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https://hackaday.com/2013/12/09/fubarino-contest-morse-code-transmitter/ | Fubarino Contest: Morse Code Transmitter | Mike Szczys | [
"contests",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"fubarino-contest"
] | The Fubarino Contest entries are slowing streaming in. Here’s the first one that we’re featuring, sent in by [Nathanael Wilson]. He dusted off a project from some time ago, which is just fine with us. It’s
a Morse Code transmitter
which he designed for use during
a fox hunt
(locating a hidden transmitter using radio direction finding).
For the project he revised his old code, adding in a Morse look-up table so that the Arduino Mega 2560 can convert plain text into dots and dashes. It uses the tone library to output signals to the radio seem above. The easter egg is unlocked when shorting pin 10 at power-up. It then broadcasts a slightly altered message as interpreted above.
One of the reasons we chose to feature [Nathanael’s] entry first is that he presented it very well. Watch his video after the break to see for yourself. Then go back and
check out the contest rules
to get your own project submission in. After all, you can win a free Fubarino board from Microchip if you’re in the top twenty!
The is an entry in
the Fubarino Contest
. Submit your entry before 12/19/13 for a chance at one of the 20
Fubarino SD boards
which Microchip has put up as prizes! | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "1128021",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2013-12-10T00:29:09",
"content": "You can do the same thing just using a UV3R. A member of K2GXT, the RIT Amateur Radio club, programmed the radio using the base written by lelazary,https://github.com/lelazary/UV3RMod. The fox firmware is l... | 1,760,376,375.561787 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/09/meet-the-teensy-3-1/ | Meet The Teensy 3.1 | Mathieu Stephan | [
"ARM",
"News"
] | [
"arduino",
"arm",
"Teensy",
"Teensy 3.0",
"Teensy 3.1"
] | [Paul Stoffregen] just released an updated version of his Teensy 3.0, meet the oddly named
Teensy 3.1
. For our readers that don’t recall, the
Teensy 3.0
is a 32 bit ARM Cortex-M4 based development platform supported by the Arduino IDE (using the
Teensyduino
add-on). The newest version has the same size, shape & pinout, is compatible with code written for the Teensy 3.0 and provides several new features as well.
The Flash has doubled, the RAM has quadrupled (from 16K to 64K) allowing much more advanced applications. The Cortex-M4 core frequency is 72MHz (48MHz on the Teensy 3.0) and the digital inputs are 5V volts compatible. Pins 3 and 4 gained CAN bus functions. The new microcontroller used even has a 12 bits Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) so you could create a simple signal generator like the one shown in the picture above. Programming is done through the USB port, which can later behave as host or slave once your application is launched. Finally, the price tag ($19.80) is in our opinion very reasonable.
Embedded below is an interview with its creator [Paul Stroffregen].
[Mathieu]
Hi Paul, I’d like to first thank you for giving us some of your time for this interview. Could you tell us what are your motivations behind the Teensy project?
[Paul]
I’ve been publishing electronic hobbyist resources since 1991, starting with the 8051 chip. Teensy 3.0 & 3.1 are my attempt to bring powerful ARM microcontrollers to hobbyists. They run code faster, but optimized native libraries are what really facilitates projects. Earlier this year I wrote OctoWS2811, for controlling thousands of RGB LEDs at video speeds. Many awesome builds have used it, like the
Disorient Pyramid
. Recently I’ve been working on an advanced audio library. Developing these platforms that enable so many people use to build such awesome projects really is my passion.
To be honest, a secondary motivation is business related. PJRC’s main focus is developing technology for hobbyists, which is distinctly different, and not nearly as profitable, as selling as many products as possible at good margins. This market is quite competitive, with many microcontroller boards and even new software initiatives appearing regularly. PJRC can’t rest on its laurels. Teensy 3.1 is meant to really step up the technical capability a hobbyist can buy for under $20 and utilize easily with excellent Arduino compatibility. I’m also pretty motivated to build projects myself, or contribute to big projects, especially for Burning Man.
[Mathieu]
What kind of projects are done with Teensy?
[Paul]
Scrolling through the
Teensy Projects
page can give you great visual idea of what people have made. My personal favorite is the motion sensor that wakes your computer up before you sit down in your chair. Why didn’t I think of that?! MIDI controllers, specialized USB peripherals, and LED projects have been popular themes.
[Mathieu]
What do you think of Arduino now that Teensy is compatible with it?
[Paul]
Arduino is awesome. We have the same goals. They focus more on absolute beginners and I cater moreso to ambitious creative types, but we’re both about building a platform to enable people to make projects. I’ve contributed regularly to Arduino over the last 4 years while developing Teensy. I’m happy to say my relations with Arduino have greatly improved in the last year or so. I believe we’re going to collaborate more in the coming years. Here’s some of my
past contributions to Arduino
.
Regarding Arduino compatibility itself, doing it well on anything other than 8-bit AVR is far more challenging than most people realize. Implementing a few dozen functions like digitalWrite() is only the beginning. For example, this afternoon I built special test hardware I’m sending to a developer of the host shield library (that library is already compatible… this is new speed-optimized development). This morning I worked on a null pointer bug in a wifi library, and yesterday I submitted a patch for a specialized graphical LCD library. Features no Arduino boards have, like Teensy’s Tools > USB Type menu for non-Serial options, really compound the required effort. I personally love doing this technical work, but the point is [that] excellent Arduino compatibility isn’t a destination, but a continuing journey.
I know some regular Hack-a-Day readers don’t love Arduino. As a long-time vi user, I activate Arduino’s “external editor” feature. But it’s undeniable how well Arduino has enabled novices to build projects. However, I am planning to start publishing a non-Arduino package next year, which includes all this effort for libraries and features that “just work”. Today you have to install Arduino and then find a makefile the Teensyduino installer buries within the core library, without much in the way of documentation or help. Many people have indeed done exactly that, but I could do much better for more advanced users who don’t want to touch Arduino or use an installer.
[Mathieu]
What have you learned in all your experiences?
[Paul]
I’ve learned a lot about making technology easier for people, but quite frankly, much of what I’ve learned is that I still have a lot more to learn! I hope to do much more, and do it much better, in the coming months and years.
Switching to a 32 bit microcontroller, and especially writing a DMA-based USB stack and libraries that leverage the DMA controller, has also been quite a learning experience. Over the course of 22 years programming 8 bit MCUs with fairly simple peripherals, I’ve developed paradigms based on such limited hardware. Many of those techniques still apply, but this more powerful hardware, especially the DMA controller, really opens up a lot of possibilities I had never really considered before. In fact, that’s one of the Teensy 3.1 improvements I’m really excited about, going from only 4 to 16 DMA channels. | 50 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "1127570",
"author": "raver1975",
"timestamp": "2013-12-09T17:21:26",
"content": "I love using the Teensy 2.0 in my projects, I’m looking forward to trying out the Teensy 3.1, Go Teensy!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1127587",
... | 1,760,376,375.831535 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/09/40-lens-hack-gives-your-flir-higher-resolution/ | $40 Lens Hack Gives Your FLIR Higher Clarity | Marsh | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"flir",
"FLIR E4",
"therma",
"thermal imaging"
] | [Josh Oster-Morris’s] FLIR camera can see a bit more clearly now that he’s
hacked it to have its own makeshift “macro” mode.
You may remember [Josh] from his power distribution
Motobrain project
. He’s still improving the Motobrain, and he wanted to better understand the thermal characteristics of the high current draws (upwards of 100amps!)
After reading that the FLIR 4
could be hacked into a better version
, [Josh] immediately purchased his own. The FLIR is, however, limited at close-range imaging, because the resolution of the FLIR’s
microbolometer
is relatively low. He had fortunately decided to stay tuned in to [Mike’s] YouTube channel and saw
his follow-up video
a few days later on refocusing the FLIR camera with an external lens. [Josh] hit up Amazon for a Gallium Arsenide lens normally used for CO2 lasers, and found one for around $40. He then mounted this lens into a simple paper frame held together by tape and staples, and fitted it onto the FLIR.
After you’ve checked out [Josh’s] blog for more examples of how astoundingly clear the images become, check out [Mike’s] video detailing the hack below. | 26 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1127495",
"author": "fartface",
"timestamp": "2013-12-09T15:47:42",
"content": "I am hoping that FLIR’s executives cry themselves to sleep at night with all the hacking that is going on with this lower cost device.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,376,375.629438 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/09/boil-off-some-white-gas-in-the-back-yard/ | Boil Off Some White Gas In The Back Yard | Adam Fabio | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"Coleman",
"Coleman fuel",
"energy",
"gasoline",
"PID controller",
"white gas"
] | [S Heath] is a Coleman lantern collector. Coleman lanterns can run from a variety of fuels, however they seem to run best with white gas, or Coleman fuel. Store bought Coleman fuel can cost upwards of $10USD/gallon. To keep the prices down, [S Heath] has
created a still in his back yard to purify pump gas
. We just want to take a second to say that this is not only one of those hacks that we wouldn’t want you to try at home, it’s also one that we wouldn’t try at home ourselves. Heating gasoline up past 120 degrees Celsius in a (mostly) closed container sounds like a recipe for disaster. [S Heath] has pulled it off though.
The still is a relatively standard setup. An electric hot plate is used to heat a metal tank. A column filled with broken glass (increased surface area for
reflux
) rises out of the tank. The vaporized liquid that does make it to the top of the column travels through a condenser – a pipe cooled with a water jacket. The purified gas then drips out for collection. The heart the system is a PID controller. A K-type thermocouple enters the still at the top of the reflux column. This thermocouple gives feedback to a PID controller at the Still’s control panel. The controller keeps the system at a set temperature, ensuring consistent operation. From 4000 mL of ethanol free pump gas, [S Heath] was able to generate 3100 mL of purified gas, and 500 mL of useless “dregs”. The missing 400 mL is mostly butane dissolved in the pump gas, which is expelled as fumes during the distillation process.
[Thanks Cody!] | 56 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "1127358",
"author": "Kaijuu",
"timestamp": "2013-12-09T12:18:51",
"content": "$10 a gallon sounds like what we pay for regular unleaded 95 over here in the Netherlands: at the moment it’s about $9.10/US gallon at a motorway fuel station.Getting UL95 in the city is slightly cheaper, ... | 1,760,376,375.73879 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/09/oculus-rift-goes-from-virtual-to-augmented-reality/ | Oculus Rift Goes From Virtual To Augmented Reality | Adam Fabio | [
"News",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"augmented reality",
"camera",
"head mounted display",
"oculus rift",
"Rift",
"University College London",
"virtual reality"
] | [William Steptoe] is a post-doctoral research associate at University College London. This means he gets to play with some really cool hardware. His most recent project is an
augmented reality update to the Oculus Rift
. This is much more than hacking a pair of cameras on the Rift though. [William] has created an entire AR/VR user interface, complete with dockable web browser screens. He started with a stock Rift, and a room decked out with a professional motion capture system. The Rift was made wireless with the addition of an
ASUS Wavi
and a laptop battery system. [William] found that the wireless link added no appreciable latency to the Rift. To move into the realm of augmented reality, [William] added a pair of Logitech C310 cameras. The C310 lens’ field of view was a bit narrow for what he needed, so lenses from a Genius WideCam F100 were swapped in. The Logitech cameras were stripped down to the board level, and mounted on 3D printed brackets that clip onto the Rift’s display. Shapelock was added to the mounts to allow the convergence of the cameras to be easily set.
Stereo camera calibration is a difficult and processor intensive process. Add to that multiple tracking systems (both the 6DOF head tracking on the Rift, and the video tracker built-in to the room) and you’ve got quite a difficult computational process. [William] found that he needed to use a Unity shader running on his PC’s graphics card to get the system to operate in real-time. The results are quite stunning. We didn’t have a Rift handy to view the 3D portions of [William’s] video. However, the sense of presence in the room still showed through. Videos like this make us excited for the future of augmented reality applications, with the Rift, the upcoming
castAR
, and with other systems.
[Thanks Scott!] | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1127270",
"author": "Ace",
"timestamp": "2013-12-09T09:50:15",
"content": "Sweet, Now all I need is to get me a bat-cape and climb a really tall bridge and Im set!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1127295",
"author": "Dax",... | 1,760,376,375.888832 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/08/solder-fume-extractor-with-heat-recovery/ | Solder Fume Extractor With Heat Recovery | Phillip Ryals | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"heat exchanger",
"solder fume extractor"
] | When snow covers the landscape outside, you do your best to preserve the heat inside. [Tom] came up with a smart design for
a solder fume extractor that includes a heat recovery ventilator
. He created a housing which contains input and output sections. A fan is used to bring in outside air, passing it through a heat exchanger made of alternating panels of coroplast. (See diagrams of his setup after the break) This is really a simple design, and could be built in a couple of hours.
A little digging turns up
some good information
on making a heat exchanger like this one. [Tom] doesn’t mention the indoor temperature, so it’s difficult to calculate the efficiency he’s getting out of it. Apparently they can attain up to 70% heat transfer, depending on the size of the heat exchanger.
In the video, [Tom] mentions some obvious improvements that could be made, including more efficient fans, and a better housing that allows the core to be removed for cleaning. Still, this is a simple setup that provides a good proof of concept. Perhaps we’ll get to see a more permanent installation from [Tom] in the future. | 49 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1127137",
"author": "dALE",
"timestamp": "2013-12-09T06:20:04",
"content": "Oh, great idea. Use the exhaust air to heat the incoming air. I need to make a big one of these for my grow room.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1127... | 1,760,376,376.072681 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/08/a-touch-scroll-wheel-via-openscad/ | A Touch Scroll Wheel Via OpenSCAD | Brian Benchoff | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"eagle",
"EaglePCB",
"openscad",
"pcb",
"traces"
] | Recent experiments with the Arduino CapSense library led [Bryan] around the Internet looking for interesting applications. He hit upon a very cool touch scroll wheel made entirely with PCB traces, but the geometry – three interleaved zig zags is impossible to build in the decidedly ungeometric Eagle PCB package. One thing leads to another and now [Bryan] has a cap touch wheel Eagle part
designed entirely in OpenSCAD
.
The touch scroll wheel implementation [Bryan] found came from an
ST touch controller datasheet
and used oddly-shaped patterns to create a capacities sensor. Eagle is terrible for designing anything that isn’t laid out at a 45 degree angle, so he fired up OpenSCAD to draw these triangles. Importing into Eagle was another challenge, but a quick Ruby script to convert a DXF file into a set of coordinates for Eagle’s POLYGON command made everything very easy.
If OpenSCADing touch sensors isn’t your thing,
there’s also an Eagle library full of them
– something we found last week. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1127049",
"author": "ST-ay away",
"timestamp": "2013-12-09T03:48:21",
"content": "TOS do not allow 3rd parties to post the app notes.That pdf website DMCAnt do that…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1127081",
"author": "Andre... | 1,760,376,375.328988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/08/hackaday-links-december-8-2013/ | Hackaday Links: December 8, 2013 | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"advent calendar",
"arcade button",
"jacob's ladder",
"metal detector",
"relay",
"scissor lift",
"smartwatch",
"ultrasonic distance sensor"
] | Let’s start off with some high voltage. Here’s
a sweet Jacob’s Ladder build
from [Robert]. The site hosting
his short writeup
has been up and down for us so here’s
a cache link
.
Speaking of high voltage, if you want to switch mains with your project [Tom] has
a breakout board for cheap mechanical relays
. [via
Dangerous Prototypes
]
[Dario] made his own version of
an electronic Advent calendar
[
translated
]. There are no numbers, you must solve the mystery of the flashing LEDs to figure out which package goes with each day.
If you ever work with lighted arcade buttons here’s a guide for
swapping out the light for an RGB LED
. This hack uses through-hole LEDs. We’ve actually seen
a surface mount hack
that includes a PCB to mimic the old bulbs.
Next time you stay overnight at an event you can give yourself the best view in the campground. This tiny little
camper was mounted on a scissor lift
! That first step on the way to the Porta Potty is a doozy! [via
Adafruit
]
[Žiga] was nice enough to
demonstrate this smart-watch hack
by displaying our name and logo (we love pandering!). It features the MSP-WDS430 which is a surprisingly stylish offering from Texas Instruments. In addition to analog clock hands it has an OLED display driven by the MSP430 inside.
Here’s
a quick PIC-based metal detector
which [Nicholas] built.
