custom gaming controllers.
The rules for this giveaway are simple: Be a hackerspace, and display, “creativity and contributions to the free software and open hardware community.” It’s as simple as that. If you’re a hackerspace without a 3D printer – which would be somewhat astounding at this point – here’s your chance to get one of the best 3D printers around.
The contest will be open starting March 1 and ends on March 14, with entry requiring a hackerspace fill out a form somewhere on the LulzBot servers. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1224766",
"author": "EccentricElectron",
"timestamp": "2014-02-26T12:52:55",
"content": "Controller Project looks like it has been abandoned – no updates in 4 months… forums link dead…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1227199",... | 1,760,376,292.412609 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/26/confuse-the-birds-with-this-daylight-simulation-system/ | Confuse The Birds With This Daylight Simulation System | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"bird daylight simulator",
"daylight simulator"
] | Hackers love a challenge. So when [Patrick’s] father-in-law asked him to look into a daylight simulation system for his bird breeding cages, [Patrick] quickly discovered the ridiculous prices for commercial systems… so he convinced his father-in-law to let him
design and build one instead.
Like any project, [Patrick] quickly listed the requirements of the system before starting anything.
It must brighten gradually in the morning
Stay constant throughout the day
Dim in the evening to a very low intensity
In addition to this, the lighting transition should be smooth, and the lights cannot flicker, as this can be stressful for the birds — oh, and it needs to be reliable.
To build the system, [Patrick] has chosen an Arduino Duemillenova, an RTC, a small LCD screen, some cheap LEDs from eBay and a handful of N-channel NPN transistors to provide the PWM for the LEDs. The entire system cost less than $100 — a much cheaper alternative to commercial systems.
We think the system looks great, but as a big fan of the Hack a Day community, [Patrick] would love to hear your feedback! | 38 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1224498",
"author": "jimmy",
"timestamp": "2014-02-26T09:13:00",
"content": "“N-channel NPN transistors”? He uses BD135 which is a bipolar type, no FET so no channel.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1224671",
"author":... | 1,760,376,292.63708 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/robot-foosball-will-kick-your-butt-if-you-play-slowly/ | Robot Foosball Will Kick Your Butt If You Play Slowly | James Hobson | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"foosball"
] | Sometimes we find a project that is so far outside of our realm of experience, it just makes us sit back and think “wow”. This is definitely one of those projects. [Saba] has created a
Robotic Foosball set that learns.
[Saba Khalilnaji] is a recent engineering graduate from UC Berkeley, and his passion is robotics. After taking an Artificial Intelligence class during his degree (you can take it online
through edX!
), he has decided to dabble in AI by building this awesome robot Foosball set.
His “basic” understanding of machine learning includes a few topics such as Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning. For this project he’s testing out a real-world application of Reinforcement Learning using the
Markov Decision Process or MDP for short.
At an extremely top level description it works by programming an agent to learn from the consequences of its actions in a given environment. There are a set of states, actions, probabilities for given state and action, and rewards for specific state and action sets.
Before we butcher the explanation anymore, check out his blog for more information — and watch the following video.
For a more simple application of AI, check out this
rock paper scissors robot
— that you can never beat! | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1224299",
"author": "Mike L",
"timestamp": "2014-02-26T06:40:10",
"content": "Awesome! I always thought it would be quite a challenge, but fun to make something like this. I’m super excited to see where this goes!My love for foosball, electronics, and hacking makes this a 10/10 for ... | 1,760,376,292.252633 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/sound-card-tachometer-rises-from-the-junkbox/ | Sound Card Tachometer Rises From The Junkbox | Adam Fabio | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"infrared",
"reflective",
"Tach",
"tachometer"
] | We love writing up projects that re-use lots of old parts. In fact, we save the links and use them as defense when our significant other complains about the “junk” in the basement. No, that tactic hasn’t ever worked, but we’re going to keep trying. Case in point, [Wotboa] needed a non-contact tachometer. There are plenty of commercial products which do just that. After consulting his parts bin, [wotboa] realized he had everything he needed to
hack out his own
. An IR break beam sensor from an old printer was a perfect fit in an aluminum tube. With the outer shell removed, the emitter and detector were mounted in the nylon shell of an old PC power supply connector, effectively turning them pair into a reflective sensor. To amplify the circuit, [wotboa] used a simple 2n2222 transistor circuit. The key is to keep the voltage seen by the sound card the range of a line level signal. This was accomplished by adding a 2.2 Megohm resistor in line with the output. [wotboa] drew his schematic in eagle, and etched his own PCB for the project. Even the tachometer’s case came from the parts bin. An old wall wart power supply gave up its shell for the cause, though [wotboa] is saving the transformer for another project.
For sensing, [wotba] used [Christian Zeitnitz’s]
Soundcard Oscilloscope software
. Measuring the RPM of the device under test is simply a matter of determining the frequency of the signal and multiplying by 60. A 400 Hz signal would correspond to a shaft turning at 24,000 RPM. The circuit performs well in the range of RPM [wotboa] needs, but using a sound card does have its limits. The signals on the scope look a bit distorted from the square waves one would expect. This is due to the AC coupled nature of sound cards. As the signal approaches DC, the waveform will become more distorted. One possible fix for this would be to remove the AC coupling capacitor on the sound card’s input. With the capacitor removed, an op amp buffer would be a good idea to prevent damage to the sound card.
[Via
Instructables
] | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1224093",
"author": "Hyratel",
"timestamp": "2014-02-26T04:03:02",
"content": "there are plenty of cheap ( <$3 ) USB sound cards that could be used for this. some don't even have decoupling caps!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,376,292.987586 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/using-sdr-to-read-your-smart-meter/ | Using SDR To Read Your Smart Meter | Abe Connelly | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"RTL-SDR",
"RTLSDR",
"sdr",
"smart meters"
] | [BeMasher] was dissatisfied with the cost of other solutions to read his smart meter, so
he made a project to read it himself using an rtl-sdr dongle
.
Using his hacking and reverse engineering skills along with a $20 RTL-SDR dongle, [BeMasher] wrote
rtlamr to automatically detect and report
the consumption information reported by smart meters within range. Though designed for his Itron C1SR, [BeMasher] claims that any electronic receiver transmitter (ERT) capable smart meter should work.
[BeMasher]’s Itron C1SR smart meter broadcasts both interval data and standard consumption in the 915MHz ISM band using a Manchester encoded, frequency hopping spread spectrum protocol. [BeMasher] used the RTL-SDR dongle to do the signal capture and analysed the resulting signal in software afterwards. [BeMasher] did a great job of going through
the theory and implementation
of analysing the resulting data capture, so be sure to check it for an in-depth analysis.
If the RTL-SDR dongles are too limited for you taste, you might want to
check out some hacker friendly SDRs with a little more punch
. | 76 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "1223789",
"author": "franklyn",
"timestamp": "2014-02-26T00:36:11",
"content": "IS RF generally this hard to decode or is he doing something wonky?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1223810",
"author": "Xerox1",
... | 1,760,376,292.745571 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/hackaday-meetup-with-chris-gammell/ | Hackaday Meetup With [Chris Gammell] | Mike Szczys | [
"Featured"
] | [
"amp hour",
"Chris Gammell",
"contextual electronics",
"meetup"
] | Update:
We have it figured out. We’re bringing the awesome at The Blind Donkey in Pasadena, CA at 6pm this evening. Stop in with your hardware and your war stories. Chris Gammell, Mathieu Stephan, and I can’t wait to talk
Arduino
hardware hacking with you!
