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https://hackaday.com/2014/02/11/retrotechtacular-where-the-linuxunix-tty-comes-from/ | Retrotechtacular: Where The Linux/UNIX TTY Came From | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"linux",
"retrotechtacular",
"terminal",
"Terminal emulator",
"tty",
"unix"
] | From time to time we realize that sayings which make sense to us probably will have no meaning for future generations. Two of the examples that spring to mind are “hang up the phone” or in a vehicle you might “roll down the window”. And so is the case for today’s Retrotechtacular. Linux users surely know about TTY, but if you look up the term you actually get references to “Teletypewriter”. What’s that all about?
[Linus Akesson] wrote a fantastic essay on the subject called
The TTY Demystified
. We often feature old video as the subject of this column, but we think you’ll agree that [Linus’] article is worth its weight in film (if that can be possible). The TTY system in Linux is a throwback to when computers first because interactive in real-time. They were connected to the typewriter-mutant of the day known as a teletype machine and basically shot off your keystrokes over a wire to the computer the terminal was controlling.
This copper pipeline to the processor is still basically how the terminal emulators function today. They just don’t require any more hardware than a monitor and keyboard. We consider ourselves fairly advanced Linux users, but the noob and expert alike will find nuggets and tidbits which are sure to switch on the lightbulb in your mind.
[Thanks Chuck]
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
. | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1193468",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2014-02-11T18:06:26",
"content": "Great … my lifetime experiences are now historical curiosities.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1193477",
"author": "Alistair",
"timestamp": "201... | 1,760,376,311.827534 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/11/from-vacuum-cleaner-hacking-to-weather-station-reverse-engineering/ | From Vacuum Cleaner Hacking To Weather Station Reverse Engineering | Abe Connelly | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"DVB-T",
"rc-switch",
"sdr",
"weather station",
"ZS-RR10-433MHZ"
] | [Spock] wanted to do a little reverse engineering of his Miele brand remote control vacuum cleaner, so he broke out his DVB-T SDR dongle to use as a spectrum analyser. Sure enough, he found a 433.83Mhz signal that his vacuum cleaner remote control was using, but to his surprise, he found a stray
QAM256
signal when he expected
an ASK
only one.
After a little detective work, [Spock] eventually tracked it down to a
cheap weather station he had forgotten about
. The protocol for the weather station was too compelling for him to go back to his vacuum cleaner, though. After
downloading an rc-switch Arduino library and
making a quick stop at his local radio shack to get a 433.92 radio receiver to decode the signal, he reverse engineered the weather station so he could digitally record the temperature output. The Arduino rc-switch library proved unable to decode the signal, but some Python work helped him get to the bottom of it.
With software defined radio becoming more accessible and common place, hacks like these are a nice reminder just how wired our houses are becoming. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1193209",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2014-02-11T15:25:23",
"content": "I don’t think there was any QAM discovered, I think that was a tongue-in-cheek comment by the author. It appears that both the vacuum and the weather station used on-off keying (OOK), which is not surprisin... | 1,760,376,311.887549 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/11/super-mario-lamp-encourages-physical-activity/ | Super Mario Lamp Encourages Physical Activity | James Hobson | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"question mark block",
"super mario",
"super mario lamp"
] | What better way to encourage jumping around in the house than by adding
your own Super Mario style question block lamps?
It’s a fun and easy project to do because it makes use of an IKEA Sangen lamp — it just needs some slight modifications and a bit of art work to turn it into this iconic question block. You will be working with mains voltage though, so please be careful!
The lamp itself is made out of fabric which means it can be taken apart easily, and then dyed that classic orange hue. Using a stencil you can spray paint on the question mark and then it’s just a matter of adding a springy-latching-pressure-switch (that’s the technical term for them right?) in line with the light bulb. Results may vary, but [Anred] has a great guide on how to make it to get you started.
Now all that’s missing is a sound effect to go with the switch!
Or if you want to really over do it — check out this Super Mario coin block hack,
which actually spits out coins at you! | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1192981",
"author": "Mcobit",
"timestamp": "2014-02-11T12:44:42",
"content": "You could use this for a nice soundeffect:http://www.conrad.de/ce/de/product/191044/Tonaufzeichnungsmodul-10-s-im-Gehaeuse-BRM06M-002-Baustein-45-VDC-Aufnahmezeit-10-s",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,376,312.198039 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/11/tardis-alarm-doesnt-go-vworrrrrp-vwrorrrp-vworrrp/ | TARDIS Alarm Doesn’t Go VWORRRRRP VWRORRRP VWORRRP | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Doctor Who",
"tardis",
"tardis motion sensor",
"tardis sensor"
] | Motion sensors are pretty useful — but they’re just so darn ugly! Well — if you’re a Whovian — maybe this hack is for you. A
3D printed TARDIS Motion Sensor Alarm
!
[Malcolm] has a home security system that uses a series of motion sensors to detect movement in the house. When movement is detected an indicator LED turns on, and a wireless signal is sent to the main control system. So after discovering a nice 3D model of the
TARDIS
(
T
ime
a
nd
R
elative
D
imension
i
n
S
pace) on Thingiverse, he decided to see if he could hack one of his motion sensors to fit inside of it instead.
As it turns out, it was as simple as removing the sensor’s external shell, 3D printing a few support pieces inside of the TARDIS, and soldering on a bright blue LED to replace the dinky indicator light. Simple, but effective!
Don’t forget to check out the following video. Allons-y!
Sadly, it doesn’t go
vworrrrp.
Fun fact though, the groaning, wheezy sound the TARDIS makes was originally achieved by dragging a house key down the bass strings of an upright piano. There was a bit of post-processing, but apparently
the essence of it is still used today! | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1192911",
"author": "Eirinn",
"timestamp": "2014-02-11T11:53:06",
"content": "“Well — if your a Whovian”.I can accept errors here and there, but don’t you dare confuse you and you’re, their and they’re.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,376,312.498676 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/08/behold-lil-screwy-a-homebrew-100-ton-press/ | Behold Lil’ Screwy, A Homebrew 100-Ton Press | Kristina Panos | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bridgeport mill",
"manliness",
"never-seez",
"press",
"steel"
] | Here we have a magnificent example of the power of the inclined plane. [Chris] has built
Lil’ Screwy, a 100-ton home-built press
for about $35 plus scrap on hand. He demonstrates its frightening power by punching a 17-mm hole through 8mm-thick steel using an Allen key.
As [Chris] explains in his hilarious video waiting for you after the jump, the force comes from using really big screws. Lil’ Screwy uses four 1-inch L7-rated ready rods with eight threads to the inch. The bolts run between two 1″ steel plates to form the press. In the top plate, he drilled 1″ holes. The bottom holes are drilled out 7/8″ and tapped so the two plates clamp together with awesome crushing power when you twist the giant coupling nuts.
[Chris] milled a pocket in the underside of the top plate for a big neodymium magnet that will keep, for instance, a 17-mm Allen key in place while you punch a piece of steel with it. He has a ring of smaller ones embedded into the bottom plate to hold supports in place for broaching.
As a special bonus, [Chris] shows you how to stick it to the man when it comes to using that last bit of Never-Seez in the can, and also how to make your decals temporarily repositionable. | 76 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "1187367",
"author": "d",
"timestamp": "2014-02-08T15:24:54",
"content": "This video embodies the maker movement. Little bit of cursing, lot of “I should use X but since I don’t have one I’ll use Y instead”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,376,312.141956 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/08/the-kickstarter-space-cannon/ | The Kickstarter Space Cannon | Brian Benchoff | [
"Crowd Funding"
] | [
"gun",
"kickstarter",
"sattelite",
"space gun",
"suborbital"
] | As far as space travel and Kickstarter is concerned, we’ve seen crowdfunding projects for satellites in low earth orbit, impacting the moon, and even a project for a suborbital rocket.
This one, though, takes the cake
. It’s a gun designed to send very small payloads into space on a suborbital trajectory.
The gun itself is an 8-inch bore, 45-foot long monster of an artillery piece. While the simplest way of shooting something down the length of a barrel would be exploding something in the breech, [Richard] is doing something a little more interesting. He’s broken down the propellent charges so instead of one giant propelling a bullet down a barrel, the projectile is constantly accelerated with a number of smaller charges.
The goal of the Kickstarter is to send a small payload into a suborbital trajectory. Later developments will include putting a small rocket motor in the dart-shaped bullet to insert the payload into an orbit.
This isn’t the first time anyone has attempted to build a gun capable of shooting something into space.
The US and Canada DOD built a gun
that shot a 180 kg projectile to 180 km altitude. The lead engineer of this project, [Gerald Bull] then went on to work with [Saddam Hussein] to design a supergun that could launch satellites into orbit or shells into downtown Tel Aviv or Tehran. [Bull] was then assassinated by either the US, Israeli, Iranian, British, or Iraqi governments before the gun could be completed.
Two videos from the Kickstarter are below, with a few more details on the
project’s webpage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvVt89enslM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0ujqnensdM | 51 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "1187131",
"author": "The Internet",
"timestamp": "2014-02-08T12:08:14",
"content": "yeah… no",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1187157",
"author": "XOIIO",
"timestamp": "2014-02-08T12:36:59",
"content": "... | 1,760,376,312.399582 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/08/8x8x8-cube-invaders/ | 8X8X8 Cube Invaders | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"8 x 8 x 8 LED cube",
"8x8x8",
"LED cube",
"led matrix"
] | Believe it or not, [Anred Zynch] had no soldering skills before starting this project! What we’re looking at here is an
8x8x8 LED cube set up as a Space Invaders style game with a Playstation 1 controller.
He was inspired by several other cubes
like [Chr’s]
, and the
Borg cube
by [Das-Labour]. The project makes use of an Arduino Mega 2560 R3 to drive the 512-LED array, and an Arduino Uno to take care of the sound effects during game play. It’s kind of like Space Invaders — but in 3D!
Complexity of building and wiring it aside, [Anred] has provided great instructions and the code for the entire project, so if you’re looking to recreate it or something like it, you can! It’s also entered in an Instructable’s contest right now, so if you like it, we’re sure he’d appreciate the votes.
And showing off the cube’s effects:
Not enough LEDs for you? How about this
massive 16x16x16 cube?
Too many LEDs? Okay, how about
this tiny 3x3x3 cube? | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1186946",
"author": "neon22",
"timestamp": "2014-02-08T09:14:29",
"content": "That would make a great game of 3D centipedes !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1187026",
"author": "ERROR_user_unknown",
"timestamp": "2014-0... | 1,760,376,312.03878 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/07/two-wheel-balancing-robot-revived-from-the-dead/ | Two-Wheel Balancing Robot Revived From The Dead | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"2 wheel robot",
"balancing bot"
] | [Jouni] built a pretty nice little two-wheeled robot a while back — but he never got it working quite right. Taking inspiration and a bit of opensource code from another hacker featured here,
he’s finished the bot, and it works great!
After seeing
[Jose’s] 3D printed Air Hockey bot,
he poked around the creator’s blog and discovered the
B-Robot
, a 3D printed, two-wheeled, stepper driven, balancing robot. As it turned out, it was incredibly similar to a robot [Jouni] had made himself previously!
[Jouni’s] robot features two NEMA-17 steppers, a 12v 2200mAh battery pack, an Arduino Pro Mini, a MPU6050 gyro and a FrSky receiver. Lucky for him, [Jose’s] B-Robot made use of the same steppers and gyro! Using some of [Jose’s]
code from his GitHub
, [Jouni] was able to bring new life into his little robot!
We’ve included videos of both the original project, and [Jouni’s] version. Aren’t opensource projects awesome?
And the original: | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "1187792",
"author": "0xfred",
"timestamp": "2014-02-08T21:05:29",
"content": "Whilst self balancers are a very common project, it’s unusual to see one using steppers. I started one about a year ago to see how well they worked, but it got put on the back burner. It seems they can wor... | 1,760,376,312.444861 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/07/router-robot-a-promising-playground-for-young-hacker/ | Router Robot A Promising Playground For Young Hacker | Mike Szczys | [
"Robots Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [] | [Stephen Downward] has put together
a very impressive Internet controlled robot
. There are so many things about his video presentation (also embedded below) which we find delightful. Notably, it’s obvious that he knows what he’s talking about when discussing everything from the electronics chosen for the project, the mechanical assembly and the issues with its current state, as well as the software backend that gives him control of the rover.
The bulk of the rover is the Linksys WRT-54G router which he picked up at a thrift shop. This has been
a popular model for building rovers
for quite some time. [Stephen] is not driving directly from the router’s serial port, but that could be an adventure for him down the road. For now he’s using an Arduino Mega along with an Ethernet shield to connect the motors to his network. The IP camera on the front gives him the video feed to operate this completely over the Internet using his own program written in C#. He mentions that the CD wheels he has aren’t ideal because of their thin tread area (covered in masking tape) and the inaccurate mounting which leaves one of them at an angle. He’s hoping to design and print his own. He plans rent some time on a 3D printer at the local University when their 3D printing service comes back online.
We think the hardest part with robot building is getting your first platform up and running. Now that he’s got that it’s a matter of making improvements and add-ons. Since he’s got the I/O of the Mega at his disposal we’d like to see him implement a bunch of different sensor:
line following
, bump sensors, distance sensor, heck… maybe someday he’ll
scavenge some Lidar for it
! | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1186523",
"author": "dodddummy",
"timestamp": "2014-02-08T03:07:54",
"content": "Good work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1186554",
"author": "Rollyn01",
"timestamp": "2014-02-08T03:38:31",
"content": "Stuff like t... | 1,760,376,312.252533 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/07/meet-raspberri-your-personal-voice-controlled-assistant/ | Meet ‘Raspberri’, Your Personal Voice Controlled Assistant | Adam Fabio | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"intercom",
"Personal Assistant",
"raspberry pi"
] | We’ve all seen the old movie scene where the executive calls his assistant on the intercom for some task or other. [Jan] may not be an executive, and he may not have an assistant. He does have
Raspberri, his voice controlled personal digital assistant
. Raspberri started life as a vintage Televox intercom box. [Jan] found it at a second-hand store, and snapped it up in hopes of using it in a future project. That project eventually happened when [Jan] got a Raspberry Pi and learned how to use it. He decided to build the Televox and Pi together, creating his own electronic assistant.
[Jan] started by adding a cheap USB sound card and WiFi module to his Pi. He also added a small 3 Watt audio amp board. The Televox used a single speaker as both audio input and output. [Jan] didn’t want to make any modifications to the case, so he kept this arrangement. Using a single speaker would mean dead shorting the audio amplifier and the sound card’s microphone input. To avoid this, [Jan] added a DPDT relay controlled by the original push-to-talk button on the Televox. The relay switches between the microphone input and the audio output on the USB sound card. Everything fit nicely inside the Televox case.
With the hardware complete [Jan] turned his attention to software. He went with
PiAUISuite
for voice input. Voice output is handled by a simple shell script which uses google voice to convert text to speech. For intermediate processing, such as scraping a weather website for data, [Jan] created custom python scripts. The end result is pretty darn good. There is a bit of lag between saying the command and receiving an answer. This may be due to transferring the audio files over WiFi. However, [Jan] can always get away with saying his assistant was out getting him more coffee! | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1186295",
"author": "madmilo",
"timestamp": "2014-02-08T00:28:32",
"content": "wowowow awesome",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1186315",
"author": "bobfeg",
"timestamp": "2014-02-08T00:42:13",
"content": "I love re-p... | 1,760,376,312.309836 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/07/reverse-engineering-a-banks-security-token/ | Reverse Engineering A Bank’s Security Token | Brian Benchoff | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"bank",
"cryptography",
"security token"
] | [Thiago]’s bank uses a few methods besides passwords and PINs to verify accounts online and at ATMs. One of these is a ‘security card’ with 70 single use codes, while another is an Android app that generates a security token. [Thiago] changes phones and ROMs often enough that activating this app became a chore. This left only one thing to do:
reverse engineer his bank’s security token
and build a hardware device to replicate the app’s functionality.
After downloading the bank’s app off his phone and turning the .APK into a .JAR, [Thiago] needed to generate an authentication code for himself. He found a method that generates a timestamp which is the number of 36-second intervals since April 1st, 2007. The 36-second interval is how long each token lasts, and the 2007 date means this part of the code was probably developed in late 2007 or 2008. Reverse engineering this code allowed [Thiago] to glean the token generation process: it required a key, and the current timestamp.
[Thiago] found another class that reads his phone’s android_id, and derives the key from that. With the key and timestamp in hand, he figured out the generateToken method and found it was remarkably similar to Google Authenticator’s implementation; the only difference was the timestamp epoch and the period each token lasts.
With the generation of the security token complete, [Thiago] set out to put this code into a hardware device. He used a Stellaris Launchpad with the
Criptosuite
and
RTClib
libraries. The hardware doesn’t include a real-time clock, meaning the date and time needs to be reset at each startup. Still, with a few additions, [Thiago] can have a portable device that generates security tokens for his bank account. Great work, and great example of how seriously his bank takes account security. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1186029",
"author": "scorinth",
"timestamp": "2014-02-07T21:45:41",
"content": "I almost wonder if his “legitimate user just getting annoyed at inconvenient security” story is a line. This story is really amusing, either way. :3 And scary.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,376,312.733265 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/07/hackaday-retro-edition-retro-roundup/ | Hackaday Retro Edition: Retro Roundup | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks",
"Featured"
] | [
"mac se",
"mac se30",
"palm",
"retro",
"retro edition",
"thinkpad",
"Xenix"
] | We’ve rebooted
the Hackaday Retro Edition
and again we’re getting a few submissions for retro successes – old computers that somehow managed to load our crappy, pure-HTML, no-javascript edition.
Inspired by the Palm Lifedrive in the previous retro roundup, [Bobby]
dug out his Palm TX
and loaded up the retro edition with the Blazer browser. Given this device has WiFi and a browser, it’s not much, but [Bobby] did run in to a bit of a problem: Palm never released WPA2 for personal use, and this device’s WPA abilities are buried away in a server somewhere. Interesting that a device that’s relatively young could run into problems so easily.
How about another Palm? [nezb]’s first smartphone, back in 2003,
was a Treo 600
. He dug it out, got it activated (no WiFi), and was able to load the retro edition. Even the Palm-optimized edition of Slashdot works!
How about some Xenix action
? [Lorenzo] had an Olivetti 386 box with 4MB of RAM with Xenix – Microsoft Unix – as the operating system. The connection was over Ethernet using a thinnet card.
Here’s a video
of it booting.
[Eugenio] sent in a twofer. The first is a
Thinkpad 600
, a neat little laptop that would make for a great portable DOS gaming rig. It’s running Mandrake Linux 9, his very first Linux. Next up is the venerable
Mac SE/30
with a Kinetics Etherport network card. It’s using a telnet client to talk to a Debian box.
Here’s one that was cool enough for its own post: [Hudson] over at NYC Resistor
salvaged an old Mac SE
with a BeagleBone Black connected to the CRT. This effectively turns the SE into a modern (if low powered) ARM Linux box. Emulators are always an option, though, as is
loading our retro edition
in xterm.
Links to the pics below, and you’re always welcome to dust off your old boxxen, fire it up, and load up
the retro edition
. It’s new and improved! Every half hour or so, five classic hacks from the first 10,000 Hackaday posts are converted to pure HTML. Take a pic and
send it in. | 28 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1185728",
"author": "voxnulla",
"timestamp": "2014-02-07T18:08:27",
"content": "Xenix.. The pronunciation of which, in dutch, phonetically meant “I can’t see anything!”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1185736",
"author... | 1,760,376,312.640208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/07/thumbs-down-songs-on-pandora-with-your-mind/ | Thumbs-Down Songs On Pandora With Your Mind | Kristina Panos | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"bayesian estimation",
"bluetooth module",
"brain waves",
"fft",
"mindwave mobile",
"music",
"pandora",
"raspberry pi"
] | [Steven] likes music. Like many of us, he uses Pandora to enjoy the familiar and to discover new music. Now, Pandora means well, but she gets it wrong sometimes. [Steven] has had a Mindwave Mobile EEG headset lying around for a while and decided to put it to good use. With the aid of a Raspberry Pi and a bluetooth module,
he built a brainwave-controlled Pandora track advancing system
.
The idea is to recognize that you dislike a song based on your brainwaves. The
Mindwave
gives data for many different brainwaves as well as approximating your attention and meditation levels. Since [Steven] isn’t well-versed in brainwavery, he used Bayesian estimation to generate two multivariate Gaussian models. One represents good music, and the other represents bad music.
The resulting algorithm is about 70% accurate, so [Steven]’s Python script waits for four “bad music” estimations in a row before advancing the track.