And finally, [Chet] saw
the oil tank level sensor we featured this week
. He built a
nearly identical system earlier this year
. The oil level sensor works in conjunction with
the custom thermostat he built around an Android tablet
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1127001",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2013-12-09T02:18:46",
"content": "F**K tornadoes, I want that trailer!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1127030",
"author": "matt",
"timestamp": "2013-12-09T03:11:1... | 1,760,376,375.376228 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/8-track-tapes-as-a-storage-medium/ | 8-Track Tapes As A Storage Medium | Brian Benchoff | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"8-track",
"scsi"
] | Before [Woz] created the elegant Disk II interface for the Apple II, and before Commodore brute-forced the creation of the C64 5 1/4″ drive, just about every home computer used cassette tapes for storage. Cassette tapes, mind you, not 8-track tapes. [Alec] thought this was a gross oversight of late 1970s engineers, so
he built a 8-track tape drive.
This actually isn’t the first instance of using 8-tracks to store data on a computer. The
Compucolor 8001
had a dual external 8-track drive, and the
Exidy Sorcerer
had a tape drive built in to the ‘the keyboard is the computer’ form factor. It should be noted that nearly no one has heard about these two computers – the Compucolor sold about 25 units, for example – so we’ll just let that be a testament to the success of 8-track tape drives.
[Alec] installed an 8-track drive inside an old external SCSI hard drive enclosure. Inside is an Arduino that controls the track select, tape insertion and end of tape signals. Data is encoded with DTMF with an FSK encoding, just like the proper cassette data tapes of the early days.
On the computer side of things, [Alec] is using a simple UNIX-style, pipe-based I/O. By encoding four bits on each track, he’s able to put an entire byte on two stereo tracks. The read/write speed is terribly slow – from the video after the break, we’re assuming [Alec] is running his tape drive right around 100 bits/second – much slower than actually typing in data. This is probably a problem with the 40-year-old 8-track tape he’s using, but as a proof of concept it’s not too bad. | 42 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1129190",
"author": "Khai",
"timestamp": "2013-12-10T21:12:06",
"content": "correct me if I’m wrong… but this is another version of the Sinclair Microdrive for Spectrums ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1129433",
"aut... | 1,760,376,375.983408 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/creative-compulsive-disorder-zina-nicole-lahr/ | Creative Compulsive Disorder: Zina Nicole Lahr | James Hobson | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"hacker documentary",
"maker",
"zina nicole lahr"
] | [Zina Nicole Lahr] was an extremely talented artist, designer, puppeteer and maker, with a self-diagnosed condition that she liked to call
Creative Compulsive Disorder
which she describes as follows:
I suppose you could say I have a self-diagnosed condition called CCD, it’s Creative Compulsive Disorder where I have to make stuff all the time, and with whatever I have around me, so if it’s trash, or junk, or things that people would normally throw away, I try to find new ways to re-fabricate them into something useful and beautiful.
A true hacker at heart. She’s worked on tons of different projects in many different fields, even doing special effects and prop work for a TV show.
Unfortunately it is with great sadness that we share her story, as she recently passed away in a hiking accident.
What we are specifically sharing is a short 5 minute documentary about [Zina] which was made by her close friend [Stormy Pyeatte] a few months earlier for a school project. In this past week [Pyeatte] has re-cut the footage in an attempt to capture her personality, creativity and to celebrate her memory. She succeeded tremendously, our heartstrings cannot lie.
It’s a beautiful video about a beautiful soul. We wish we could have met you [Zina].
There is more information on the
reddit thread
, and [Pyeatte] was also
interviewed on the radio
, in case you’re not sad enough already.
[via
thisiscolossal
] | 54 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "1129081",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2013-12-10T19:11:12",
"content": "From a fellow CCD “sufferer”, God bless, Zina. May you rest in peace.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1129083",
"author": "romfont",
"timestamp... | 1,760,376,375.256887 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/retrotechtacular-cathode-ray-tube-crt-manufacturing/ | Retrotechtacular: Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) Manufacturing | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"cathode ray tubes",
"crt"
] | This week we return to the grainy and un-color-corrected goodness that is synonymous with ancient video reels. [CNK] sent in a tip to a set of videos showing how Cathode Ray Tubes are manufactured on a massive scale. You’ll want to watch the pair of clips embedded below which total about 18 minutes. But there’s also some background to be found at
this post from the Obsolete Technology Telley Web Museum
.
The video presentation starts off with a brief overview of the way a color CRT works. It then moves to a factory tour, carefully showing each step in the process. The footage was shot in the 1960’s and because of that we catch a glimpse of some vintage equipment, like that used to measure the curvature of the CRT glass. You may be thinking that the world of CRT is in the past, but not so. We think there may even been a coming fad of
producing them in your home lab
.
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
. | 21 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1128976",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2013-12-10T17:34:54",
"content": "Incredible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1128983",
"author": "mlseim",
"timestamp": "2013-12-10T17:41:34",
"content": "I’m 53 yrs ol... | 1,760,376,376.126488 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/hanging-plotter-with-a-color-twist/ | Hanging Plotter With A Color Twist | Phillip Ryals | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"color",
"hanging",
"plotter"
] | [Jack Boland], a mechanical engineer at the University of Wisconsin, built a cool
hanging plotter project called HangBot
. It’s a fairly standard setup, where he converts an image to G-Code files, and it is plotted using two stepper motors for control. We’ve seen vertical plotters
before
, but they tend to only have a single pen. [Jack] expanded this one to
bring color into the mix
by splitting an image into separate CMYK layers, and plotting each onto separate transparency film. When overlaid, they create something close to a full color image. His idea is to use this setup as a replacement for typical window signage.
Since it’s drawing a continuous line, he appears to be employing a grid instead of a traditional dot pattern. That, combined with the inaccuracy of a marker tip means resolution will be limited. Still, you can tell that he’s made a great start in this (albeit blurry)
photo
. Check out the video of it’s operation after the break.
'Hangbot' robot sketches images and data
from
Wisc Institute for Discovery
on
Vimeo
. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1128868",
"author": "Gronk",
"timestamp": "2013-12-10T15:52:37",
"content": "Was really hoping to see it printing in multiple colors (or layers) and see an image produced.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1128871",
"aut... | 1,760,376,376.312675 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/ultrasonic-data-transmission-with-gnu-radio/ | Ultrasonic Data Transmission With GNU Radio | Brian Benchoff | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"data transmission",
"gnu radio",
"ultrasonic"
] | When we hear GNU Radio was used in a build, the first thing we think of is, obviously, radio. Whether it’s a using extremely expensive gear or just a USB TV tuner dongle, GNU Radio is the perfect tool for just about everything in the tail end of the electromagnetic spectrum.
There’s no reason GNU Radio can’t be used with other mediums, though, as [Chris] shows us with his
ultrasound data transmission between two laptops
. He’s transmitting audio from the speakers of one laptop at 23 kHz. It’s outside the range of human hearing, but surprisingly able to be picked up by a cheap desktop mic connected to another laptop. His GNU Radio setup first converts a string of text to a 5-bit packet, modulates it with FSK, and bumps up the signal to 23 kHz. On the other end, the data is decoded by doing the same thing in reverse.
The setup is easily able to reject all audio that isn’t in the specified frequency range; in the video after the break, [Chris] successfully transmits a ‘hello world’ while narrating what he’s doing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0DKRl8XIcU | 35 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1128730",
"author": "Joseph Massimino",
"timestamp": "2013-12-10T13:21:55",
"content": "Have you tried testing it with a dog in the room? It was always possible, but not very practical. There are so many impractical ways to do things that we are already doing in a more practical wa... | 1,760,376,376.487655 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/disk-o-mat-a-photobooth-for-records/ | Disk-O-Mat: A Photobooth For Records | Brian Benchoff | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"45",
"photo booth",
"record",
"record cutting"
] | A photo booth is a simple concept – drop in a coin and get a few pictures in a couple of minutes. That’s only a visual record, though. What if you wanted to record audio? T
hus the disk-o-mat was born.
The disk-o-mat is one of [flo]’s projects. In place of the miniaturized dark room found in a photo booth, [flo] put a record cutting setup. The 7″ records are polycarbonate sheets, each transferred to the turntable by a vacuum gripper. When the plastic disk is loaded, a stylus is set down on the disk and the record light goes on.
There isn’t a computer or any other digital means of saving audio and playing it back later. Everything is done just as how 45s – or more specifically, really old 78s – were cut; whatever goes into the microphone is cut directly into plastic.
The disk-o-mat was originally built in 2009, and has traveled to a few venues. [flo] is working on speeding up the process and making the machine a bit more reliable. Still, an awesome build and an awesome concept.
Videos below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDJ3XAunS2s | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1128620",
"author": "Paul Kastner",
"timestamp": "2013-12-10T11:06:32",
"content": "These have been around for at least 70 years. I have a few original disks recorded in the 1940s. Researching how they worked now…http://sneezingcow.com/2011/01/19/digital-resurrection/",
"paren... | 1,760,376,376.41936 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/solar-powered-tweeting-bird-feeder/ | Solar Powered, Tweeting Bird Feeder | Phillip Ryals | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"bird feeder",
"raspberry pi",
"solar",
"tweet"
] | The folks at Manifold created their version of a tweeting bird feeder, and [Chad] wrote up
a behind-the-scenes of their design
. The goal is something we’ve seen before: When the bird lands to eat, take a picture and tweet it. In this case, they had some corporate money behind the project, and that allowed them to buy a nice
solar panel
and
battery pack
to keep the whole thing running.
The write-up is full of the experimentation that we all enjoy: They found that detecting motion through the camera feed wasn’t reliable, so they switched over to a PIR sensor. The PIR sensor was too sensitive to heat changes during the day, so they went with an ultrasonic rangefinder, but wind caused issues there. They finally came up with a solution which involves using two sensors to confirm motion. This seems a bit more complicated than it needs to be, but it works well for them.
We think it is nice to see companies getting behind quirky projects. All told, they spent dozens of hours on this, and they chose to give all of their findings back to the community in the form of thorough explanations and project diagrams. It would be nice to see more of this.
The weather in Colorado hasn’t been the best lately, so the birdhouse hasn’t been tweeting for a while. In our experience, a project that’s turned off is in the dangerous position of being scavenged for parts. Hopefully that isn’t the case here, and we will see it
back in action
when Spring starts. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1128594",
"author": "Xavier Romagosa",
"timestamp": "2013-12-10T10:33:05",
"content": "Why not use one (or two) break beam IR barriers? This has the added benefit of defining exactly the point in space where the bird should be to take a perfectly focused photo.",
"parent_id": nu... | 1,760,376,376.16771 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/11/xbox-one-headset-2-5-mm-plug-adapter/ | Xbox One Headset 2.5 Mm Plug Adapter | Todd Harrison | [
"Xbox Hacks"
] | [
"2.5 mm adapter",
"adapter",
"headset",
"xbox one"
] | In all of Microsoft’s grand wisdom they found it necessary to make the new Xbox One headset adapter without a standard 2.5 mm headset jack. People have invested great amounts of money in quality headsets for previous game platforms that now cannot jack into the Xbox One controllers. This may seem like a déjà vu hack from a week ago but it is different and adds more solutions for the annoying Xbox One headset compatibility problem.
[Jon Senkiw] A.K.A [Xandrel] wasn’t having any of this Microsoft nonsense so he cracked open the headset adapter case that plugs into the Xbox One controller. He photographed the PCB and wiring and realized he could fit a
2.5 mm headset jack from an old donor cellphone into the case
. A dap of hot glue, some AWG 30 jumper wires and a bit of plastic trimming was all it took to get a jack inside the headset adapter just the way Microsoft should have done from the factory.
Previously when
[octanechicken] added a 2.5 mm female phone adapter at the end of the cable
he did not connect the black wire to anything being it was the 2nd side of a push-pull speaker. However, from looking at [Jon’s] photos he connected the speaker output wire to a solder pad on the PCB where the black wire originally connected, marked HPL, and he had nothing connected to the HPR pad. This seemed to work for [Jon] just fine, but is the opposite of what [octanechicken] did last week when he connected the blue wire to the speaker output which would have traced back to the HPR pad on the PCB.
This hack makes these controllers backwards compatible without too much issue being reported. If you have issues please report here or on
[Jon’s] SE7ENSINS thread
. He has also made comments on the thread that he is willing to help mod headsets, so if you’re not able to hack this yourself [Jon] might be willing to help. | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1129938",
"author": "Slenders",
"timestamp": "2013-12-11T11:18:38",
"content": "i don’t own one . but if the pcb said gnd,mic,hpl,hpri would assume it would be Ground, Microphone, Left speaker and Right speakeror is stereo sound not common in headphones anymore?",
"parent_id": n... | 1,760,376,376.368346 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/11/hidden-reed-switches-for-diy-home-security/ | Hidden Reed Switches For DIY Home Security | James Hobson | [
"how-to"
] | [
"diy home security",
"hidden reed switch",
"reed switch"
] | [Rhys] wanted to secure his home against burglars, but didn’t want to go the normal route of using those bulky plastic magnet and reed switch deals. So he sourced some glass reed switches and made his own
completely hidden security system.
By using small glass reed switches [Rhys] was able to mount them flush to the wood paneling just above the window frames. To do this he drilled and then chiseled two slots for the reed switches to go in, with the wires routed into the house. A bit of bondo or drywall filler and some paint later and they are completely invisible! To finish it off he glued small neodymium magnets to the top of the window frame which close the switches. It’s a very clean build and quite inexpensive to do — the possibilities for wiring up your entire home like this are quite tempting!
He’s got the switches installed already… why not couple it all to a complete home security setup? We shared a project last year
that does just that! | 36 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1129836",
"author": "tehmwak",
"timestamp": "2013-12-11T09:07:59",
"content": "I’m a communications and security tech, we’ve done this a few times for people where money is no object… Labor is expensive.While it looks a lot better, seeing security on everything is a much better dete... | 1,760,376,376.875085 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/e-volo-vc200-makes-maiden-flight-flying-cars-incoming/ | E-volo VC200 Makes Maiden Flight. Flying Cars Incoming | Adam Fabio | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Brushless DC electric motor",
"Carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer",
"e-volo",
"german",
"helicopter",
"multirotor",
"Outrunner"
] | The
e-volo VC200 has made it’s maiden unmanned flight
. Does the craft above look a bit familiar?
We first reported on the e-volo team back in 2011.
Things have been going great for the team since then. They’ve created an 18 motor (Octadecacopter?) prototype dubbed the VC200. The group has taken a smart approach to building their craft. Rather than try to keep everything in-house, they’ve
created a network
by partnering with a number of companies who are experts in their fields. A sailplane company laid up the carbon fiber composite frame for the EC200. Junkers Profly, a German aviation company, developed a ballistic parachute system in case something goes wrong in flight.
From the outside, the VC200 looks like a grown up version of the
Quadcopters we’ve seen here on Hackaday
. Even the control system used for the test flight looks like a modified Radio Control Transmitter. The motors are outrunner brushless motors. Props are carbon fiber. We’re hoping the control system is a bit more evolved (and redundant) than the systems used in R/C quads though. Just like in smaller scale models, batteries are still the limiting factor. The VC200 will only fly for about 20 minutes on a charge. However, e-volo says that new technology should allow it to extend that time to around an hour. Not very much for a cross country flight, but plenty to pioneer a new type of aircraft. Where do we sign for the beta program?
Videos are in German, with English subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzP0Zqxam7E | 83 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "1129744",
"author": "AC",
"timestamp": "2013-12-11T07:14:46",
"content": "Can’t beat the energy density or availability of fossil fuels. Stick a gas engine on that bad boy and we will be in business.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,376,377.027993 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/vfd-and-nixie-clock-twofer/ | VFD And Nixie Clock Twofer | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks",
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"nixie",
"vfd",
"vfd display"
] | Sometimes the stars align and we get two somewhat similar builds hitting the Hackaday tip line at the same time. Recently, the build of note was clocks using some sort of display tube, so here we go.
First up is [Pyrofer]’s
VFD network time clock
(pic, above). The build started as a vacuum flourescent display tube he salvaged from an old fruit machine – whatever that is. The VFD was a 16 character, 14 segment display, all controlled via serial input.
The main control board is, of course, an Arduino with a WizNet 5100 Ethernet board. The clock connects to the Internet via DHCP so there’s no need to set an IP address. Once connected, the clock sets itself via network time and displays the current date, time, and temperature provided by a Dallas 1-wire temperature probe.
Next up is [Andrew]’s
beautiful Nixie clock
with enough LEDs to satiate the desires of even the most discerning technophile. The board is based on a PIC microcontroller with two switching power supplies – one for the 170VDC for the Nixies, and 5V for the rest of the board.