I’m getting to meet all kinds of cool people in person this year, and so can you! Well… if you happen to be in Pasadena, California on Wednesday after work and have nothing better to do. [
Chris Gammell
] — well-known for
The Amp Hour
and
Contextual Electronics
— and
I
are both going to be in town. We’re meeting up for a beer and thought we’d invite you along for the fun.
Details are scarce right now. I’m not sure of time or place (other than Pasadena area) so make sure you follow
@Hackaday
on Twitter and watch for the #HaD_meetup tag Wednesday afternoon for the details. We’ll also update
the Hackaday Projects event page
at the time. I’ll bring along some swag; you’d better cart along a piece of hardware to show off in return for a t-shirt or stickers. You’re on your own for food and beverages at this one.
Wondering what I meant about meeting lots of cool people? In addition to the nearly 500 awesome readers who showed up at
The Gathering
, I met [Brian] and [Eliot] for the first time. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "1223726",
"author": "Squirrel",
"timestamp": "2014-02-25T23:59:08",
"content": "Y’all should meet up in Colorado.Boulder is the home of Sparkfun, after all; Asher brewery is within sneezing distance of Sparkfun…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,376,292.863749 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/hexapod-robot-terrifies-humans-and-wallets/ | Hexapod Robot Terrifies Humans And Wallets | Adam Fabio | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"Golem",
"hexapod",
"Hexapod robot",
"robot",
"ros",
"skynet"
] | [Kevin] brings us
Golem, his latest robot project
. Golem is crafted not of clay and stone
like his namesake
, but of T6 Aluminum and Servos. We don’t have a banana for scale, but Golem is big. Not [Jamie Mantzel’s]
Giant Robot Project
big, but at 2.5 feet (76.2 cm) in diameter and 16 lbs (7.3 Kg), no one is going to call Golem a lightweight. With that kind of mass, standard R/C servos don’t stand much of a chance. [Kevin] pulled out all the stops and picked up
Dynamixel MX64
servos for Golem’s legs. Those servos alone propelled the Golem’s costs well beyond the budget of the average hobbyist. Kevin wasn’t done though. He added an Intel
NUC
motherboard with a fourth generation i5 processor, a 120 Gigabyte solid state drive, and 8 Gigbytes of Ram. Sensing is handled by gyros, accelerometers, and an on-board compass module. We’re assuming from the lack of a GPS that Golem will mainly see indoor use. We definitely like the mini subwoofer mounted on Golem’s back. Hey, even robots gotta have their tunes.
Golem is currently walking under human control via a Dualshock 3 controller paired via bluetooth. [Kevin’s] goal is to use Golem to learn
Robotic Operating System (ROS)
. He’s already installed ubuntu 13.04 and is ready to go. [Kevin] didn’t mention a vision system, but based on the fact that
some of his other robots use the Xtion pro live
, we’re hopeful. We can’t wait to see Golem’s first autonomous steps. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1223481",
"author": "Matt Bunting",
"timestamp": "2014-02-25T21:29:15",
"content": "Wow! Never thought someone would make a hexapod that cost more than mine!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVHd2_NUgIs",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,376,292.933898 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/retrotechtacular-hacking-mother-natures-north-temperate-regions/ | Retrotechtacular: Hacking Mother Nature’s North Temperate Regions | Kristina Panos | [
"how-to",
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"caterpillars",
"food",
"north temperate regions",
"survival"
] | …because they’ll tickle your insides! Seriously, don’t eat them if you happen to parachute alone into wilderness and must survive without firearms or equipment like our protagonist here. This 1955 US Navy-produced
gem of a training film
will show you how to recognize, procure, and prepare many kinds of nutritious plant, insect, and animal life commonly found between 45° and 70° north latitude.
While you hone your large game hunting skills, you can tide yourself over with all kinds of things that will just sit there ready to be plucked for your nourishment: many berries and fruits, nuts, moss, lichens, and the inner bark of several kinds of trees is edible. Sate your taste for savory with grubs, termites, or grasshoppers. When in doubt, eat what the birds and small animals are eating, but stay away from mushrooms. It’s too hard to distinguish the poisonous varieties.
Many edible things are found in and around bodies of water. Game such as deer, ducks, and birds are attracted to water and make their homes near it. Various kinds of traps made from twigs and vegetation will outwit rabbits and squirrels. You can fashion a bow and arrow in order to kill large quadrupeds like deer, elk, and ram. It’s best to aim for the head, neck, or just behind the shoulders as these are the most vulnerable areas.
Once you have killed a large animal, prepare it for cooking by draining its blood and removing its entrails. There are many ways to cook your spoils of survival, and most of them involve cutting the meat into small pieces first. Hopefully, you have some basic
tools for starting fires
.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzplUDaBMuw
Retrotechtacular is a weekly column featuring hacks, technology, and kitsch from ages of yore. Help keep it fresh by
sending in your ideas for future installments
. | 54 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1223180",
"author": "matt",
"timestamp": "2014-02-25T18:06:40",
"content": "“prepare it for cooking by draining its blood and removing its entrails”I was under the impression that field dressing involved removing off the organs in the chest cavity, not just the entrails.",
"pare... | 1,760,376,293.65023 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/us-government-screws-up-terrorist-watchlist-few-surprised/ | US Government Screws Up Terrorist Watchlist, Few Surprised | Brian Benchoff | [
"News"
] | [
"dave jones",
"EEVblog",
"Element 14"
] | It looks like [Dave Jones] got himself on a US government watch list. We don’t mean [Dave
L.
Jones], awesomesauce electronic wizard and host of eevblog, though. Some three-letter agency is just looking at
someone
named
[David Jones]. Is this going to screw over our Aussie friend?
You betcha.
[Dave] bought a few things through Element 14 that he would later pick up at their Sydney warehouse. When he got there, he discovered the parts were ‘on hold’. Out of curiosity, he asked what the holdup was and discovered his name was flagged on a US government watch list.
If you’re keeping score, this is an Australian citizen buying stuff from an Australian subsidiary of a UK company, and being told ‘no’ by the US government.
The folks behind the counter at the Element 14 warehouse were extremely helpful, clearing the hold and getting [Dave]’s parts in just a few minutes. This has, apparently, been going on for a while; [Dave] recalled a few times when orders showed up a few days late with the Farnell/Element 14 people apologizing with the word ‘hold’ in there somewhere.
Of course this means it’s possible for someone working at the Element 14 warehouse to clear one of these US government holds, and even if they don’t the order will still go through in a day or two. Government efficiency at its best.
At the time of this writing, [David Bowie], the singer for The Monkees, the creator of Grand Theft Auto, and the British author famous for perpetual motion machines were unavailable for comment. -ed. | 107 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "1222905",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2014-02-25T15:05:52",
"content": "Nor is Davy Jones of the Monkees likely to be available for comment anytime soon. He died 2 years ago (almost to the day). :-(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,376,293.309506 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/this-little-piggy-stayed-home-and-became-a-stove/ | This Little Piggy Stayed Home And Became A Stove | James Hobson | [
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"stove",
"wood stove"
] | This little piggy probably should have gone to the market. Instead, its become an extremely decorative, and cute,
wood burning stove!