[Steven] streams Pandora through
pianobar
and has a modified version of the control-pianobar script in
his GitHub repo
.
His script will also alert you if the headset isn’t getting good skin contact, a variable that the Mindwave reports on a scale of 0 to 200.
Stick around for a demo of [Steven] controlling Pandora with his mind. If you don’t have an EEG headset, you can still
control Pandora with a Pi, pianobar, and some nice clicky buttons
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1185479",
"author": "Michael Boswell",
"timestamp": "2014-02-07T16:00:10",
"content": "The future is NOW. This is totally amazing and what a great idea.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1185659",
"author": "Evan",
"timest... | 1,760,376,313.554323 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/07/linksys-wrt120n/ | Hacking The Linksys WRT120N | Adam Fabio | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"Binwalk",
"Craig Heffner",
"firmware",
"linksys",
"obfuscation"
] | [Craig Heffner] recently found himself on the
case of the Linksys WRT120N
router. The router’s firmware was using some previously unknown form of obfuscation, causing headaches for those wishing to run their own software. The WRT120N, being a 2009 model is somewhat out of date at this point. That didn’t stop [Craig] though, as he dove into reverse engineering the firmware obfuscation.
[Craig] started by running the firmware through his own
Binwalk tool
. Binwalk analyzes firmware files for known data, be it embedded filesystems, raw compression streams, or binary files. In this case Binwalk only found a small LZMA block which contained the compressed html files for the router’s web interface. The rest of the firmware was unknown data with a high level of entropy. [Craig] couldn’t do anything more with the firmware update file alone, so he ordered a router to attack from the hardware side. Inside he found typical low-end router components: An Atheros AR7240 SoC, a 2MB SPI flash chip, 32MB of RAM. He also found serial and JTAG headers.
[Craig] connected to the serial port and was greeted with a boot menu. This allowed him to run some commands on the router, but didn’t give him any way to dump memory. He had to go straight to the source – connecting directly to the router’s SPI flash with an
FTDI C232HM
cable. Using
libmpsse
, another of his open source tools, [Craig] was able to dump the flash. He now had the un-obfuscated bootloader code, albeit in MIPS assembly. [Craig] was then able to go after the bootloader with
IDA Pro
. After a bit of work, the obfuscation system was exposed. The system was simple – several byte and nibble swaps had been performed between the LZMA header block and the first few bytes of data. [Craig] finished out this part of his hack by
writing a simple C program
to de-obfuscate and decompress the firmware. | 27 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1185190",
"author": "Kaspokas",
"timestamp": "2014-02-07T12:38:25",
"content": "Reverse engineering obfuscated stuff is very cool. But forgive me for my lack of knowledge, what can you do with a hacked router?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,376,313.455617 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/07/robot-chameleon-teaches-little-girl-about-camouflage/ | Robot Chameleon Teaches Little Girl About Camouflage | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"chameleon",
"robot chameleon"
] | [Markus] has been teaching his daughter about animals using a big old animal encyclopedia. A few days ago, they stumbled upon the chameleon, and when he tried to explain its camouflage abilities, she didn’t quite understand. So he decided to
make her a pet color-changing chameleon robot
. The best part is he built it during her nap!
It’s a fairly simple circuit consisting of an Arduino Uno, a TCS3200 color sensor with breakout board, a ping pong ball, some resistors, and an RGB LED. He plans on adding temperature sensing as well as a capacitive sensor for touch later on. So far, his daughter loves it and plays with it all the time. She’s starting to learn how some chameleons can change their skin color in order to camouflage — and she’s learning the names of some new colors too!
As always, there’s a demonstration video following the break.
What an awesome dad! | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1184983",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2014-02-07T09:19:47",
"content": "Fun idea! However, I’m not sure his daughter will really get any closer to understanding that the main point of the chameleon’s color adaptation ability is blending into the background.. ;) Still very cute ... | 1,760,376,313.756861 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/06/turning-a-broken-laptops-lcd-into-a-fancy-monitor/ | Turning A Broken Laptop’s LCD Into A Fancy Monitor | James Hobson | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"instructable",
"laptop LCD"
] | Seems like you can find broken laptops everywhere these days — so why not do something with them? [Damutsch] shows us how to make
a rather cool looking monitor from a laptop’s LCD display.
First, you’ll need to salvage a working LCD from a dead laptop. Once you have the panel out you can identify the serial key and order a controller board off eBay, which will allow you to plug a normal video input such as VGA or HDMI into the panel. We browsed around a bit and it looks like you can get driver boards from around $15-$30, so not too bad price-wise. It wasn’t so long ago that salvaged LCD panels were basically unusable because of a lack of these driver boards.
Now that you have an LCD panel and a controller board you’ll have to mount it somehow. [Damutsch] decided to use plexi-glass and we’re a fan of the result, kind of modern while still showing off the inside guts. You could also get fancy and
bend the acrylic with a hot wire forming tool! | 59 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1184828",
"author": "Torpenhow Hill",
"timestamp": "2014-02-07T07:20:16",
"content": "Allow me to be the one to point outthe redundancy of having the word“LCD” followed by “Display”.Liquid Crystal Display.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"co... | 1,760,376,313.852355 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/06/plastic-recycling-at-home-promises-a-revolution-in-local-plastic-production/ | Plastic Recycling At Home Promises A Revolution In Local Plastic Production | James Hobson | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"plastic recycling"
] | [Dave Hakkens] graduated from the Design Academy of Eindhoven and decided to try his hand at
making affordable plastic recycling machines
.
His reasoning?
“We recycle just 10% [of waste plastic],” says Hakkens. “I wondered why we recycle so little so I investigated it. I went to all these companies and I realized that they don’t really want to use recycled plastic. So I wanted to make my own tools so I could use recycled plastic locally.”
Typical plastic production, like injection molding, uses very large and expensive machines — so expensive that most of the time, companies don’t want to risk using inferior recycled plastic, as it might damage the machine, or slow production time. Not convinced that recycled plastic is “inferior”, [Dave] has built his own line of machines capable of making recycled plastic parts.
He’s built his own rotary molder, a lever-operated injection molding machine, an extruder, and even a plastic shredder capable of taking in most scrap plastic. The results are quite impressive, and the machines are relatively simple to build. He’s also decided to make the project open source to encourage others to help save the environment —
He hasn’t released the plans online just yet, but promises they will come soon! To see the machines in action, and to see what they’re capable of, check out the following video:
Did Eindhoven ring any bells? Hack a Day actually visited Eindhoven during our Hackerspacing in Europe tour! We visited the city, the old factories, the university, and
a children’s hackerspace called the De Ontdekfabriek! | 73 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "1184564",
"author": "Chris C.",
"timestamp": "2014-02-07T03:25:20",
"content": "I’m impressed. But it’s only half the equation, now [Dave] just needs an actual product. Preferably something:1) With wide enough appeal that you can move a lot of recycled plastic.2) That won’t itself... | 1,760,376,313.197453 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/06/pi-powered-radio-over-ip/ | Pi-Powered Radio Over IP | Brian Benchoff | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"echolink",
"raspberry pi"
] | [KP4TR]
connected a Raspberry Pi to a small, cheap handheld radio
, allowing anyone within a few miles of his house to connect to amateur radio operators all around the world.
For the hardware, [KP4TR] is using a Raspi, a Baofeng BF-888s 400MHz – 470MHz walkie-talkie radio, a USB sound card, and a pair of transformers for the 5V and 3.7V lines. All this is tucked away in a remakably vintage-looking plate and standoff enclosure, complete with acorn nuts and an RGB LED connected to the Raspi’s GPIO to indicate whether the radio is transmitting or receiving.
The software used is
SVXLink
, a Linux port of the
Echolink
software. This app allows hams the world over to connect to very distant radios over the Internet.
You can check out the video demos of the system below. | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1184657",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2014-02-07T04:35:31",
"content": "Vintage would have it in a Bud box or something made of plastic. An enclosure, not a patio with a roof.. Acorn nuts alone don’t do it. Plexiglass cancels all.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,376,313.092141 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/09/using-a-computer-to-read-braille/ | Using A Computer To Read Braille | Brian Benchoff | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"braille",
"fiducial",
"fiduciary marker",
"opencv"
] | [Matthiew] needed to create a system that would allow a computer to read braille. An electromechanical system would be annoying to develop and would require many hardware iterations as the system [Matthew] is developing evolves. Instead, he came up with a much better solution
using a webcam and OpenCV
that still gets 100% accuracy.
Instead of using a camera to look for raised or lowered pins in this mechanical braille display, [Matthiew] is using OpenCV to detect the shadows. This requires calibrating the camera to the correct angle, or in OpenCV terms, pose.
After looking at the OpenCV tutorials, [Matthiew] found a demo that undistorts an image of a chess board. Using this same technique, he used fiducials from the
ARTag project
to correctly calibrate an image of his mechanical braille pins.
As for why [Matthiew] went through all the trouble to get a computer to read braille – something that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you think about it – he’s building a braille eBook reader, something that just screams awesome mechanical design. We’d be interested in seeing some more info on that project as well. | 6 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "1189490",
"author": "Erin",
"timestamp": "2014-02-09T19:24:37",
"content": "I hope it doesn’t sound like a criticism, but the summary doesn’t make it clear what the connection between building a braille ebook reader (which would presumably convert the ebook text to braille text, whi... | 1,760,376,313.247441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/09/upgrading-home-automation-to-home-anticipation/ | Upgrading Home Automation To Home Anticipation | Marsh | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"arduino fio",
"Arduino Uno",
"home automation",
"u.fl",
"xbee"
] | [Bithead’s] already built some home automation to control the lighting and temperature in his house while he’s away, but he wanted to take things a step further and
have the house automatically anticipate his arrival
and adjust the environment accordingly. The project takes advantage of
geofencing
to create a perimeter around the home that listens for a transceiver in [Bithead’s] car. We featured
a similar project with a Raspi
a few months ago, which locked the doors upon driving away.
[Bithead’s] implementation uses a pair of Digi Xbee Pro XSC radios with U.FL antennas to provide an impressive 2+ mile range of communication. The home-based Xbee hooks up to a Parallax Xbee USB adapter and subsequently into his computer—its antenna sits in a nearby window on the top floor of his house to maximize range. For his car, [Bithead] originally opted for an Xbee shield and an Arduino Uno,
but he’s recently overhauled the build in favor of an Arduino Fio
, which reduced the footprint and increased the range. Check out his page for the build log specifics and more pictures. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1188793",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2014-02-09T09:31:41",
"content": "hope he has the right keys so that his house does not get overly friendly.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1188852",
"author": "tutnixzursache1",
... | 1,760,376,313.300054 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/08/adding-an-rpm-readout-for-a-home-made-cnc-mill/ | Adding An RPM Readout For A Home Made CNC Mill | James Hobson | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"dremel CNC",
"hall effect sensor",
"rpm",
"RPM sensor"
] | [Rui] recently put the finishing touches on his homemade CNC mill, which utilizes a dremel-like rotary tool. The problem with using rotary tools for this kind of application is you don’t really have an accurate speed readout… so he designed
his own RPM gauge
.
The sensor is in itself very simple. He’s using a TLE4935L hall effect sensor, a spare 16FE88 microcontroller, a Nokia LCD, and one tiny neodymium magnet. The magnet has been carefully epoxied onto the motor fan, with the hall effect sensor close by. He’s also built a guard around it, just in case the magnet decides to fly off at high speeds.
During testing he hooked up the hall effect sensor to both his home-made circuit, and an oscilloscope to confirm his findings. Once he was assured everything was working properly he sealed it off and mounted the LCD above the spindle as a nice digital readout.
This isn’t [Rui’s] first project to grace the front page either — he’s also made a great
laser range finder hack
as well as
a laser trip wire for Airsoft games! | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1188843",
"author": "XOIIO",
"timestamp": "2014-02-09T10:34:10",
"content": "I did the same thing a few weeks ago with my drill press, also using a hall effect sensor, but was just too lazy to make a video and submit it :/ Guess now it will seem like a copy-cat, damnit.",
"paren... | 1,760,376,313.501164 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/08/pneumatic-powered-flight-simulator/ | Pneumatic Powered Flight Simulator | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"flight simulator",
"Pneumatic cylinder"
] | Remember that feature a few days ago about the Cessna 172 flight simulator? It was pretty awesome. But do you know what it was missing? It was missing
this
.
A fully motion-controlled, pneumatically driven, flight simulator cockpit.
[Dominick Lee] is a high school senior, and he was able to whip together this awesome flight simulator made out of PVC pipe, pneumatic cylinders, an Arduino, a projector, and a gaming PC — in just a few months time! He calls it the LifeBeam Flight Simulator, and he’s released all the information required to make one yourself.
It’s most similar to a
Stewart platform
simulator, which features 2 degrees of freedom, but instead of 6 actuators, this one runs on only two pneumatic cylinders. It works by exporting the roll and pitch (X and Y) data from the game, and then parsing it to an Arduino which controls the pneumatic valve amplifier, powering the cylinders.
It’s an amazing project, and it sounds like [Dominick] had an awesome physics professor, [Dr. Bert Pinsky], to help mentor him. Don’t forget to check out the demonstration video!
[Thanks Matt!] | 16 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1188359",
"author": "cr0sh",
"timestamp": "2014-02-09T04:17:11",
"content": "In case anyone is unfamiliar – this looks really similar to the JoyRider PVC flight simulator:http://www.acesim.com/chapter2.htmlhttp://home.comcast.net/~srdots/my_flight_simulator.htmPretty cool that a hig... | 1,760,376,313.617067 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/08/building-a-tape-recorder-in-1949/ | Building A Tape Recorder In 1949 | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"magnetic tape",
"tape recorder"
] | After telling a few stories about how he built a tape recorder as a 16-year-old boy in post-war Germany, [Hans] was finally cajoled into
retelling this story in a proper form
, giving the Internet one more example of how clever old-school tinkerers could be.
In 1949, [Hans] was but a wee lad of 16 and having built a crystal and tube radio set at 13 and 14 respectively desperately wanted a tour of the local radio station in Hamburg. A kind engineer responded to a letter and a month after requesting a tour [Hans] and his friend found themselves being guided around a proper radio station. One of the most impressive pieces of technology at the time was a tape recorder, which the engineer demonstrated by recording and playing back the voices of [Hans] and his friend. This was the first time [Hans] had ever heard his voice played back and instantly knew he needed to build one of these for himself.
Technical details on the theory and operation of a tape recorder were sparse, but [Hans] managed to come up with an amplifier, tape transport mechanism, a recording and playback head, and homemade magnetic tape made from a reel of iron filings glued to a reel of 8mm film stock.
Testing the equipment, [Hans] and his friend found the device simply wouldn’t work; the homemade magnetic tape was simply too thick, and you couldn’t just go out and buy a reel of magnetic tape. Undeterred, they mailed BASF, the only manufacturer of magnetic tape, and after a month received a 1000m reel of tape.
With tape that worked, [Hans] set about improving his recorder with a tape transport mechanism built from a turntable and a new recording head. This time, his tape recorder worked. When word got around of this amazing machine that could record music, [Hans] was invited to record the local symphony and the speeches for a senior group.
The first commercial reel to reel recorders were released in Germany a little more than a year after [Hans] completed his project, making this one of the more impressive DIY projects we’ve seen. | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1188029",
"author": "Dan Fruzzetti",
"timestamp": "2014-02-09T00:08:34",
"content": "My question: was 1000m the correct figure? How large is a 1000m reel of early magnetic tape, and how safe is it? Is it the kind that winds up like a spring and is ready to pop and sever heads, or ... | 1,760,376,313.700601 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/08/improve-your-ht-ham-radio-by-adding-a-counterpoise-antenna-wire/ | Improve Your HT Ham Radio By Adding A Counterpoise Antenna Wire | Todd Harrison | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"Counterpoise",
"ham",
"ham radio",
"ht",
"tiger tail"
] | We found an interesting tip that might just improve the performance of those small affordable handheld ham radios called a “Handy Talky” or HT for short in ham vernacular. [RadioHamGuy] posted an interesting video on
adding a counterpoise antenna wire to an HT
. He claims it will noticeably improve both transmit and receive by making a quarter-wave monopole into a makeshift dipole antenna system.
Per his instructions you basically add a short wire to the antenna’s outer ground connection or to an equivalent case screw that’s electrically connected to the antenna’s ground side. Apparently this can be referred to as a Tiger Tail and does make it look like your HT has a tail. You would construct a counterpoise antenna wire 11.5 inch for VHF, 6.5 for UHF and about 19.5 inches for an OK performing dual band VHF/UHF radio.
Normally with a handheld radio the counterpoise (ground) is your own body as you are holding the HT. This is because the capacitance of your body makes a good counterpoise under normal conditions. It would be interesting to hear what others find for performance when adding a counterpoise antenna wire.
You can watch [RadioHamGuy’s] full construction tutorial video for multiple radio types after the break. | 38 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1187793",
"author": "scorinth",
"timestamp": "2014-02-08T21:06:03",
"content": "I always thought “HT” was “handheld transceiver”.Also, I wonder if I could get away with making a little plush sleeve to go over it. I bet furry hams would love it…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,376,314.784484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/08/raspi-powered-adm-3a-dumb-terminal/ | RasPi Powered ADM-3A Dumb Terminal | Todd Harrison | [
"classic hacks",
"computer hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"ADM-3A",
"ADM3A",
"dumb terminal",
"Ras-PI",
"raspberry pie",
"retro"
] | [Andrew Curtin] tipped us off to another excellent
resurrected vintage one piece ADM-3A dumb terminal
. [Andrew] not only resurrected this sexy machine by breathing life into her once more after 37 years but he also got it connected online to retro.hackaday.com for those coveted retro Super Nerd bonus points.
As with
other ADM-3A terminals
we have seen on Hackaday, the terminal screen can be interfaced over an RS-232 serial connector to a laptop, however, [Andrew] didn’t have a laptop to sacrifice so he utilized the now popular laptop stand-in RasPi. It’s a clever form factor solution which makes it appear more like a standalone computer for the first time in its life.
To make the hack work he needed a serial adapter to link the ADM-3A terminal to the Ras-PI so he constructed one for himself. It’s another clever solution but he didn’t share much information on this build. Maybe he’ll comment below or elaborate on his site with more details on the construction and utilization of the adapter board from the Ras-PI so others could easily repeat this fun hack. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1187655",
"author": "mikemac",
"timestamp": "2014-02-08T18:59:44",
"content": "From Andrew’s article: “The serial adapter is just a typical MAX232 circuit, I pulled it right out of the datasheet, page 7.”Nice to see the ADM still works!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,376,314.077163 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/06/exploded-hardware-wall-art/ | Exploded Hardware Wall Art | Marsh | [
"hardware",
"Teardown"
] | [
"art",
"art installation",
"exploded view"
] | The gang at Bolt.io realized that the walls in their office deserved some special attention, and they got it by
mounting exploded hardware throughout the space.
They sourced the used devices from eBay, then carefully broken them down into their components and mounted each on its own sheet of
PETG
. The result: exploded views of some of their favorite hardware, including a MacBook Pro, a Roomba, a Dyson Air Multiplier, and more.
Is it a hack? Eh, maybe. This is the first example we’ve seen of a collection of devices on display in this fashion. Regardless, it’s worth a mention considering what happened in the office as a result of the installation. Though the original purpose was simply to decorate the walls, it seems employees have been staring at them regularly, learning more about the designs, the plastics, and the component choices. Think of it as still life—depicting that moment you cracked open a device to inspect its guts—frozen in permanence and on display for both inspiration and convenience.
[via
reddit
| Thanks Buddy] | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1184125",
"author": "Jamie Bliss",
"timestamp": "2014-02-06T21:08:41",
"content": "I want one. Someone needs to make an Etsy for this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1184185",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2014-02-... | 1,760,376,313.90098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/06/fail-of-the-week-oil-expeller-and-hasty-pcb-layout/ | Fail Of The Week: Oil Expeller And Hasty PCB Layout | Mike Szczys | [
"Fail of the Week",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"fab",
"fail of the week",
"oil expeller",
"pcb",
"soldering iron"
] | This Fail of the Week is a twofer. On the left we have
an attempt to heat the output of an oil expeller
. After a bountiful crop of sunflower seeds [Mark] picked up the oil expeller to make is own cooking oil. He tried to use the soldering gun as a heat source but after just a couple of minutes of on-time it melted the soldering iron’s plastic case. He’s looking for an alternate heat source but we wonder why he can’t just ditch the plastic and bolt this to a heat sink?