A battery backed DS1307 is the real-time clock for this board, and two MCP23017 I/O expanders are used to run the old-school Nixie drivers
All this is pretty standard for a Nixie clock build, if a little excessive. It wasn’t enough for [Andrew], though: he used the USB support on his PIC to throw a USB port on his board and wrote an awesome bit of software for his PC to set the time, upload new firmware, and set the color fade and speed. With this many LEDs, it’s not something you want in your bedroom with all the lights on full blast, so he implemented a ‘sleep’ mode to turn off most of the lights and all the Nixie tubes. It’s a great piece of work that could easily be successfully funded on Kickstarter. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1129662",
"author": "Wonko The Sane",
"timestamp": "2013-12-11T05:30:49",
"content": "Fruit machine == British for slot machine (because of what’s usually on the reels – fruit).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1129669",
"aut... | 1,760,376,377.084754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/a-kinect-controlled-robotic-hand/ | A Kinect Controlled Robotic Hand | Brian Benchoff | [
"Kinect hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"glove",
"Kinect",
"robot"
] | It’s that time of year again when the senior design projects come rolling in. [Ben], along with his partners [Cameron], [Carlton] and [Chris] have been working on something very ambitious since September:
a robotic arm and hand controlled by a Kinect
that copies the user’s movements.
The arm is a
Lynxmotion AL5D
, but instead of the included software suite the guys rolled their own means of controlling this arm with the help of an Arduino. The Kinect captures the user’s arm position and turns that into data for the arm’s servos.
A Kinect’s resolution is limited, of course, so for everything beyond the wrist, the team turned to another technology – flex resistors. A glove combined with these flex resistors and an accelerometer provides all the data of the position of the hand and fingers in space.
This data is sent over to another Arduino on the build for orienting the wrist and fingers of the robotic arm. As shown in the videos below, the arm performs remarkably well, just like the best Waldos you’ve ever seen. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1130103",
"author": "chris p",
"timestamp": "2013-12-11T14:17:20",
"content": "I’m not about to say that this is terrible or anything. Actually, I can’t at the moment even come close to what these people have accomplished. However, for the sake of presentation, the seemingly loose a... | 1,760,376,376.802878 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/diy-3d-projector-from-an-lcd/ | DIY 3D Projector From An LCD | James Hobson | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"3d projector",
"diy projector"
] | We’ve shared many home made projectors in the past, but we think this might just be the first
home made 3D projector!
[Nicholas] has created a wonderful write up on this project on his blog, and in an
Instructable
, and even more details are available on the
original forum post
(in French though).
To sum it up though, he’s using an old LCD from a broken laptop, split into two halves. By using a Fresnel lens and two separate optical lenses that are adjustable he can combine the two images (top and bottom of the LCD) on the wall. Then by adding a polarization filter to each lens, he can reuse the cheap 3D goggles from the cinema for his own setup to see in 3D! This style of passive 3D does require a special projector screen to keep the polarization intact — he’s using a Da-Lite Silverlight screen, whose metallic surface ensures the polarization is kept the same.
It’s a great project and is definitely worth checking out. If you’re in the mood for a smaller form factor projector, it’d be worth checking out
this one
we covered quite a few years ago! | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1129673",
"author": "BotherSaidPooh",
"timestamp": "2013-12-11T05:48:33",
"content": "Nice, with the cheap netbooks around surplus thanks to the imminent demise of XP this would be an effective reuse for them.160GB is enough to store a fair number of 3D films, and they are also low ... | 1,760,376,376.912839 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/10/get-tangled-up-in-el-wire-with-freaklabs/ | Get Tangled Up In EL Wire With Freaklabs | Adam Fabio | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"Akiba",
"Electroluminescent wire",
"FreakLabs",
"light emitting diode",
"tron",
"Wrecking Crew"
] | [Akiba] over at Freaklabs has been working with electroluminescent (EL) wire.
An entire dance company worth!
We know [Akiba] from his post tsunami
radiation monitoring work with the Tokyo Hackerspace
. Today he’s one of the engineers for Wrecking Crew Orchestra, the dance company that put on the viral
“Tron Dance”
last year. Wrecking Crew Orchestra just recently put on a new production called
Cosmic Beat
. Cosmic Beat takes Wrecking Crew’s performances to a whole new level by adding stage projection mapping and powerful lasers, along with Iron Man repulsor style hand mounted LEDs.
As one might expect, the EL wire costumes are controlled by a computer, which keeps all the performers lighting effects in perfect time. That’s where [Akiba] came in. The modern theater is awash in a sea of RF noise. Kilowatts of lighting are controlled by
triacs
which throw out tremendous amounts of noise. Strobes and camera flashes, along with an entire audience carrying cell phones and WiFi devices only add to this. RF noise or not, the show must go on, and The EL costumes and LEDs have to work. To that end, [Akiba] He also created new transmitters for the group. He also changed the lighting booth mounted transmitter antenna from an omnidirectional whip to a directional
Yagi
.
The EL wire itself turned out to be a bit of a problem. The wire wasn’t quite bright enough. Doubling up on the wire would be difficult, as the dancers are already wearing 25 meters of wire in addition to the control electronics. Sometimes best engineering practices have to give way to art, so [Akiba] had to overdrive the strings. This means that wires burn out often. The dance troupe has gotten very good at changing out strands of wire during and between shows. If you want a closer look, there are plenty of pictures available on
[Akiba’s] flickr stream
. | 13 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1129313",
"author": "supershwa",
"timestamp": "2013-12-10T23:26:10",
"content": "Oh yeah that never gets old.Now if you’ll excuse me…I’m going to go have an epileptic seizure.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1129914",
... | 1,760,376,377.128622 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/08/50-backyard-rollercoaster/ | $50 Backyard Rollercoaster | James Hobson | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"backyard rollercoaster",
"diy rollercoaster"
] | This is great. What happens when you bet a group of friends they can’t build a roller coaster in their backyard for under $50?
They build one.
They built it almost entirely out of old forklift pallets, some wood from Home Depot, assorted nails and screws, some caster wheels and a folding seat from an old arena. It was built in just over 9 hours by three people. Once assembled they tested it with a 15lb cinder block — safety first right? The cinder block survived the ride, and by that logic, a 160lb+ person should be fine as well!
Well… they were right! To finish it up and get into the holiday spirit they also decked it out in Christmas lights and let the neighborhood kids use it all night. The total came to $49.27 from Home Depot for the wood and wheels.
Stick around after the break to see a .GIF of it in action!
We covered a similar backyard roller coaster last year, which featured
PVC piping for the rails
made by a father for one very lucky child.
[via
Reddit
] | 36 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1126828",
"author": "FormerUtahrd",
"timestamp": "2013-12-08T21:32:54",
"content": "Typical Utahrds! It’s okay if one of the kids gets hurt — they have at least 8 spares!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1126832",
"author": "... | 1,760,376,377.201389 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/08/openmv-the-camera-for-your-next-project/ | OpenMV: The Camera For Your Next Project | Brian Benchoff | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"serial camera",
"STM32F4"
] | Last month we saw [Ibrahim] tackle the lack of cheap, high speed, high resolution serial cameras
with full force
. He designed a serial camera based on the STM32F4 microcontroller that’s the perfect solution to anyone wanting to add visual processing or machine vision to a project. It’s cheap, too: instead of the $100 or so you’d spend on a high-end serial camera, [Ibrahim]’s version only has about $15 in parts.
Now he’s back at it again
, with 25 FPS face detection, 30 FPS color detection, a new board with a micro SD socket, and support for USB OTG full speed. [Ibrahim] has been hard at work deep in the bowels of the STM32F4 micro,
playing around with the core coupled memory
. This allows for some very fast image processing, combined with the micro running at 168 MHz makes for very fast face and color detection.
As for a few benchmarks for this camera, the maximum resolution is 1280×1024, and at 88×72 resolution this little board can output at 60 FPS. Of course everything is limited by the speed of the serial connection, but there’s a lot of potential in this small serial camera.
No word on how much this board will cost, but [Ibrahim] may be putting a few boards up on Tindie shortly. Here’s to hoping he’ll send us an email telling us when his store is open. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1126681",
"author": "Indyaner",
"timestamp": "2013-12-08T18:15:35",
"content": "I hope you’re not trying to tell me, that I blew my money on the Pixy Kickstarter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1126712",
"author": "Ib... | 1,760,376,377.246345 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/08/an-awesome-electric-bike/ | An Awesome Electric Bike | Brian Benchoff | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"electric",
"electric conversion",
"motorcycle"
] | Converting a motorcycle to electric is always a favorite project of ours, and
[Peter]’s build is up there with the rest of them
.
T
he bike is a 2002 ZX6E he bought from a salvage shop. It had been parted out over the years and for $250 this very light aluminum frame made the for the perfect electric conversion frame. After learning MIG welding from his brother, [Peter] cut up a few plates and built a motor mount for his new 4.2 kW power plant.
The controller is a 300 amp IGBT he found on eBay, with an extraordinarily sturdy looking circuit
built into an ammo box
. The motor from the bike was replaced with
16 60Ah LiFe cells
providing 52 volts. [Peter] also built his own battery management system using a Cypress PSoC 3 microcontroller and a beautiful custom PCB.
It’s still a long way from being finished, but already [Peter] has a great looking bike and an awesome weekend project on his hands. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1126546",
"author": "fartface",
"timestamp": "2013-12-08T15:13:29",
"content": "I would love to see what the real world range is on that both in city and at highway speed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1126575",
"author": ... | 1,760,376,377.29837 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/08/four-cable-drawing-machine-pulls-our-strings/ | Four Cable Drawing Machine Pulls Our Strings | Adam Fabio | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"canada",
"drawing",
"Numerical control",
"skycam",
"stepper motor"
] | [David] has created a
four cable drawing machine
for the
Telus Spark Science Centre
in Canada. Hackaday has featured [David’s] unconventional drawing contraptions before, specifically his
center pivot pen plotter
. The drawing machine is a new take on a
drawbot
, and could be considered to be close cousins with [Dan’s]
SkyCam
. The premise is simple: A stepper motor with a reel of string is placed at each corner of a square. The strings for all four motors come together at a center weight. When all four strings are taut, the weight is lifted off the drawing surface. When a bit of slack is added into the strings, gravity pulls the weight down to touch the sand.
It’s at this point that a simple premise becomes a complex implementation. Moving the weight in one direction is a matter of reeling out string on one motor, and reeling in string on the other. But what about the two “un driven” strings? They have to be slack enough to allow movement in the driven direction, but not so slack that the weight can dig in and tumble on the sand, causing a tangle. To handle some of these questions, [David] called on [Kevin] to write some software. [Kevin] created a custom kinematics module for LinuxCNC to control the drawing machine. The drawing machine runs on Gerber Code, similar to a CNC. Simply feed the machine Cartesian coordinates, and [Kevin’s] module converts to steps.
The hardest part of the building the machine was creating a homing system. Be it a CNC, 3D printer, or a four cable drawing machine, any stepper motor based system has to have a home position. Stepper motors are open loop systems. They are very precise to move, but there is no way to tell where they are at any given moment in time. The most often used method is to get to a known “home” position and use software to keep track of steps. [David’s] problem was getting to the home position in the first place. If he doesn’t know where the weight is, he can’t reel out too much string or he’ll wind up with a tangled mess. His solution was actually pretty simple. He commands one motor to reel in and tells the others not to move. The moving motor is stronger than the holding torque of the other motors, which allows it to pull the weight up until it hits a switch on the pulling motor’s mount. This type of “tug of war” makes all sorts of noise, and requires a stoutly built machine. The results speak for themselves though – [David’s] machine looks great! | 22 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1126443",
"author": "ATC",
"timestamp": "2013-12-08T12:12:23",
"content": "please enable fullscreen in youtube !!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1126655",
"author": "voxnulla",
"timestamp": "2013-12-08T17:39... | 1,760,376,377.363867 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/08/arduino-rfid-car-starter/ | Arduino RFID Car Starter | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"electric car starter",
"rfid car starter"
] | [Pierre] recently bought his first car and decided to make his own
RFID electric starter for it!
An Arduino Nano controls two relays which in turn can turn the car on, start it, and turn it off. Instead of adding a button for “push to start” he opted for a 13.56MHz RFID module. Now when he passes his RFID badge across the dash, the car turns on — if it’s held there for over a second, the car starts. Another pass and it will turn off.
His eventual goal is to relocate this circuit closer to the wheel and use an
NFC ring
to start it! He’s done an amazing job hiding all the components under the trim in his car so far, you can’t tell anything is amiss! Check out the demonstration in the video after the break.
While his goal to use an NFC ring is admirable, one of our readers took it a step further a few years ago, and starts his car with a
RFID tag implanted in his hand!
Personally, we prefer [Pierre’s] approach. | 29 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1126363",
"author": "Josh",
"timestamp": "2013-12-08T09:48:32",
"content": "Very nice, just a shame it’s a crappy Peugeot!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1126375",
"author": "bandit, Albuquerque",
"timestamp": "2013-12-... | 1,760,376,377.4388 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/07/led-concert-dress/ | LED Concert Dress | James Hobson | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"led cocktail dress",
"LED dress",
"Taylor Swift"
] | [Geri] has an awesome brother. He made this
amazing LED dress
for her to wear at the [Taylor Swift] concert last weekend!
As you may or may not know, she encourages her fans to bring “glowy” things to wave around at her concerts. A quick check of the exhibition arena’s
conditions of entry
, and it seemed like LEDs would be allowed, so [Patrick] got to work.
He’s using a set of waterproof red LED strips and a cheap controller ordered from China. They needed a rather beefy battery pack so [Patrick] threw together a switchmode buck converter to drop a 19.8V 4.5A/h battery pack to a constant 12V for the LED controller. Not wanting to mess up the red cocktail dress, their mom sewed the strips into place. The dress is super bright and looks great — it draws about 25W, so the battery pack should last for the entire duration of the concert.
Unfortunately about a week before the concert they discovered Vector Arena is not allowing LED lights into the concert, which as you can imagine, was quite heartbreaking.
Thankfully, someone reached out to the organizers and they made an exception for them! [Geri] even ended up on the
front page
of their local newspaper! Stick around after the break to see a video of the dress in action!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MY9UhbTGUE
[Thanks Mike!] | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1126278",
"author": "Ernest Cunningham",
"timestamp": "2013-12-08T07:22:02",
"content": "Ohh wow, something form NZ on hackaday.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1130553",
"author": "Jamie",
"timestamp": "2013-1... | 1,760,376,377.528908 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/07/will-dance-for-bitcoin/ | Will Dance For Bitcoin | Eric Evenchick | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"api",
"arduino",
"bitcoin",
"coinbase",
"python"
] | It seems that Bitcoin is all over the news nowadays, but the
Bitcoin Bot
is probably the first robot that will dance for Bitcoins.
[Ryan] at
HeatSync Labs
in Mesa, AZ, is a fan of the cryptocurrency, and decided to build something to accept it. He discovered that Coinbase, a popular hosted Bitcoin wallet service, has a
callback API
. This causes Coinbase to fetch a specified URL any time a wallet receives a transaction, and provides information on the transaction in the request. A Python script handles these requests and updates a running count of the BTC balance sent to the robot’s wallet.
On the hardware side, an Arduino with an Ethernet Shield checks the balance. If it has changed, it calls the dance function and the luau girl dances.
The robot sits in the window of the hackerspace, so anyone passing by can read about Bitcoin and make a donation. The source code is on
Github
, and a video follows after the break.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAdKmcUyp9s | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1126628",
"author": "Mark Agius (@MAAgius)",
"timestamp": "2013-12-08T17:04:39",
"content": "How can you post the Bitcoins through the slot when it’s behind the window?And do you get a bigger dancing doll if you post more money?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,376,377.485727 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/07/super-simple-fm-transmitter/ | Super Simple FM Transmitter | James Hobson | [
"Portable Audio Hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"FM broadcasting",
"fm transmitter"
] | Making your own FM radio is practically a rite of passage for hackers. How about
making a small FM transmitter?
Originally designed by the Japanese multimedia artist [Tetsuo Kogawa], this simple FM transmitter can be built with only 10 components and about an hour of your time. The method shown here is one of the easiest to build, and it’s called the Manhattan Style — the same method used
when [Bill Meara] built his BITX radio
. It’s unique in that instead of using traces it uses one copper PCB which is used for all ground connections, and then small islands of the same PCB glued on top to form nodes for the circuit to connect to. Besides being an extremely easy way to make a PCB without any fancy tools, it also makes you think about circuits in a different light. In fact, it gives “floating ground” a whole new meaning!