After being inspired by a similar Instructable that guides you through the creation of a wood stove using
an expired gas cylinder
, [Ruudvande] had to try it himself. The problem was — he didn’t have a gas tank. Luckily for him, he found someone who did, but as it turned out, they wanted to turn it into a barbecue! So, slightly sidetracked, he built them a barbecue using the center of the cylinder, and got to keep the ends and enough steel to make Mr. Piggy himself.
Almost the entire wood burning stove is made of scrap bits and pieces of steel, and various pieces of mounting hardware. Armed with just a MIG welder, [Ruudvande] welded it together all by hand, and we think it turned out great! He’s not quite happy with it yet though and plans to upgrade the chimney, put a larger grill inside, paint it, and even add a glass window to the door. | 11 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1222775",
"author": "Michiel",
"timestamp": "2014-02-25T13:29:55",
"content": "Nice post! Little sidenote: the name “RuudvandeLooij” is Dutch, and his firstname would be “Ruud”. : )",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1222887",
... | 1,760,376,293.165828 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/nxps-arm-micros-with-motor-controllers/ | NXP’s ARM Micros With Motor Controllers | Brian Benchoff | [
"ARM",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"arm",
"ARM Cortex-M3",
"cortex-m3",
"LPC1500",
"Motor control",
"nxp"
] | It’s still relitavely early in the year, and all those silicon manufacturers are coming out with new toys to satiate the engineer and hobbyist for years to come. NXP’s offering is the
LPC1500
, a series of ARM microcontrollers optimized for motor and motion-control applications.
The specs for the new chips include an ARM Cortex-M3 running at 72MHz, up to 256kB Flash, 36kB SRAM, USB, CAN, 28 PWM outputs, an a real-time clock. There are options for controlling brushless, permanent magnet, or AC induction motors on the LPC1500, with dev boards for each type of motor. Each chip has support for two Despite NXP’s
amazing commitment to DIP-packaged ARM chips
, the LPC1500 chips are only available in QFP packages with 48, 64, and 100 pins.
Don’t think the LPC1500 would be a perfect chip for a CNC controller – the chips only support control of two motors. However, this would be a fantastic platform for building a few robots, an electric car, or a lot of the other really cool projects we see around here. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1222374",
"author": "Trui",
"timestamp": "2014-02-25T09:29:49",
"content": "Still perfect for a CNC controller, you just need more chips. (by the way, your link is broken)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1222379",
"author":... | 1,760,376,293.558874 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/24/cyclone-dust-collector-requires-no-bags-or-filters/ | Cyclone Dust Collector Requires No Bags Or Filters | James Hobson | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"dust collector"
] | After discovering their dust collection vacuum was blowing through filters and leaking powdered fiberglass dust all over their workshop, the folks at i3Detroit decided to take matters into their own hands, and built this
awesome cyclone dust collector that requires no bags or filters!
They were inspired by a similar
wooden sawdust collector
, but as they cut many different materials, they decided to build a steel cyclone for durability. The build makes use of two 5-gallon buckets, a 5-gallon vacuum cleaner, and a meticulously designed sheet metal
cyclone cone
. The vacuum creates a strong suction force and the dust enters the cyclone, getting sucked to the bottom and into the blue bucket. This keeps the filter in the vacuum clean, and keeps all the debris in an easy to access bucket.
To build the cone they used galvanized sheet metal, and cut it to shape with a pneumatic nibbler. A sheet metal roller helped form the cone, which was then riveted together. To seal in the cracks they used duct sealer and foil tape. After adding some vacuum hose and accessories the build was done — approximate cost (minus the shop vac) was around $50, making it a very affordable and quick to pay off project considering the cost savings of replacement bags and filters.
To see another example of cyclone styled dust collectors,
check out this one
which can also be made using stuff you probably have lying around the shop anyway!
[Thanks Evan!] | 46 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1222137",
"author": "will1384",
"timestamp": "2014-02-25T06:40:36",
"content": "I made one a few years ago, using a shop vac, I used it with my CNC router and to clean the floor in my work shop, I found you do still need a filter because any light and fluffy stuff or fine powder wil... | 1,760,376,293.497666 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/24/el-wire-nixie-tube-is-in-your-reach/ | EL Wire Nixie Tube Is In Your Reach | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"el nixie tube",
"nixie tube",
"nixies"
] | Nixie tubes are awesome, but sometimes a little out of reach for some makers, whether it is a matter of obtaining them, or figuring out how to drive them. The hackerspace over at H3 Laboratories decided to try making a fun alternative —
EL wire nixie tubes.
[Marty] leads us through the build in a very detailed Instructable, which makes use of CoolNeon EL wire. He’s using an Arduino Uno with a CoolNeon shield to control it. The trickiest part of this build is forming the numbers to minimize the overlap — to figure this out he modeled it in Blender. He created a test jig and formed the numbers using coat hanger wire first before playing around with the EL wire.
EL wire can be soldered together — it’s just a bit of a fine art, which is explained in
another detailed Instructable
. To black out parts of the number and the trailing wires, [Marty] made use of black plastic dip. The numbers are mounted on a Styrofoam cylinder which fits into the bottom of a large masonry jar. It’s a great build and a fun project to get into Nixies … without actually getting into Nixies.
Stick around for a video of it in operation.
[Thanks Guillermo!] | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1221812",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-02-25T03:15:59",
"content": "Interesting build but the numbers are a bit obscured by the wires as you said, maybe this would work better for a seven segment display (although I know this is meant to simulate a nixie.)",
"parent... | 1,760,376,293.709968 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/24/3d-printing-metal-structures-with-a-6-axis-robot/ | 3D Printing Metal Structures With A 6-axis Robot | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"cnc hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"joris laarman",
"metal 3d printer",
"mx3d-metal"
] | [Joris Laarman] is working on a project called the
MX3D-Metal
which uses an ABB industrial robot arm and a welding machine to create strong metal structures on any working surface and in any direction.
He started last year with the
MX3D Resin printer
, which is the exact same concept, but instead of metal, it uses a two-part epoxy that bonds instantly upon mixing. Their lab is located in Amsterdam, and they work closely with
IAAC
(the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia) — Autodesk provides funding for the research.
[Joris] has successfully printed complex structures using steel, stainless steel, bronze, copper, and even aluminum. Poking around their website you can find many examples of different things they have printed, including intricate matrices of multiple curved lines which end up looking more organic than mechanical. It uses mostly the same concept as the
Rostock Welding robot
we covered a few months ago, which is open source and fairly cheap to make at home!
Stick around for a video of both the MX3D-Metal and Resin robot printers in action!
[via
Gizmodo
] | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1221675",
"author": "strider_mt2k",
"timestamp": "2014-02-25T01:50:53",
"content": "The mind absolutely reels with the possibilities, both practical and…whimsical!I sincerely hope we see more of this in the future.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,376,293.84644 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/24/we-salute-the-television-tube-flag/ | We Salute The Television Tube Flag | Adam Fabio | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"crt",
"flag",
"television",
"tv tube flag"
] | From [Gijs] comes
Beeldbuis Vlag Tijsdlijn, or television tube
flag (
Translated
). We’re not up on our Dutch, but it appears that [Gijs] and friends have created a television tube which waves much like a flag in response to airflow from a fan. The effect is pretty darn amazing, and that’s putting it mildly. To create this hack, [Gijs] built a modified
Wobbulator
. The Wobbulator is an early
video synthesizer
which used added steering coils to modify the operation of a standard TV tube. When excited, the coils would deflect the tube’s electron beam, causing some rather trippy images to appear on-screen. (Yes, here at Hackaday “trippy” is a scientific term).