To the right is the product of hasty PCB layout. [Andrew] needed a USB to GPIO converter to use with his Android stick. He had built several of these before, etching the PCBs himself. But now he didn’t have the time to do his own etching and figured he could lay out a revision of the board and have it fabbed. Turns out
this isn’t the time saver he had hoped
. Problems with the location of silk screen labels aren’t a huge deal, but the ‘V’ in the board where his USB connector is located blocked any cable he tried to plug in. A bit of cutting solved that but he also had to deal with spring terminals whose leads wouldn’t fit the diameter of holes drilled in the board. We always print out the Gerbers and compare the footprints to our parts before submitting to the fab house. But we’re not sure we would have caught the USB cable clearance issue doing it that way. What checklists do you use before submitting your own boards?
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. | 38 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "1183943",
"author": "jordandsp",
"timestamp": "2014-02-06T18:32:04",
"content": "Fail of the week for PCB with silkscreen and clearance problems…. And you guys use MANUAL checks against the gerbers??? Do your tools seriously not have DFM or DRC checks??? Time to move tools. You get ... | 1,760,376,314.317286 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/06/oculus-releases-open-source-hardware/ | Oculus Releases Open Source Hardware | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware"
] | [
"Oculus",
"oculus rift",
"open hardware",
"open source",
"open source hardware"
] | Oculus VR, makers of the very cool Oculus Rift VR display, are making their first steps towards open hardware. Their first project is a
latency tester
, meant to precisely measure the latency of a VR setup or application. This is true open hardware with everything – the firmware, schematics, and mechanical parts
all available on GitHub
Inside this neat bit of hardware is a STM32F102 microcontroller and a TCS3414 color sensor. The firmware is designed to measure changes in color and send that data back to a computer with a timestamp.
Not only are the schematics and board files available, there are also a few links to buy the PCBs at OSH Park: for about $24, you can get three copies of the
main PCB
and
sensor board
delivered to your door. If you have a 3D printer,
Oculus has provided the .STL files
to print out the enclosure for this device.
While this is a fairly niche product, we’re amazed at how well the Oculus folk have put together this open source hardware project. Everything you need to replicate this product, from board files, mechanical design, firmware, and instructions on how to build everything is just
right there,
sitting it a GitHub. Wonderful work. | 18 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1183752",
"author": "Geoffrey Brown",
"timestamp": "2014-02-06T15:38:24",
"content": "Looks like the processor is and stm32f102",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1183797",
"author": "Brian Benchoff",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,376,314.553529 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/06/building-a-cessna-172-simulator/ | Building A Cessna 172 Simulator | Brian Benchoff | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"flight simulator",
"Microsoft Flight Simulator X",
"simulator"
] | As anyone who has downloaded Microsoft Flight Simulator X or X-Plane knows, piloting an aircraft using a keyboard and mouse just doesn’t work. If you’re going to get in to the world of flight simulators, it’s best to go all-in. [Stevenarango] knows this and
built a great Cessna 172 cockpit
for his personal use.
All the gauges, instrument panels, and controls are from
Saitek
, one of the best manufacturers of home/hobbyist flight controls. The instruments were mounted on a 5mm piece of PVC, which is mounted on a C172 cockpit-sized wooden frame. All the instruments, from the throttle, pedals, yoke, trim wheel, individual LCD steam gauges, and multi panel are driven by USB.
As for the actual simulation, [Steven] is using a fairly powerful computer running Flight Simulator X with dual monitors – one for the glass cockpit and another for the windscreen. It’s not quite the same scale
as building a 737 in your garage
, but it’s more than sufficient for an awesome flight simulator experience at home. | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1183488",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2014-02-06T12:28:06",
"content": "[i]…individual LCD steam gauges…[/i]World’s only steam-powered 172! Does it haul a tender full of coal?I like how he did the top of the instrument panel with the right shade of leatherette :-)Nice work….",... | 1,760,376,314.493803 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/06/free-falling-quadcopter-experiments-end-with-splat/ | Free Falling Quadcopter Experiments End With Splat | Adam Fabio | [
"drone hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"crash",
"free fall",
"multicopter",
"quadcopter"
] | Don’t get too attached to the great picture up above, as the quad shooting it was in a death plunge when the frame was snapped. There’s just something tempting about free fall. Nearly every tri/quad/hex/multicopter pilot has the impulse to chop the throttle while flying around. Most quadcopters are fixed pitch, which means that as power drops, so does control authority. When power is cut, they fall like stones. A quick throttle chop usually results in a few feet of lost altitude and a quickened pulse for the pilot. Cut power for much longer than that, and things can get really interesting. [RcTestFlight]
decided to study free fall in depth
, and modified a test bed quadcopter just for this purpose.
First, a bit of a primer on free-falling quadcopters and their power systems. Quadcopters always have two motors spinning clockwise, and two spinning counterclockwise. This configuration counters torque and allows for yaw control. Most large quads these days use sensorless brushless motors, which can be finicky about startup conditions. Brushless controllers are generally programmed to kick a motor into spinning in the proper direction. If a motor is spinning in reverse at several hundred RPM, things can get interesting. There will often be several seconds of stuttering before the motor starts up, if it starts at all. The controller MOSFETS can even be destroyed in cases like this.
When a quadcopter loses power, the motors slow down and thrust drops off. The quad begins to drop. As the falling quadcopter picks up speed, the propellers begin to spin (windmill) due to the air rushing up from below. If the quadcopter started its fall in a normal attitude, all four of the propellers will rotate reverse of its normal direction. The now spinning props will actually act as something of an air brake, slowing the fall of the quad. This is similar to a falling maple seed, or autorotation in a helicopter. The spinning blades will also act as
gyroscopes
, which will add some level of stabilization to the falling quadcopter. Don’t get us wrong – the quadcopter can still be unstable as it falls, generally bobbing and weaving through the air. None of this is a guarantee that the quad won’t tip over onto its back – which will reverse the entire process. Through all of this bobbing, weaving, and falling the flight controller has been along for the ride. Most flight controllers we’ve worked with have not been programmed with free fall in mind, so there is no guarantee that they will come back on-line when the throttle is rolled on. Thankfully many controllers are open source, so testing and changes are only a matter of risking your quadcopter.
[RcTestFlight] found that his FPV h-quad quad was relatively stable in free fall, so he began experimenting with falls from high altitude. He found that many tests don’t end well. One crash managed to bend his aluminum frame badly enough that he replaced two of the arms with more forgiving wood. His quad originally had 9 inch props. In an attempt to go for a slower sink rate, [RcTestFlight] switched to 14 inch props. The larger props also needed slower motors with more torque. After these changes, the quad definitely fell slower, however he found the fall was actually less stable than the 9 inch props. Self deploying foam drag flaps slowed things down even further, but the flaps themselves became an issue when a particularly violent fall ripped them all off. After taking his quad up to 4142 feet, nearly losing his quad, and a number of rough crashes, [RcTestFlight] had has his fill of free fall. We’d love to see more testing, especially with
collective pitch quadcopters
. We’ll keep our own quads safe in powered flight though. | 35 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1183287",
"author": "russellmcmahon",
"timestamp": "2014-02-06T09:25:58",
"content": "If props are rotating in reverse direction in auto-rotate mode and if transition to stable normal forward operation may not be straightforward (both of which were implied to be the case in typical ... | 1,760,376,315.033452 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/05/the-beginning-of-a-diy-vehicle-night-vision-system/ | The Beginning Of A DIY Vehicle Night Vision System | James Hobson | [
"Transportation Hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"night vision",
"night vision car",
"opencv",
"vehicle nightvision"
] | [Stephen] has just shared with us the current progress of his night vision vehicle system, and
it’s looking quite promising!
The idea of the project is to provide the driver with a high contrast image of the road, pedestrians and any other obstacles that may not be immediately visible with headlights. It’s actually
becoming a feature on many luxury cars
including BMW, Audi, GM and Honda. This is what inspired [Stephen] to try making his own.
The current system consists of an infrared camera, two powerful IR light spot lights, and a dashboard LCD screen to view it. It may be considered “not a hack” by some of our more exuberant readers, but [Stephen] does such a great job explaining his future plans for it, which include object recognition using OpenCV, so we felt it was more than worth a share, even at this point.
You see, the idea of vehicle night vision is not to constantly watch a little screen instead of the road — it’s designed to be there when you need it — and to let you know
when
you need it, [Stephen’s] planning on adding a Raspberry Pi to the mix running OpenCV to detect any anomalies on the road that could be of concern. We shudder at the amount of training a system like that might need — well, depending on the complexity of this image recognition.
Anyway, stick around after the break to hear [Stephen] explain it himself — it is a long video, but if you want to skip to the action there are clips of it on the road at 1:53 and 26:52.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NhzUjbXHJg | 57 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "1183095",
"author": "fajo",
"timestamp": "2014-02-06T06:03:57",
"content": ">[Stephen’s] planning on adding a Raspberry Pi to the mix running OpenCV to detect any anomalies on the roadyou could use arduino, buzzer and some RNG, it will work just as good as PI.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,376,314.433596 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/05/3d-printering-making-a-thing-in-freecad-part-i/ | 3D Printering: Making A Thing In FreeCAD, Part I | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"3D Printering",
"freecad",
"tutorial"
] | I’ve been writing these tutorials on making an object in popular 3D modeling programs for a while now, and each week I’ve put out a call for what software I should do next. There is one constant in all those comment threads: FreeCAD. I don’t know if these suggestions reflect the popularity
or difficulty of FreeCAD
nevermind, it’s totally the difficulty.
FreeCAD is an amazing tool that, if used correctly, can be used to make just about any part,
and do it in a manufacturing context
. If you need a bauble that’s three times the size of the original, FreeCAD’s parametric modeling makes it easy to scale it up. If you’re designing a thumbscrew and want the head larger while keeping the threads the same, FreeCAD is for you. Basically, you can think of this as a graphical extension of the
Thingiverse Customizer
. Very powerful, very cool, and unlike a lot of CAD packages out there,
free.
Our in-house, overpaid SEO expert (he’s really just a monkey someone trained to use a bullwhip) demands I link to the previous ‘Making a Thing’ tutorials:
OpenSCAD
AutoCAD Part I
AutoCAD Part II
Blender Part I
Blender Part II
SketchUp
Autodesk 123D
The tutorial for FreeCAD continues below.
Our Thing
As with all tutorials, we’ll be copying this “thing”, taken from an 80-year-old textbook on drafting.
We won’t be copying this thing
exactly –
there’s a small taper on the tab with the counterbored hole – but we’ll get close enough so our finished model should be functionally equivalent.
Starting Up, And An Overview
To use FreeCAD, you might want to
download FreeCAD
. It’s available for Windows, Linux, and OS X in 32 or 64-bit varieties. Pick your poison. After downloading and installing, you’ll end up with a “start center” that looks something like this:
FreeCAD is unique among 3D design programs in that it has
many different workbenches
, or modes, to draw and model in. For most of our thing we’ll be using the Part Design workbench. Under the Start A New Project tab in the start page, click on the Part Design button. Hit Create Sketch, Choose the XY-Plane, and marvel at your drawing grid.
Before you begin, you might as well change the grid size to 1mm and turn on grid snap.
A word of note:
While the grid size
says
millimeters, FreeCAD doesn’t really have units. Well, it has units, where one FreeCAD unit is equal to one FreeCAD unit. This is fine, because now we can design our part in eighths of an inch, where one eighth of an inch is one unit. It’s simpler, and to print out a correctly sized part we’ll need to multiply
anyway…
If you read nothing else, read these two paragraphs
FreeCAD is a parametric modeler. This means all lines, figures, and subassemblies are defined by parameters and constraints. parameters are pieces of information that define a property of a part – a 10cm cube would have a parameter for the X, Y, and Z axes equal to 10cm. Constraints define the relationship between parts of an object. Two lines can be constrained to being parallel; move one vertex of a line, and a vertex of the constrained line will move as well.
Modeling an object parametrically is how companies can design many similar, but differently sized objects. A company that makes shoes may have only one model for every size of shoe. With parametric models, fabricating the parts for a run of size 6 and size 10 shoes may be as simple as changing a single number – the length from toe to heel.
Finally, Building
For most of our modeling, we’ll be working with two toolbars. They are the
geometries
and
constraints
toolbars:
The Geometries toolbar is what you would find in just about any CAD or drawing package. You have buttons for creating a point, an arc, a circle, lines and polylines, and even fillet and trim buttons.
The Constraints toolbar has buttons for locking an object (a line, circle, polyline, or what have you) onto the vertical axis and horizontal axis. In addition, lines can be made parallel, perpendicular, on a tangent to an arc, and the vertical, horizontal distances of a line, as well as the total length of a line or the radius of a circle may be constrained as well.
The first part of our ‘thing’ we’ll draw is the largest circle. Using the grid snap (or by pressing CTRL while moving the cursor around), draw a circle at 0,0 on the grid. This circle will have a radius of 9.5. We’re doing our units in eighths of an inch, and since the largest circle has a diameter of 2 3/8″, or 19/8″, the radius will be 9.5 units. Also add another circle with a radius of 4.
You can use the Geometries button to make these circles roughly to size, then use the radius constraint to make the circles the required sizes.
After you’ve drawn and constrained these circles, you should have something that looks like this:
Now for some detailing
There’s still a lot to add to our ‘thing’. Let’s start with the 3/8″ wide slot. Start by drawing two lines roughly going from the center of the circles through the larger circle. Constrain them to be parallel, and the angle of one (the far right button on the Constrain toolbar) to be 45 degrees.
Using the Trim tool on the geometry toolbar, trim off all the excess – the ends of both lines, and the cutout on both of the circles. Now you should have something that looks like the letter C.
With the “Fix a length” constraint tool, make the distance between both of the 45 degree lines to be 3. Finally, lock the upper, outer vertex of the slot with the ‘Lock’ constraint. You should have something that looks like the pic to the right. You’ll also notice on the left-hand toolbar of FreeCAD the “Solver messages” says it’s a fully constrained sketch.
This means we’ve done this
properly
. Well, in this case that’s a bit of a lie (we haven’t guaranteed the slot is lined up with the center of the circles), but it’s close enough. In FreeCAD, the object is to have a fully constrained object. That’s what we’ve done here.
Since I like to keep these tutorials down to about 1000 words, I’m going to end this here. In the next installment of this tutorial, we’re going to add the flanges on this washer-type part, extrude it into the third dimension, and add the bit with the countersunk hole.
To be continued, and I’ll probably put a link to Part II
right here. | 33 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1182901",
"author": "TheBogueRat",
"timestamp": "2014-02-06T03:08:29",
"content": "Sweet, freeCAD is the one I wanted to see you working with in this series!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1184480",
"author": "Marcus"... | 1,760,376,314.709244 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/04/ws2811-spi-driver-using-one-transistor-and-passives/ | WS2811 SPI Driver Using One Transistor And Passives | Mike Szczys | [
"LED Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"spi",
"timing",
"ws2811"
] | We love the WS28xx projects because even if we never plan to use them, the signal timing is like the most addictive puzzle game ever. For instance, check out
this WS2811A driver which uses hardware SPI to generate the signals
.
The WS28xx offerings place a microcontroller inside an RGB LED, allowing them to be individually addressed in very long chains or large matrices (still a chain but different layout). But the timing scheme used to address them doesn’t play well with traditionally available microcontroller peripherals. [Brett] had been intrigued by some of the attempts to bend hardware SPI to the will of the WS2811 — notably
[Cunning_Fellow’s] work featured in this post
. He took it a great step forward by simplifying the driver to just one transistor, three resistors, and a capacitor.
Click through the link above for his step-by-step description of how the circuit works (it’s not worth re-explaining here as he does a very concise job himself). The oscilloscope above shows the SPI signal on top and the resulting timing signal below. You will notice the edges aren’t very clean, which requires the first pixel to be very close to the driver or risk further degradation. But, since the WS28xx drivers feature a repeater which cleans up signals like this, it’s smooth sailing after the first pixel. | 6 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1181388",
"author": "cyberteque",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T04:47:56",
"content": "Is this a bi-phase encode protocol?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1181431",
"author": "Mike Lu",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T05:31:15",
... | 1,760,376,314.832996 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/04/kitchen-computer-hides-in-pantry-door/ | Kitchen Computer Hides In Pantry Door | Mike Szczys | [
"computer hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"hidden",
"kitchen",
"kitchen computer",
"secret"
] | You might look at the images above and think “oh neat” and then go about your business. But you’d be missing
a great motorized hidden computer build
. We simply must insist that you click on that link and look at all that went into it. Do it. DO. IT.
Still here? Okay, we’ll give you the gist and then you won’t be able to help yourself. First off, [Designforhire] built that door completely from scratch using skills that your average hacker wields. At first glance you’d think it was a retrofit or done with serious woodworking tools (quality table saw, router table, etc.). This actually started with a simple frame out of 2″x3″ pine studs. This is faced with Masonite which was affixed with glue and brads. From there the upper half was outfitted with a dry-erase panel, and trim pieces were added.
Now the hack really starts to get interesting. The opening for the monitor and the keyboard are both motorized. An old cordless drill (borked handle and dead battery) was cannibalized for its motor which is run using the two black switches just above the left corner of the monitor. When closed, a dry-erase calendar covers the monitor and a blank panel keeps the keyboard secret. The computer itself is actually in the basement, with cables running down the hinged side of the door and through a hole in the jamb.
We didn’t see a video showing off the build, but you can satisfy that craving by looking back
at the Kitchen HAL installation
from a few years back. | 33 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1181044",
"author": "VintagePC",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T00:13:53",
"content": "Please tell me “a hole in the jam” is an intentional pantry-based pun… I laughed more than I should have at that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,376,314.90083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/04/gps-for-a-graphing-calculator/ | GPS For A Graphing Calculator | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware"
] | [
"gps",
"graphing calculator",
"ti-84"
] | [Chris], graphing calculator hacker extrordinaire, has seen a few of his projects show up on the front page of Hackaday, mostly involving builds that turn graphing calculators like the TI-84 Plus shown above into something that copies a few features from a smartphone. His latest build,
a hardware GPS module attached to the TI-84
Plus
, is yet another feather in his cap of awesome and impractical addition to a classic piece of hardware.
There were two major technical challenges behind adding GPS to a graphing calculator. The first of these was powering a GPS sensor. Many a calculator modder has put a lot of work into documenting the USB port on the 84 Plus, revealing it is a USB OTG port, capable of serving as a host or device. It also supplies 5V of power to just about anything, burning through batteries as a result.
The next challenge was reading the data coming off the GPS sensor at 4800bps.The TI-84 Plus series of calculators have a series of interrupts that can fire at fractions of the 15MHz clock. By setting the timer up to fire every 197 clock ticks and dividing again by 16, [Chris] can read data at 4758.9bps. It’s close enough to get most of the data, and the checksum included in the NMEA protocol allows the software to discard bad messages. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1180879",
"author": "Krinkleneck",
"timestamp": "2014-02-04T22:01:33",
"content": "Well, that’s interesting… now I have to make it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1180980",
"author": "tekkieneet",
"timestamp": "2014-02-0... | 1,760,376,314.958159 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/04/retrotechtacular-bakelite-plastics/ | Retrotechtacular: Bakelite Plastics | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"Bakelite"
] | [ColdTurkey] sent in a really great video for this week’s Retrotechtacular. It’s a half-hour
promo reel about Bakelite Plastic
. There is so much to enjoy about this film, but we’ve been overlooking it because the first six minutes or so consist of an uncomfortably fake interview between a “Chemist” and “Reporter”. They are standing so close to each other that it’s violating
our
personal space. But endure or skip ahead and the rest of the video is gold.
Bakelite
is an early plastic, and putting yourself in the time period it’s very easy to see the miracle of these materials. The dentures being molded above are made out of phenol formaldehyde resin (to us that sounds like something you don’t stick in your mouth but what do we know?). The plastic pellets take on the shape of the mold when heated — we don’t know if this where the name comes from or if it’s a variation on the name of the chemist who discovered the material: [Dr. Leo Baekeland]. This was the first synthetic plastic, and came at just the right time as it was heavily adopted for use in the electronics and the automotive industry. Both of which were forging new ground at the time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlCFBexBWGU
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
. | 46 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "1180611",
"author": "macegr",
"timestamp": "2014-02-04T18:12:12",
"content": "Proof that Stephen Colbert traveled back in time to explain phenolic plastic to a fake reporter!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1181971",
"... | 1,760,376,315.739212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/04/a-usb-connected-box-o-encoders/ | A USB Connected Box-o-Encoders | Adam Fabio | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"encoder",
"oscilloscope",
"picoscope",
"rotary encoder",
"Teensy",
"test equipment",
"USB scope"
] | [Colin] loves his PicoScope, a USB based “headless” oscilloscope. While using it he found himself longing for a classic oscilloscope interface. Mouse clicks just weren’t a replacement for grabbing a dial and twisting it. To correct the situation he created his
USB-Connected Box-o-Encoders
. The box maps as a USB keyboard, so it will work with almost any program.