While its 10 component count is impressive, it can’t beat this
3 component FM transmitter
we shared a year ago! Stick around after the break to see how to make your very own. | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1125953",
"author": "ejonesss",
"timestamp": "2013-12-08T01:04:20",
"content": "i think with analog dying it is pretty doubtful that the law is even being enforced.heck there was a sing along microphone and the transmitter for the verbot toy in the 80’s was simply fm transmitters.i ... | 1,760,376,377.756773 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/07/repairing-bose-active-noise-cancelling-headphones/ | Repairing Bose Active Noise Cancelling Headphones | Eric Evenchick | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"bose",
"headphones",
"qc15",
"repair"
] | [Mansour] was disappointed to find out that his Bose QC15 headphones had a dead right channel. These headphones have active noise cancelling, which uses a microphone to capture ambient noise and digital signal processing to insert an out of phase signal. Since they’re quite expensive, [Mansour] was
determined to resurrect them
.
First, he determined that the right speaker had died, so he found a
replacement on eBay
. These were designed for a different set of headphones, but matched the impedance of the original Bose part. After replacing the driver, it seemed that the repair was a failure. The sound cancelling wasn’t working, and a the playback was high-pitched. As a last attempt, he potted the speaker with glue, to match the original construction. Much to his surprise, this worked.
The problem was that the new driver didn’t have sufficient sound isolation from the microphone, which is meant to pick up passive noise. This feedback likely caused issues with the noise cancelling DSP. A little glue meant a $20 fix for a $400 pair of headphones. | 51 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "1125803",
"author": "hojo",
"timestamp": "2013-12-07T22:47:12",
"content": "not to nitpick, but I kind of doubt those use a DSP. Probably just an inverting amp. All those caps and inductors suggest analog signal processing to me. I could be wrong…",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,376,377.939133 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/07/speeding-up-beaglebone-black-gpio-a-thousand-times/ | Speeding Up BeagleBone Black GPIO A Thousand Times | Brian Benchoff | [
"ARM",
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"beaglebone",
"beaglebone black",
"gpio"
] | For both the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black, there’s a lot of GPIO access that happens the way normal Unix systems do – by moving files around. Yes, for most applications you really don’t need incredibly fast GPIO, but for the one time in a thousand you do, poking around /sysfs just won’t do.
[Chirag] was playing around with a BeagleBone and a quadrature encoder and found the usual methods of poking and prodding pins just wasn’t working. By connecting his scope to a pin that was toggled on and off with /sysfs he found – to his horror – the maximum speed of the BBB’s GPIO was around three and a half kilohertz.
Something had to be done
.
After finding
an old Stack Overflow question
, [Chirag] hit upon the solution of using /dev/mem to toggle his pins. A quick check with the scope revealed he was now toggling pins at 2.8 Megahertz, or just about a thousand times faster than before. | 42 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1125572",
"author": "Michael R. (@soegal)",
"timestamp": "2013-12-07T18:05:02",
"content": "Compared to this method would it be faster to use the PRU (something like PyPruss) ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1128537",
... | 1,760,376,378.43787 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/07/using-xbox-one-and-ps4-controllers-with-everything/ | Using XBox One And PS4 Controllers With Everything | Brian Benchoff | [
"Playstation Hacks",
"Xbox Hacks"
] | [
"controller",
"playstation",
"ps4",
"xbox",
"xbox one"
] | The controllers from the last generation of consoles served their purpose well. They were there for us when we wanted to experiment with an I2C bus, and they stood by when we wanted to build a quadcopter out of parts just lying around. A new generation of consoles is now upon us, and with them come new controllers. Controllers for which Arduino libraries haven’t been written yet. The horror.
Until those libraries are developed,
there’s ChronusMAX
, a USB dongle that allows you to use XBox One controllers on a PS4, PS4 controllers on the XBox, mice and keyboards on both systems, and both types of controllers on your PC.
The folks behind ChronusMAX
put up a video
demoing the XBox One controller working on the 360, PS3, and PC, with
another video
showing the same for the PS4 controller. As far as what we can see from the PC demos, everything on these controllers can be read, right down to the accelerometer data on the DualShock 4.
Although this is a commercial product, we’re surprised we haven’t seen a more open version by now. From the looks of it, it’s a very small device with two USB ports and a firmware upload utility. Microcontrollers with two native USB ports are usually encased in large packages, so there might be some very clever engineering in this device. Let us know when someone does a teardown of one of these.
Thanks [Josh] for sending this one in. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1125460",
"author": "emuboy",
"timestamp": "2013-12-07T15:50:34",
"content": "maybe inside there is only one chip, that make some auth. on the controller,I think all the other stuff is pretty standard…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_... | 1,760,376,378.087718 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/07/a-rostock-welding-3d-printer/ | A Rostock Welding 3D Printer? | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"metal 3d printing",
"mig welding 3d printer",
"MOST reprap",
"welder 3d printing"
] | Tired of printing in boring old plastic? Why not try metal? Researchers at Michigan Tech have come up with an open source reprap style design of a
3D printer that can print metal for only $1200.
The paper was
published in IEEE Access
a few weeks ago that it outlines the design and testing of this printer, which is basically an upside down Rostock with a MIG welder used as the extruder. As you can imagine, the quality and resolution of the parts isn’t that amazing (hang around after the break to see an example), but this is an exciting step forward for 3D printing. Equipped with this and a mill and the possibilities are quite endless!
Did we mention how cheap welding wire is? A cost that could add up is the shielding gas though, but as
a user on Reddit points out
, an upgrade for this machine could be an enclosed build chamber which could then just be flooded with the gas. Alternatively, would flux-core welding wire work?
As you can see, the printed part is rather rough — but it is solid carbon steel (ER70S-6). Combine this with a quick machining pass on a CNC and you’ll have a prototyped metal sprocket that barely wasted any material! We can’t find the video right now, but there was a commercial machine that is basically the same concept, using a modified 6-axis robotic welder. Its main purpose was for the production of large mostly hollow parts, like a wing casing on a plane. Instead of machining a giant chunk of metal, it could be printed and then cleaned up with a single machining pass — considerably less material processed.
So who wants to try building one?
[via
Reddit
] | 65 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "1125262",
"author": "ERROR_user_unknown",
"timestamp": "2013-12-07T12:13:46",
"content": "GUNS GUNS GUNS .. bunkers down for the coming onslaught of rubbish about 3D printed weapons",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1125345",
... | 1,760,376,378.243268 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/07/raspi-ac-and-blinds-controller/ | Raspi AC And Blinds Controller | Marsh | [
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"air conditioning",
"blinds",
"home automation",
"infrared",
"raspberry pi",
"raspberry pi home automation",
"stepper motor"
] | [Chris’s] bedroom has a unique setup with an air conditioning unit perched on the wall next to the top of the blinds that cover his window. Normally, to open the blinds he had to tug on a cord and operating the AC meant fiddling with a remote control. Not anymore. Now [Chris] has an
all-in-one Raspberry Pi-based solution to drive both
.
The build uses a stepper motor salvaged from a printer to directly drive the blinds, with a familiar-looking
Easy Driver
connecting it to the Pi. The motor spins the blinds’ mechanism either open or closed, though at a modest pace that’s slow enough to provide the needed torque. [Chris] added an IR diode plugged into the Pi that imitates the air conditioning unit’s remote control, and simply pointed it directly at the unit’s receiver. An inexpensive WiFi dongle gets the Pi onto the network, allowing [Chris] to interact via a custom web interface. The interface itself not only provides a couple of clickable buttons, but a cleverly-designed status image indicating the position of the blinds.
Make sure you see the video below for a demonstration and for more details on the build. This is one of the better examples of home automation devices we’ve seen recently, especially considering it actually fits the “autonomous” implications discussed in our
Ask Hackaday post from a few months back
—although a relatively simple automation, [Chris’s] interface does allow for operating both the blinds and the AC on a preselected schedule. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1125250",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2013-12-07T11:58:42",
"content": "What I want to know is, what printers have decent steppers in them like that. Anything I’ve torn down, at least inkjets just use brushed dc motors with quadrature encoder strips/discs.",
"parent_id": n... | 1,760,376,378.669626 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/06/ballys-bomber-a-13rd-replica-of-a-b-17g/ | Bally’s Bomber – A 1/3rd Replica Of A B-17G | James Hobson | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bally bomber",
"bally's bomber",
"Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress",
"scale plane replica",
"United States Army Air Corps"
] | One of our tipsters just sent us this fascinating story about
The Bally Bomber
, a single man’s huge undertaking that started back in 1999. It’s a 1/3rd scale version of the B-17G Bomber — and no, it’s not remote controlled, there will be a pilot.
Not familiar with the B-17G? What about its trade name? It’s called the Boeing B-17
Flying Fortress
. This massive bomber was developed back in the 1930’s for the United States Army Air Corps as a combination between the
Boeing 247 transport plane
and the experimental
Boeing XB-15 Bomber
.
8680 of the B-17G model were built, but as of September 2011, only 13 of the entire B-17 family remain airworthy. The Bally Bomber is the only known scale replica, and looking through the progress photos it is an absolutely jaw-dropping project. It hasn’t been test flown yet, but they are getting painfully close to its maiden flight.
For more information, you can also check out their
Facebook page
which seems to be updated on a regular basis.
[Thanks Ryan!] | 19 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1125018",
"author": "Robot",
"timestamp": "2013-12-07T07:12:56",
"content": "I am in love with this project.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1125061",
"author": "big billy",
"timestamp": "2013-12-07T08:06:05",
"conte... | 1,760,376,378.031864 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/06/dcf77-powered-clock-is-a-work-of-art/ | DCF77 Powered Clock Is A Work of Art | Mathieu Stephan | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"clock hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"clock",
"dcf77"
] | [Brett] just completed his
DCF77 Master Bracket Clock
, intended to be a backup to an
old logic controlled clock he made
. For our readers that don’t know,
DCF77
is a German longwave time signal whose transmitter is located near Frankfurt (Germany). Every minute, the current date and time are sent on the 77.5kHz carrier signal.
The result, which you can see above, is made using an Ikea lantern, a skeleton clock, an ATmega328 (for Arduino compatibility), a voice recording playback IC (ISD1730), a cheap 20×4 LCD display, a DCF77 receiver module, and many LEDs. We’re pretty sure that it must have taken [Brett] quite a while to get such a nice looking clock. In case the clock loses power from the power supply, 3 AA cells provide battery backup. On the firmware side, making the platform Arduino-compatible allowed [Brett] to use its libraries so the coding was quickly done. Embedded after a break is a video of the final result. | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1124913",
"author": "notabena",
"timestamp": "2013-12-07T04:58:02",
"content": "Wait a second… you got the time?… LOL+1EXCELLENT ;^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1124918",
"author": "Alex Tsekenis",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,376,378.146102 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/06/3d-printer-exhaust/ | 3D Printer Exhaust | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer exhaust"
] | [Malcolm] finally got fed up with the fumes produced by his 3D printer, so he decided to setup this rather extensive
fume exhausting system.
He already has a pretty awesome setup with his Type A 3D printer inside of a filing cabinet, with a plastic tote above it to keep his filament from absorbing too much water. But as you know, the fumes released while printing ABS are actually
pretty bad for you.
With this in mind he 3D printed adapter rings and fitted a fan salvaged from a space heater to the outside of his filing cabinet. A dimmer switch provides variable fan speeds and some dryer vent tubing reroutes the fumes to central vac piping which then goes directly outside. When the system is not in use the piping can be plugged to prevent cold air from entering the house. It’s a fairly clean build but [Malcolm] wants to make a nicer enclosure for the fan and speed control circuit.
The major problem we see with doing something like this is removing too much heat from the build chamber which can always affect print quality. Do you vent your 3D printer? | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1124685",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2013-12-07T00:28:13",
"content": "I’ve been thinking about this for when my printer works, I would turn on the fan once the print is finished so it wouldn’t affect the temperature while printing, then you can run the fan less (hopefully).",
... | 1,760,376,378.356556 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/06/skyjack-a-drone-to-hack-all-drones/ | SkyJack: A Drone To Hack All Drones | Marsh | [
"drone hacks",
"Network Hacks",
"Security Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"aircrack",
"aircrack-ng",
"alfa",
"alfa awus036h",
"ar drone",
"drone",
"quadcopter",
"raspberry pi"
] | Quadcopters are gradually becoming more affordable and thus more popular; we expect more kids will unwrap a prefab drone this holiday season than any year prior. [Samy’s] got plans for the drone-filled future. He could soon be the proud new owner of his own personal army now that he’s built
a drone that assimilates others under his control
.
The build uses a
Parrot AR.Drone 2.0
to fly around with an attached Raspberry Pi, which uses everybody’s favorite
Alfa adapter
to poke around in promiscuous mode. If the SkyJack detects an
IEEE-registered MAC
address assigned to Parrot,
aircrack-ng
leaps into action sending deauthentication requests to the target drone, then attempts to take over control while the original owner is reconnecting. Any successfully lassoed drone doesn’t just fall out of the sky, though. [Samy] uses
node-ar-drone
to immediately send new instructions to the slave.
You can find all his code
on GitHub
, but make sure you see the video below, which gives a thorough overview and a brief demonstration. There are also a few other builds that strap
a Raspberry Pi onto a quadcopter
worth checking out; they could provide you with the inspiration you need to take to the skies. | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1124505",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2013-12-06T21:55:03",
"content": "As long as you define ‘all’ as being one specific make and model of drone that has absolutely nothing to do with the mentioned amazon delivery system.Also you do seem to be condoning theft of kids christmas p... | 1,760,376,378.301117 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/06/developed-on-hackaday-lets-build-some-hardware/ | Developed On Hackaday: Let’s Build Some Hardware! | Mathieu Stephan | [
"Featured",
"hardware"
] | [
"developed on hackaday",
"encryption",
"hardware development",
"mooltipass",
"password",
"smart card"
] | We’re pretty sure that most of you already know that a few months ago Hackaday was bought by SupplyFrame, who therefore became our new evil overlords. We do hope you’ve noticed that they’re actually quite nice, and in their divine goodness they recently gave the go-ahead on this series called
Developed on Hackaday
.
A new project will be made by the Hackaday staff & community and will hopefully be brought to the consumer market. For those who don’t have the time/experience to get involved in this adventure, we want to show and document what it takes to bring an idea to the marketable product stage. For the others, we would like to involve you in the design/development process as much as possible. Obviously, this project will be open source hardware/software. This time around, the hardware will mainly be developed by yours truly. You may already know me from the
whistled platform
(currently sold on Tindie) or from all the different projects described on
my website
, which makes this new adventure far from being my first rodeo.
What’s in it for the contributors? During all the steps of this project, we’ll offer many rewards as well as hand-soldered first prototypes of the device so you can start playing/testing it. Nothing is set in stone so every suggestion is welcome. Should we make a Kickstarter-like campaign to manufacture the final product, we’ll only do so once our prototype is final, our partners are chosen and all details of the production process are set and confirmed. In that case, we will just need to gather the required funds to make the device a reality. What are we going to build? Keep reading to find out.
So what about this new device? After many discussions with the writers, we decided we would make something useful for Hackaday readers. We wanted something simple that would simplify users’ lives and therefore settled on a
secure offline password keeper
. Keep in mind that the following description is just a draft, so your input is welcome in the comments section. Please keep it
constructive
as the way the comments are formatted is not optimal for this kind of discussion (we’re currently working on that).
The concept behind this product is to minimize the number of ways your passwords can be compromised, while generating long and complex random passwords for the different websites you use daily. As a side note, you may already know that most people often
don’t use secure passwords
, except
red-haired women
. Hypothetically, password keeping software could be circumvented by reading the key + encrypted passwords on the computer’s RAM. Ideally, the product should be so simple that my grand mother could use it (I’ll let you image her email password…). It will be as small as possible so it could fit in your pocket. Simply visit a website and the device will ask for confirmation to enter your credentials when you need to login.
What about the hardware? We thought a good solution was to make
a device that uses a smart card
, connected to your computer via USB (to keep costs low). The device will store your AES-256 encrypted passwords and the smart card will keep your AES-256 key (as well as a few other passwords). The smart card will be (for the sake of simplicity) a read protected EEPROM that requires a PIN code to unlock its contents. As with your credit card, too many tries will permanently lock the smart card. Therefore, the project’s main components will be: a smart card connector, a microcontroller (Arduino compatible?), an OLED screen and its touchscreen panel. The OLED screen will provide good contrast and therefore better visibility. On the software side, we’ll ‘only’ need to write a simple script running on the users’ browsers. The browser script will send the current website URL to the device (via HID reports).
We prefer a contact based smart card for several reasons. They’re much easier to source, are cheaper and can’t be easily sniffed without you noticing it. We hope that making this an open project will ensure any future problems are handled. We also want the device to be as hackable as possible, and an Arduino compatible device with a touch sensitive OLED screen and USB connectivity will surely interest beginners out there.