[Gijs] wanted his screen to be “waved” by a fan, just like a flag would wave. To do this he used an anemometer made of ping-pong ball halves. The anemometer spins up a DC motor from a CD-ROM drive. In this application, the motor acts as a generator, creating a DC voltage. An ATmega328 running the Arduino code reads the voltage from the motor. If the anemometer is spinning, the Arduino then outputs a sinusoidal value. The Arduino’s output is amplified and applied to the coil on the CRT. A network of power resistors ensures the amplifier is correctly loaded. The results speak for themselves. In the video after the break, the tube flag is displaying a slide show of photographs of its construction. As an added hack, [Gijs] used an Arduino Leonardo as a USB keyboard. When the anemometer spins, the primary ATmega328 sends a signal to the Leonardo, which then emulates a push of the arrow keys on the host computer. This lets the tube flag advance its own images. Very cool work indeed! | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1221240",
"author": "peterbjornx",
"timestamp": "2014-02-24T21:19:25",
"content": "Tijsdlijn is a typo of the word “tijdlijn” which means timeline.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1221368",
"author": "Jacques",
"timestam... | 1,760,376,293.779151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/24/guest-post-try-radar-for-your-next-project/ | Guest Post: Try Radar For Your Next Project | Gregory L. Charvat | [
"Featured",
"News",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"cw",
"fmcw",
"impulse radar",
"radar",
"wideband impulse radar"
] | Sensors. The low-end stuff that we can get our hands on usually suffers from poor range, lack of sensitivity, and no way to characterize what the target is. But today we can use the good stuff that, until recently, was only available to military: radar. In this post we will discuss how radar works, commercially available small radar devices, and where to learn more to help make it easy to add radar to your next project. Reach out and sense something!
Radar Basics
Radar uses a radio transmitter and receiver to measure the time of flight from a transmitted radio wave that scatters off a target back to the receiver.
Radar is simple, it consists of a radio transmitter and receiver. Radar is a World War Two acronym meaning Radio Direction and Ranging, in other words a radar consists of a radio transmitter and receiver where the range to an object is measured by clocking the time between the transmitter transmitting a known modulated waveform and the receiver receiving this waveform scattered from a target.
This block diagram represents a conventional radar that comes to mind when you think about radar, you might find this design used on a fishing boat or commercial aircraft.
One enabling technology for Radar was the cathode ray tube (CRT), which facilitated a method of measuring the time delay between transmitted and received waveforms. This led to the development of numerous radar sensors used in the second world war, which generally followed the Plan Position Indicator (PPI) architecture.
Toady, rather than using a CRT we can use high-speed digitizers. This offers the obvious advantage of applying signal processing to acquired data so that only moving targets are detected, tracking can be achieved, imaging, and a multitude of other modes.
But for hobbyist and consumer projects we do not need this much power, range, and can not afford the cost. We need the ability to sense like a long range radar (detecting only moving targets, imaging, Doppler, signatures, etc) but at short ranges and at low costs.
Very few off-shelf small radar options exist as of today. In this post we’ll review these, their basic architectures, and direct you on the next steps.
Continuous Wave (CW) Doppler Radar
How CW Doppler radar works.
If you are not interested in ranging or imaging but would like to measure velocities or radar signatures then consider CW Doppler radar. CW Doppler radar works by feeding the output of a CW oscillator to an antenna and radiates that carrier towards a moving target. This carrier scatters off the moving target back to the receive antenna where it is amplified and fed to a frequency mixer. The mixer mixes the oscillator and the scattered carrier resulting in a Doppler shift product. This product is the Doppler shift off of the carrier’s center frequency and is generally in the KHz range. Low enough to be easily digitized by the audio input port of a laptop computer or other low-cost digitizer.
A low-cost X-band CW Doppler Radar Module, readily available on Ebay.
Try a CW Doppler radar. You can
hack an old police radar gun
by locating the video amplifier or mixer’s output and plugging that signal into the audio input port of your laptop and displaying this data using a ‘water fall’ Fourier transform.
If you find an old motion sensor or door opener. These typically use CW Doppler radar modules known as Gunnplexers. Hack into one just as you would with the Police radar.
Or, you can procure new
off-shelf X-band CW Doppler radar devices from China for < $10 on Ebay
. I’ve used these devices before, they do work but have limited range. This may not matter for your project.
Impulse Radar
The most basic impulse radar simply feeds the output of the impulse generator directly to the transmit antenna. Scattered impulses are amplified and digitized.
Short range radars sense at 150m or less. At these short ranges extremely short pulses (meaning short in time duration, nS or pS in duration) are required to provide sufficient resolution to be useful. Short pulse, or impulse radar systems, generally follow a simple architecture where the impulse generator is often tied directly to a transmit antenna and a low noise amplifier (LNA) is tied to a receive antenna. A high speed digitizer is triggered off the impulse generator and acquires data on the output of the LNA.
Novelda manufactures single-chip impulse radar devices.
You can incorporate impulse radar technology into your next project. Commercial versions of impulse radars are available to hobbyists and developers.
Most notable are the ASIC based impulse radar manufactured by Novelda
. These devices do require external antennas but contain on-board radar and high speed digitizers.
Additional impulse radar systems are being manufactured in quantity for automotive applications (blind spot detection, parking aids, etc), but details on these are not easy to find unless you directly engage the manufacturers. Manufacturers of automotive radar equipment include, Delphi, Continental, TRW, Bosch, Denso, and Autoliv.
Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) Radar
FMCW radar was originally used in radar altimeters starting in the 1930’s. Today, FMCW radar is the leading short-range radar architecture because it offers short-pulse radar resolution while providing significantly greater sensitivity with the same peak transmit power. This is because FMCW radars transmit continuously and leverage the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) to increase SNR in proportion to the time over which the DFT is applied. But for a hobbyist the key take-away is that these radars use a simple architecture and radar signals can be acquired by low-bandwidth digitizers such as the audio input port on your laptop, ADC input ports on micro controllers, the lower cost National Instruments NIDAQ units, etc.
How FMCW radar works.
For an FMCW radar, a CW oscillator is frequency modulated with a linear ramp. In other words, the CW oscillator starts at one frequency and ramps-up to a second over a relatively long period of time (0.5-10 uS). This waveform is radiated out of the transmit antenna towards the target scene. Some of this waveform is fed to the receiver mixer. What is scattered off the target is amplified by the LNA and fed into the receive mixer where it is mixed with the transmit waveform. The mixing product results in a low frequency (KHz range) beat tone that is proportional to range. The higher the frequency of beat tone the further the target. If measuring a multitude of targets then expect to see a multitude of beat tones superimposed on each other. To measure the range to targets you digitize with a low bandwidth digitizer being careful to synchronize the digitizer’s trigger with the start of the up-ramp. With this digitized data for each up-ramp, apply the DFT. This results in a time domain representation of the round trip time from transmitter, to targets, and back to receiver.
The RF Beam Microwave GmbH K-LC1 FMCW radar, a 24 GHz FMCW radar for < $10 (in quantity).
Learn by doing, take the MIT Coffee Can Radar Course, open to everyone through either MIT Professional Education or take it online for free at MIT Opencourseware.
The first fully manufactured Coffee Can Radar Kit is now available from Quonset Microwave in Warwick RI.
Coming soon, the radar Arduino shield.