[Colin] started by finding encoders. There are plenty of choices – splined or flatted shaft, detents or no detents, panel, PCB, or chassis mount. He settled on an encoder from Bourns Inc. which uses an 18 spline shaft. His encoder also includes a push button switch for selection. With encoders down, knobs were next. [Colin] chose two distinct styles. The two knob styles aren’t just decorative. The user can tell which row of knobs they are on by touch alone. Electronics were made simple with the use of a
Teensy++ 2.0
. [Colin] used a ATUSBKey device running Teensy software, but says the Teensy would have been a much better choice in terms of size and simplicity.
Once everything was wired into the box, [Colin] found his encoders would “spin” when the knobs were turned. They are actually designed to be PCB mounted, and then screwed into a control panel. Attempts to tighten down the panel mounting nut resulted in a broken encoder. Rather than redesign with purely panel mounted encoders, [Colin] used a dab of epoxy to hold the encoder body in place.
The software setup is simple: Whenever an encoder is moved, Teensy outputs a unique keystroke for that encodrer’s
clockwise rotation, counterclockwise rotation, and press-to-select. The PicoScope software keyboard shortcut keys are setup to respond to the keys programmed into the encoder box. The final result is very slick. Timebase, channel voltage, and trigger level, all work like a regular scope. | 27 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1180375",
"author": "Tom Hargrave",
"timestamp": "2014-02-04T15:16:40",
"content": "The PEC11-4215K-S0024 used in his project is no longer being manufactured.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1180560",
"author": "Lindsa... | 1,760,376,315.100873 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/04/manual-bitcoin-transactions/ | Manual Bitcoin Transactions | Brian Benchoff | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"bitcoin",
"cryptocurrency"
] | For something that’s used for such banal transactions like buying drugs and sending the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are actually very impressive pieces of software. It’s a very ingenious solution to the
Two Generals Problem
, and the fact it made a few Bitcoin early adopters very, very rich doesn’t hurt either.
[Ken Shirriff] decided to take a look at the Bitcoin protocol
by creating a Bitcoin address and transferring a small amount of bitcoin to that address,
manually.
It’s a great look at how the Bitcoin protocol actually works, and how ingenious this protocol actually is.
[Ken]’s first task was to create a Bitcoin address. This is a 256-bit private key is the basis for the Bitcoin wallet private key (after being encoded as ASCII characters), and as the 512-bit public key (after being sent through an elliptic curve algorithm). The 512-bit public key is then hashed with SHA-256 and RIPEM 160 to generate the 160-bit public key hash and the Bitcoin address.
After creating a bitcoin address and wallet, [Ken] set out on manually creating a transaction. The idea was to buy a few cents (USD) from Coinbase and send them to his manually created address. This involved creating a transaction according to
the Bitcoin spec
and signing the transaction. Signing each Bitcoin transaction is the key to Bitcoin’s security, and is done with a small bit of code written in the
Bitcoin scripting language
.
With everything written in Python, [Ken] was ready to send his transaction off into the Bitcoin network. This was done by finding a few peers on the Bitcoin network and
sending off a few packets
. After a little bit of mining on the network, [Ken]’s
transaction went through
, confirmed by a deposit into his Bitcoin wallet.
It’s an awesome writeup and impressive achievement to manually send a few Bitcoins from one wallet to another. More impressively, [Ken] provided some amazing insight into how the Bitcoin protocol works, and how much work went into its creation. | 40 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1180154",
"author": "Rodrigo",
"timestamp": "2014-02-04T12:15:17",
"content": "Great, but next time you can test sending to 1DDduZ7Ke6rKi3YnGoFGZsdkNidUgJqChd",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1180164",
"author": "mh",
"ti... | 1,760,376,315.350609 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/04/weaponized-quadrotor-upgrades/ | Weaponized Quadrotor Upgrades | James Hobson | [
"drone hacks",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"quadrotor laser",
"quadrotor rocket"
] | Today we’re looking at a few fun hacks, although they are perhaps a bit ill-advised. What’s the craziest thing you could strap to a quadrotor?
Rockets
?
Lasers
? Turns out… they’ve both been done already.
First up is [Ramicaza’s] firework launching quadrotor. The drone is stabilized using the ArduPilot Mega 2.6, and it carries a pair of “rockets” which are ignited by a pair of steel elements. An ATtiny analyzes the auxiliary radio channel’s PWM signal which controls the relays that power the elements. He’s tested it high up in the sky, so he’s actually being pretty safe about it.
Next is [JLaservideo’s] laser quadrotor. He’s taken a RC controller of a cheap toy to add wireless capabilities to his Arduino Uno. He’s re-routed the original RC toy’s motor wires to an input on the Arduino which in turn activates a 5V relay that powers the 1W laser. It looks awesome thanks to the bright beam — we just really hope he’s wearing proper eye protection, as a laser of that power can do some serious damage to your retinas!
Stick around after the break to see both quadrotors in action!
Editor’s Update:
I agree with many of the comments that this is both dangerous and irresponsible. But instead of censoring the content (which is posted elsewhere so our taking this post down does little) we should be highlighting the dangers and thinking of ways to accomplish the same shenanigans safely and responsibly. -Mike Szczys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdFbia2h0_U
Let us know if you’ve seen anything crazier! | 70 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "1179913",
"author": "Sam Twibill",
"timestamp": "2014-02-04T09:06:43",
"content": "Yes, I can clearly see how having a ToU, HaD has changed irreparably…These are awesome.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1179918",
"author": "... | 1,760,376,315.593159 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/05/robot-dominates-air-hockey-frightens-john-connor-wayne-gretzky/ | Robot Dominates Air Hockey, Frightens John Connor, Wayne Gretzky | Rich Bremer | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"cnc hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"air hockey"
] | We’ve all been disappointed at some point in our lives after yearning to play air hockey and not finding anyone to play against. This is no longer a problem at [Jose]’s house. He has built a very amazing
Air Hockey Playing Robot
. This robot moves in 2 directions, can predict the movements of the puck and also decide to block, shoot or a do a combination of both.
Surprisingly, most of the ‘robotics’ parts are 3D printer left overs, which includes: NEMA17 stepper motors, an Arduino Mega, a RAMPS board, motor drivers, belts, bearings and rods. The bracketry, puck and paddle are all 3D printed. The air hockey table itself was built from scratch using off-the-shelf wood. Two standard 90mm PC fans are all that are responsible for creating the air pressure used to lift the puck. A PS3 camera monitors the action and is literally this robot’s
eye in the sky
.
Check out the video and learn more about this project after the break.
Perhaps the most impressive part of this build is the way that it works. The camera mounted above the table watches the puck and determines its trajectory. The the robot then moves the paddle to the appropriate position to block and return the puck. The trajectory prediction can even take into account bounces off the wall. In case you are a sore loser, it is easy to adjust the robot’s speed, acceleration and strategy algorithms in order to guarantee yourself a win.
This is a complicated build and [Jose] did indeed have some problems to solve along the way. Originally, the rails that spanned the table were made of steel and turned out to be too heavy for the performance characteristics required of the gantry. The steel rods were replaced with carbon fiber tubes intended for kites. The lower weight reduced the gantry’s inertia and allowed for faster movements with less effort from the motors.
If you would like to try your hand at building one of these robots, [Jose] has written an extremely detailed
manual
and makes all of the software and firmware files available on his site. If only he had developed this just a year ago, we are sure he would have taken home the cup at this
tournament
. | 24 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1182700",
"author": "asdf the third",
"timestamp": "2014-02-06T00:18:20",
"content": "HOT DAMN. That really is cool.I’d imagine that that would be a pretty cool thing to have in an arcade, if those still exist.Would it be possible to have different difficulty settings?",
"parent... | 1,760,376,315.657678 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/05/the-30th-anniversary-macintosh/ | The 30th Anniversary Macintosh | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks",
"Mac Hacks"
] | [
"beaglebone",
"beaglebone black",
"crt",
"Macintosh SE"
] | It’s been just over thirty years since the original Macintosh was released, and [hudson] over at NYC Resistor thought it would be a good time to put some old hardware to use. He had found an all-in-one Mac SE “on the side of a road” a while ago (where exactly are these roads, we wonder), and the recent diamond anniversary for the original mac platform
convinced him to do some major hardware hacking
.
Inspired by a six-year-old project from a NYC Resistor founder aptly named
the 24th anniversary Mac
, [hudson] decided to replace the old hardware with more powerful components – in this case, a BeagleBone Black. Unlike the earlier build, though, the original CRT would be salvaged; the analog board on the Mac SE has pins for video, hsync, vsync, and power.
To get a picture on the old CRT, [hudson] needed to write a software video card that used the BeagleBone’s PRU. The CRT isn’t exactly “modern” tech, and everything must be clocked at exactly 60.1 Hz lest the CRT emit a terrible buzzing sound.
With a software video card written for the old CRT, the BeagleBone becomes the new brains of this beige box. It runs
all the classic Linux GUI apps
including XEyes and XScreenSaver, although flying toasters might be out of the question. He also managed to
load up the Hackaday retro site
with xterm, making this one of the best ways to make an old Mac SE useful. | 17 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1182515",
"author": "rj",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T21:57:17",
"content": "The last time I was poking around the yoke of a mac classic, it looked like it would only take bypassing a few parts to convert from 1bpp to greyscale.Alternatively, using a white noise source and a comparator... | 1,760,376,315.408219 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/05/cassapa-augmented-pool/ | Cassapa: Augmented Pool | James Hobson | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"AR pool",
"arpool",
"augmented reality",
"augmented snooker",
"google glass"
] | No good at pool? Never fear, Cassapa is here! [Alex Porto] has created
an augmented reality system for playing pool
, and it means almost anyone can make those cool trick shots!
Ca-what? Cassapa (“caçapa”) is a Portuguese word for pool table pocket. The software works by placing a webcam directly above the pool table for image recognition. Dedicated software interprets the image and identifies the position of the holes, borders, balls and the cue which can then be used to calculate game physics. A projector then projects the forecast physics and allows you to make tiny adjustments — updated in real-time — to make the perfect shot.
Unfortunately, having a big projector shining down on your pool table won’t exactly make anyone believe you’re actually good at pool. Although if you could combine this with Google Glass or any other vision augmenting goggles… that would be pretty cool. Well, you’d still be terribly dishonest and a cheater — but anyway, take a look at the video after the break.
This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen augmented pool though —
what if you hooked it up to a robot? | 48 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1182247",
"author": "Eirinn",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T18:18:07",
"content": "Google glass here it comes :P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1182276",
"author": "voxnulla",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T18:37:05",
... | 1,760,376,316.333974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/05/software-controlled-per-port-power-switching-for-usb-hubs/ | Software-Controlled Per-Port Power Switching For USB Hubs | Kristina Panos | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"power efficiency",
"USB hub"
] | [Befi] wanted to add a second stage backup disk to his ODROID embedded-board server, which typically draws ~1.5W at idle. After adding the disk, he saw power consumption increase by 2W when the new disk
wasn’t
spinning. He thought about using one of those USB hubs with the adorable little rocker switches for each port and replacing them with transistors, but that was going to be messy. After some poking around in the USB standard, he found that most support per-port power switching (PPPS), and set about to
hack a USB hub to enable software-controlled per-port switching
.
[Befi]’s NEC hub uses a
uPD720112
chip which supports PPPS according to the datasheet. After tying the configuration pin labeled GANG_B to +3.3V, the hub declared itself PPPS-compatible. Of course, the manufacturer saved a penny or two by omitting the individual switches, so [Befi] added an open-drain NMOS to each port. He is using
this program
to switch the port on and off and made the switching transparent with autofs. [Befi]’s current script has the bus ID and device ID of the hub hard-coded, but he intends to update it to find them automatically. This hack saves him 10W on average, which is about €30 ($40) per year.
If your hub is under powered, you could
try adding an external power supply
. | 34 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1182021",
"author": "pedro",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T15:13:12",
"content": "30€ per year? where does he buy the electricity from?!?! that’s crazy expensive.It would only save me about 8€. And that is if I had the hub connected 24/7 without ever disconnected in the entire year.",
... | 1,760,376,315.93027 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/05/hidden-pantry-compartment-opens-with-a-puzzle/ | Hidden Pantry Compartment Opens With A Puzzle! | James Hobson | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"Myst",
"puzzle",
"puzzle lock",
"secret compartment"
] | What’s the number one thing kids always dream about for when they have their own house someday? Hidden passages? Revolving bookcases? Closets that lead to Narnia? Secret compartments? Well, [TracRat] has lived out at least one of those dreams by making his very own
Myst inspired hidden pantry compartment!
His pantry is located under the stairs and to make use of the awkward space, he decided to build a wine rack. He still had a lot of unused space so he decided to take it a step further. He’s built a wooden puzzle combination lock consisting of four colored knobs that slide back and forth in grooves. When the correct combination is made, pressing on the square symbol at the top rolls the entire wine rack backwards, exposing a secret side cabinet. It’s an absolutely gorgeous piece of woodwork and we’re totally impressed by the perfect execution of it.
Do you love Myst too? Check out this awesome
Myst inspired Myst(ery) box
[Michael] made for his girlfriend’s birthday! Or how about a leather-bound Myst book that lets you play
Myst on a computer inside of it! | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1181889",
"author": "naught101",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T13:06:41",
"content": "Bonus: Locks out drunk people.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1181932",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T13:56:07",
... | 1,760,376,316.086758 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/05/tic-tac-pic-pack-a-pocket-programmer/ | Tic Tac PIC Pack: A Pocket Programmer | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"pic",
"PICkit 2",
"PICkit 2 clone",
"tic tac box"
] | Sure, mint tin housings are great. But you have to defend against shorts, and cutting out holes for ports and buttons is dangerous business. [Daniel] prefers plastic, and he tipped us off about
a PICKit2 clone that he designed
to fit inside of a tic tac box.
Almost all of the components were salvaged except for the microcontroller and the connectors. He wound his own inductor using the ferrite core from a CFL. [Daniel] had to make a few improvisations for this project. He didn’t have a 20MHz crystal, so he used a 12MHz crystal and tweaked the fuse bits after burning the firmware.
To save space on the board, he soldered wires to RESET, VCC, GND, PGD, and PGC to program the firmware and then removed the wires. The only trouble he had with it was more or less easily solved by replacing two transistors.
You may remember that
we linked to his USBasp programmer in a mentos container
a few months back. We figure [Daniel] must have some pretty fresh breath. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1181738",
"author": "Andy7",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T10:29:46",
"content": "Tic-Tac boxes are GREAT for project boxes!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1181740",
"author": "Andy7",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T10:3... | 1,760,376,316.028718 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/04/nimble-dodgebot-is-super-skittish/ | Nimble Dodgebot Is Super Skittish | James Hobson | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"dodgebot",
"robot toy"
] | For one of [Aron’s] recent robotics modules at college he was tasked with building a small robot. He decided to make project
Dodgebot,
a cute and extremely quick robot that won’t run into things!
The body is made of perforated steel and supports the motor boxes with wheels (
stolen from a toy perhaps?)
, two IR sensors, and the tidy protoboard on top to contain the electronics — seriously check out the wiring on it!
To control it he’s using an 18-pin dsPIC30F3012 and a SN754410NE driver. The robot works by detecting different states based on the distance measurements from each sensor, and then varying the output to each motor. It’s extremely quick and quite fun to watch as it seems to
dodge
everything in its path! See for yourself, after the break.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yohauCuuijs
Hoping for a more evil robot? Don’t forget about [Rodney’s] laser toting robot
that taunts the internet’s favorite pet… | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1181479",
"author": "Alec Kennedy",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T06:08:48",
"content": "I demand to see these in swarms :D!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1181498",
"author": "Nova",
"timestamp": "2014-02-05T06:23:09",
... | 1,760,376,315.977958 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/03/musician-on-a-budget-midi-bass-pedals/ | Musician On A Budget MIDI Bass Pedals | James Hobson | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"bass pedals",
"midi",
"midi bass pedals"
] | Organ pedal boards have been around forever — they’re an easy way to multitask while playing the piano, organ, or even the guitar. [Ville] plays the electric guitar and wanted to give bass pedals a shot — the only problem is, the commercial versions are pretty pricey. So he decided to
make his own temporary solution using an old MIDI keyboard he had lying around.
The beauty of this hack is it’s completely non-destructive — although you might find you like it so much you won’t want to take it apart! [Ville] started by marking out spacer keys using green cardboard. He then grouped together other sets of keys using tape and polystyrene sheets, which he recycled from a plastic waste bin. He then marked off each set of keys with the range of notes to program into the MIDI receiver — on a 49 key keyboard you get just a bit more than an octave of bass pedal keys! It’ll certainly do until you get your hands on
a proper organ pedal unit
.
From there it was just a matter of re-mapping the keys on the software end of things, and disabling the other unused keys. He offers a few different methods of doing this, including using VST plugins, and Pure Data — to which he’s provided a patch he made to simplify the process.
To see it in action, stick around after the break and hear [Ville] play One Hour Backwards on electric guitar. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1180094",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2014-02-04T11:11:31",
"content": "A variant on early keyboard design, with the E-F pair. Good start. Look for a junk-able organ. Wurlitzer 25’s have reed switches on the pedal assembly that is removable. Pedal spacing is such that the p... | 1,760,376,316.131599 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/03/decascrap-a-three-servo-decapod/ | Decascrap: A Three Servo Decapod | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"decapod"
] | [Drewtoby] loves making robots. His latest project is a 10-legged bot called the Decascrap,
which makes use of only 3 servos!
What we like most about this project is the leg mechanism [Drew] has cooked up. The legs are made of guitar picks hinged to what look like popsicle sticks. Each guitar pick has a hole punched in it which allows the servo rod to go through the legs. Strategically placed globs of hot glue on either side of each leg on the servo rod allows for the parallel motion during the actuation of the legs. A third servo tilts the bot back and forth as the legs are moved, allowing the bot to scuttle about.
Stick around after the break to see it tackle some
rough
terrain — well, actually it’s just a piece of uneven foam, but hey!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BBqDQLfjdg
He’s also made
many other robots
, including a Decipede, various maze solving bots, and even a few that play simple games like Tic Tac Toe! | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1179503",
"author": "Matt",
"timestamp": "2014-02-04T03:21:38",
"content": "It kinda takes one step forward, one back, then one to the right.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1179610",
"author": "TacticalNinja",
... | 1,760,376,316.179332 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/03/controlling-alphanumeric-lcds-with-three-wires/ | Controlling Alphanumeric LCDs With Three Wires | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware"
] | [
"hd44780",
"lcd",
"shift register"
] | The HD44780 LCD controller is the defacto way of adding a small text display to your next project. If you need a way to display a few variables, a few lines of text, or adding a small user interface to a project, odds are you’ll be using one of these parallel LCDs. These displays require at least six control lines, and if you’re using a small microcontroller or are down to your last pins, you might want to think about
controlling an LCD with a shift register
.
[Matteo] used the ubiquitous ‘595 shift register configured as a serial to parallel converter to drive his LCD. Driving the LCD this way requires only three pins on the Arduino, [Matteo]’s microcontroller of choice.
For the software, [Matteo] modified the stock Arduino LiquidCrystal library
and put it up on his Git
. Most of the functions are left untouched, but for this build the LCD can only be used in its four bit mode. That’s not a problem for 99% of the time, but if you need custom characters on your LCD you can always connect another shift register.
If you just can’t spare three pins for a display, you could
squeeze this down to just two
, or add a second microcontroller for a
one-wire-like interface
. | 38 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1179386",
"author": "bobfeg",
"timestamp": "2014-02-04T01:36:19",
"content": "I just use a drop of epoxy to dead-bug mount an ATtiny84 on the back of the LCD. That way you can use 1-wire or I2C or whatever you want. I get the tinys in 100 lot at Mouser for $0.80 ea. I get the LCDs ... | 1,760,376,316.489975 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/03/ikea-led-table-mod-doesnt-lack-awesome/ | IKEA LED Table Mod Doesn’t LACK Awesome | Adam Fabio | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"ikea",
"lack",
"led",
"ws2812"
] | Some people look at IKEA LACK tables as cheap furniture. Our readers look at them as a blank canvas. [Klaas] has turned a LACK Side table into an
interactive LED table
featuring 144 RGB LEDs. After attending a class on WS2801 pixel strings at his student IEEE chapter, [Klaas] was inspired to design something of his own. He settled on an IKEA LACK table and started sketching. He didn’t actually have a table on hand, so he had to deduce the size from the website images and dimensions. He calculated a usable size of around 45cm, which was pretty close to the mark. After running a few tests, [Klaas] determined that a 12×12 grid of squares 35mm on a side would provide that enough resolution to play simple games. The 35mm x 35mm grid would also be small enough for the LEDS to illuminate. He used a laser cutter to cut the an interlocking grid from 3mm MDF. A base plate with 144 12mm LED holes was also cut out, and the entire assembly was glued together.