So what’s next? We
need a project name
, so please give us some feedback in the comments section. You can also directly contact me: mathieu[at]hackaday[dot]com if you’d like to contribute (we need designers, coders, webmasters…), be part of the beta tester team or if you already know potential partners for this project. We look forward to your comments!
[
Smartcard Image Source
–
CC-BY-SA
] | 142 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "1124210",
"author": "Alex",
"timestamp": "2013-12-06T18:08:48",
"content": "Do you enter your PIN on the computer or on the device’s touchscreen?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1124211",
"author": "Mathieu Stephan",
... | 1,760,376,378.622469 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/06/the-sub-500-deltaprintr/ | The Sub-$500 Deltaprintr | Brian Benchoff | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Crowd Funding"
] | [
"3d printer",
"Deltaprintr",
"kickstarter"
] | We’ve seen them before, but only now has the Deltaprinter, a very simple and affordable delta printer
finally hit Kickstarter.
We saw the Deltaprintr
at the World Maker Faire last September
where the team showed off their fancy new printer and the very nice prints it can produce. The printer itself is unique in that it eschews printed parts and is instead made of lasercut parts. Instead of belts, each arm of the delta bot is lifted with spectra line, and the entire mechanism is billed as not requiring calibration probably due to the accurate laser cut parts.
On a completely different note, we did notice the rewards for the Deltaprintr Kickstarter are limited. Unlike the gobs of 3D printers on Kickstarter, the Deltaprintr team actually wants to stay on schedule for their shipping dates. That’s an admirable dedication to getting their printer out to backers in a reasonable amount of time. | 33 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1124052",
"author": "draeath",
"timestamp": "2013-12-06T15:36:05",
"content": "It says “automatic calibration,” not no calibration.Very nice! I wish them luck!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1124108",
"author": "cole... | 1,760,376,378.747762 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/06/trimming-the-fat-from-avr-gcc/ | Trimming The Fat From AVR GCC | Brian Benchoff | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"assembly",
"attiny",
"attiny85",
"AVR",
"c++",
"gcc"
] | [Ralph] has been working on an extraordinarily tiny bootloader for the ATtiny85, and although coding in assembly does have some merits in this regard, writing in C and using AVR Libc is so much more convenient. Through his trials of slimming down pieces of code to the bare minimum, he’s found a few ways to easily
trim a few bytes off code compiled with AVR-GCC
.
To test his ideas out, [Ralph] first coded up a short program that reads the ATtiny85’s internal temperature sensor. Dissassembling the code, he found the a jump to a function called __ctors_end: before the jump to main. According to the ATtiny85 datasheet, this call sets the IO registers to their initial values. These initial values are 0, so that’s 16 bytes that can be saved. This function also sets the stack pointer to its initial value, so another 16 bytes can be optimized out.
If you’re not using interrupts on an ATtiny, you can get rid of 30 bytes of code by getting rid of the interrupt vector table. In the end, [Ralph] was able to take a 274 byte program and trim it down to 190 bytes. Compared to the 8k of Flash on the ‘tiny85, it’s a small amount saved, but if you’re banging your head against the limitations of this micro’s storage, this might be a good place to start.
Now if you want to hear some stories about optimizing code you’ve got to check out the
Once Upon Atari
documentary. They spent months hand optimizing code to make it fit on the cartridges. | 39 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "1123865",
"author": "w",
"timestamp": "2013-12-06T12:12:18",
"content": "This would be even more beneficial on the Tiny25 and Tiny45 chips as they have 2KB and 4KB code space respectively.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "11245... | 1,760,376,378.940206 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/06/android-and-arduino-rf-outlet-selector/ | Android And Arduino RF Outlet Selector | Marsh | [
"Android Hacks",
"Arduino Hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"android",
"Arduino Uno",
"home automation",
"radio frequency",
"reverse engineer",
"reverse engineering",
"RF"
] | Cyber Monday may be behind us, but there are always some hackable, inexpensive electronics to be had. [Stephen’s]
wireless Android/Arduino outlet hack
may be the perfect holiday project on the cheap, especially considering you can once again snag the
right remote controlled outlets from Home Depot
. This project is similar to
other remote control outlet builds
we’ve seen here, but for around $6 per outlet: a tough price to beat.
[Stephen] Frankenstein’d an inexpensive RF device
from Amazon
into his build, hooking the Arduino up to the 4 pins on the transmitter. The first step was to reverse engineer the communication for the outlet, which was accomplished through some down and dirty
Arduino logic analyzing
. The final circuit included a standard Arduino Ethernet shield, which [Stephen] hooked up to his router and configured to run as a web server. Most of the code was borrowed from the
RC-Switch outlet project
, but the protocols from that build are based on US standards and did not quite fit [Stephen’s] needs, so he turned to a
similar Instructables project
to work out the finer details.
Stick around after the break for a quick video demonstration, then check out
another wireless outlet hack
for inspiration.
[Via
Reddit
] | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1123766",
"author": "Joe Barnett",
"timestamp": "2013-12-06T10:33:46",
"content": "I bought a similar kit a while ago and sniffed the communication using LIRC (linux Infrared Remote Control) by wiring directly into the encoder chip. I was then able to control the power switches fro... | 1,760,376,379.052005 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/05/turning-a-pi-into-an-ibeacon/ | Turning A Pi Into An IBeacon | Brian Benchoff | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"ibeacon",
"raspberry pi"
] | Nowadays, if you want to ‘check in with Foursquare’ at your local laundromat, deli, or gas station, you need to take out your phone and
manually
‘check in with Foursquare’. It’s like we’re living in the stone age. iBeacon, Apple’s NFC competitor that operates over Bluetooth 4.0 changes all that. iBeacon can automatically notify both iOS and Android users of where they are. [Kevin Townsend] over at Adafruit
came up with a tutorial that turns a Raspberry Pi into an iBeacon
, perfect for telling you that you’re somewhere in the proximity of a Raspberry Pi, and some other cool stuff too.
The iBeacon protocol is actually very simple. Basically, the only thing the iBeacon transmits is a 128-bit company/entity value, and an optional major and minor values (to differentiate between locations and nodes within locations, respectively). After plugging in a Bluetooth 4.0 USB dongle into the Pi, it’s a simple matter of installing
BlueZ
and entering the iBeacon data.
iBeacon by itself doesn’t really do anything – the heavy lifting of figuring out exactly which Panera Bread or Starbucks you’re in is left to the apps on your phone. If you’re a mobile developer, though, this is a great way to set up a very useful testing rig. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1123676",
"author": "K",
"timestamp": "2013-12-06T08:27:00",
"content": "So…it spits out numbers, but those numbers really have no meaning, and the software on the phone still has to figure out where it is. This seems completely useless.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,376,378.99602 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/05/instant-inkjet-circuits-with-silver-nanoparticle-ink/ | Instant Inkjet Circuits With Silver Nanoparticle Ink | James Hobson | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Brother DCP-J140w",
"Georgia Institute of Technology",
"Microsoft Research",
"printing pcbs",
"University of Tokyo"
] | Researchers at the University of Tokyo, Georgia Tech and a team from Microsoft Research have developed a low-cost method of printing circuits using an ordinary inkjet printer using a technique called
Instant Inkjet Circuits.
The hack is quite literally as simple as injecting a refillable printer cartridge with a commercially available Silver Nano-particle Ink. This allows the printing of circuits onto many different flexible substrates including paper, transparent film, or basically anything you can fit in the printer. Typically if the medium is designed for printing it will work. Some exceptions to this include canvas cloth, magnetic sheets, and transfer sheets.
The researchers chose a Brother inkjet printer because they typically have nozzles that eject higher volumes of ink than other printers. The exact model they used was the Brother DCP-J140w. To maximize ink deposition, all cartridges are filled with the ink, and printed using photo mode where the C M and Y cartridges are simultaneously used to create black. No special software is required to print.
The full article is well worth the read and shows many examples of the different applications this could be used for — including instant prototyping using nothing but scotch tape.
If anyone can source some of this ink and try it out we would love to hear from you! Those that can’t may want to
give the old inkjet/laser toner etch resist trick a try
.
[via
Power Electronics
] | 63 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "1123451",
"author": "KC2YXU",
"timestamp": "2013-12-06T03:14:49",
"content": "They probably also chose a Brother printer because, in my experience they have the easiest ink cartridges to refill. Most Brother print cartridges are literally just a plastic box full of ink, and don’t h... | 1,760,376,379.155502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/05/avr-atmega-based-pid-magnetic-levitator/ | AVR Atmega Based PID Magnetic Levitator | James Hobson | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"atmega8",
"electromagnetism",
"hall effect sensor",
"Magnetic levitation"
] | [Davide] saw our recent post on magnetic levitation and quickly sent in his own project, which has a great explanation of
how it works
— he’s also included the code to try yourself!
His setup uses an Atmega8 micro-controller which controls a small 12V 50N coil using pulse-width-modulation (PWM). A hall effect sensor (Allegro A1302) mounted inside the coil detects the distance to the magnet and that data is used by a PID controller to automatically adjust the PWM of the coil to keep the magnet in place. The Atmega8 runs at 8Mhz and the hall effect sensor is polled every 1ms to provide an updated value for the PWM. He’s also thrown in an RGB LED that lights up when an object is being levitated!
So why is there a kid with a floating balloon? [Davide] actually built the setup for his friend [Paolo] to display at an art fair called InverART 2013!
After the break check out the circuit diagram and a short demonstration video of the device in action!
Oh yeah, those of you not impressed by magnetic levitation will probably appreciate
acoustic levitation
.
(click for full size diagram) | 33 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1123310",
"author": "Jordan",
"timestamp": "2013-12-06T00:12:07",
"content": "Just a silly comment: since there’s no friction on the object being levitated by that which is suspending it, if this was put in a complete vacuum, could you spin something and it would spin for infinity?I... | 1,760,376,379.226872 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/05/logic-analyzers-and-x11/ | Logic Analyzers And X11 | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"logic analyzer",
"x11"
] | [Andrew] recently scored an awesome HP 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer, lucky dog. Even though this machine was built in 1992, it was a top of the line device back in the day and had a few very interesting features. This logic analyzer also had a few networking ports implementing FTP, NFS, TCP/IP, and the X11 protocols over a 10Base2 (“thinlan”) and 10BaseT (“ethertwist” seriously, that’s what’s in the manual) connections. The X11 protocol interested [Andrew] so
he set this logic analyzer up so he could use it via his Linux box.
X Windows is simply a way to display GUI interfaces over a network. While today we usually only see X Windows apps confined to the desktop, in the bad old days of *NIXes you had to pay for, running a GUI app over a network was considered the wave of the future. The Internet replaced this idea with a
palimpsest
of JavaScript, but we digress…
[Andrew]’s new toy didn’t support DHCP, so after inputting the IP address manually, he checked the host file – still the same after twenty years – and connected with his Linux Mint box. The result is a remote control panel for the ‘ol girl in a garish color scheme that violates all modern sensibilities. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1123156",
"author": "matt",
"timestamp": "2013-12-05T21:29:55",
"content": "So connecting to a built in X11 server is now a hack? What is the next article, connecting to a web site using your laptop?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_... | 1,760,376,379.363283 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/05/fail-of-the-week-hackaday-writers-first-cnc-adventure/ | Fail Of The Week: Hackaday Writer’s First CNC Adventure | Mike Szczys | [
"cnc hacks",
"Fail of the Week",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"cnc",
"CNC mill",
"fail of the week",
"probotix"
] | This Fail of the Week post focuses on a project from [Limkpin] aka [Mathieu Stephan], one of the Hackaday contributors. He wanted a CNC mill of his very own and decided to go with a kit that you assemble yourself. If it had been clear sailing we wouldn’t be talking about it here. Unfortunately he was met with
a multitude of fails during his adventure
. We’ll cover the highlights below.
At the top of his post he lists the features he was looking for in a mill. He wanted something that had good community support, could be used for milling aluminum, and worked with tight precision. He settled on
the Probotix Fireball V90
. The kit is shipped from the US, and an international (shipping) incident caused the first fail. The front panel on the controller was bashed in, which in turn damaged the electronics on the circuit board. What’s worse is that it took several weeks to get replacement parts because of the insurance claim process with the shipping agent.
Next came problems with connecting parts — to us it sounds like the issue was with Probotix’s stock of screws. One was too large for the milled hole in a connector, and another was too short to use with the three others that made up the set. Once replacement parts were shipped [Limpkin] thought he was finally in business. He was wrong.
With the rig finally assembled he realized the Z-axis had some play in it due to the machined holes for the X-axis bearings. The video after the break shows a close-up of the issue. After receiving a replacement he started testing and realized there was an alignment issue with the Z-axis ball screw. Another clip below shows it misbehaving, resulting in a screech as the sled passes a certain point on the screw. It seems there was a bend somewhere that caused this. [Limpkin] did get around the issue by using a helicoidal coupler. This small success finally got his mill up and running.
So this Fail post actually ends in a successful CNC build running the sound-dampening box you see above. We thought about featuring this some time ago when it wasn’t working but [Limpkin] wanted to wait for the company to respond to his support requests. We’re glad we waited. The
Fail of the Week series
isn’t about trashing on creators of failed projects, so we don’t want to hear you bad-mouth Probotix. Instead we’d like to hear your stories about problems with your first CNC machine project. This example should drive home the message that whether you buy a kit or build from scratch, you need to be ready to deal with adversity the first time around.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HGjuGl7NM0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M65wd2cjwzk
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. | 41 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "1123014",
"author": "t-bone",
"timestamp": "2013-12-05T18:14:20",
"content": "so we don’t want to hear you bad-mouth Probotix.There’s really not much more we can add.To be fair, even the $500,000 machine we just got came with problems (the motors cut out, and the mfgr can’t figure o... | 1,760,376,379.305595 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/05/fubarino-contest-example-a-sneaky-irc-bot/ | Fubarino Contest Example: A Sneaky IRC Bot | Adam Fabio | [
"contests"
] | [
"1337",
"Adam",
"arduino",
"fubarino-contest",
"hackaday",
"internet relay chat",
"irc"
] | You may have heard about
Hackaday’s contest to win one of 20 Fubarino boards
. We included an example entry from [Mike]. Here’s my example entry for the contest: An IRC search Bot powered by a
Wicked Device WildFire board
. We’ve all seen IRC bot’s before, but how many have you seen that can turn on an LED while running off a cell phone battery?
The IRC bot’s operation is fairly straightforward. It enters a channel and can be commanded to search. The first two searches will return links to Google searches for the strings given. Every third search however, will return a link to Hackaday’s search page. In the example below, “SedAwk” is an unsuspecting user, and “SearchRobot” is our bot.
SedAwk: SearchRobot: SEARCH Unicorns
SearchRobot: Search Complete! https://www.google.com/#q=Unicorns
SedAwk: SearchRobot: SEARCH Rainbows
SearchRobot: Search Complete! https://www.google.com/#q=Rainbows
SedAwk: SearchRobot: SEARCH Quadcopters
SearchRobot: Search Complete! http://hackaday.com/?s=Quadcopters
SedAwk: What the heck?
Follow along after the break to see what other tricks the bot has up its sleeve…
The bot will also respond to “HELP, SHOW, ECHO” The real fun starts when the bot is placed into “1337” mode
SedAwk: SearchRobot: 1337
SearchRobot: 1337 H4x0r Mode ENGAGED.
The bot will now send all searches to Hackaday.
To turn off 1337 mode, the user simply has to tell the bot it is a Lamer
SedAwk: SearchRobot: LAMER
SearchRobot: 1337 H4x0r Mode DISENGAGD. Returning to Lamer status.
The WildFire has a white LED connected to the D5 output. The LED is controlled with LED ON, and LED OFF.
SedAwk: SearchRobot: LED ON
SearchRobot: Turning On an LED, because I'm an Arduino after all
SedAwk: SearchRobot: LED OFF
SearchRobot: Turning OFF an LED. Someday I'll grow up to be a 6502
I freely admit this code was hacked together from several sources, and it may well violate all standards of good programming, as well as space, time, and the laws of physics. Thankfully as a Hackaday contributor I’m not eligible for the contest. If you would like to take a look at the code check out
the Github repo
. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "1122902",
"author": "Max Kelley",
"timestamp": "2013-12-05T15:41:09",
"content": "This is cool!!! But can we fix the issue with \"’s in the source code?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1122995",
"author": "Mike Szczys"... | 1,760,376,379.413493 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/05/the-melt-o-matic-a-digital-melting-point-apparatus/ | The “Melt-O-Matic” – A Digital Melting Point Apparatus | Phillip Ryals | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"melting point"
] | A common technique in organic chemistry is to determine the melting point of a specimen. While commercial options exist, [kymyst] decided to
build one with similar (or better) functionality
, and managed to keep it under $100. The basis of his rig is a 60W soldering iron. He simply replaced the normal soldering tip with an aluminum heating block that holds the capillary tubes and temperature probe. Two small fans are used to quickly cool the heating block, allowing fairly quick measurement times. It should be noted that building a project like this one will mean working with wires that carry 220V (or 115V, depending on your country). Please use proper precautions.