Add an FMCW radar to your next project. FMCW radar devices are available for developers and hobbyists. Some of the lowest cost FMCW radar devices are manufactured by
RF Beam Microwave GmbH, who offers 24 GHz FMCW radar modules for less than $10 in quantity, shown here is a K-LC1.
In addition to this, you can
build your own ‘Coffee Can Radar’ from the MIT Opencourseware site.
Not interested in building your own coffee can radar from scratch? You can buy a
ready-made coffee can radar kit form Quonset Microwave
. This radar provides data via a USB or BlueTooth.
And
coming soon will be the radar Arduino shield
! Credit for this belongs to Tony Long, who developed this shield loosely based on the MIT Coffee Can radar.
Learn more
Add a radar sensor to your next project. It is not difficult to do with some basic understanding of architectures and signal processing. To learn more,
teach yourself for free with
the MIT OCW course
,
Pick up Gregory Charvat’s book:
Small and Short-Range Radar Systems
(use promo code EEE24 for discount),
If you need help please visit
the community forum
which Greg set up.
Want to learn fast and your employer is willing to pay for a short-course? Sign up to the
MIT Professional Education Short-Course ‘Build a Small Radar System,’
and learn about small radar systems by making your own in 5 days. This was the top-ranked MIT Professional Ed course in 2011.
We can do this.
Soon small radar devices will be everywhere, let your project be one of the first!
Gregory L. Charvat
, is author of
Small and Short-Range Radar systems
, co-founder of Butterfly Network Inc., visiting research scientist at the Camera Culture Group MIT Media Lab, and editor of the
Gregory L. Charvat Series on Practical Approaches to Electrical Engineering
. He was a technical staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory from September 2007 to November 2011, where his work on through-wall radar won best paper at the 2010 MSS Tri-Services Radar Symposium and is an MIT Office of the Provost 2011 research highlight. He has taught short radar courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his
Build a Small Radar Sensor
course was the top-ranked MIT professional education course in 2011 and has become widely adopted by other universities, laboratories, and private organizations. He has developed numerous rail SAR imaging sensors, phased array radar systems, and impulse radar systems; holds several patents; and has developed many other radar sensors and radio and audio equipment. He earned a Ph.D in electrical engineering in 2007, MSEE in 2003, and BSEE in 2002 from Michigan State University, and is a senior member of the IEEE, where he served on the steering committee for the 2010 and 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Phased Array Systems and Technology and chaired the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Boston Chapter from 2010-2011. | 77 | 33 | [
{
"comment_id": "1220945",
"author": "Mark Swope",
"timestamp": "2014-02-24T18:19:22",
"content": "Wow – what a great, in-depth post! Thanks!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1220960",
"author": "Wildar Pease",
"timestamp": "2014-02-24T1... | 1,760,376,294.115459 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/24/luxblaster-blast-a-beam-of-light-at-the-most-intense-light-source/ | LuxBlaster: Blast A Beam Of Light At The Most Intense Light Source | Nick Conn | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"automatic lighting",
"automobile",
"headlight",
"headlight hack",
"LED lighting"
] | [Hazim] wrote in to tell us about his project that teaches inconsiderate drivers a lesson! Well, theoretically. The
LuxBlaster
is a spot light which points towards the most intense light source.
The idea is that you can blast drivers who do not turn their high-beams off with a reverse high-beam of your own.
It is very important to note that this should never be used
, as [Hazim] also clearly states. While this project is meant to prove that it can be done (a “what if”) project, it has two components that are very well done and can easily be used in different projects: the Arduino controlled spotlight and the light intensity tracker.
What would you use an Arduino controlled spotlight for?
Smart lighting
? What about a light source tracker? Let us know in the comments. | 59 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "1220598",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2014-02-24T15:07:17",
"content": "First thing that came to mind for me was rotating a solar array towards the brightest source! Though that’s been done before… there’s always a place to re-purpose something. :)",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,376,293.949162 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/24/braigo-a-lego-braille-printer/ | BRAIGO – A Lego Braille Printer | Eric Evenchick | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"accessibility",
"BRAIGO",
"braille",
"lego",
"Mindstorms EV3"
] | Accessibility devices tend to be prohibitively expensive, and it’s always nice to see a hacker apply their skills to making these devices more affordable.
BRAIGO
is a low cost braille printer
by [Shubham Banerjee]. He built the printer using parts from the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 kit, with a few additions. This LEGO kit retails for $349, and a standard braille printer costs over $2000.
The BRAIGO print head uses weights and a pin to punch holes in standard calculator paper rolls. LEGO motors are used to feed the paper and align the head for accurate printing. It takes about 5 to 7 seconds to print each letter, which are entered on the Mindstorms controller.
While this is a great prototype, [Shubham] intends to continue development with the goal of creating an affordable braille printer. He’s a bit swamped with media requests right now, but is working on releasing BRAIGO as an open source project so others can contribute. It’s an impressive project, especially for a 12 year old student. After the break, watch the BRAIGO do some printing.
Another Open Source braille related project we saw several years ago pipes digital chars to
an Arduino powered braille terminal
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1220364",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2014-02-24T12:12:29",
"content": "My mother was a certified Braille transcriber. She taught me that Braille is not just the conversion of letters into six-bit cells. Frequently used words are shortened, abbreviations are common and short ... | 1,760,376,293.997822 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/24/an-arduino-programmable-load/ | An Arduino Programmable Load | Brian Benchoff | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"constant current",
"constant voltage",
"load",
"programmable load"
] | Having a big block of hot to dump current into is a very useful thing to have if you’re testing batteries, power supplies, high power LEDs, electroplating, or any thing else that would normally require a huge resistor. [Jakub] found himself in need of an electronic load, and instead of a transistor and a pot, decided to make something more automatic:
a programmable load built around an Arduino shield.
The idea behind this load is pretty simple: connect a device to a FET and shunt resistor to measure current. Drive the gate of the FET with an op-amp that maintains either constant current or constant voltage. Control everything with a DAC, and you have a programmable load controlled by an Arduino.
With such a small form factor, getting rid of all that heat was bound to be a problem. For this, [Jakub] is using a 50×50 mm BGA style heat sink with a 5V fan. If it’s good enough for a big CPU, it should be able to handle dumping 70 Watts into a FET. There’s also a conservative application of thermal paste and a very small thermistor underneath the FET that’s able to be read by the Arduino. It might slowly heat up your room, but it’s not going to catch fire.
With the Arduino sketches [Jakub] wrote for his load he was able to characterize a pair of Idea batteries and figure out how much charge a three-year-old recyclable battery had. It’s a great piece of work, and if [Jakub] is willing to go through the hassle of a Kickstarter, it would make a fine crowdfunded product. | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1220145",
"author": "Trui",
"timestamp": "2014-02-24T09:44:55",
"content": "Why not slap an atmega on the board itself, instead of attaching it to an arduino ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1220298",
"author": "Eirin... | 1,760,376,294.183449 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/23/the-bitbox-console-gets-upgraded/ | The BitBox Console Gets Upgraded | Eric Evenchick | [
"ARM",
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"bitbox",
"emulator",
"game console",
"gameboy"
] | The Bitbox, an open source game console, has
received a number of updates
in the past couple of months.
Last time we covered this DIY console
, [Makapuf] had just managed to get the first revision to run a simple game. The second revision will increase the colors to 32k, add another channel of sound for stereo, switch controllers from PS2 to USB, and add support for
Olimex’s UEXT expansion devices
.