For illumination, [Klaas] settled on WS2812B LEDs, as they were cheaper than their WS2801 couterparts. The WS2812B’s also snapped easily into his 12mm holes. At this point [Klaas] actually purchased his IKEA table and proceeded to cut a huge hole in it. The grid glued right in, and some aluminum L-profile cleaned up the top edge. Driving all those LEDs would need a bit of processing power, [Klaas] chose a
Teensy
3, and the well-known
OctoWS2811
library. He also added a USB host shield, which allowed him to use an Xbox 360 USB game pad as his controller. For software, he created a simple Tetris clone, and ported snake from the Arduino game shield. A menu and some scrolling text ties everything together. The only thing left to add is a glass top. [Klaas] hasn’t settled on clear or diffuse glass yet. We a suggest clear to avoid hiding any details of this great build. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1179120",
"author": "delmadord",
"timestamp": "2014-02-03T21:40:46",
"content": "Simple and oh, shineees!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1179229",
"author": "Kris",
"timestamp": "2014-02-03T23:11:44",
"content": "He... | 1,760,376,316.54318 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/03/laser-based-pcb-printer/ | Laser-Based PCB Printer | Rich Bremer | [
"cnc hacks",
"how-to",
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"DIY laser",
"diy pcb",
"etched PCB",
"pcb"
] | Being able to create PCB’s at home is a milestone in the DIYer’s arsenal. Whether you physically mill or chemically etch boards, it’s a tricky task to perfect. [Charlie & Victor] are working towards a solution to this complicated chore. They call their machine the
DiyouPCB
. DiyouPCB is an open source PCB etching project consisting of both hardware and software components.
The project is based on using a Blue Ray optical pickup. The pickup was used in its entirety, without any modification, to simplify the build process. In order to use the stock pickup, [Charlie & Victor] had to reverse engineer the communication protocol which also allowed them to take advantage of the auto-focus feature used while reading Blue Ray discs. The frame of the machine is reminiscent of a RepRap, which they used to do preliminary testing and laser tuning. The X and Y axes run on brass bushings and are belt driven by stepper motors which are controlled by an Arduino through a specially designed DiyouPCB Controller Shield.
To start the process a blank PCB board is cut to the final board size. Photoresist Dry-Film is applied to one side of the board before it is put face down on the machine. The PCB design is generated using
Cadsoft Eagle
PCB Design Software and exported as an HPGL file. The DiyouPCBRun software sends the HPGL information to the custom written Arduino firmware, which in turn controls the stepper motors and optical pickup using the DiyouPCB Controller Shield. The optical pickup’s laser removes the photoresist film from the non-trace areas of the board. The exposed copper is then etched away by means of an acid bath followed by stripping the remaining photoresist film to expose the copper traces. The result is a completed PCB board.
Admittedly, the PCB results are not perfect. The stepper motors are believed to be causing vibration which can be seen in some of the etchings. Axis stiffening and carriage damping reduced the vibration but did not eliminate it. To further combat the vibration issues, [Charlie & Victor] are debating upgrading to servo motors or sacrificing speed by replacing the belts with lead screws.
If you are wondering how you can get one of these machines, it’s easy. [Charlie & Victor] have made all of the necessary
project files
available on their website for you to download, including the 3D-printable .stl files, software, and controller shield. | 62 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "1178829",
"author": "Necromant",
"timestamp": "2014-02-03T18:09:09",
"content": "This one looked like a cleaner and more simple approach.http://hackaday.com/2012/08/09/exposing-pcbs-with-a-home-made-laser-printer/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,376,318.866025 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/03/soldering-in-the-dark-add-some-light-to-your-iron/ | Soldering In The Dark — Add Some Light To Your Iron! | James Hobson | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"soldering iron light"
] | While [William] may not know
what he’s doing (his words, not ours!), at least he can SEE what he’s doing now with this
awesome soldering iron light modification
.
And judging by the build quality, we’d reckon he really does know what he’s doing!
He’s taken a piece of copper-clad PCB, and formed it to create a nice circular copper donut. This allows him to make a ring of LEDs in parallel that will slide nicely over the soldering iron and integrate into the plastic case.
To power it, he’s made a small diode bridge to rectify the AC, and a 24 ohm high-wattage resistor run in series with the heating element. The voltage drop across the resistor is 7.5V max, which equates to about 5.3V RMS minus the diode voltage drops. This means the LEDs see about 4.5V at a total of 135mA, which works out to about 17mA each — just under the approved rating. All of this fits nicely into the original casing of the soldering iron.
Finally to finish it off, he’s MacGyver’d an old pill bottle into a protective casing around the LED ring — it looks surprisingly stock on the soldering iron!
Do you have a tool hack that adds handy features? Let us know through the
Tips Line! | 33 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1178620",
"author": "0xfred",
"timestamp": "2014-02-03T15:16:54",
"content": "Aaaarrggh! There’s just *so* much wrong with that simple circuit I hardly know where to begin. I thought LEDs in parallel were bad enough. Then there’s that “unknown wattage” resistor – if it decides that ... | 1,760,376,318.765925 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/03/from-a-truck-trailer-to-a-mobile-workshop/ | From A Truck Trailer To A Mobile Workshop | James Hobson | [
"Hackerspaces"
] | [
"mobile hackerspace",
"mobile workshop",
"project polaris",
"Steven Roberts"
] | If you’re a seasoned hacker, you might find you need a portable workshop, because every moment away from home you feel a bit naked without access to all your tools and machines. It’s a bit of an older project that we’re quite surprised we never covered, but without further ado let us introduce you to [Steven Roberts’]
Polaris Project trailer
!
[Steven] is
quite
the seasoned hacker. In 1983, he took a
17,000 mile journey across America
on a technology equipped bicycle — a very impressive feat at the time — seriously you won’t regret watching his video about it.
Anyway, fast forward to 2010, and [Steven] was invited to explain his new project on Make — with detailed build instructions! The 24′ mobile workshop utility trailer features thousands of electronic parts, cabinets filled with both hand and power tools, welders, a CNC router, a 2kW generator, a solar array, AGM battery backups, a ham radio, dedicated computer, soldering equipment, microscopes and more. It is quite literally packed to the gills with an amazing variety of tools.
The picture here doesn’t do it justice, so we recommend you check it out for yourself!
Is anyone planning on making their own mobile workshop? We don’t know about you, but we are now!
[via
Toolmonger
] | 39 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1178386",
"author": "Nammar Gatzi",
"timestamp": "2014-02-03T12:24:51",
"content": "If I’m a seasoned hacker what?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1178646",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2014-02-03T15:33... | 1,760,376,318.387852 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/02/the-most-horrifying-use-of-3d-printing/ | The Most Horrifying Use Of 3D Printing | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D ultrasound",
"ultrasound"
] | As anyone with a Facebook account that’s over the age of 25 will tell you, 3D ultrasounds of fetuses are all the rage these days, with ultrasound pictures of the unborn recently taking the leap from black and white blobs to 3D – and 4D – images. With the advent of 3D printers,
the inevitable has happened
. Now you can order a 3D print of your yet-to-be-born progeny.
The company behind this – 3D Babies – takes 3D ultrasound data from weeks 24-32 and turns it into a 3D model. The printed 3D models sell for $800 for the full size version, $400 for a half-size version, and $200 for a quarter size version. It appears the 3D ultrasound data is simply wrapped around a pre-defined mesh, so while the resulting print may come out looking like your spawn, it’s still not a physical copy of the 3D/4D ultrasound data.
Despite the ‘creepy’ factor of these little bundles of plastic, we’re wondering why we haven’t seen anything like this before. Are there any obstetricians/radiologists/ultrasound techs out there that have experience with importing 3D ultrasound data into an editor of some sort? Notwithstanding any HIPAA violations, it seems it would be rather easy to turn this sort of 3D data into a printed object.
3D printing CT scans models
can’t be the only other instance of this type of thing.
Thanks [Will] for the nightmares | 38 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1176565",
"author": "RBR",
"timestamp": "2014-02-02T12:22:47",
"content": "I find it kinda of weird that the example pics have topology laid out…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1178136",
"author": "Tony",
"tim... | 1,760,376,318.941502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/02/rewriting-ws2812-driver-libraries-for-optimization/ | Rewriting WS2812 Driver Libraries For Optimization | Mike Szczys | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"attiny85",
"logic analyzer",
"reverse engineering",
"saleae",
"timing",
"ws2812",
"ws2812b"
] | We like [Tim’s] drive for improvement. He wrote a WS2812 driver library that works with AVR and ARM Cortex-M0 microcontrollers, but he wasn’t satisfied with how much of the controller’s resources the library used to simply output the required timing signal for these LED modules.
When he set out to build version 2.0
, he dug much deeper than just optimizing his own code.
We remember [Tim] from his project
reverse engineering a candle flicker LED
. This time, he’s done more reverse engineering by comparing the actual timing performance of the WS2812(B) module with its published specs. He learned that although several timing aspects require precision, others can be fudged a little bit. To figure out which ones, [Tim] used an ATtiny85 as a signal-generator and monitored performance results with a Saleae logic analyzer. Of course, to even talk about these advances you need to know something about the timing scheme, so [Tim] provides a quick run-through of the protocol as part of his write-up.
Click the top link to read his findings and how he used them to write
the new library, which is stored in his GitHub repository
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1176442",
"author": "Joost Yervante Damad",
"timestamp": "2014-02-02T10:43:26",
"content": "Awesome work!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1176507",
"author": "ftorama",
"timestamp": "2014-02-02T11:35:27",
"content": ... | 1,760,376,318.312153 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/01/oscilloscope-repair-projects-still-probing-for-success/ | Oscilloscope Repair Projects Still Probing For Success | Mike Szczys | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"lecroy",
"oscilloscope"
] | [Luke] isn’t able to declare total victory yet.
His LeCroy 9450 oscilloscope repair project
has seen some success, though. The glitchy screen seen above is just one of the problems it had, but has now been fixed. When [Luke] got his hands on it, this was one of three screen states: the other two being normal operation or completely dead. Replacing the screen connector was all it took, so he moved on to the second part.
This one is much less trivial. Only one of the two channels works—which might be the point at which many would abandon the repair—but it’s still a fine single-channel scope. [Luke] continued to trouble-shoot by disassembling the bottom of the case and breaking out the device’s schematics. He traced the circuit and found one module that is suspect (and is looking for help finding a replacement). Unfortunately, the problems don’t end there. Another unknown problem is causing erroneous signals on the displayed waveforms. It’s an odd issue but it really feels like he’s close to solving this one! | 35 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1176172",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2014-02-02T06:49:02",
"content": "Go thru all connected boards, modules, and edge connectors with bright light and cleaning tip of cloth on a spatula. Blow with compressed air and inspect fail-prone solder joints like regulator chips et... | 1,760,376,319.013557 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/01/raspi-inception-cd-rom-case-mod/ | RasPi “Inception” CD-ROM Case Mod | Marsh | [
"computer hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"case",
"case building",
"cdrom",
"enclosure",
"raspberry pi"
] | At first glance, [John’s]
CD-ROM RasPi case
may not seem all that unique, but we like both the implementation as well as the end-result functionality it provides. His goal was to use the Pi as a torrent downloader, and to store the downloaded files on a shared network drive. The Pi drive would slide into a bay in the server’s case—hence the
Inception
reference: a computer in a computer—allowing downloads while putting another step between the server and the outside world keeping, as well as guaranteeing that the network share would be available, because the server and the Pi would use the same power source.
[John] gutted the CD-ROM’s internals to leave only the PCB, which he stripped of most everything save for the power connector in the back. He then used the base of his old RasPi case as a standoff, mounting it to the top of the CD-ROM’s PCB. He soldered the power lines to the ROM’s power connector and temporarily hooked up a 5V adapter until he gets the server running. The final step was to carve out the back of the case for access to the Ethernet and USB ports, which [John] accomplished with a dremel, a hacksaw and a file. The front of the case still looks like a stock CD-ROM drive, and [John] has plans for future mods: re-purposing the LED to show network activity and modifying the buttons to serve as a reset, pause, or start for torrent downloads. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1175959",
"author": "chango",
"timestamp": "2014-02-02T03:34:24",
"content": "Ross SparcPlug. Google it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1175984",
"author": "Alex",
"timestamp": "2014-02-02T03:51:30",
... | 1,760,376,318.442345 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/01/controlling-alphanumeric-lcds-with-two-wires/ | Controlling Alphanumeric LCDs With Two Wires | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware"
] | [
"hd44780",
"lcd"
] | The Hitachi HD44780 LCD controller is the most common interface to all those alphanumeric LCDs out there, and there are a million and one tutorials for connecting these displays to any microcontroller imaginable. This still doesn’t mean hooking up these displays is necessarily simple, though: you still need at least four wires for the data, at least two for control signals, and power and ground lines for connecting the LCD the traditional way.
Here’s a neat trick for connecting HD44780 displays
that only needs two wires. In this setup there’s only a ground and power+data wire. The interesting part of this build is using the power pin to transmit serial data with an RS-232-like format. The only difference is keeping the data line at +5 V when idle; a reasonable-sized cap keeps the display and controller alive when the master microcontroller is transmitting.
This technique does require a bit of logic on the receiving end, which a small 8-pin PIC can handle with ease. Communication between a microcontroller and this “smart” LCD is done at 2400 bps, which even the wimpiest micro can handle. All the software to make this setup work
are available here
, and we expect an Atmel-based version to hit the Hackaday tip line shortly. | 42 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1175711",
"author": "Peter S. May (@psmay)",
"timestamp": "2014-02-02T00:44:58",
"content": "For the curious, 1-Wire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Wire) is basically a generalization of this concept to a multiple-device bus, like I²C with lower bandwidth and fewer wires.",
"pa... | 1,760,376,318.584933 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/01/duo-portable-a-homebrew-computer-with-keyboard-and-display/ | DUO Portable: A Homebrew Computer With Keyboard And Display | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"atmega1284",
"DUO Portable",
"homebrew"
] | [Jack] is famous ’round these parts for his modern reinterpretations of very early computers. He’s created a computer entirely out of logic chips, a microcontroller-powered multicore box, and even a very odd one-instruction computer. For his latest project, he’s stepped up his game and made something that’s actually fairly useful:
a microcontroller-powered system
with an integrated keyboard and display.
The DUO Portable, as [Jack] calls his new toy, is built around an ATMega1284P microcontroller. Also on this board is a serial EEPROM that acts as a very small drive, a 102×64 pixel graphic display, and enough tact switches to create a QWERTY keyboard.
The DUO Portable boots to a primitive operating system where files can be created, edited, and saved. The
programming language for this computer
is called DCPL – the DUO Portable Command Language – and can be used to create anything from a simple ‘Hello World’ program to a block-building game.
Like all of [Jack]’s homebrew computer projects, he’s written an emulator
that can be run in a browser
. There’s also video of [Jack] playing around with the DUO Portable available below.
If you’re wondering what music [Jack] is using for this video,
I found it
. It’s an Atari POKEY. | 17 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1175441",
"author": "Matt",
"timestamp": "2014-02-01T21:24:59",
"content": "Quick one, it’s DPCL. If it was DCPL, it’d be one of those acronyms like php.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1175449",
"author": "truthspew",
"... | 1,760,376,318.50286 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/01/autonomous-lighting-with-intelligence/ | Autonomous Lighting With Intelligence | Kevin Darrah | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Kinect hacks"
] | [
"Kinect",
"lighting",
"xtion"
] | Getting into home automation usually starts with lighting, like hacking your lights to automatically turn on when motion is detected, timer controls, or even tying everything into an app on your smart phone. [Ken] took things to a completely different level, by
giving his lighting intelligence
.
The system is called ‘Myra’, and it works by detecting what you’re doing in the room, and based on this, robotic lights will optimally adjust to the activity. For example, if you’re walking through the room, the system will attempt to illuminate your path as you walk. Other activities are detected as well, like reading a book, watching TV, or just standing still.
At the heart of the ‘Myra’ system is an RGBD Sensor (Microsoft Kinect/Asus Xtion). The space in the room is processed by a PC running an application to determine the current ‘activity’. Wireless robotic lights are strategically placed around the room; each with a 2-servo system and standalone Arduino. The PC sends out commands to each light with an angle for the two axis and the intensity of the light. The lights receive this command wirelessly via a 315MHz receiver, and the Arduino then ‘aims’ the beam according to the command.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen [Ken’s] work; a couple of years ago we saw his extremely unique
‘real life’ weather display
. The ‘Myra’ system is still a work in progress, so we can’t wait to see how it all ends up. Be sure to check out the video after the break for a demo of the system. | 28 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "1175232",
"author": "David J",
"timestamp": "2014-02-01T18:24:58",
"content": "Very nice makes the remote control lights i’m building look a bit outdated! I look forward to seeing more of Ken’s work on Myra",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"com... | 1,760,376,319.081795 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/01/atmega-attiny-core-temperature-sensors/ | ATMega & ATtiny Core Temperature Sensors | Brian Benchoff | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"atmega",
"Atmel",
"attiny",
"sensor",
"temperature"
] | We don’t know if this will come as a surprise to the regular Hackaday reader, but a whole bunch of Atmel microcontrollers have a very cool feature hidden away in their datasheets. Most of them – everything from the ATMega 168, 328, 32u4, to the ATtiny85 and 84 have a temperature sensor right on the chip. [Connor] did a little bit of research on this sensor and
came up with a little bit of code
that spits out the core temperature of these Atmel chips over the serial port.
The temperature sensor on these Atmel chips is accessed by writing a code – ‘100111’ for the Mega32u4 and ‘100010’ for the tiny84, for example – into the ADMUX register on the chip. According to the datasheet, the returned temperature is accurate to +- 10°C, but that can be easily calibrated by holding an ice cube (in a plastic bag, of course) up to the chip.
With a little more code, [Connor] is able to output the temperature of the microcontroller core over a serial port. In testing, his chip started out at 20°C and reached equilibrium at 24°C after about a minute. Pretty neat, and could be used as a temperature sensor for a project in a pinch. | 47 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "1174942",
"author": "ogap",
"timestamp": "2014-02-01T15:22:06",
"content": "I wonder what happens when you submerge an Arduino in a toilet bowl.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1175283",
"author": "John",
"time... | 1,760,376,319.251466 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/01/pvc-cryptex-keeps-your-stuff-safe/ | PVC Cryptex Keeps Your Stuff Safe | James Hobson | [
"how-to"
] | [
"cryptex",
"diy cryptex"
] | Apparently we’ve never shared a Cryptex before! Made popular (and coined) by the Da Vinci Code, a Cryptex is a combination style lock originally used to store secret messages. You can make your very own
using a few pieces of PVC pipe, some epoxy, and nuts and bolts!
Cryptexes
have a clever design that cannot really be lock picked, without simply breaking it. In [Dan Brown’s] novel, it was said that some Cryptexes stored a fragile vial of vinegar with the message written on papyrus — that way, if it was forcibly opened the vile would break, dissolving the thin papyrus note.
They work similar to a bicycle’s combination lock, where if the correct password is guessed, the tumblers inside align, allowing the two halves of the cylinder to come apart. It’s actually a very simple design on the inside, and the whole mechanism can easily be made by yourself with minimal tools.
Using PVC it’s a relatively easy project, although you could also make a much more impressive one out of metal instead, like this amazing one made from a copper pipe. | 24 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1174706",
"author": "asdf the third",
"timestamp": "2014-02-01T12:05:06",
"content": "And now someone will be making a Cryptex bruteforce cracking tool.Actually, that’d be really cool. I’d imagine that it would have bands that wrap around the individual rings connectd to servos or s... | 1,760,376,319.140719 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/01/the-k9-curfew-door/ | The K9 Curfew Door | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"doggy door",
"x10"
] | [Kenbob] is an awesome pet owner. He has two small dogs that have free access to the backyard through a doggy door. It’s great during the day, but they have to close it at night to stop the dogs from bothering the neighbors. So he decided to make
an automatic curfew based doggy door
!
Before setting out on his project, he determined some design goals that had to be met. Namely, he couldn’t have it lock the dogs outside by accident! The hack makes use of an old large format flat-bed scanner that had stopped working a while ago. As it so happened, this scanner had just enough carriage travel to be able to actuate a cover for the doggy door. After reinforcing the sliding cover, he hooked it up to an Arduino Nano, a RTC and a H-Bridge motor driver in order to control it.