In case organic chemistry is on your list of ‘to learns’, [kymyst] included a nice writeup of the determination of melting points. It’s a great primer for those interested in learning more.
Using this setup, [kymyst] gets readings of ±0.1 °C. He mentions the possibility of adding a webcam for determining melting point automatically, something that would make this system competitive with much more expensive hardware.
The last time we saw one of these
it used a hot glue gun as the heating element
. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1122750",
"author": "EccentricElectron",
"timestamp": "2013-12-05T12:16:03",
"content": "66 It should be noted that building a project like this one will mean working with wires that carry 220V (or 115V, depending on your country). Please use proper precautions. 99Oh please, please ... | 1,760,376,379.468884 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/05/learncnc-game/ | LearnCNC Game | James Hobson | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"how cnc machining works",
"how to CNC",
"learncnc",
"learning CNC",
"ubc project"
] | Do you want to learn how a CNC machine works, but don’t have access to one (yet)? One of our tipsters just informed us of this great project that was created by a team of students from the University of British Columbia, and it’s an interactive 3D learning system that teaches everything about
CNC machining.
We downloaded the “game” and it’s pretty cool — you get to walk around a virtual workshop and can click on various things to learn about their functions. Alternatively, you can go just go through
their lessons
(that appear when you click on things) on the website. It’s a great summary to get your feet wet in the world of CNC machining.
Beyond how the machines themselves work, the website also goes into great detail about the various applications you can use CNC machining for and physics behind tooling design.
Even if you’ve had a brief introduction to CNC machining before, this site provides a great summary of most everything — it’ll be very handy if you’re hoping to use a school’s machine shop for personal projects…
[Thanks Chris!] | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1122814",
"author": "Drake",
"timestamp": "2013-12-05T13:43:27",
"content": "Looks like the project has been dead since 2009. Wish I could have the time to update it but, life ….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1123037",
"au... | 1,760,376,381.219998 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/04/lavaamp-equalizer/ | LavaAMP Spectrum Analzyer | James Hobson | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"lava lamp",
"pumpspark",
"student innovation contest"
] | Is your dusty Lava Lamp just not cool enough anymore? What if you could make it bubble to the music? [Christian] and [Eric]
managed to do just that.
No, they aren’t regular Lava Lamps. In fact, they look like oversize jam jars, but the video of them in action is pretty cool! They designed and built this system for the
UIST 2013 Student Innovation Contest
, and while there isn’t too much information on the actual build, the contest required everyone to use the
exact same kit
. The kit consists of 8 aquarium pumps, a PumpSpark controller board, assorted tubing and fittings and an optically-isolated serial interface for use with an Arduino or another kind of microcontroller. From there, it’s pretty easy to guess the rest — analyzing the audio, and timing the pumps according to the various levels.
Other competition entries of note include an awesome game of
WaterPong
, a
Water Bottle Bagpipe
, and even an
Xbox H2O
!
Stick around after the break to see the LavaAMP bubble to the bass. | 15 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1122523",
"author": "hojo",
"timestamp": "2013-12-05T06:31:03",
"content": "very cool, but it seems like they forgot the lamp part. I feel that would make it a lot more visually effective.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "112253... | 1,760,376,381.731135 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/04/crab-ble-a-table-that-walks/ | Crab-ble – A Table That Walks | James Hobson | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"crab table",
"robot table",
"strandbeest",
"theo jansen",
"walking table"
] | Do you have a heavy kitchen table? Wish you could move it all by yourself? [Ekaggrat] set out to
design one
for this year’s Beijing Design Week back in September.
It’s based off of the awesome
Strandbeest design
by [Theo Jansen], and it looks great. [Ekaggrat] made several prototypes of the “Crab Table” out of ABS plastic, and was planning to make a full size one using bamboo rods, which were the theme of the design week. Unfortunately the team ran out of time and was not able to make the full scale model. The prototypes walk around all by themselves with geared DC motors, but the plan for the full size one was to simply be able to push it.
We’ve seen lots of walking tables before, but there’s just something about the mechanical beauty of this design that we love. It’d be heavy — but imagine it in chrome! Maybe just the plastic could be plated… Stick around after the break to see it scuttle about!
Now the only problem we see with giving your table crab legs is that it might just run off with your food since it’s shellfish… | 22 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1122401",
"author": "patrick",
"timestamp": "2013-12-05T03:03:43",
"content": "I was watching the very same video on youtube and then.. poof, it happened here!That’s really amazing! (The table, ofc!)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,376,381.546489 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/04/a-555-based-two-channel-remote-control-circuit/ | A 555-Based, Two-Channel Remote Control Circuit | Phillip Ryals | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"555",
"remote control",
"transmitter"
] | [fahadshihab], a young tinkerer, shared his circuit design for a
simple remote control using 555 timers
. Using a
555 calculator
, he designed a clock circuit that would run at 11.99 Hz. Two transistors are connected to inputs (presumably button switches). One sends the plain clock signal, and one sends the inverted clock signal. A matching circuit at the other end will separate the channels. All it requires is connecting the two circuits in order to synchronize them. It would be easy enough to interface this with an oscillator, an IR LED, or a laser for long-range control.
The great thing about this circuit is its simplicity. It’s often so easy to throw a microcontroller into the mix, that we forget how effective a setup like this can be. It could also be a great starter circuit for a kid’s workshop, demonstrating basic circuits, timers, and even a NOT gate. Of course, it would be a good refresher for those without a lot of circuit knowledge too. Once you’ve mastered this, perhaps an
AM transmitter
is next? | 21 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1122289",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2013-12-05T00:16:29",
"content": "Inverted signal for second channel? What if there’s phase shift between tx an rx oscillators? that would swap channels… Or there is duty cycle different from 50% to tell which signal is inverted and whi... | 1,760,376,381.182996 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/04/using-ultrasonic-sensors-to-measure-and-log-oil-tank-levels/ | Using Ultrasonic Sensors To Measure And Log Oil Tank Levels | Mathieu Stephan | [
"hardware",
"home hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"oil tank",
"ultrasonic sensor",
"xbee"
] | [Mike] lives in a temperate rainforest in Alaska (we figured from his website’s name) and uses a 570 gallon oil tank to supply his furnace. Until now, he had no way of knowing how much oil was left in the tank and what his daily usage was. As he didn’t find any commercial product that could do what he wanted,
he designed his own solution
. In his write-up, [Mike] started by listing all the different sensors he had considered to measure the oil level and finally opted for an
ultrasonic sensor
. In his opinion, this kind of sensor is the best compromise between cost, ease of use, range and precision for his application. The precise chosen model was the ping))) bought from our favorite auction website for around $2.5.
[Mike] built the custom enclosure that you can see in the picture above using PVC parts. Enclosed are the ultrasonic sensor, a temperature sensor and an LED indicating the power status. On the other side of the CAT5 cable can be found an Arduino compatible board with an XBee shield and a 9V battery. Using another XBee shield and its USB adapter board, [Mike] can now wirelessly access the tank oil level log from his computer. | 52 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1122107",
"author": "jcwren",
"timestamp": "2013-12-04T21:16:12",
"content": "I’m surprised he couldn’t find a COTS sensor. Centroid (http://www.centroidproducts.com) makes several styles. The fuel and water tank in my houseboat used these. They even have controllers that handle non... | 1,760,376,381.816104 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/04/hack-your-datasheets-using-datasheet-net/ | Hack Your Datasheets Using Datasheet.net | Mike Szczys | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"datasheet",
"datasheet.net",
"interactive",
"supplyframe"
] | If you use datasheets (which is probably every reader of Hackaday) you need to check out this tool that seeks to
add modern features to the decades-old component specification delivery system
. That link takes you to the announcement of the launch of
Datasheet.net
.
What you see above is the biggest feature the service brings to the table, the ability to create “snippets” from datasheets by clicking and dragging the area you’d like to save (you can even get
a public link to the snippet
). Once you have selected a snippet there are a few tools that allow you to make annotations on it. We’ve used the rectangle tool to highlight the clock speed and divider settings in this snippet for an ATmega328 uC. The interface also offers the ability to draw arrows, freehand, or to add text to the snippet. At the bottom of this example we used the description area to notate the fuse settings (in hex) which we most often use with this chip. These snippets and annotations can then be shared with other users of the service, and there’s also a comments section below the snippet for your team to use. See examples of this in the video below.
This solves one of our biggest beefs with PDF datasheets — the ability to jump back and forth and to easily find commonly used sections. This datasheet is 567 pages long and not fun to paw through looking for the same info repeatedly. It also offers rudimentary “favorite” flagging to keep a list of your oft-used sheets — but we’d like to see more options for categorizing our collection. We also find it hard to get by without the Table of Contents functionality we’re used to in our normal document view (
evince
). We’ve already pestered the lead developer, [Ben Delarre], to add this feature. He’s the same guy who came up with the schematic sharing site
CircuitBee
. Now would be a great time to mention that this service is owned by Hackaday’s parent company SupplyFrame.
Datasheet.net has a mammoth source of datasheets available through the search, but the list of planned feature additions includes datasheet upload. Also on the list is a “Discussion” feature which sounds interesting to us. What if, through the discussion engine, searching for datasheets also turned up a list of open hardware projects that use this part? We are also drooling over the ability to embed these snippets directly in webpages. [Ben] tells us that’s already built but they didn’t have time to add it to the UI before launch. Gone will be the days of taking screenshots of PDFs for your blog writeup!
PDF delivery of datasheets revolutionized access to information about electronic components. We’re hoping that this marks the next evolution. In addition to better working features, wouldn’t it be nice if you could actually get notifications when new datasheet revisions or errata were published? | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1121973",
"author": "willrandship",
"timestamp": "2013-12-04T18:57:12",
"content": "This looks really useful, especially for MCU sheets.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1122005",
"author": "Rob",
"timestamp": "2013-12-04... | 1,760,376,381.60227 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/04/a-collective-pitch-quadcopter/ | A Collective Pitch Quadcopter | Brian Benchoff | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"collective pitch",
"multicopter",
"quadcopter"
] | Quadcopters aren’t a new thing, but for all the advances in multi-rotor craft, they all still fall into the paradigm of, ‘stick a prop on a motor and repeat three more times. [Curtis Youngblood], one of the top RC heli pilots in the world,
came up with a very cool drive system for a quad
, requiring only one motor and granting each blade collective pitch that allows for absolutely insane acrobatic ability.
There’s only one motor inside the Stingray 500, as [Curtis] calls his new toy. It’s at the rear of this quad’s H-frame, attached to a shaft running down the spine with a pair of pulleys. All four rotors are driven by this spinning shaft.
Because [Curtis] is an acrobatic pilot, he needed a way to control his ‘copter in more than one direction. To do this, he added four servos on each arm of the quad, giving each rotor collective pitch, just like the tail rotor of a real helicopter. The result is a quadcopter that can fly upside-down with the greatest of ease, perform barrel rolls, and all the other maneuver a true 3D RC ‘copter can do.
The awesome guys at Flite Test had [Curtis]
visit their hangar
and had him do an awesome demo flight. You can check out that video below. | 46 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1121780",
"author": "XOIIO",
"timestamp": "2013-12-04T15:08:39",
"content": "Oh man I haven’t even watched the video but can tell this is going to be awesome.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1122135",
"author": "prigno... | 1,760,376,381.679205 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/03/compliant-robot-gripper-wont-scramble-your-eggs/ | Compliant Robot Gripper Won’t Scramble Your Eggs | Adam Fabio | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"eggs",
"Grippers",
"robot",
"robotics"
] | [Chiprobot] has
created an amazing compliant gripper
. Designing robot hands (or end effectors) can be a perilous task. It is easy to give robots
big, good, strong hands
. Strong grippers have to be controlled by sensors. However, sensors can’t always be relied upon to ensure those hands don’t crush anything they touch. Hardware fails, software has bugs. Sometimes the best solution is a clever mechanical design, one which ensures a gripper will conform to the object it is gripping. We’ve seen
“jamming” grippers before
. (so named for their use of a granular substance which jams around the object being gripped).
[Chiprobot’s] gripper is something entirely different. He designed his gripper in blender, and printed it out with his Ultimaker 3D printer. The material is flexible PLA. Three plastic “fingers” wrap around the object being gripped. The fingers are made up of two strips of printed plastic connected by wire linkages. The flexible plastic of the fingers create a leaf spring design. The fingers are attached to a linear actuator at the center point of the gripper. The linear actuator itself is another great hack. [Chiprobot]
created it from a servo and an empty glue stick
. As the linear actuator is pulled in, the fingers pull around any object in their grip. The end result is a grip strong enough to hold an egg while shaking it, but not strong enough to break the egg.
We would like to see the gripper gripping other objects, as eggs can be surprisingly strong. We’ve all seen the
physics trick
where squeezing an egg with bare hands doesn’t break it, yet squeezing an egg while wearing a ring causes it to crack much… like an egg.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MQmlvzE0i8 | 24 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "1120349",
"author": "pod",
"timestamp": "2013-12-03T15:11:07",
"content": "what a clever design, well donelove the pritt stick hack :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1120370",
"author": "T",
"timestamp": "2013-12-03T15:... | 1,760,376,381.27839 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/03/advice-about-over-driving-leds/ | Advice About Over-Driving LEDs | Mike Szczys | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"mutliplex",
"OverDrive",
"peak current"
] | We usually stay within the recommended Amperage with LEDs, but multiplexed displays provide an interesting opportunity to push them outside of that range. Because multiplexing scans a set of LEDs, they are not on all of the time. If your multiplexing setup allows you to remain within a certain time frame and duty cycle they can be driven past the constant current specifications. [Bryanduxbury] decided to take a look at
the best way to overdrive LEDs
.
The example that he gives is that his 30 mA constant current rated parts can accept up to 185 mA but only for 0.1ms with a duty cycle of 10%. If you know how to apply these figures you can get them to shine much brighter. This becomes especially useful when your multiplexed display already has the light off for the majority of the time because the resulting average luminosity will be much higher. His side-by-side test is shown above. With a current limited LED on the left of each color group, a multiplexed LED driven at normal voltage in the middle, and multiplexing with overdrive on the right.
The biggest drawback that [Bryan] mentions is that if your firmware hangs for more than the spec’ed time you’ll definitely fry these diodes. | 64 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "1120194",
"author": "XOIIO",
"timestamp": "2013-12-03T12:59:17",
"content": "I still feel like this would shorten the life of your LED’s considerably, but for a one off it’s potentially a handy trick for someone.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,376,381.375254 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/03/cellphone-charging-inductive-purse/ | Cellphone Charging Inductive Purse | James Hobson | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"adafruit",
"inductive charging",
"inductive charging purse"
] | For whatever reason, cell phone companies really don’t seem to care about giving you a good battery for your phone. Here’s a great hack if you happen to have a purse —
turn it into an inductive charger!
Manpurses count too, we’re not judging.
[Becky] from Adafruit came up with a great idea for this wearable hack. If your phone is sitting in your purse for long periods of time, why not charge it? It’s a pretty simple hack that makes use of a pair of inductive charging loops. One is hidden inside the bottom of your bag of choice, and the other mounted to a fixture at work or home. She’s using magnets to snap her purse into place on a shelf at work — this ensures the coils line up so the full rated charge can be transmitted.
Another option is to put the entire inductive charging circuit inside your purse, then use a battery pack with a special pocket for you phone — that way the phone is always charging while it’s safely put away!
Stick around after the break to see the complete how-to video.
Want to take this hack up a notch? Why not cram the
entire inductive circuit
right into your phone? | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1119990",
"author": "John U",
"timestamp": "2013-12-03T09:09:19",
"content": "Lifestyle hack: if you can live without checking facebook/twitter every 30 seconds and posting photos of everything you see/eat/do, you can have a normal cheap mobile phone with a battery that lasts weeks ... | 1,760,376,381.879968 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/02/repairing-and-adding-bluetooth-control-to-an-induction-cooker/ | Repairing And Adding Bluetooth Control To An Induction Cooker | Mathieu Stephan | [
"cooking hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"cooking",
"igbt",
"ioio",
"rectifier",
"reverse engineering"
] | When his 6 years old induction cooker recently broke, [Johannes] decided to open it in an attempt to give it another life. Not only did he succeed, but he
also added Bluetooth connectivity
to the cooker. The repair part was actually pretty straight forward, as in most cases the
IGBTs
and rectifiers are the first components to break due to stress imposed on them. Following advice from a Swedish forum, [Johannes] just had to measure the resistance of these components to discover that the broken ones were behaving like open circuits.