While the hardware upgrades are impressive, there’s been a lot of work on the Bitbox software as well. A new game demo called
Fire
was created as a set of tutorials to help people start developing for the console. There’s also a
BitBoy
, a GameBoy emulator for the Bitbox. BitBoy is a ported version of
gnuboy
for the ARM Cortex-M4 processor that powers the Bitbox. It successfully emulates a number of commercial GameBoy ROMs.
We’re looking forward to seeing what’s next for the Bitbox. After the break, check out a video of BitBoy running on the Bitbox. | 16 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1219873",
"author": "Json",
"timestamp": "2014-02-24T07:13:05",
"content": "I would love to see a good cnc controller on this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1220048",
"author": "makapuf",
"timestamp": "2014-0... | 1,760,376,294.460427 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/23/soundcube-a-companion-cube-that-can-talk/ | SoundCube: A Companion Cube That Can Talk | Marsh | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"digital audio hacks",
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"arduino mega",
"bluetooth",
"companion cube",
"portal",
"stereo",
"tda7560"
] | The Enrichment Center likely disapproves of the
SoundCube: a portal music box in the form of a
Portal
Companion Cube
. [Andreas] finished this project a couple of years ago, but we’re glad he’s finally had time to give a rundown on the details at his blog.
The build is primarily a modified speaker box cube—constructed out of what appears to be MDF—with four Alpine SXE-1725S speakers placed at the center of the middle faces. The faces were routed out to resembled the Companion Cube, while the electronics mount and the speaker grills were 3d printed. Inside is a homemade amplifier built around an Arduino Mega, with a TDA7560 quad bridge amplifier, a TDA7318 audio processor, a Belkin bluetooth receiver, and a 3.5″ touchscreen for volume control and for input selections.
Two 12v 7.2Ah lead-acid batteries keep the cube functional for an entire weekend of partying, but probably add a few pounds to the already hefty MDF construction. Check out [Andreas’s] blog for more pictures and
his GitHub
for all the necessary code. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1220123",
"author": "noouch",
"timestamp": "2014-02-24T09:32:46",
"content": "Do we still disregard its advice though?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1221694",
"author": "strider_mt2k",
"timestamp": "2014-02-25T02:00:47... | 1,760,376,294.308904 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/23/hackaday-links-february-23-2014/ | Hackaday Links: February 23, 2014 | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"drone",
"futon",
"laminator",
"laser pointer",
"teardown",
"Trinket"
] | You can pick up a tiny laser pointer on the cheap if you know where to look. But when it comes time to replace the multiple button cells that power it be prepared to clean our your wallet. [KB3WZZ] got around that with the cap from a ball-point pen. He drilled holes in the end plug of the pointer, and
used wire and a plastic pen cap as a battery adapter
. He’s powering it from USB, but now that you have wires exiting the case you can use any source you wish.
[Gerben] tipped us off about
the trinket clone he built himself
. It’s a tiny sliver of a PCB which he etched, populated with through-hole parts only, and finished off with some finger nail varnish to prevent shorting and corrosion. The solder-covered edge connector for USB was left unvarnished of course.
If you live in a college town you are probably quite used to seeing futon pads and frames on the curb waiting for the garbage collector. A little bit of ingenuity, and some added lumber, will
turn a futon frame into a respectable shelving unit
. [Thanks Martin]
Complicated bench equipment + good lighting + a great camera = an awesome teardown. This time around it’s the guts of
a Keithly 2002 8.5 digit mulitimeter laid bare
. [Thanks David]
Here’s
a PCB laminator hack
that is definitely worth a look. The original unit was acquired on eBay for about $25 and had a thermostat whose performance wasn’t optimal. A bit of alteration for the thickness of the substrate, and you’ll never hand iron a toner transfer board again! [Thanks William]
Last summer we heard about
Scout, an ocean-going drone trying to cross the Atlantic
. We just checked the live tracking and the craft is still at sea. But
a much smaller 5ft vessel made it
from New Jersey to Guernsey (an island between the UK and France) after traveling for about 14 months. [Thanks Rob] | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1219156",
"author": "scorinth",
"timestamp": "2014-02-24T00:10:45",
"content": "Looking at the Scout tracker page, it looks like the thing died a while ago and is now just a drifting hazard to shipping. Is that right?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,376,295.003497 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/23/3d-printed-rgb-led-bracelet/ | 3D Printed RGB LED Bracelet | Marsh | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"LED Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"accelerometer",
"Adafruit trinket",
"bracelet",
"led strip",
"neopixel",
"RGB LED"
] | [Marcus’s]
3D-printed LED bracelet
has moved through a number of revisions recently, but each iteration is impressive in both simplicity and functionality. Inspired to experiment with his print of [nervoussystem’s]
Diagrid Bracelet
, [Marcus] took the opportunity to add some LEDs with
his first build
, which combined a strip of RGB LEDs, a small battery, and an
Adafruit Trinket
microcontroller.
A
second build
soon followed, which overhauled the bracelet’s design into a more solid form and managed to double the amount of LEDs by upgrading to a different strip. The bracelet is currently in its third revision, cycling through the spectrum for around 3.5 hours on a single charge. This build also sports a
3-axis accelerometer
: when the wearer shakes the bracelet, the colors skip around. If shaken long enough, the bracelet will enter a dazzling flurry of color flickering. Stick around after the break for a few demonstration videos. If you want to print your own, head over to [Marcus’s]
Thingiverse file
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1218905",
"author": "rdmilligan",
"timestamp": "2014-02-23T21:15:48",
"content": "look pretty sturdy. could add a bit of fun to electronic tagging?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1218937",
"author": "yfjfjhyv",
"timesta... | 1,760,376,295.121065 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/23/advanced-beer-carrier-or-how-to-get-beer-onto-a-plane/ | Advanced Beer Carrier, Or How To Get Beer Onto A Plane | Mike Szczys | [
"Beer Hacks"
] | [
"airline",
"beer",
"customs",
"foam",
"hole saw",
"import",
"TSA"
] | [Badmonky] was facing a life crisis. How could he enjoy the hard-to-find German beers from his homeland while living in Princeton, New Jersey? Sure, you can find many good imports if you try, but that may come at a hefty price. Plus, the lesser known beers are completely unavailable in the States. Of course the solution is to import them himself after each trip home. He just needed a way to
get as much beer on a plane as he possibly could
.
We’d have no problem walking down the aisle with a couple of cases of cold ones, but let’s be honest here. Security won’t even let you on the plane with a bottle of water these days much less a case of tallboys. [Badmonky] hacked together this custom carrier so that it could be checked as luggage while protecting the frothy goodness. Two limiting factors to consider are size and weight. He started with the latter, calculating that 24 bottles would remain under his 50 pound limit. From there he selected a sports bag and picked up sheets of foam which were perforated using a hole saw. Alas the size constraint forced him to leave three of the (now empty?) vessels behind.
The bottles ride upside down and made the international voyage without incident. In retrospect he would have picked a roller-bag as this thing is hard on your shoulder after a trip through the airport and the public transit ride home.