In order to add scheduling ability and to program the door remotely, he has also hooked it into his existing x10 control infrastructure in his house — not too shabby! It also features a manual 3-position switch to lock it open, closed, or to leave it on automatic. The question is, can a raccoon get in?
He’s been testing it for a few weeks and it works quite well, although he admits it is not the most rugged solution — lucky for him, his dogs aren’t the type to run headfirst into things. Stick around after the break to see it in action.
http://socialcam.edgesuite.net/videos/2014-1-20/FseNzMgO.mp4 | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1174719",
"author": "ameyring",
"timestamp": "2014-02-01T12:21:01",
"content": "A very interesting hack with a large device! One suggestion is to put weak magnets at the bottom of the opening so when the door is down, it sticks to the magnets and doesn’t give wildlife the impression... | 1,760,376,319.490333 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/31/are-we-not-indestructible-we-are-quiz-buttons/ | Are We Not Indestructible? We Are Quiz Buttons! | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"arduino pro micro",
"arduino pro mini",
"devo",
"low power",
"quiz buzzer"
] | In what we hope is a new trend in interviewing, some of the people at [Anthony]’s place of work asked him to
make some wireless quiz buttons
. He took the task quite seriously, making them extremely robust and low-power.
[Anthony] is experienced in the button arts, having made
this party push button
for a wedding reception. His design for the quiz buttons is a little different. Each button has an Arduino Pro mini and an nRF24L01 wireless RF module. On the receiver side is an Arduino Pro micro and an another RF module. A connected PC captures the serial data and displays the pressed button’s ID. It also shows the order in which subsequent buttons were pressed and the time elapsed between them.
The really notable part of this build aside from the awesome laser-cut MDF Devo energy dome button housings is the extremely low power consumption of the transmitting Arduinos. [Anthony] has designed them to go into sleep mode which disables all on-board circuitry and only wakes on interrupt. He removed the power LED and the voltage regulator since they run on 2-AA batteries. The voltage regulator was drawing more than 25mA in sleep mode. Because of these mods, each button consumes < 1μA, which is less power than the batteries can self discharge over their lifetime.
[Thanks Jef] | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1174408",
"author": "gartral",
"timestamp": "2014-02-01T08:04:06",
"content": "dude.. a nanoamp? you could theoretically power those little guys on the ambient wireless radiation coming off the cell phones of 2-3 people in the same room! That’s freaking awesome!",
"parent_id": n... | 1,760,376,320.222372 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/31/verifying-a-wireless-protocol-with-rtlsdr/ | Verifying A Wireless Protocol With RTLSDR | Brian Benchoff | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"433MHz",
"NRF905",
"radio",
"RTLSDR",
"sdr",
"software-defined radio"
] | [Texane] is developing a system to monitor his garage door from his apartment. Being seven floors apart, running wires between the door and apartment wasn’t an option, so he turned to a wireless solution. Testing this wireless hardware in an apartment is no problem, but testing it in situ is a little more difficult. For that, he turned to
software defined radio with an RTLSDR dongle
.
The hardware for this project is based around a TI Stellaris board and a
PTR8000 radio module
. All the code for this project was written from scratch (Github
here
), making it questionable if the code worked on the first try. To test his code, [Texane] picked up one of those USB TV tuner dongles based around the RTL2832U chipset. This allowed him to monitor the frequencies around 433MHz for the packets his hardware should be sending.
After that, the only thing left to do was to write a frame decoder for his radio module. Luckily, the datasheet for the module made this task easy.
[Texane] has a frame decoder for the NRF905 radio module available in his
Git
. It’s not quite ready for serious applications, but for testing a simple radio link it’s more than enough. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "1174093",
"author": "DainBramage1991",
"timestamp": "2014-02-01T03:25:16",
"content": "Another good use for those incredible RTL-SDR modules. They are truly revolutionizing the radio hobby, IMHO.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,376,319.662114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/31/cnlohr-demos-his-photoetch-pcb-process/ | [CNLohr] Demos His Photoetch PCB Process | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"pcb",
"pcb fabrication",
"Photoetch",
"Riston",
"uv"
] | If you’re going to learn something, it only makes sense to learn from a master. [CNLohr] is known around these parts for his fablous PCBs, and he’s
finally started to document
his entire fabrication process.
[CNLohr] is using a photoetch process, where a mask is created with a laser printer on overhead transparencies. He covers the copper clad boards with a Riston photosensitive mask—available
here
, and they accept Bitcoin—sent through a laminator, and exposed with the laser printed mask and a UV grow bulb. After the mask has developed, [CNLohr] drops his boards into a ferric chloride bath that eats away the unexposed copper. He then removes the photomask with acetone and cuts the boards with a pair of aircraft snips, and they’re ready to be soldered up with components.
Yes, home PCB etching tutorials are pretty much a solved problem, but [CNLohr]’s work speaks for itself. He’s also the guy who made a
microcontroller/Linux/Minecraft thing
on a glass microscope slide. Learning from a guy with these skills means you’re learning from one of the best.
Video below, and there’s also a video going over the design of a PCB using KiCAD (!) and
TopoR
(!!!)
available here
. | 25 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1173865",
"author": "sneakypoo",
"timestamp": "2014-02-01T01:00:51",
"content": "Those traces are making my eyes bleed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1173873",
"author": "Brian Benchoff",
"timestamp": "2014-0... | 1,760,376,319.62033 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/31/this-smd-reflow-hot-air-gun-hangs-around-your-workbench/ | This SMD Reflow Hot Air Gun Hangs Around Your Workbench | Rich Bremer | [
"cnc hacks",
"how-to",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"hot air gun",
"hot air rework station",
"reflow soldering",
"smt",
"surface mount"
] | Has reflowing surface mount components got you down? [Giorgos] is currently working on a project that will lift your spirits…. well at least your hot air gun. Tired of manually holding his heat gun in one hand and IR thermometer in the other, [Giorgos] set out to create a device to alleviate just that. Although not completed yet, it appears the
machine’s intent is to hold the heat gun at an appropriate height
above the work piece in order to achieve the correct reflow temperature. He
doesn’t say how the height of the hot air gun will be controlled. We’d like to see a microcontroller adjust the height of the hot air gun depending on the temperature of the component to be reflowed.
[Giorgos] gives an extremely detailed account of his build process.
Make sure to check out all four pages of the project post!
We’ve seen a lot of interesting work from [Giorgos] over the years like this
capacitive touch-pad entry system
.
[via
Dangerous Prototypes
] | 6 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1173753",
"author": "Matt H",
"timestamp": "2014-01-31T23:41:48",
"content": "Its easier to just modify an old drill press to hold it:http://imgur.com/ayYIhVA,9ZIbgdY,zXxrq5P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1173854",
"author... | 1,760,376,319.552554 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/03/collins-lab-is-coming-back/ | Collin’s Lab Is Coming Back | Todd Harrison | [
"how-to",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Collin",
"Cunningham",
"Digital Mulit Meter",
"dmm",
"measure current",
"measure ohms",
"measure voltage",
"measurement"
] | We would like to share a bit of good news;
Collin’s Lab is back
on the airwaves of the Internet. If you didn’t know, [Collin Cunningham] previously created excellent short videos, sometimes entertainingly tongue-in-cheek, for Make Magazines on the subjects of electronic components and fundamental electronics. In 2012 he was hired at Adafruit as a Creative Engineer to help with software development and video production.
Going forward Collin’s Lab videos will be a regular feature on
Adafruit’s Blog
and their
YouTube channel
. We’re sure there is going to be tons of entertaining learning from Collin with his unique video production skills and presentation delivery.
This first release of Collin’s Lab on Adafruit is a primer review covering fundamental multimeter functionality and measurements. Not much here for the medium to advanced electronics hacker but for the beginner this is an excellent and quick way to learn the basics on using your multimeter.
If you want to checkout Collin’s older video productions you can find them on his Narbotic Instruments site under –
“Make Presents”
and
“Collin’s Lab”
or watch them all with this
convenient playlist
. Just after the break you can also watch his latest edition of Collin’s Lab. | 30 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1178260",
"author": "Sasha",
"timestamp": "2014-02-03T10:37:44",
"content": "This guy is sooooooooooo annoying and boring. I did not miss him at all.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1178849",
"author": "JimBob",
... | 1,760,376,320.111994 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/02/clever-mini-matchstick-gun/ | Clever Mini-Matchstick Gun | James Hobson | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"grant thompson",
"matchstick gun",
"toothpick gun"
] | Looking for a quick fun little project you can do for next to nothing? Why not
make your own matchstick/toothpick launcher!
[Grant Thompson] the [King of Random] is at it again with another fun project that anyone can do — we just hope you’re responsible with it! All you need is some clothespins, a utility knife, and some form of munition — we like the flaming matches!
By cutting a few grooves into the clothespin, gluing it back together and re-configuring the spring layout, you can make a formidable mini-gun that can shoot upwards of 20 feet. Using a pointy toothpick it will skewer innocent fruits quite effectively too!
To see it in action and to learn how to make one yourself, stick around after the break.
[Grant] can’t take all the credit for it though, as it was originally inspired by [Samarai’s] Instructable the
Clothespin Gun
, which also has some neat ideas about modifications! | 24 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1177950",
"author": "jipgsje",
"timestamp": "2014-02-03T06:20:26",
"content": "Next big thing in american prisons.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1177953",
"author": "supershwa",
"timestamp": "2014-02-03T06:21:46",
... | 1,760,376,319.800906 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/02/hacking-an-escape-from-east-germany/ | Hacking An Escape From East Germany | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"escape",
"hot air balloon",
"night crossing",
"stasi"
] | Some hacks are just for fun. Some make your job or your life easier. Once in a great while, a hack will save your family from an oppressive government. This is the kind of hack that [Günter] pulled off when he and [Peter]
built a homemade hot air balloon
to escape East Germany and the oppression of
the Stasi
in 1979.
Like many East Germans who weren’t in line with the Party, [Günter] found life unsatisfactory on his side of the
Berlin Wall
. Travel, job options, and freedom of expression were all severely limited. Aside from joining the Communist Party, the only option seemed to be escape to West Germany.
[Günter] and his wife [Petra] were inspired when [Petra]’s sister, who had escaped in 1958, came to visit. She brought with her a newspaper that covered the
International Balloon Fiesta
in Albuquerque, New Mexico. [Günter] and [Peter], whom he worked with, decided that they would conspire to build a hot air balloon capable of transporting them, their wives, and their four children across the border.
Theirs is an incredible story fraught with adversity. They ended up constructing three different balloons, all the while traveling further and further from home to avoid suspicion when buying large quantities of fabric. They had a lot of trouble finding the right propulsion method and ended up using pure oxygen. During the narrow window they had before [Günter] was due to report for military duty, the weather was unfavorable except for a short period after a front had passed through. They had no time for testing and just went for it.
Everything that could go wrong did. One of the ropes caught fire. The last anchor ripped suddenly from the earth and hit [Frank], one of [Peter]’s kids in the forehead. Once the burner illuminated the balloon, they noticed the hole you see pictured above.
If you think this sounds like a movie, you’re right. Disney adapted this true story in the 1982 film
Night Crossing
.
[Thanks Jeffrey] | 39 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1177845",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2014-02-03T04:43:05",
"content": "Hackaday should do an article on how Captain Ahab hacked a brick compass by forging a harpoon tip into a new compass needle in the novel Moby Dick.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,376,319.74211 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/02/hackaday-links-february-2-2014/ | Hackaday Links: February 2, 2014 | Brian Benchoff | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"9v",
"9V battery",
"apple",
"enclosure",
"hammock",
"hammond enclosure",
"pentalobe",
"RTLSDR",
"slingshot",
"solder paste",
"solder stencil"
] | [Michel] was in need of a 9V battery connector, and in a brilliant bit of insight realized 9V batteries will plug directly into other 9V batteries (just… don’t do that. ever.) Taking a dead 9V, he tore it open, was disappointed by the lack of AAAA cells, and
soldered some wires onto the connector
.
Sometimes a project starts off as a reasonable endeavour, but quickly becomes something much more awesome. [Wallyman]
started off building a hammock stand
and ended up making a giant slingshot. We’re not one to argue with something that just became a million times more fun.
We’ve seen solder stencils made out of laser-cut metal, photoetched metal, plastic cut on a vinyl cutter, laser-cut plastic, and now
finally one made on a 3D printer
. It’s a pretty simple process – get the tCream layer into a .DXF file, then subtract it from a plastic plate in OpenSCAD.
Apple loves their proprietary screws, and when [Jim] tried to open his Macbook Air with the pentalobe screwdriver that came with an iPhone repair kit, he found it was too large.
No problem, then: just grind it down
. Now if only someone could tell us why a laptop uses smaller screws than a phone…
[Victor] has been playing around with an RTLSDR USB TV tuner dongle for a few months now. It’s a great tool, but the USB thumb drive form factor wasn’t sitting well with him. To fix that, he stuck everything
into a classy painted Hammond 1590A enclosure
. It looks much cooler, and now [Victor] can waterproof his toy and add a ferrite to clean things up. | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1177494",
"author": "cheapskate",
"timestamp": "2014-02-03T00:22:10",
"content": "The laptop screws weren’t smaller than the ones in the phone. “I then realised that the head on this screwdriver has a stretched sort of taper so I basically ground the end of it with a grindstone fitt... | 1,760,376,319.989502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/02/decoding-news-helicopter-signals-on-youtube/ | Decoding News Helicopter Signals On YouTube | Adam Fabio | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"1200 Baud",
"afsk",
"bfsk",
"Decode",
"FSCK",
"FSK",
"helicopter",
"IFB",
"news",
"Signals"
] | A serendipitous YouTube video recommendation led [Oona] to a raw copy of a news helicopter car chase video. While watching the video she noticed an odd sound playing from her left speaker.
That was all it took to put [Oona] on the hunt
. Decoding mystery signals is a bit of an obsession for her. We last saw [Oona]
decoding radio signals for bus stop displays.
She isolated the left audio channel and sent it through
baudline
software, which helped her determine it was a
binary frequency shift keyed (BFSK)
signal. A bit more work with
SoX
, and she had a 1200 baud bit stream.
Opening up the decoded file in a hex editor revealed the data. Packets were 47 bytes each. Most of the data packets was static. However, thee groups of bytes continuously changed. [Oona] decoded these numbers as latitude and longitude, and plotted the resulting data on Google Earth. Plotting her data against the position of the car in the video revealed a match. [Oona] had a complete track of the news helicopter as it followed the car. The telemetry data is in 7-bit
Bell 202
ASCII, and is most likely part of an
Interruptible Foldback (IFB)
system used by the helicopter news crew and the studio producers. Click past the break for the YouTube video that started this all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCKRe4jJ0Qk
[
News Helicopter Image Source
] | 20 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1177336",
"author": "cooperised",
"timestamp": "2014-02-02T21:58:39",
"content": "That is some genuinely excellent sleuthing. I love it. :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1177366",
"author": "CorrosiveOne",
"timestam... | 1,760,376,320.043446 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/02/a-better-usi-i2c-library-for-the-msp430/ | A Better USI I2C Library For The MSP430 | Brian Benchoff | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"i2c",
"msp430",
"universal serial interface",
"USI"
] | TI’s MSP430 chips are rather interesting – they’re low power, very capable, and available for under a dollar in most cases. Some of these chips, though, don’t have native SPI or I2C interfaces; instead, everything is done through a USI, or Universal Serial Interface module. [Jan] found the stock I2C USI module was a little rough around the edges,
so he created his own
.
[Jan] found the TI example code for using the USI as an I2C device overly complicated and something that an intern whipped up in a week and was never touched again. In response to this, he created a much, much simpler USI/I2C module that’s actually readable. It’s available
over on the GitHub
if you want to grab it for yourself.
Compared
to the TI code
, [Jan]’s library is dead simple. There are only two functions, one for initialization, and another for sending and receiving. Easy, small, and it works. Can’t do much better than that. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1177274",
"author": "cn",
"timestamp": "2014-02-02T21:03:11",
"content": "I’ve tried to do this, as well as use ti’s lib. The frustrating thing is that each slave device implements i2c slightly differently requiring digging through the library to add in the right options. 7 or 8 b... | 1,760,376,320.165104 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/02/02/this-space-saver-puts-the-squeeze-on-your-keys/ | This Space Saver Puts The Squeeze On Your Keys | Rich Bremer | [
"how-to"
] | [
"bike",
"bike locks",
"key",
"key chain",
"lock"
] | Keys? Who needs them? Well, pretty much everyone. You can’t deny that there are some ridiculously crowded key chains out there. It’s clear that [Robb] wanted to hit the other side of that spectrum when he started working on his latest
multi-key
project.
The term “multi-key” may be a little misleading as there are more than just keys on this tool. In addition to the bike lock, locker, work and house keys, there is a USB drive, bottle opener, screw driver and a couple of Allen wrenches. The side frames started out as part of an Allen key combo set; one not of the highest quality. The Allen keys started snapping off during use which left [Robb] with a set of otherwise useless side frames. These became the platform of which [Robb’s] project is based. Adding a couple new bolts, nuts and a few modified keys got him the rest of the way there. A lot of thought went into which items to put into this tool and [Robb] explains his thought process in his step-by-step instructions.
The simple nature and potential for customizing makes this a great utilitarian DIY project. Although this may not be Janitor worthy, it will certainly consolidate some of the bulk in our pockets. | 30 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "1176803",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2014-02-02T15:35:46",
"content": "Nice of him to supply us with good photos of his house and car keys. Not like this community is full of hackers with 3d printers and modeling skills.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,376,320.289203 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/31/hackaday-terms-of-use-aka-the-lawyers-are-coming/ | Hackaday Terms Of Use (aka: The Lawyers Are Coming!) | Mike Szczys | [
"Featured",
"News"
] | [
"lawyer",
"legal",
"polices",
"privacy",
"privacy policy",
"terms of service",
"terms of use"
] | Hackaday has posted
Terms of Use
and
Privacy Policy
documents which you should read. These can also be accessed through the
Policies Page
which is linked in the footer. We’ve edited this post to take up less room since it will be sticky for a few days. Original text and updates after the jump.
Original Post Body:
This is happening. Hackaday is posting legal documents to which all readers are bound. We figure the least that we can do is be up-front about it. So here’s a conspicuous post that will remain “sticky” for a few days.
We’ve had
a policies page
for quite a long time, but you’d be hard pressed to figure out how to get to it; now it’s part of the footer. Our policies are a straight-forward statement of how we look at content use and ownership, and what the readers can expect from us. We’ve updated it and twisted some legal arms to keep that summary (succinct and understandable policies are important to us). But we did concede the full publication of
Terms of Use
and a
Privacy Policy
which you should add to your reading list.
Update:
1/31/14 15:24 PST – I went through the HTML for these documents (which had been exported from Word) and fixed the multitude of styling problems. They are now presented in a much better format and the font color sticks out more from the background as requested in the comments. I also fixed the “youronlinechoices” link.
[
Image Source
] | 203 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "1173306",
"author": "caleb",
"timestamp": "2014-01-31T18:20:49",
"content": "Yep, it had to be done. I stole the old one from boingboing I think. Glad you guys are actually doing something official!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,376,320.772522 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/31/fft-on-the-raspis-gpu/ | FFT On The Raspi’s GPU | Brian Benchoff | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"fft",
"Fourier",
"gpu",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspi"
] | The Raspberry Pi has been around for two years now, and still there’s little the hardware hacker can actually do with the integrated GPU. That just changed, as the Raspberry Pi foundation just announced a library
for Fourier transforms using the GPU
.
For those of you who haven’t yet taken your DSP course, fourier transforms take a function (or audio signal, radio signal, or what have you) and output the fundamental frequency. It’s damn useful for everything from software defined radios to guitar pedals, and the new GPU_FFT library is about ten times faster at this task than the Raspi’s CPU.
You can get a copy of the GPU_FFT library by running rpi-update on your pi. If you happen to build anything interesting – something with a software defined radio or even a guitar pedal – you’re more than welcome to send
it in to the Hackaday tips line
. We’d love to see what you’re up to. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1173127",
"author": "Dodo",
"timestamp": "2014-01-31T15:48:24",
"content": "So was this made by the foundation or someone else (using the reverse engineered videocore info?). It’s not really clear in the article…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,376,320.504567 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/31/paintball-picasso-purposely-misses-its-prey/ | Paintball Picasso Purposely Misses Its Prey | Adam Fabio | [
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"myRIO",
"paintball",
"paintball gun",
"Paintball marker",
"waterloo labs"
] | We’ve seen quite a few automated paintball marker systems over the years. Generally it’s the same story – a motion detection system used to target and fire upon the opposing team, prowlers, spouses, etc. [Waterloo Labs] decided to take a slightly different approach, and create a system that intentionally misses its target.