He then started to reverse engineer the boards present in the cooker, more particularly the link between the ‘keyboards’ and the main microcontroller (an ATMEGA32L) in charge of commanding the power boards. With a Bus Pirate, [Johannes] had a look at the UART protocol that was used but it seems it was a bit too complex. He then opted for an IOIO and a few transistors to emulate key presses, allowing him to use his phone to control the cooker (via USB or BT). While he was at it, he even added a temperature sensor. | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1119860",
"author": "izzi_cz",
"timestamp": "2013-12-03T06:07:58",
"content": "Everything is better with bluetooth",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1119898",
"author": "Sven",
"timestamp": "2013-12-03T06:56:50",
"cont... | 1,760,376,381.939878 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/02/energy-harvesting-peltier-ring/ | Energy Harvesting Peltier Ring | James Hobson | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"Electricity generation",
"energy harvesting",
"energy ring",
"SeeBeck Effect",
"thermoelectric effect"
] | [Sean] is by no means an electrical engineer, but when he discovered the magic of Peltier plates he knew he had to make a project with them. This is his
Energy Harvesting Peltier Ring.
The effect he is harnessing is called the
SeeBeck Effect
— the process of generating electricity through temperature differentials. He has shown how peltier plates work to many people, and, as you can guess, most people think they are amazing (free energy wow!). Unfortunately, most peltier plates are rather large and bulky, so [Sean] decided he wanted to try to design something small enough that could fit on a ring. Just a proof of concept, to light a tiny SMD LED.
The tiny Peltier plate he found generates about 0.3V with a temperature differential of about 20C — not bad, but it won’t light up any standard LEDs at that voltage! He started looking into voltage steppers and discovered
Linear Technology’s 3108 Ultralow Voltage Step-up converter and Power Manager
— a surface mount chip capable of scaling 0.3V to 5V. The only problem? [Sean’s] never done surface mount soldering.
His first circuit was built on a prototyping board, and after it worked successfully, he designed a PCB using Fritzing. Another success! Prototyping complete, it was now time to try to downsize the PCB even more to fit on a ring. Realizing there was no way he was going to fit it on a single ring, he decided to make a double ring out of CNC machined aluminum. He made use of his school’s CNC shop and the ring came out great. It works too! The room has to be fairly cool for the LED to light, but [Sean] definitely proved his concept. Now to make it even smaller! | 51 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "1119713",
"author": "Mister X",
"timestamp": "2013-12-03T03:19:36",
"content": "I’m pretty sure that ring would be considered a weapon akin to “brass knuckles” in California, and most other States in the USA, and likely elsewhere.It’s a nice piece of fabrication, but I’d be very, ve... | 1,760,376,382.153186 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/02/adding-a-sim-card-to-the-photon-q-4g-lte/ | Adding A SIM Card To The Photon Q 4G LTE | Mathieu Stephan | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"motorola",
"phone mod",
"reflow",
"sim",
"xda"
] | [Charles] is a big fan of phones that have physical keyboards. He thinks they are better suited for writing lengthy emails, but unfortunately his HTC Desire Z was getting old so he had to replace it. [Charles] therefore decided to import the Motorola Photon Q from the USA which exposed one major problem. The Verizon phone uses CDMA so there is nowhere to put a GSM SIM. But a bit of hacking allowed him to add a
SIM card slot to it
. Even though he’s not the one who originally found this hack (XDA thread
here
), his write-up is definitely an interesting read. To perform this modification, he needed a hot air reflow station, a soldering iron, a Dremel with the appropriate cutting wheel and several SIM card slot assemblies from the Galaxy S3 (as the first ones usually get burned during the disassembly process).
Obviously the first steps involved opening the phone, which may have taken a while. Using hot air, [Charles] removed the
EMI
shield covering the SIM card IC . He then extracted the latter using the same technique. Finally, he removed another EMI shield covering the contacts to which the SIM card slot should be connected. A few minutes/hours of delicate soldering and case modding later, [Charles] could use his SIM card on his brand new phone. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1119563",
"author": "Galane",
"timestamp": "2013-12-03T00:08:45",
"content": "I wonder what it would take to get Sprint, Verizon and the other north american CDMA companies to go to the RUIM, the CDMA version of the SIM?With unlocked GSM phones you can have several phones and swap o... | 1,760,376,382.198784 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/02/hacking-and-philosophy-crackdown-part-iv/ | Hacking And Philosophy: Crackdown Part IV | Marsh | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"hacking and philosophy"
] | This week we conclude our discussion of
The Hacker Crackdown
with the final chapter, which covers the rise of
the EFF
. In early 1990, the idea of civil liberties online was little more than a notion in [John Barlow’s] head, but by the end of the same year, the EFF had formed to not only keep Phrack editor [Knight Lightning] out of prison, but to also successfully challenge the Secret Service on behalf on
Steve Jackson Games
.
[Sterling] details [Knight Lightning’s] trial in this chapter and it’s worth reading. Had the EFF lost the case, online publications would have suffered serious setbacks in terms of freedom of speech, and sites like ours would likely be considered illegal. Read on, dear reader.
0. From Last Week’s Discussion:
RE: Q1 (Have any of our readers been raided?)
While there were no epic tales of late-night knocks on the door followed by an eruption of hinges and wood, [matt] did
share an equally frightening situation at a former job.
RE: Q2 (Should young hackers only aspire toward careers in law enforcement?)
RE: Q3 (Any instances of hacking leading directly to death as predicted in the book?)
Unfortunately neither of these questions received a directly reply. Perhaps someone can chime in this week.
[Macon]
and
[dan]
did, however, provide some excellent comments on open source systems; check them out!
I. What’s important for this week’s discussion?
[Sterling] shines as a storyteller in this chapter, and his inclusion of the actual E911 document in the midst of the court case description makes for a brilliant rebuttal. Above all, however, you’ll want to read this excerpt of an encounter between founding EFF member [John Barlow] and a federal investigator:
Barlow was troubled to find himself under investigation in an area of his interests once quite free of federal attention. He had to struggle to explain the very nature of computer crime to a head-scratching local FBI man who specialized in cattle rustling. [1]
To a lesser extent, this section has led me to reconsidered my position from last week where I criticized [Sterling’s] recommendation that young would-be hackers should all seek out a career in law enforcement. I still believe unforeseen career paths (unforeseen by [Sterling]; he’s writing in 1992 and would need a crystal ball to predict where hacking might go) such as pen testing provide the appropriate alternative option for young hackers. It is, however, frightening to know that those creating the laws, or prosecuting and arresting presumably malicious hackers, likely have limited background in these emerging fields. It will take individuals with a hacker mentality to not only keep pace with developments, but to find appropriate responses to legal gray-area transgressions that avoid abuse and seek fairness for all parties.
II. Questions for this week
1. What parallels, if any, do you see between the information revealed by the defense for [Knight Lighting] and the onslaught of leaks coming from [Snowden] and others? How effective are recent attempts to “get information out in the open?”
2. If this is your first time reading
Crackdown
, what’s your overall response to it? It doesn’t have to be a formal essay; consider this a survey. Did you like the topic? The writing style? Was this a book you enjoyed discussing (or lurking while others discussed?)
NEXT WEEK:
Well gang, we’ve finished our first book, so take a break from reading this week and instead hit up the comments for some discussion. Next week we will announce a new text and go from there!
NOTES:
[1] Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown, (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 236.
Hacking & Philosophy is an ongoing column with several sections:
October 28th: Hacking & Philosophy: An Introduction
November 4th: The Mentor’s Manifesto
November 11th: Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown: Intro & Part I
November 18th: Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown: Part II
November 25th:
Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown: Part III
December 2nd: Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown: Part IV | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,376,382.239291 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/04/tiny-3x3x3-smd-led-cube/ | Tiny 3x3x3 SMD LED Cube | James Hobson | [
"Android Hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"LED cube",
"smd led cube",
"tinyduino"
] | LED cubes are cool, but they’re usually pretty big and clunky. [One49th] set out to make one of the smallest LED cubes we’ve seen yet, and he’s shared how he did it in
his Instructable!
His first LED cube was the traditional kind, and it turned out
pretty nice.
But he wanted to go smaller — what about using SMD’s? What he did next was no simple feat — in fact, we’d be willing to call him an artist with a soldering iron. The array is just over
one centimeter across
.
Using a combination of vices and pliers he soldering each SMD onto his structure one by one. Each LED anode is tied together on each horizontal layer. Each cathode is tied together on each vertical column. This allows the TinyDuino to control any one LED by knowing which of the 9 columns and 3 layers the LED is on. Send a high signal to chosen layer, and a low signal to the column to light the LED. Doing this quickly allows you to create the illusion of different LEDs being on at the same time. Take a look through his image gallery to see just how tight the soldering quarters were, it’s definitely not something we’re planning on doing anytime soon!
Looking for a bigger cube? Check out this gorgeous
7x7x7 one that is capable of 142 frames per second! | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1121654",
"author": "oodain",
"timestamp": "2013-12-04T12:31:35",
"content": "that is some impressive soldering.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1121795",
"author": "tekkieneet",
"timestamp": "2013-12-04T15:28:18",
"... | 1,760,376,382.287875 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/04/easy-capacitive-touch-sensors-in-eagle/ | Easy Capacitive Touch Sensors In Eagle | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"capacitive sensing",
"capsense",
"eagle",
"part libraries"
] | Capacitive sensing libraries for the Arduino and just about every other microcontroller platform have been around for ages now, but if you’d like to put a slightly complex cap sense pad in a PCB without a lot of work, you’re kind of out of luck. Not only do you need a proper education in how capacitors work, but a custom cap sense pad also requires some advanced knowledge of your preferred PCB layout program.
The folks over at PatternAgents have just the solution for this problem.
They created an Eagle library of touch widgets
that includes everything from buttons, linear and radial sliders, touchpads, and a whole lot more.
The simplest cap sense pad is just a filled polygon on the top layer of a board, but this simple setup isn’t ideal if you want to use Eagle’s autorouter. By playing with the restrict layers in Eagle, PatternAgents were able to create easy cap sense buttons that will work perfectly, without the problems of the autorouter placing traces willy-nilly.
There are more than enough parts to replicate a whole lot of touch interfaces – buttons can easily be made into a smallish keyboard, and the radial touch sensor will emulate the ‘wheel’ interface on an iPod. Very cool stuff, and we can’t wait to see these in a few more boards. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "1121513",
"author": "notabena",
"timestamp": "2013-12-04T09:09:42",
"content": "I can’t touch this… sorry for the pun. It was there I had to take it… lolCheers!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1121574",
"author": "ei... | 1,760,376,382.345326 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/03/a-speaking-ultrasonic-distance-sensor/ | A Speaking Ultrasonic Distance Sensor | Brian Benchoff | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"adafruit wave shield",
"arduino",
"ultrasonic",
"ultrasonic distance sensor",
"wav shield"
] | [Klaus] wanted some sort of aid for parking his car, and after running across a $4 ultrasonic sensor, decided to build his own
speaking distance sensor
(.de,
Google Translation
).
Inside [Klaus]’ device is an Arduino Uno, an HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor, and an
Adafruit Wave Shield
. Originally, this parking/distance sensor used a small TFT to display the distance to an object, but after a few revisions, [Klaus] redesigned the device to speak the current distance, courtesy of an SD card and a soothing female voice.
Right now, the voice is set up to speak the distance from an object to the sensor from 10 cm to 1 m in 5cm increments. This isn’t the limit of the sensor, though, and the device can be easily reconfigured to sense a distance up to four meters.
The board doesn’t have an amplifier or speaker, but with the addition of
a small amplifier
, [Klaus]’ device is loud enough to be heard in even the noisiest environments.
Video demo below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQzhLnJa9os | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1121413",
"author": "vonskippy",
"timestamp": "2013-12-04T06:29:22",
"content": "Worth watching the video just to see his “Bat Detector”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1121484",
"author": "Alan",
"timestamp": "2013-12-... | 1,760,376,382.404021 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/03/fabricate-your-own-7-segment-displays/ | Fabricate Your Own 7-Segment Displays | Mike Szczys | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"casting",
"epoxy",
"eraser",
"mold",
"resin",
"seven segment"
] | We see more and more projects that use custom molds and casting materials. The latest is
this custom seven segment display
which [Ray74] put together. The idea of making your own LED displays couldn’t be much easier than this — everything but the LEDs and wire is available at the craft store.
He started by making models of each segment out of pink erasers. The lower left image of the vignette above shows the eraser segments super glued to some poster board. The decimal is a pencil eraser, with a fence of wood to contain the molding material.
Amazing Mold Putty
was mixed and pressed into place resulting in the mold shown in the upper right.
From there, [Ray] cast the clear epoxy three times. Once dried the clear pieces were sanded, which will shape them up physically but also serves to diffuse the light. They were then placed inside of another mold form and an epoxy pour — this time doped with black enamel paint — finishes the 7-segment module. The final step is to glue the LEDs on the back side and wire them up.
This definitely trumps the build which Hackaday Alum [Kevin Dady] pulled off
using hot glue sticks as light pipes
. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1121288",
"author": "dizot",
"timestamp": "2013-12-04T04:11:30",
"content": "Nice work.As an alternative, I’ve made custom 7-segment displays using two stacked 3/16″ laser-cut acrylic sheets, with white copy paper as the diffuser, and SMD LEDs. I tried both white and clear silicone... | 1,760,376,382.626434 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/03/retrotechtacular-an-axe-factory-of-yore/ | Retrotechtacular: An Ax Factory Of Yore | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"ax",
"blacksmithing",
"factory"
] | When your mind’s eye thinks of an ax factory you may envision workers loading blanks into a machine that refines the shape and profile before heading to an annealing furnace. But this is Retrotechtacular, and we’re tickled to feature a look at a different time in manufacturing history. This
ax factory tour looks at every step in the manufacturing process
at a factory in Oakland, Maine. It was shot on film in 1965 just a few months before the factory shut down. [Peter Vogt] did a great job of shooting and editing the reel, and an equally fine job of converting it to digital so that we can enjoy it on his YouTube channel.
Above you can see the automatic hammer — known as
a trip hammer
— that is driven by cam action. At this point a lot of work has already been done. Blanks were cut from steel bars by two workers. These were shaped on the trip hammer before being bent in half to create the loop for the ax handle. From there a piece of high-carbon steel was added to form the cutting surface. This brings us to the step above, shaping the two glowing-hot pieces into one.
We don’t want to undermine the level of craftsmanship, and the labor-intensive process shown off here. But we can’t end this write-up without at least mentioning the kitsch that is smoking cigarettes and pipes on the job. At one point a worker actually lights his pipe using a the glowing-hot ax head.
To give you an idea of how this contrasts with modern manufacturing, here’s
a
How It’s Made
episode on axes
(although we think whats being made would more appropriately be called hatchets).
[via
Reddit
]
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
. | 40 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "1121071",
"author": "der",
"timestamp": "2013-12-04T00:30:09",
"content": "“But we can’t end this write-up without at least mentioning the kitsch that is smoking cigarettes and pipes on the job. At one point a worker actually lights his pipe using a the glowing-hot ax head.”What do ... | 1,760,376,382.583598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/03/stealing-100-million-in-bitcoins/ | Stealing $100 Million In Bitcoins | Brian Benchoff | [
"News"
] | [
"bitcoin"
] | In early October of this year, online Bitcoin marketplace and ‘the eBay of drugs’ The Silk Road was taken down by the FBI. Just after the black vans took Silk Road head honcho [Dread Pirate Robberts] away, a new Bitcoin marketplace came onto the scene called Sheep Marketplace. Sheep Marketplace closed after revealing that 5400 bitcoins – or $5.8 million USD were stolen by the user EBOOK101 by exploiting a bug in the Sheep site.
Over this last weekend, it was revealed this bug in the Sheep Marketplace site wasn’t responsible for the loss of 5,400 coins,
but instead 96,000 BTC, or $100 million USD
,
making this one of the largest thefts of all time.
Whoever was responsible for this theft didn’t make a clean getaway. Because the Bitcoin block chain records the history of every transaction, laundering bitcoins is harder than it seems. The most common method is to ‘tumble’ the bitcoins – sending them through multiple wallets, combining and recombining them, until tracking groups of bitcoins just becomes too hard.