The real question in our mind: why didn’t he check a keg? | 74 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "1218615",
"author": "cr0sh",
"timestamp": "2014-02-23T18:16:38",
"content": "I’m surprised the TSA didn’t “confiscate” it upon landing…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6203321",
"author": "Anonymous Coward",
"t... | 1,760,376,295.424398 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/23/mobilecg-goes-open-source/ | MobilECG Goes Open Source | Adam Fabio | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"ecg",
"medical devices",
"MobilECG",
"open source"
] | After a failed crowdfunding campaign,
MobilECG
has gone open source. MobilECG is a medical grade 12 lead
electrocardiograph
. A 12 lead system is quite a bit more complex than
some of the ECG
systems we have
featured in the past
. [Péter], the founder and designer of the device attempted to fund it through an Indiegogo campaign. While MobilECG is relatively cheap, medical certifications are not. The campaign didn’t reach its goal of $230,000 USD. [Péter] tried again with a grass-roots donation round at his website. That round also fell short of [Péter’s] goal to keep working on the project. Rather than let his hard work go to waste, [Péter] has made the decision to release his hardware and software to the community. The hardware is licensed under
CERN OHL v1.2
. The software is released under the humorously named
WTFPL
.
While we’re not ECG experts, the basic hardware design appears to be sound. MobileECG is based around the
Texas Instruments ADS1278
octal analog to digital converter. Two AVR microcontrollers are used, an ATTiny24, and an ATUC64. The analog design incorporates such niceties as lead off detection and defibrillator protection. It should be noted that there are some known bugs in the design, [Péter] mentions he can be contacted with questions. The software seems to be in an early state, and would require quite a bit of work to get it to a final design. While we do wish [Péter] had better luck with his campaign, we’re always glad to see designs released into the open source community. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1218441",
"author": "Mike Lima",
"timestamp": "2014-02-23T16:23:31",
"content": "Very nice design. Just wondering why they used a general purpose ADC instead of something like a specific ECG Front End (like the ADS 1198 or ADS 1298)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,376,295.07545 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/22/flux-1440-a-highly-impractical-but-awesome-clock/ | FLUX 1440: A Highly Impractical But Awesome Clock | James Hobson | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"FLUX 1440",
"rope clock"
] | One our tipsters just sent us this great project — it’s a unique style of clock that we haven’t seen before. It was completed as part of what we think was a post-graduate program by [Felix Vorreiter]. This is
FLUX 1440
(
translated
).
It uses 1200 meters of marked rope that is fed into the clock and strung between various pulleys and gears. Every second, the rope is moved 1.3cm. Every 57 seconds, the time is readable across the strands of rope — but only for 3 seconds. After that everything goes “back into the river”, a metaphor for chaos.
The explanation behind it is in German, but we’ve tried to piece together a general statement about the meaning behind it. Of course, we’d love if one of our German readers could provide a better translation!
FLUX 1440 displays time as a spatial dimension and counts the length of a day using a long segmented rope. The length of each minute is felt physically, as the viewer must wait as the shapes change until the current time reveals itself from the chaos of the markings.
Stick around for an extremely well produced video demonstrating it — it’s also in German, but we think you’ll be able to piece together the meaning.
[Thanks Matt!] | 52 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "1216195",
"author": "Alex",
"timestamp": "2014-02-22T15:10:23",
"content": "Weird clocks are awesome. I’ve never seen one quite like this before.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1216201",
"author": "RicoElectrico",
"time... | 1,760,376,294.919713 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/22/listening-to-a-smart-scale/ | Listening To A Smart Scale | Abe Connelly | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"bathroom scale",
"infrared",
"ir toy",
"python",
"usb ir receiver"
] | [Saulius] couldn’t find a cost-effective wireless scale that did what he wanted, so he reverse engineered the communication protocol for an off the shelf model to
get weight data himself
.
[Saulius] bought a cheap Maxim 29-66SH scale that uses infra-red to communicate to a detachable digital readout. Using the
USB IR toy
, [Saulius] intercepted the messages that were broadcast. After a little reverse engineering and with the help of some Python scripts, he soon discovered the protocol his scale was using to encode weight messages.
[Saulius] went on to write
a little web app
using JavaScript, SocketIO and Tornado, a light weight Python web server. By connecting to the tiny web server that’s interfaced with a Python script listening for the scales messages received from the USB IR toy, [Saulius] was able to see his weight displayed on his smart phone through a web browser.
Since all the communication is through IR, there is no need to do any invasion of the scale as the receiver can be placed anywhere in line of sight from the transmitter on the scale itself.
Check out the demo video for the whole thing in action. If patching into the scale isn’t hard enough,
you should just build one from scratch
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1216642",
"author": "Martin",
"timestamp": "2014-02-22T20:15:27",
"content": "I love the elegant solution, I have been trying various approaches to weight logging, but this is by far the easiest way. Thanks for the heads up",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,376,294.686714 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/22/smart-reflow-oven-is-over-engineered/ | Smart Reflow Oven Is Over-Engineered | Abe Connelly | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"amoled",
"lcd",
"reflow",
"stm32",
"stm32f429"
] | [Linas] reverse engineered an AMOLED HTC 800×480 screen and interfaced it with an STM32 micro-controller, along with some other components, to make a
gorgeously over engineered reflow oven
.
Under the hood there is a PSoC5LP PID controller to control the 800W IR heating coil and two K-type thermocouples for sensing.
The real beauty is in the relatively small STM32 chip powering the HTC AMOLED screen. The AMOLED screen is high contrast and has a wide viewing angle, giving it a clear crisp view from all front facing viewpoints. Though pushing the limits of what the STM32F429i can do, [Linas] managed to make a very nice “home-grown” user interface, complete with user configurable settings and current temperature graphs.
The user interface looks very responsive and using some clever programming, [Linas] was able to make use of the potential of the screen to provide beautiful plots and interface widgets.
[Linas] goes into quite a bit of detail about the programming involved with rendering to the screen, so be sure to check out the video after the jump. | 28 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1215762",
"author": "Don",
"timestamp": "2014-02-22T09:57:49",
"content": "Would love to see more info on the screen and its interface to the STM32, software.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1215916",
"author": "megahe... | 1,760,376,295.550097 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/21/researchers-create-synthetic-muscle-100-times-stronger-than-the-real-thing/ | Researchers Create Synthetic Muscle 100 Times Stronger Than The Real Thing | James Hobson | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"fishing line",
"muscle",
"nylon"
] | A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have come up with an ingenious way to make a low-cost, high strength, artificial muscle. Their secret? Fishing line. The study was just published today in the
journal Science
, and the best part is they describe how to recreate it at home.
To create it, the researchers take regular fishing line (polyethylene or nylon string) and twist it under tension until it curls up into a tightly formed spring. It can then be temperature treated to lock in this position.
When heated again, the plastic tries to untwist — the peculiar thing is, this causes the entire coil to compress — think of it as Chinese finger-trap. Polyethylene and nylon molecules also contract lengthwise when heated. It can contract up to about 49%, with as much pulling power as 100 times its equivalent human muscle in weight. This equates to about 5.3 kilowatts of mechanical work per kilogram of muscle weight — similar to the output of a jet engine.
Stick around to see the video of how to make it — we’re excited to see what you guys think up for project applications!