Paintball Picasso
uses a pair of Tippmann A-5 paintball markers to draw an outline around the person in its sights. This is a rather safe project for [Waterloo Labs], considering their
previous adventures in car surfing
.
The Paintball Picasso system uses a webcam to capture an image of a willing test subject. Picasso then processes the image. The human outline is plotted on a 50×50 grid of paintball pixels. Then the real fun begins. Paintball Picasso uses a National Instruments myRIO to command two paintball markers to simultaneously fire. The markers are fitted with high torque R/C style servos for pan and tilt. At 10 rounds per second the markers quickly draw the human outline. The test subject walks away slightly splattered, but otherwise unscathed. With a matrix of 2500 points, [Waterloo Labs] has enough resolution to draw some basic logos.
We liked the mounting system [Waterloo Labs] created for the markers. Using a mix of 3D printed parts, Lego Tetrix, 80/20 aluminum extrusion, and ball bearings, they fashioned a mount that moved smoothly enough for R/C servos to actuate, yet was strong enough to withstand the kick of firing. We’d love to see the servos swapped for stepper motors and belt drives. While open loop, stepper motors would afford more accuracy and a longer life than PWM driven R/C servos. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1172920",
"author": "cr0sh",
"timestamp": "2014-01-31T13:17:58",
"content": "Why not stepper motors, belt-drive, and some kind of feedback system (oh, perhaps some high-resolution servo potentiometers, or maybe an absolute digital encoder) – and have all the advantages of a high-ac... | 1,760,376,320.913302 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/31/immersion-video-game-biofeedback/ | Immersion: Video Game Biofeedback | Marsh | [
"Medical Hacks",
"Xbox Hacks"
] | [
"biometrics",
"pulse",
"xbox 360"
] | We’re not sure how scientific the following hack is, but it’s certainly interesting. Designer [Samuel Matson], interested in the correlation between gaming and stress, has pieced together a device that provides
biofeedback during gameplay
. He referenced
this /r/gaming thread
—which measured a player’s heart rate during a Halo session—as well as conducted his own tests that monitored the heart rate of gamers. After several iterations, [Samuel] had the above-pictured headset, which features the familiar and hackable
pulse sensor
placed by the earpiece.
The headset uses a TinyDuino and a Bluetooth TinyShield to communicate to the gamer’s computer in real time. He didn’t stop with simply monitoring heart rates, however; he integrated the signal into the game design. [Samuel] used indie-favorite game engine
Unity3d
to create a third-person shooter that reacts to the pulse sensor by raising the difficulty level when the player’s heart rate increases. It seems that his goal is to reduce or control stress among players, but we suspect inverting the model may be more effective: have the game cut you some slack when you’re stressed and present a challenge when you’re mellow.
[Thanks Ken] | 16 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1172643",
"author": "hoga",
"timestamp": "2014-01-31T09:38:13",
"content": "You should wear this while on the toilet, you can even tweet the fact of completing a dump.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1172664",
"author": "Luc... | 1,760,376,321.289499 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/30/help-ithaca-generator-get-a-laser-cutter/ | Help Ithaca Generator Get A Laser Cutter | Adam Fabio | [
"Hackerspaces"
] | [
"60 Watt",
"indiegogo",
"Ithaca Generator",
"laser cutter"
] | Ithaca Generator, a hackerspace in upstate New York, is
running an indiegogo campaign for a laser cutter
. With the recent
stories of fires,
and
landlord problems
hitting hackerspaces lately, we thought it would be good be to mention a space that is doing well and working to expand their tools. The Generator is looking to purchase a 60 Watt laser cutter. The flexible funding campaign is set for $3000 US, and they
are within striking distance of
just passed their goal! As any laser veteran will tell you, $3000 isn’t nearly enough for a 60 Watt model from a reputable company. The group already has a donor who will match the campaign final funding amount up to $4000.
If the campaign exceeds
Now that the campaign has exceeded their goal, the extra funds will go toward a fume extraction systems for the new laser, as well as spare lenses and parts. The group has also added stretch goals for an extended warranty and an upgrade to 90 Watts of laser power.
Many of the donation perks include free membership to the hackerspace. [Vic Aprea], a member of The Generator board told us that out-of-town donors can gift these memberships to anyone local to the hackerspace. A membership would be a great gift for a Cornell or Ithaca college student. For more information on the generator and the campaign check out
their website
and the video after the break. | 42 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1172434",
"author": "Sven",
"timestamp": "2014-01-31T07:04:32",
"content": "Why Do Some People Write Titles Like This? I Find It A Very Strange Way Of Writing.Also, Wasn’t This Exactly The Thing People Complained About In Just About Every Other Thread About Hacker Spaces? The Fact T... | 1,760,376,320.857281 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/30/drilling-custom-standoffs/ | Drilling Custom Standoffs | Brian Benchoff | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"delrin",
"drill press",
"standoff"
] | Every electronics project of sufficient complexity needs standoffs – little plastic or metal cylinders – to mount boards to one another. Keeping hundreds of little plastic trinkets around doesn’t really fit with the hacker mentality, though: it would be far simpler to keep some Delrin rod stock around to drill and cut standoffs as needed. [HomeCSP]
created a device to do just that
, allowing him to turn 1/4″ Delrin rod stock into any size standoff he needs.
Before building this device, [HomeCSP] was taking plastic rods to the drill press fitted with a very tiny drill bit for a #2 screw. The problems with that technique should be evident to anyone. The new solution uses an old cordless drill and a 6 inch piece of linear rail, effectively turning some bits of scrap into a horizontal drill press with a stationary bit.
The end result is a machine that can bore a hole straight down a 1/4″ rod. With a box of screws these homebrew plastic rods are much cheaper than off-the-shelf parts and can be made in any length desired. | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1172104",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2014-01-31T03:10:56",
"content": "Eh. He’s doing this the wrong way around.To drill a hole down the center of a cylinder, mount the cylinder in the rotating chuck and the drill bit is stationary.Using a drill press to do this is easy, put ... | 1,760,376,321.22492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/30/pan-flute-hero/ | Pan Flute Hero | Marsh | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"bamboo",
"flute",
"guitar hero",
"pan flute",
"panflute",
"spotify"
] | The latest creation in the never-ending collection of “____ Hero” instruments is
this Raspi-infused pan flute
, built by [Sven Andersson] and his team at the 2013 WOW Hackathon. The flute itself consists of varying lengths of bamboo from a local flower shop, cut short enough to be hand-held while still hiding the Pi from the front side. In the spirit of other ‘Hero’ instruments, the pan flute has no real musical functionality. Each pipe houses what appears to be an
electret microphone breakout board
, which they kept in place by sealing off the end of the pipe with glue.
The sensors connect to the GPIO connector on the Raspi, which communicates to a local TCP/IP server the team ran as a controller hub. The game is also their original creation, written entirely in LUA. They turned to Spotify to find suitable material for the player to experience, creating playlists with actual pan flute songs and using the
libspotify SDK
to access the music. You can see the end result of the project in a short demo video below. | 21 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1171610",
"author": "Mr. Tamnus",
"timestamp": "2014-01-31T00:36:06",
"content": "I give 2 hoof stomps for this!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1171659",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2014-01-31T00:55:50",
"con... | 1,760,376,320.975364 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/29/designing-flip-flops-with-python-and-migen/ | Designing Flip-Flops With Python and Migen | Brian Benchoff | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"fpga",
"Migen",
"verilog",
"vhdl"
] | Flip-flops are extremely simple electronic circuits, forming the basis of clock circuits, memory circuits, buffers, and shift registers. Through his dilly-dallying with digital logic, [Jeffrey]
decided he would build his own.
Not with Verilog or VHDL, though, but Migen: the Python-based way to build digital circuits with software.
Migen
is an interesting tool that makes traditional FPGA programming a lot easier; instead of Verilog or VHDL, Migen allows an FPGA to be programmed in Python. Yes, it’s the tool you’ve been waiting for, and
the tutorials make it look pretty easy
. After installing
Migen
, [Jeff] wrote a class for a D flip-flop in only three lines of code. That’s three
readable
lines of code, and he was able to simulate the flip-flop with gtkwave in another two lines. Compared to learning the complexities of VHDL or Verilog, Migen makes digital logic and FPGA programming a breeze.
[Jeff] has a great tutorial for building a D flip-flop with Migen, but we’d love to see some more complex examples of what can be done with this very cool tool. If you’re building (or have built) something with Migen, be sure to
send it in
and relate your experiences. | 39 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1171159",
"author": "rasz",
"timestamp": "2014-01-30T00:37:03",
"content": "programming inherently parallel hardware using one of the last languages that has no support for parallelism, nice ….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,376,321.832492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/29/ask-hackaday-whats-up-with-this-carbon-fiber-printer/ | Ask Hackaday: What’s Up With This Carbon Fiber Printer? | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Ask Hackaday",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"3d printer",
"carbon fiber",
"filament"
] | The Hackaday Tip Line has been ringing with submissions about the
Mark Forg3D printer
, purportedly the, “world’s first 3D printer that can print carbon fiber.”
Right off the bat, we’re going to call that claim a baldfaced lie.
Here’s a Kickstarter from a few months ago
that put carbon fiber in PLA filament, making
every
desktop 3D printer one that can print in carbon fiber.
But perhaps there’s something more here. The Mark Forged site gives little in the way of technical details, but from what we can gather from
their promo video
, here’s what we have: it’s a very impressive-looking aluminum chassis with a build area of 12″x6.25″x6.25″. There are dual extruders, with (I think) one dedicated to PLA and Nylon, and another to the carbon and fiberglass filaments. Layer height is 0.1mm for the PLA and Nylon, 0.2mm for the composites. Connectivity is through Wifi, USB, or an SD card, with a “cloud based” control interface.
Here are the full specs
, but you’re not going to get much more than the previous few sentences.
Oh, wait, it’s going to be priced at around $5000, which is,
“affordable enough for average consumers to afford.”
Try to contain your laughter as you click the ‘read more’ link.
That’s all we know. There’s no mention of how carbon fiber get into the printed objects. Is it embedded in a plastic filament, like the previously mentioned filament, or something far more exotic? If the former, the idea of printing with carbon fiber doesn’t make sense except in a very few niche cases.
I’ll be one of the last people on earth to claim experience in composite fabrication, but I have built a few things with resin and cloth, and know a little bit about why 3D printed carbon fiber parts is a really dumb idea. With composites like CF, fiberglass, and Kevlar, all the strength is derived from the
bias
, or the direction of the weave. If you want to make a part strong in one direction, lay your cloth down at an angle and slather on some epoxy. Need it stronger in two directions? You need two layers of cloth, at least.
This is rudimentary stuff, and doesn’t even touch on vacuum bagging, and degassing the resin. There’s a whole host of other things that make carbon fiber crazy strong, and you just can’t do these things by hitting a ‘print’ button.
That being said, there are probably less than a dozen people on the planet that know how this printer actually works. Is there some magic in the way Mark Forge filament is produced? Are there special slicing algorithms that capitalize on the unidirectional strength of CF? Is this just a tool for printing things with carbon fiber for the sake of printing things out of carbon fiber? I don’t know.
If you have any information on how this printer actually works, post it in the comments. If you have any materials testing data on a part manufactured on a Mark Forged printer, post it. We’re dying to know if this is actually a cool product, or just a cool business model and a bit of PR. | 40 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1171078",
"author": "Addidis",
"timestamp": "2014-01-29T21:04:35",
"content": "Makes sense , Run a line of cf fiber to replace filament. Then it mixes with epoxy as it is extruded out.Normal procedure :layout piece of fiber,squeegee lots of epoxy over itrepeat.",
"parent_id": nu... | 1,760,376,321.153659 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/29/ball-bearing-motor-rolls-for-reasons-unknown/ | Ball Bearing Motor Rolls For Reasons Unknown | Adam Fabio | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"Ball Bearing Motor",
"physics",
"RimstarOrg"
] | [RimstarOrg] has brought us an oldie but goodie this week. He’s built a
ball bearing motor
, a design which has been causing engineers and scientists to squabble for decades. [RimstarOrg] used a microwave oven transformer with a 70 turn primary coil and a single turn secondary coil to create a low voltage, high current AC power supply. Needless to say, there’s a real risk of fire or electrocution with a setup like this, so be careful if you try this one at home. [RimstarOrg] then built the motor itself.
He de-greased two ball bearings
then installed them on a metal shaft along with a wooden flywheel. The entire assembly was then mounted on a board so the wheel could spin freely. Two copper straps hold the bearings to the board. Finally, the transformer is wired into the copper straps. In this configuration, the current will flow through the outer race of one bearing, through the balls, and into the inner race. The current then passes down the axle and passes through the other bearing. There is very little resistance in this circuit, so it can only be powered on for a few seconds at a time before things start to melt down.
When the current is switched on with the flywheel stationary, nothing happens. If left long enough, the bearings will overheat. The real magic starts if you give the flywheel a spin just before turning on the current. As soon as power is applied, the flywheel starts to pick up speed. Power off, and things start to slow down. This happens both with the flywheel spinning clockwise and counterclockwise.
So what’s going on here? A motor with no magnets? Is this some type of perpetual motion machine? Alien technology? We can assure you that the effect is real, but the mechanism is still unproven. [RimstarOrg] explains one common explanation, which is the motor is operating as a
heat engine
rather than a standard electric motor. The metal ball bearings have relatively tiny contact points with their respective races. These small points create a large resistance, which causes uneven heating of the balls. The heated balls expand to ovals. If the entire ball bearing isn’t turning, the expansion force will simply lock the two races together. If the motor is turning when expansion starts, it serves to push the outer race along.
This isn’t the only explanation of the motor though. Several electromagnetic explanations for the motor’s movement have been presented over the years. The physics behind these explanations are rather complex. The complex math and integrals can be found in
this 1977 paper
(pdf link) by [H. Gruenberg]. A more recent example is in this
2011 paper (updated in July of 2013)
(pdf link) by [Prof. Kirk T. McDonald] of Princeton University.
[RimstarOrg] isn’t the only hobbyist to tackle this problem – [Mike] has a
page about ball bearing motors
as well. He concluded on the thermal explanation. Even
Wikipedia seems a bit confused
on the subject. The only thing everyone does agree on is the fact that the ball bearing motor is too inefficient to have any practical purpose. We may be a bit naive here, but it would seem that some simple hands on experimentation could solve this decades old question. A basic test would be to try DC vs AC current – perhaps with a common car battery as a power supply. Delving deeper, non ferrous vs ferrous balls. The real answer would lie in using ball bearings with known thermal expansion characteristics. Balls that expand more (and at a higher rate) should produce a faster running motor than “control” balls. It might be worth a phone call to
your local bearing supplier
to put this one to rest for good.
[via
Hacked Gadgets
] | 97 | 35 | [
{
"comment_id": "1171001",
"author": "Addidis",
"timestamp": "2014-01-29T18:05:15",
"content": "Yeah I was thinking ceramic bearings. Negate that one right off.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1171009",
"author": "Todd Harrison",
... | 1,760,376,321.420647 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/29/heatsink-tester-shows-thermal-resistance-isnt-futile/ | Heatsink Tester Shows Thermal Resistance Isn’t Futile | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"atxmega32a4u",
"AVR",
"heatsink",
"microcontroller"
] | [Bogdan] knows that it’s hard to model the cooling needs of any given project. It’s important to know how much heat a system can dissipate given the housing material, airflow opportunity, and the proximity of neighboring components. Inspired by an aluminium-walled enclosure that allows for mounted transistors,
he devised and built a heatsink tester
.
He’s using an ATXMEGA32A4U, a temperature sensor, and a IRF540 MOSFET. A specific power is dissipated across the transistor, and the temperature sensor measures the heatsink as close as possible to the transistor. Through the serial connection, he gets back the supply voltage, current, calculated power, DAC set, temperature, and calculated thermal resistance in the terminal.
[Bogdan]’s tester assumes that it is reading the ambient temperature, so the circuit needs to warm up first. He found that an hour is generally long enough to reach this point. He also found that the system exhibits high thermal inertia, so it regulates the DAC output based on the dissipated power. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1170935",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2014-01-29T15:04:38",
"content": "One of my (favorite) Electronics instructors said, “If you are asked what is a ‘heat sink’ during a job interview, don’t say “it’s where you dump the heat when you’re done with it”,” B^) Although in a metap... | 1,760,376,321.8828 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/29/the-robot-operating-system-ros-101/ | The Robot Operating System (ROS) 101 | James Hobson | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"clearpath robotics",
"hydro medusa",
"ilia baranov",
"Robot Operating System",
"ros"
] | Ever heard about the Robot Operating System? It’s a BSD-licensed open-source system for controlling robots, from a variety of hardware. Over the years we’ve shared quite a few projects that run ROS, but nothing on how to actually
use
ROS. Lucky for us, a robotics company called Clearpath Robotics — who use ROS for everything — have decided to graciously share some tips and tricks on how to get started with ROS 101:
An Introduction to the Robot Operating System.
The beauty of the ROS system is that it is made up of a series of independent nodes which communicate with each other using a publish/subscribe messaging model. This means the hardware doesn’t matter. You can use different computers, even different architectures. The example [Ilia Baranov] gives is using an Arduino to publish the messages, a laptop subscribed to them, and even an Android phone used to drive the motors — talk about flexibility!
It appears they will be doing a whole series of these 101 posts, so check it out — they’ve already released numéro 2,
ROS 101: A Practical Example.
It even includes a ready to go Ubuntu disc image with ROS pre-installed to mess around with on VMWare Player!
And to get you inspired for using ROS, check out this
Android controlled robot using it
! Or how about a ridiculous
wheel-chair-turned-creepy-face-tracking-robot? | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1170924",
"author": "julianoeng",
"timestamp": "2014-01-29T14:31:16",
"content": "Hello Guy,I’m developing a robot based on ros. see the preliminar results:http://jeaeletronica.blogspot.com/2013/11/primeiros-passos-do-bebe-etmos.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,376,322.2698 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/29/satisfying-way-to-build-projects/ | Satisfying Way To ‘Build’ Projects | Kevin Darrah | [
"hardware",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"emergency push button",
"keyboard",
"Teensy"
] | When you’re writing code for your next big creation, chances are that you build/debug the project 100’s of times a day. Sure, the keyboard hotkey gets the job done, but is it really that satisfying? [Victor] sends in this quick project on turning an
Emergency Stop Push button into a ‘Build’ button
.
From the looks of it, this project uses a
Teensy 2.0
, which sports an ATMEGA32U4. Since this part features a USB controller, it is a piece of cake to get it to
mimic a keyboard
. The circuit is also very simple; the pushbutton contacts are wired from ground to a digital input. On detection of a ‘press’, the Teensy will send out the keyboard combination to build your project: Ctrl-B, F7, etc… If you prefer working within the Arduino IDE, this could upload sketches as well (Ctrl-U).
Adding a little fun to ‘building’ your projects does come at a cost though. Besides forfeiting a Teensy, you also have to give up a precious USB port. [Victor] does mention Bluetooth, but that could break your budget for this sort of project. A possible alternative to the Teensy could be to implement
Virtual USB on a low-cost standalone Arduino
. | 35 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "1170847",
"author": "Bogdan",
"timestamp": "2014-01-29T10:05:07",
"content": "I so want this!!! So much cooler than pressing F7 key in the keyboard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1170859",
"author": "dustin evans (@dl_evan... | 1,760,376,322.016088 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/28/tesla-coil-auto-winder/ | Tesla Coil Auto-Winder | James Hobson | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"tesla",
"tesla coil",
"tesla coil winder"
] | Tesla coils are awesome. But if you’ve ever built one, you know how tedious winding the secondary coil is. So [Krux] decided to
build a machine to do it for him.
He’s currently working on his first Tesla coil — code-named
Project Icarus
— he doesn’t have all the logistics ironed out quite yet, but he’s been slowly collecting the components. What he does know is that he wants to use a 4.5″ secondary coil, using 22AWG magnet wire, meaning that’s a lot of turns! Since he’s also a member of a local
hackerspace
, he decided to make it a modular machine that can wind different sized coils for different sized projects.
Essentially, he’s built his own CNC lathe to accomplish this, well, missing one axis. There’s the main rotary axis, and a wire-guide that moves along it ensuring the coils are wrapped tightly without gaps. It’s an impressive build and you can tell he’s put a lot of thought into the design — He’s even got a semi-flexible 3D printed motor coupler on the wire-guide axis, to help mitigate quick acceleration! The main rotary axis is also driven by a 3D printed herringbone style gear — similar to the style used on Printrbot extruders. The rest of the build is made of plywood and pegboard — allowing for even larger coils to be wound by shuffling around the components. He’s even got a full featured command console with manual/automatic controls and an LCD giving feedback on the coil being wound!
Stick around after the break to see [Krux] explain the fascinating build, and to see a fun time-lapse of an 814-turn Tesla coil winding!
And the time-lapse of it in action…
Tesla coils are just great.
Big ones
.
Small ones
. One inside of
Thor’s Hammer… | 18 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1170788",
"author": "LightningPhil",
"timestamp": "2014-01-29T07:01:36",
"content": "Great work. Have been planning one of these myself but would lily not be so well made. Certainly beets my electric drill powered manual method. Looks handy for varnishing could to :-)",
"paren... | 1,760,376,321.749525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/30/fail-of-the-week-reverse-engineering-a-wireless-energy-monitor/ | Fail Of The Week: Reverse Engineering A Wireless Energy Monitor | Mike Szczys | [
"Fail of the Week",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"433 mhz",
"fail of the week",
"reverse engineering",
"weather station"
] | [Afonso] picked up a cheap energy use monitor a few years back. He really like the data it displays about his home’s electricity, using a sensor to gather this info and a display that communicates with it wirelessly. But there is no option to log or dump the data. He set out to
reverse engineer the wireless protocol
in order to extend the use of the system. As the name of this column implies, he failed to get this working.
The hardware above is a 433Mhz transceiver that he rigged up as test hardware. It sounds like he’s assuming the monitor works on this band, which could have been his first misstep (we really don’t know). The speaker is there to give audible confirmation that he’s receiving
something
from the transmitter. This is where things start to get pretty weird. White noise was coming from the speaker, but when he stepped away from the bench it stopped. He was able to measure a regular pattern to the noise, and proceeded to place the speaker next to his computer MIC so that he could record a sample for further analysis.
Fail of the Week always aims to be a positive experience. In this case we’d like to have a conversation about the process itself. We agree that connecting a speaker (or headphones) should help get your foot in the door because your ear will recognize a rhythmic pattern when it is received. But with this noise, measuring the timing and recording a sample we’re not so sure about. Given the situation, how would you have soldiered on for the best chance at successfully sniffing out the communication scheme used by this hardware? Leave a comment below!
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. | 58 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "1171535",
"author": "nigae",
"timestamp": "2014-01-30T21:09:19",
"content": "1. Buy a DS1052E2. Analyze your crap the right way3. Win!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1171593",
"author": "TakingItBack",
"timest... | 1,760,376,322.113089 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/30/2d-room-mapping-with-a-laser-and-a-webcam/ | 2D Room Mapping With A Laser And A Webcam | James Hobson | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"2d map",
"laser room mapping",
"opencv",
"room mapping"
] | [Shane Ormonde] recently learned how to measure distance using just a webcam, a laser, and everyone’s favorite math — trigonometry. Since then he’s thrown the device onto a stepper motor, and now has
a clever 2D room mapping machine.
He learned how to create the
webcam laser range finder
from [Todd Danko], a project we featured 7 years ago! It’s a pretty simple concept. The camera and laser are placed parallel to each other at a known distance, axis-to-axis. On the computer, a python script (using the OpenCV library) searches the image for the brightest point (the laser). The closer the brightest point is to the center of the image, the farther the object. Counting pixels from the center of the image to the laser point allows you to calculate an angle, which can then be used to calculate the distance to the object — of course, this needs to be calibrated to be at all accurate. [Shane] does a great job explaining all of this in one of his past posts,
building the webcam laser rangefinder.
From there it was just a matter of slapping the rangefinder onto a stepper motor, driving it with a small PIC, and running the calculations on the fly! His results are fairly impressive. | 20 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1171487",
"author": "T0x1c",
"timestamp": "2014-01-30T18:49:46",
"content": "You could add a dispersion lens to increase the dot size, this might yield greater resolution.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1171503",
"author": ... | 1,760,376,321.941698 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/30/riverwatch-an-autonomous-surface-aerial-marsupial-robot-team/ | RIVERWATCH: An Autonomous Surface-Aerial Marsupial Robot Team | James Hobson | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"ECHORD",
"marsupial robot team",
"riverwatch",
"ros",
"UNINOVA"
] | Every once in a while we get a tip for a project that really, really,
really
blows our minds.
This is one of them.
It looks like a basic catamaran with a few extra bells and whistles — except it is so much more than that. You’re looking at a fully Autonomous Surface Vehicle, complete with a piggybacking 6-rotor UAV. It’s decked out in cameras, sonar sensors, laser rangefinders, high accuracy GPS-RTK tracking, an IMU, oh, and did we mention the autonomous 6-rotor UAV capable of taking off and landing on it?
It all started out as a simple experiment within
ECHORD (the European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development)
, and since then it has become a fully funded project at
UNINOVA
, a Centre of Technology and Systems in Portugal.
The purpose of the mind-blowing robot team is to collect data of river environments — think of it as Google Maps 2.0 — which is almost an understatement for what it is capable of.
You seriously have to watch the video after the break. | 24 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1171423",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2014-01-30T15:31:33",
"content": "Nice, I didn’t see any mention of range or its power source, Can the hexacopter stay on the platform in choppy water, or wind gusts?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,376,322.656321 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/30/s-a-m-the-safety-attention-monitor/ | S.A.M. The Safety Attention Monitor | James Hobson | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"distracted driving",
"opencv",
"s.a.m.",
"safe drivingd",
"safety attention monitor",
"sam"
] | Last term’s project at Chico State University hopes to reduce driver distraction by alerting you
when it notices you aren’t paying attention (to the road!).
The team designed SAM using
OpenCV
to track your face in order to recognize when you aren’t watching the road. It alerts you through a variety of audible beeps and LED lights, and is programmed to only alert you after set time values — i.e. it’s not going to go off when you’re checking your blind spot, unless you’ve been checking it for over a certain length of time. It also has a silence button you can press for situations like looking around while you are parked.
The proof of concept device was built using a Raspberry Pi, the PiCam, and a breadboard to accommodate some manual controls, the buzzer, and LEDs. It also continuously records video of you on a 30 second loop, and in the event of an accident, it saves all the video — perhaps proving it was your fault. Can you imagine if all cars had this installed? On the plus side you wouldn’t have to argue with insurance companies — but if it really was your fault, well then you’re straight out of luck. | 19 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1171379",
"author": "nigae",
"timestamp": "2014-01-30T12:57:51",
"content": "You should connect it to a nerf gun so it shoots you in the face when you are not looking.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1171384",
"author": "cr0... | 1,760,376,322.221779 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/30/the-filawinder/ | The FilaWinder | Marsh | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer filament",
"filament",
"filament extruder",
"spool",
"winder"
] | The latest addition to the line of 3D printer accessories is
the FilaWinder
, a tool for winding your filament neatly onto a spool. If you’ve abandoned buying your filament by the reel in favor of making your own from cheaper pellets—such as
the Lyman Extruder
, the
Filabot Wee
, or
other alternatives
, including the winder’s companion product, the
FilaStruder
—then you’ve likely had to roll everything up by hand, perhaps after it flopped around on the floor first.
The FilaWinder spools for you while the filament extrudes, using a sensor to adjust the winding the speed to match extrusion rates as well as running it through some PTFE tube to gently coil it as it moves along. Perhaps most important, the FilaWinder provides a guide arm to direct the filament back and forth across the reel as it spools up, to keep it evenly distributed. Swing by
their Thingaverse page
for a list of printable pieces and their
assembly guide can be found here
, as well as
on YouTube
. You can see an overview video of the FilaWinder winding away after the break.
[Thanks David] | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1171439",
"author": "Macon",
"timestamp": "2014-01-30T16:08:16",
"content": "$160 sounds expensive for this, but maybe a DIY version would be cheaper. The BOM excel file on the ThingiVerse page lists the parts cost as $136, plus $57 shipping. All of the pieces are $2 or less except ... | 1,760,376,322.162726 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/29/iowa-forensics-opts-for-a-csi-style-hack-to-save-their-budget/ | Iowa Forensics Opts For A CSI Style Hack To Save Their Budget | James Hobson | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"electrostatic dust print lifter",
"finger print",
"finger printing",
"forensic",
"forensics"
] | There’s a very effective way of lifting dusty fingerprints from the field, or in a lab. It’s called an Electrostatic Dust Print Lifter — but as you can imagine, it is rather expensive from a forensic supply store. [Bradley VanZee] — from the Iowa Division for International Association for Identification — realized how simple a tool it was,
and made his own for just over $50.
But first, how does it work? Electrostatic print lifting is a non-destructive process where you develop an electrostatic field on a sheet of “lifting film” which attracts the dust particles to stick to the film. It’s capable of recovering impressions from both porous and non-porous surfaces — even ones not visible to the naked eye.
Commercial versions of the tool cost upwards of $600-$800 + lift film. The first hack they realized is that instead of using proprietary lift film, it is just as effective to use car window tint instead! The second hack is even more clever — using a 80,000V tazor, some electrical leads, and some tinfoil you can create your own version of the tool. The aluminum foil acts as a ground, and the object you are inspecting is sandwiched between it and the lifting film. Holding the tazor with one electrode to the foil, you can trace the film using the other electrode at a distance, which induces an electrostatic charge in the film, attracting and capturing the dusty fingerprints. Allow the static to discharge, and store the film in a safe place to be digitized later!
Now obviously this is only really effective for flat objects, but it’s still a brilliant hack — especially to save your budget!
[Thanks John!] | 32 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1171269",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2014-01-30T06:19:48",
"content": "1. That is a stun-gun.2. Are you trying to avoid using the trademark “Taser” by intentionally misspelling it?3. Pretty clever hack. Now they just need to either automate the electrode movement or repli... | 1,760,376,322.529459 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/29/automatically-sorting-beads-by-color/ | Automatically Sorting Beads By Color | Marsh | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"color detection",
"color detector",
"sorting"
] | [Tomas] wanted to try building something mechanical with electronic control, and ended up with
this sorter that organizes beads
into one of two containers based on color. He built most of the structure from
popular interlocking plastic bricks
, then added a stepper motor salvaged from an old scanner and two plastic discs.
The two discs sit on top of each other. The bottom one is stationary and has two holes drilled in it, with a container sitting below each hole. The top disc has a smaller, bead-sized hole and rotates from its starting position—where it collects one bead—to a camera for analysis. After the camera determines the color of the bead, the disc rotates again to position itself over one of the two sorting holes in the disc below, and the bead falls into the awaiting container. The device is controlled by the MSP430 microcontroller on a
FITKit
(
translated
), which is the development platform of choice for [Tomas’s] school.
[Tomas] originally attempted to determine the color of beads by using 3 different color LEDs and a light-dependent resistor, but switched to using a webcam and a Java program to capture images and calculating average hues. You can find more details and the source code on his site, but first see the short video below. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1171218",
"author": "Raymond Johnson",
"timestamp": "2014-01-30T03:36:06",
"content": "Now, can you get it to sort M&Ms?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1171221",
"author": "notabena4us",
"timestamp": "2014-01-... | 1,760,376,322.721056 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/28/the-8-bit-harmonica-blows-in-from-japan/ | The 8 Bit Harmonica Blows In From Japan | Adam Fabio | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"cartridge",
"famicom",
"Harmonica",
"nes",
"nintendo"
] | From [Basami Sentaku] in Japan comes this
8bit harmonica
. [Basami] must remember those golden days of playing Famicom (or Nintendo Entertainment System for non-Japanese players). As the systems aged, the contacts would spread. In the case of the NES, this would often mean the infamous blinking red power light. The solution for millions of players was simple. Take the cartridge out, blow on it, say a few incantations, and try again. In retrospect, blowing on the cartridges probably
did more harm than good
, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. We’d always assumed that the Famicom, being a top loading design, was immune from the issues that plagued the horizontal slot on the NES. Either [Basami] spent some time overseas, or he too took to tooting his own cartridge.
Blowing into cartridges has inspired a few crafty souls to
stuff real harmonicas into cartridge cases
. [Basami] took a more electronic route. A row of 8 microphones picks up the players breath sound. Each microphone is used to trigger a specific note. The
katakana
in the video shows the traditional
Solfège
musical scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la ti, do. A microcontroller monitors the signal from each microphone and determines which one is being triggered. The actual sound is created by a Yamaha YMZ294. The ‘294 is an 18 pin variant of the venerable
General Instrument AY-3-8910
, a chip long associated with video game music and sound effects. While we’re not convinced that the rendition of Super Mario Bros’ water theme played in the video wasn’t pre-recorded, we are reasonably sure that the hardware is capable of doing everything the video shows. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1170703",
"author": "Peter Larson",
"timestamp": "2014-01-29T03:16:58",
"content": "It would be cool to add a couple buttons to this: two buttons to shift up and down a half step so you could do sharps and flats, then maybe up and down octave buttons.",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,376,322.592435 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/28/fabrickation-combining-lego-and-3d-printing/ | FaBrickation: Combining Lego And 3D Printing | Eric Evenchick | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"cad",
"fabrication",
"lego"
] | While 3D printing gives you the ability to fabricate completely custom parts, it does have some drawbacks. One issue is the time and cost of printing large volumes. Often these structures are simple, and do not require completely custom design.
This is where the
faBrickation
system comes in. It allows you to combine 3D printed parts with off the shelf LEGO bricks. The CAD tool that lets you ‘Legofy’ a design. It creates directions on how to assemble the LEGO parts, and exports STL files for the parts to be 3D printed. These custom bricks snap into the LEGO structure.
In their demo, a head mounted display is built in 67 minutes. The same design would have taken over 14 hours to 3D print. As the design is changed, LEGO blocks are added and removed seamlessly.
Unfortunately, the tool doesn’t appear to be open source. It will appear for the
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
, so hopefully we will see more in the future. Until then, you can watch the demo after the break. | 29 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1170647",
"author": "mike",
"timestamp": "2014-01-29T00:30:11",
"content": "Now install “Minecraft LEGO Texture Pack” and move this software to the Minecraft LEGO World Editor ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1170658",
"au... | 1,760,376,322.790082 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/28/hackaday-visits-the-clark-magnet-high-school/ | Hackaday Visits The Clark Magnet High School | Brian Benchoff | [
"Featured",
"News"
] | [
"Clark Magnet High School",
"First Robotics",
"high school"
] | Thought Hackaday’s trip to LA was all about hackerspaces, parties, and rummaging through piles of awesome junk? Nope. We’re also tasked with some community outreach that brought us to the Clark Magnet High School in Glendale, CA.
This isn’t your usual high school. Each year, it accepts around 300 new freshmen (grade 9) from the other high schools in the Glendale district. Selection is done through a lottery system, ensuring it’s not just the kids “on the good side of the tracks” or whose parents are active in the PTA that are selected; about 52% of the students at Clark can be classified as at or below the poverty line.
The curriculum? Instead of stopping at the classical comprehensive high school education, the students at Clark Magnet are focused primarily on the STEM fields. They’re also the home base for
Team 696
, a FIRST robotics team that has done very well in robotics competitions. A few mentors from JPL and IBM help the students out on their projects, and the head of Clark’s engineering program, [David Black], as well as the principal, were once students themselves.
As far as their engineering program goes, they have a very impressive setup; their workshop features a Haas minimll with a 10-tool carousel, a huge CNC wood router, more than one 3D printer, a small woodshop, a CAD classroom – in short, enough tools to make just about anything. Because Clark Magnet is in sunny California, they’ve been able to get a few grants and build a 358kW peak solar array behind the football field. It’s enough to keep the lights on, and the electric bill down, allowing them to hire an additional teacher or two.
In addition to an impressive engineering/shop class, there’s also an audio and video production suite filled with Mac Pros, cameras, mixing boards and 96 Terabytes of storage. It’s not an exaggeration to say this high school is better equipped than some colleges.
Clark also does some other very interesting stuff outside of class; they’ve launched and recovered high altitude balloons, traveled to elementary schools to play with Lego robots, and some students also have impressive home-built projects they bring in to tinker with. We saw a homebrew quadcopter and a very awesome Mecanum wheel robot that we expect to see in the Hackaday tip line shortly.
Despite how awesome the Clark engineering department is, and how capable the students are, they’ve said the FIRST robotics team has been getting a lot of flak from the rest of the maker community. Apparently some people see an amazing engineering program as a waste of resources. From our short time at Clark, we think nothing could be further from the truth. These students are quickly becoming experts at CAD design and CNC operations. They’re competent embedded programmers and well on their way to becoming awesome engineers. Students who don’t want to build a robot or program firmware get involved in project planning, marketing, and all the rest of the business that goes into running a initiative of this size. It’s a truly awesome program, and I have to say I’m a little bit jealous I didn’t graduate from Clark.
Gallery of pics and two videos below: going over the workshops at Clark and a robot project. Our fanboyism for Clark also demands we link to
the (very small and very resonable) Kickstarter
the FIRST robotics team is using for their 2014 budget. | 26 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1170597",
"author": "strider_mt2k",
"timestamp": "2014-01-28T21:22:38",
"content": "I thought a Clark Magnet was a magnet that sticks to copper. KIDDING!Stay in school kids!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1170599",
"author"... | 1,760,376,323.631043 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/28/retrotechtacular-salvaging-a-capsized-ocean-liner/ | Retrotechtacular: Salvaging A Capsized Ocean Liner | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"azorian",
"retrotechtacular",
"salvage",
"SS normandie",
"uss lafayette"
] | The scale of this salvage operation is nothing short of daunting. The SS Normandie was an ocean liner put into service in 1935 and capable of carrying 1,972 people across the Atlantic Ocean. The ship is still the fastest turbo-electric-propelled passenger vessel ever built, so it’s no surprise that it was seized by the US Navy during World War II for conversion to a troop carrier called the USS Lafayette. But in 1942, during retrofit operations, the vessel caught fire and capsized. The topic of today’s Retrotectacular is the remarkable salvage operation that righted the ship. Unfortunately, it was subsequently scrapped as bringing it into service was going to be too costly. Lucky for us
the US Navy documented the salvage operation
which makes for a fascinating 35-minutes of footage.
A huge barrier to success was the total lack of underwater visibility due to mud, sewage, and debris. Divers were first sent in to remove as much extraneous gear as possible, much of the time cutting with torches and attaching hoisting lines using only their sense of touch. To bring the ship upright the water flooding the hall needed to be displaced. To facilitate this, wooden bulkheads were built using timbers with tongue and groove joinery. These wooden barriers were sealed to the metal hull using cement poured under water. With everything patched up a very careful pumping procedure began, with many starts and stops to ensure the righting of the vessel was controllable. Of course not all was smooth sailing. Things get pretty interesting again at about 27 minutes in as a serious leak prevented the evacuation of the remaining water. You’ll need to watch for yourself to learn how they got around that. In the end it too 17 months and 19 days to right the ship.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBYpqlqZryk
If you liked this offering we’d recommend you watch the documentary
AZORIAN: The Raising of the K-129
which is a fascinating look at engineering wizardry leveraged to salvage a Soviet ballistic missile submarine from three miles of depth. Here’s
a trailer for that film
.
[Thanks Frederick]
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
. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1170546",
"author": "cap-couillon",
"timestamp": "2014-01-28T18:31:29",
"content": "Oooo! Boats! Nice vid on how to get it done….. Not to be too pedantic, but the bulkhead joinery is splined, not t&g… Just sayin",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,376,322.942201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/01/28/a-deep-dive-into-nes-tetris/ | A Deep Dive Into NES Tetris | Eric Evenchick | [
"classic hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"emulator",
"fceux",
"nes",
"tetris"
] | Back in 1989, Nintendo released Tetris for the NES. This detailed article first explains the
mechanics of how Tetris works, then builds an AI to play the game
.
To understand the mechanics of the game, the ROM source was explored. Since the NES was based of the
MOS 6502
microprocessor, this involves looking at the 6502 assembly. The article details how the blocks (called Tetriminos) are created and how they move across the screen. The
linear feedback shift register
used for random number generation is examined. Even details of the legal screen and demo mode are explained.
After the tour through how Tetris works, an algorithm for the AI is presented. This AI is implemented in Lua inside of the
FCEUX
NES/Famicom emulator. It works by evaluating all of the possible places to put each new Tetrimino, and choosing the best based on a number of criteria. The weighting for each criterion was determined by using a
particle swarm optimization
.
The source for both the Lua version and a Java version of the code is available with the article. Everything you need to run the AI is available for free, except the Tetris ROM. If you’re interested in how 8 bit games were built, this dissection is a great read.
[via
Reddit
] | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1170496",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2014-01-28T15:50:24",
"content": "I suggest reading the rest of this guy’s site. It is wonderful source of interesting reading. Nice find.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1170506",
... | 1,760,376,322.878734 |
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