[via
Popular Mechanics
] | 110 | 35 | [
{
"comment_id": "1215434",
"author": "EliTheIceMan",
"timestamp": "2014-02-22T06:10:24",
"content": "This seems pretty impractical. Maybe the next step is to sheath some nichrome in a high temp protective and heat dispersive casing and then wrap the monofiliment around that?",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,376,295.314462 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/21/dual-color-extruder-with-a-single-stepper/ | Dual Color Extruder With A Single Stepper | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Crowd Funding"
] | [
"3d printing",
"dual extruder",
"extruder"
] | Once you have a 3D printer able to build a few objects in a single color, the next logical upgrade is a dual extruder. A dual extruder allows for multiple color prints, and by adding a dissolvable filament, the ability to print object that would otherwise be impossible. Fitting a dual extruder on an existing 3D printer presents a problem: simply by using a second stepper motor, you reduce the print area of your printer significantly. That’s the problem Dglass 3D
aims to solve with their extruder
. It’s a dual filament extruder that uses only one stepper motor and takes up less space than some other single filament extruders.
This isn’t the first time the guys at Dglass 3D have tried Kickstarting a dual filament extruder; last year we saw
a very similar mechanism
that used a single stepper motor to feed two filaments. This older model lacked retraction, though, meaning two colored prints would range somewhere between messy, inaccurate, to impossible.
The new extruder uses a servo to ‘latch’ the filament and drive it into the hot end. This means retraction of the filament is possible and from the sample prints with this extruder, the results look pretty good.
Below You’ll see a few video demos of the dual color/retraction extruder printing an object in black and white filaments at the same time. It’s very cool, and with the addition of a dissolvable filament means very complex objects can be printed very easily. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1215330",
"author": "asdf",
"timestamp": "2014-02-22T04:48:20",
"content": "Any word of if this is for 1.75mm and 3mm filament?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1221481",
"author": "Carl@D3D",
"timestamp": "2014... | 1,760,376,295.609538 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/21/meltinator-9000-fuses-glass-by-degrees/ | Meltinator 9000 Fuses Glass By Degrees | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"Arduino Uno",
"glass fusing",
"kiln",
"relay"
] | [Richard]’s wife scored an Evenheat glass-fusing kiln, but the 20-year-old temperature controller was broken. He could have simply ordered a replacement controller, but that kind of problem solving doesn’t get you on Hack a Day. His wife wanted more control over the kiln and he convinced her that building their own was the way to go. Thus,
the Meltinator 9000 was born
.
[Richard]’s design uses an Arduino Uno and an Adafruit display shield, protoshield, and thermocouple reader board. He built a simple relay driver with a resistor, BJT, and a diode and connected it to pin 13 and its built-in indicator. To [Richard]’s delight, all of this fit in the original enclosure.
[Richard]’s software provides 25 fusing schedules with ten steps apiece. Each step has a target temperature, rate of
temperature
change, and a hold time which can be increased on the fly. He ran a test program that heated the kiln to 1500°F at a rate of 2550°F/hour. He then cooled it to 500°F at a rate of 1000°F/hour, which took longer than he thought. The good news is that the kiln is well-insulated! [Richard] has the software available
on his GitHub
.
Don’t have a glass kiln? Prefer to control beer-related temperatures? You could always
hack your stove in the name of homebrewing
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1214951",
"author": "Alan",
"timestamp": "2014-02-22T00:35:38",
"content": "Copper melts at 1083C [1981F]. Standard glass melts at 1500C [2700F],with high grad melting at 2300C [4200F]. Forget etching – you can now MELT copper.I suspect the actual components wouldn’t be happy, howe... | 1,760,376,295.169841 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/21/hacking-the-linksys-wrt120n-part-2/ | Hacking The Linksys WRT120N Part 2 | Adam Fabio | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"Binwalk",
"Craig Heffner",
"firmware",
"linksys",
"obfuscation",
"WRT120N"
] | [Craig Heffner] has been
busy with his Linksys WRT120N
router. When we last checked in on [Craig] he had
reverse engineered the obfuscation
techniques used in the router’s firmware. Since then,
he’s re-enabled JTAG
, cracked the
“encryption” used for saving configuration
backups, and now
he’s devised a simple attack to change the admin password
. With the firmware unlocked, [Craig] went after the hardware JTAG. His first hurdle was a missing jumper connecting the TDI pin to the processor. With a solder blob making the connection, he then found the router would connect to his JTAG debugger, and immediately reset. TDI had been re-used as a GPIO in software, and assigned to the reset button on the back of the router. [Craig’s] JTAG pod was pulling the pin low and causing the reset. To make matters worse, the bootloader also redefined and checked for the reset button. If the button were pressed it would boot into a recovery mode. [Craig] patched the bootloader with a little help from IDA pro. He then desoldered the router’s flash and programmed it outside the system. The firmware required a similar patch. Rather than desolder the flash chip again, [Craig] created a firmware update the router would accept and flashed it via the router’s web interface.
Since he already was deep into the Linksys Firmware, [Craig] looked for any obvious attack vectors. He found a big one in the /cgi/tmUnBlock.cgi. Inside the firmware, the URL sent to the CGI would be sent through sprintf(). In plain english, it means that no input length checking was happening – so a URL longer than the firmware engineers expected (in this case 256 bytes) would overflow into areas of memory it wasn’t supposed to – in this case, the stack. For an astute attacker, that’s a wide open door. [Craig] was able to use find some
Return Oriented Programming (ROP) gadgets
and created an input value that would cause the router to reset its own administrator password. After running the exploit, a quick trip to the router’s webpage proved his attack was successful.
If that wasn’t enough, [Craig] also spent some time looking at the patches to the router’s firmware. The release notes of one of the patches mentioned encrypting configuration files. The WRT120N, like many routers, allows the owner to download and save the configuration as a file. It turned out that the “encryption” scheme was
nothing more than an exclusive OR with 0xFF
. A pretty weak encryption scheme by any standards. To [Craig] we send our congratulations. To the WRT120N software engineers, we’d suggest taking one of
[Craig’s] embedded device exploitation classes
. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1214654",
"author": "SimplEEngineering",
"timestamp": "2014-02-21T21:16:27",
"content": "Wait, so if I understand this correctly, anyone on your LAN can overwrite the admin password with a simple URL? *sigh* (is this the same exploit that “TheMoon” uses?)What’s absurd is the number ... | 1,760,376,295.480695 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/23/workbench-with-built-in-solder-fume-extractor/ | Workbench With Built-In Solder Fume Extractor | Brian Benchoff | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"fume extractor",
"solder",
"solder fume",
"solder station"
] | There’s nothing quite like getting an eye full of solder fumes, but when it comes to solder fume extraction, the most common solution take up a whole lot of work area.
Here’s a very clever solder fume extractor
that doesn’t get in the way, and can be perfectly positioned over the acrid brimstone of a soldering station.
The build consists of a cheap bathroom vent fan built into the back of the workbench feeding into a long PVC pipe that blows the exhaust to the floor a few feet away. The fan is controlled by a simple wall switch, but the intake is where this build really shines. It’s a series of
hard, flexible plastic segments
that allow the intake to be precisely oriented above the work piece, or wherever it’s most convienent to suck solder fumes from.
This solder fume extractor is just a part of
a really amazing electronics workbench
. A lot of thought went into this workspace, from threaded inserts in the work surface to mount a panavise to an amazingly thoughtful equipment rack for computers, monitors, and other assorted heavy equipment.
via
Hacked Gadgets | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1218149",
"author": "Trui",
"timestamp": "2014-02-23T12:50:38",
"content": "I just use the fan from on old PC PSU, with part of the case still attached so that it works both as a guard for the blades, as well as a stand for the fan. I position the fan behind the work area, with the ... | 1,760,376,296.210728 |
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