[sheeproadreloaded2] over on Reddit
managed to track these bitcoins
to this bitcoin address
, an amazing feat that also means there are 96,000 coins in a wallet somewhere that can’t be spent or cashed out without the thief telling the world who he is.
As far as crimes of the century go, this one is at least in the top ten. Unless the thief behind this heist is extraordinarily smart, though, his identity will most likely be found out eventually. | 104 | 36 | [
{
"comment_id": "1120824",
"author": "colecoman1982",
"timestamp": "2013-12-03T21:12:08",
"content": "I wonder just how many different drug dealers that guy/girl just stole from…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1120837",
"author": "Tired Jua... | 1,760,376,382.850611 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/03/new-contest-win-one-of-20-microchip-fubarino-boards/ | New Contest: Win One Of 20 Microchip Fubarino SD Boards | Mike Szczys | [
"contests",
"Featured"
] | [
"easter egg",
"fubarino-contest",
"microchip",
"microcontroller"
] | We had a blast with
the Trinket Contest
in October and November and can’t wait to see what you can come up with for this month’s competition. Microchip Technology is one of our advertisers and they offered us 20
Fubarino SD boards
to give away as prizes. The challenge for you is to add our URL as an Easter Egg in your own microcontroller project. Rise to the top of our seemingly arbitrary system for picking winners and one will be delivered to your door for your future hacking pleasure.
Obviously we mean
http://hackaday.com
when we say URL, but what constitutes an Easter Egg? We figure it’s anything that is not apparently obvious in a piece of hardware. We built a quick example to get you thinking. Shown off in the clip after the break is a clock that displays our web address every day at 1:37pm. What did we pick that time? Because our clock displays in 24-hour time format and 13:37 is
leet
. See the code we used
in our repo
.
We thought of a few others, like making an embedded gaming that uses
the Konami Code
to reveal the Easter Egg, or a man-in-the-middle device that attaches to your keyboard and redirects your feeble attempts to load Facebook by closing the tab and opening Hackaday. The sky’s the limit with how creative these things can be!
Follow these rules to submit your qualifying entry:
You must somehow hide
http://hackaday.com
in your microcontroller project (embedded Linux doesn’t count unless you do some type of bare-metal programming)
Preference will be given to projects that are both clever and well documented. Notice we
made a video
, and
posted code and an explanation
of our project.
Write an email that has “[Fubarino]” in the title, includes the information on your documented entry, and
lists your name and mailing address
. Your name and mailing address will be used for shipping only and NOT for anything else. Emails should be sent to:
contests@hackaday.com
Entries must be received before 12:00am
Pacific time
on 12/19/2013.
Employees and their families of Hackaday, SupplyFrame, and Microchip Technology are not eligible to win.
What are you waiting for? Dust off those chips and get hacking! | 63 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "1120605",
"author": "lol",
"timestamp": "2013-12-03T18:29:48",
"content": "Until PIC32 can run Linux/Android — no one will care about them…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1120679",
"author": "Haku",
"timestamp... | 1,760,376,382.71992 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/02/pokemon-blue-becomes-an-ide/ | Pokemon Blue Becomes An IDE | Brian Benchoff | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"game boy",
"nintendo",
"pokemon"
] | With WiFi, Wonder Trade, and new Pokemon that are freakin’ keys, you’d think the latest generation of everyone’s reason to own a Nintendo portable is where all the action is, right? Apparently not, because
Pokemon Blue just became a development tool for the Game Boy
.
Despite all notions of sanity, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone
program a Game Boy from inside a first generation Pokemon game
. Around this time last year, [bortreb]
posted a tool assisted run
that deposited and threw away in-game items to write to the Game Boy’s RAM. Using this method, [bortreb] was able to craft a chiptune version of the
My Little Pony
theme inside Pokemon Yellow.
A year later, [TheZZAZZGlitch] has gone above and beyond what [bortreb] did. Instead of a tool assisted run, [ZZAZZ]’s hack can be done manually on a real Game Boy. This trick works by using an underflow glitch to obtain item ‘8F’ in the player’s inventory.
Here’s a great tutorial for doing that
. With this 8F item, a few items can be tossed and a ‘programming’ mode is activated where code can be written to RAM by walking to an X Y position on the map, using the 8F item, and writing a program byte by byte.
The maximum amount of code that can be written to the Game Boy RAM is 254 bytes, just large enough for [TheZZAZZGlitch] to write a very, very simple version of Akranoid, Breakout, or one-player Pong. Not much, but very, very impressive.
Video of [ZZAZZ] ‘jailbreaking’ his copy of Pokemon Blue available below. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "1119274",
"author": "Kerimil",
"timestamp": "2013-12-02T18:33:54",
"content": "Mindblowing. After watching it I had like the craziest idea. Some say that we live in the matrix or that the world we know is just someone’s simulation – if so then we could probably recreate this. We cou... | 1,760,376,383.249074 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/02/an-engineers-emergency-business-card/ | An Engineer’s Emergency Business Card | James Hobson | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"circuit board business card",
"circuit business card",
"engineer's emergency business card",
"macgyver"
] | We’ve seen lots of circuit board business cards before, but none quite like this. [Saar] calls it the
Engineer’s Emergency Business Card.
Since he actually makes a living from
making circuit boards
, it made sense for him to make a truly functional card. But unlike some of the
fancier cards
we’ve seen, you can’t plug it into your computer, or even open a
beer with it!
In fact, all it does is light up when a voltage is applied across the main pins.
But wait — why are all the components in through holes? Well, according to [Saar], that’s because it’s designed to be the electrical engineers emergency kit!
When all hope is lost, the MacGuyver engineer could snap out one of the components and save the day. Recall the countless times you desperately needed a 1 KOhm resistor to fix an amplifier at a party, only to see the girl you were trying to impress slip away with an OCaml programmer? Never again with this little kit. You even have 2 cm of solder in there to make sure the connection’s electrically solid!
We love it. Whether or not anyone will ever successfully use it in an emergency situation such as [Saar’s] hypothetical one is another question altogether. But we do have to give him creativity points for it, the artistic traces look awesome! | 46 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "1119089",
"author": "Name",
"timestamp": "2013-12-02T15:45:54",
"content": "I think that girl would still prefer OCaml programmer ;-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1119474",
"author": "nes",
"timestamp": "201... | 1,760,376,382.932481 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/02/crafting-a-liquid-crystal-display/ | Crafting A Liquid Crystal Display | Brian Benchoff | [
"chemistry hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"lcd",
"liquid crystal",
"Liquid crystal display"
] | Throughout the 1960s, the management at RCA thought LCD
displays
were too difficult to commercialize and sent their engineers and researchers involved in LCDs off into the hinterlands. After watching [Ben Krasnow]’s
efforts to build a liquid crystal display
, we can easily see why the suits thought what they did. It’s an amazing engineering feat.
Before building his own version of an LCD (seen above in action), he goes through the mechanics of how LCDs operate. Light enters the display, goes through a polarizer, and is twisted by a liquid crystal material. The first successful LCDs used two types of liquid crystals – chiral and nematic. By combining these two types of molecules in the right proportion, the display can ‘twist’ the polarized light exactly 90 degrees so it is blocked by the second piece of polarizing film in the display.
Besides getting the right crystals and engineering processes, another major hurdle for the development of LCDs
displays
is transparent electrically conductive traces. [Ben], along with every other LCD manufacturer, uses a thin layer of indium tin oxide, or ITO. By embedding these clear electrodes in the display, segments can be built up, like the seven segment displays of a calculator or a bunch of tiny dots as found in a TV or computer monitor.
In the end, [Ben] was able to build an extremely simple single-segment LCD
display
out of a pair of microscope slides. It does modulate light, just barely. With a lot of work it could be made in to a calculator type display but for now it’s an awesome demonstration of how LCDs actually work. | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1118891",
"author": "Sirslask",
"timestamp": "2013-12-02T12:08:44",
"content": "LCD displays? Oh, come on, Hack a Day, you’re better than this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1119374",
"author": "pcf11",
"time... | 1,760,376,382.984146 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/02/scratch-built-smart-flashlight/ | Scratch-built Smart Flashlight | Mike Szczys | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"16f88",
"3d printed",
"flashlight",
"pic"
] | This flashlight has a face; one of the many tricks which [Hobbyman] included during the development process.
The smart flashlight build
turned out to be a great way to practice so many different aspects of product development.
It was envisioned as a light for use when walking or biking that could do more than just light your way or flash on and off. Of course we know it’s really just a reason to spend way too much time in his lair. He started with the electronics, driven by a PIC 16F88. The 5×5 LED matrix gives him just enough to work with for patterns and rudimentary text. The prototype is wrapped up into a pretty tight package which leaves enough room in the 3D printed case for 4 AAA batteries. As the project progressed more and more features were added in. The most current offering includes a temperature sensor as well as the ability to react to ambient sound. See for yourself after the break.
[Thanks Zibri] | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1118730",
"author": "Veyo Exxon",
"timestamp": "2013-12-02T09:05:58",
"content": "Thank you for including a commercial music track in the video, making it unavailable in certain countries like Germany.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,376,383.043909 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/01/newsstand-shotgun-hack-poised-to-further-ruin-air-travel/ | Newsstand Shotgun Hack Poised To Further Ruin Air Travel | Mike Szczys | [
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"airport",
"lithium",
"newsstand",
"red bull",
"shotgun"
] | The people who go nuts over 3D printed guns are going to have a field day with this one. It’s a shotgun and ammo built entirely
from items you can purchase after passing through airport security
. Now look, obviously the type of folks who read Hackaday understand that security in any form is something of an illusion. House keys don’t keep people from breaking into your home. Encryption doesn’t keep the government from looking over your shoulder. And no level of security screening can eliminate every possible hazard. So let’s just enjoy this one for the fine act of hacking that it is.
[Evan Booth] put his mind to work on the items you can buy at the stores inside of an airport terminal. Above you can see the diagram of all the parts. The break action accepts a Red Bull can that acts as the cartridge for the shotgun (our calculations put this at
just under 0.25 Gauge
). The bottom of the can contains water separated from Lithium metal (from cellular phone accessories?) by a condom. When the nonet of 9V batteries are connected to the heating element from the hair dryer it melts a hole in the prophylactic, mixing the water with the metal causing a reaction that propels pocket change as the projectile. The video after the break shows that this does take a while… perhaps 10 seconds from the time the trigger is pulled. Oh, and you might not want to be holding the thing when it goes off. We’d say the firearm can barely contain the explosion.
If you like this (or were horrified by it) [Evan’s] got
a whole collection of weapons built inside the airport terminal
. For those that care, here’s a link to
the most recent of 3D printed gun posts
which we referenced earlier.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsem22DkIjw
[Lukas] | 66 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "1118590",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2013-12-02T06:19:12",
"content": "Just use the same materials to build a bomb, much simpler all around.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1118648",
"author": "spider",
... | 1,760,376,383.143222 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/01/3d-printing-lithium-ion-cells/ | 3D Printing Lithium Ion Cells | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing batteries",
"3dprinting",
"Harvard University",
"Lithium-ion battery",
"printed battery"
] | [Jennifer Lewis] is a Harvard Materials Scientist, and she’s recently come up with a type of Lithium Ion “Ink” that allows her to
3D print battery cells.
You might remember our recent 3D Printering article on
Pastestruders
, but this research certainly takes it up a few notches. The ink is made up of nano-particles of Lithium Titanium in a solution of de-ionized water and ethylene glycol. When producing the ink, small ceramic balls are added to the mixture to help break up microscopic clumps of said particles. The mixture is then spun for 24 hours, after which the larger particles and ceramic balls are removed using a series of filters. The resulting ink is a solid when unperturbed, but flows under extreme pressures!
This means a conventional 3D printer can be used, with only the addition of a high pressure dispenser unit. We guess we can’t call it a hot-end any more… The ink is forced out of a syringe tip as small as 1 micrometer across, allowing for extremely precise patterning. In her applications she uses a set up with many nozzles, allowing for the mass printing of the anodes and cathodes in a huge array. While still in the research phase, her micro-scale battery architectures can be as small as a square millimeter, but apparently compete with industry batteries that are much larger.
And here’s the exciting part:
Although she says the initial plan is to provide tools for manufacturers, she may eventually produce a low-end printer for hobbyists.
3D Printable electronics. The future is coming!
[Thanks Keith!] | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1118489",
"author": "Reggie",
"timestamp": "2013-12-02T03:16:18",
"content": "Fantastic use of the technology, this will undoubtedly allow the manufacture of batteries that fit the free space in devices rather than having to clear space for them using existing tech.",
"parent_id... | 1,760,376,383.197158 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/01/hackaday-links-december-1-2013/ | Hackaday Links: December 1, 2013 | Brian Benchoff | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"Antique electronics",
"cell phone",
"GSM module",
"hackaday links",
"indiegogo",
"kickstarter",
"lpc1114",
"LPC812",
"menorah",
"teardown"
] | Since our ‘ol buddy [Caleb] left Hackaday for EE Times, he’s been very busy. One of his latest projects
is doing Antique Electronics Autopsies
. This time around it’s a 1953 Heathkit Grid Dip Meter. It’s a beautiful piece of engineering with Point to Point wiring and metal gears.
We love microcontroller breakout boards, and so does [Tim] apparently. He built a breadboard friendly
breakout for the NXP LPC812
. It’s an ARM Cortex M0+ with 16kb of Flash and 4kb of SRAM. The entire breakout board is smaller than
the through-hole DIP LPC1114
. When are we going to see these on Tindie, [Tim]?
Here’s the Git
with the board files. You can also pick up a board at
OSH Park
– $3.30 for a set of three.
What do you do when you have the perfect idea for a Kickstarter, but don’t have the funds for the perfect sales pitch?
The obvious solution is to start an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for your Kickstarter.
Unfortunately, this campaign has already been successfully funded, so it’s already too late to get in on the ground floor.
Relevant xkcd.
We’ve seen
this DIY cell phone before
but now it’s
just about ready for production
. [David] at the MIT Media Lab has been working on a bare-bones, ATMega & GSM module phone for a while now, and now you can grab the firmware and board files. Make your own cell phone!
Here comes Hanukkah, so drink your gin and tonica.
Here’s a pedal powered menorahica
so put on your yarmulke, it’s time to celebrate Hanukkah. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1118368",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2013-12-02T00:26:11",
"content": "A pedal powered Menorah? They’re supposed to be kept lit for 1/2 hour! I’ed schvitz till I plotzed! Now lets sing the dreidel song! “Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I made you from a stick, but I won’t play ... | 1,760,376,383.29182 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/30/over-powered-fume-hood-is-awesome/ | Over-powered Fume Hood Is Awesome | James Hobson | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"fume hood",
"fumehood",
"solder fume hood"
] | Recognize the Black & Decker unit up top? Yeah,
that’s part of a leaf blower.
[Paul] does a lot of soldering. He had one of those cheap desktop fume extractors but it just wasn’t doing the trick. So after being inspired by the countless DIY fume hoods,
like this one
, he decided to try his hand at it. A sale on an electric leaf blower inspired a Saturday afternoon of hacking.
The leaf blower is one of those models that can also suck up leaves, so no modification was necessary. He still cracked it open though and upon taking it apart he discovered the motor is in fact a
Universal Motor
, that can run off of AC or DC! Not wanting to suck up his entire setup, he began to play with a variable power supply to determine the best voltage to run it at — 30V was the sweet spot. Quiet, but still powerful. A few simple modifications to the case and wiring, and it was good to go.
Next up was the enclosure, and like most fume hoods, he started with a large plastic bin. He also happened to have some nice aluminum profiles on the scrap heap that he used to finish the cut edges of the bin, and to support the leaf blower with. It’s done for now, but he also plans on cleaning up the wiring a bit more permanently and adding a proper carbon filter.
You can still tell it’s a plastic bin, but we have to admit, it looks pretty nice! | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1117315",
"author": "blade",
"timestamp": "2013-12-01T00:12:27",
"content": "Nice one; truly shows what sort of things you can accomplish with a small amount of ingenuity.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1117329",
"aut... | 1,760,376,383.515892 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/30/making-an-unix-clock-while-making-a-few-mistakes-along-the-way/ | Making A UNIX Clock While Making A Few Mistakes Along The Way | Mathieu Stephan | [
"clock hacks",
"hardware"
] | [
"Laser cutting",
"mistake",
"rtc",
"unix clock"
] | Sometimes the projects we think are easy to design are the ones on which we end up making the most mistakes. The
UNIX clock
that you see in the picture above is one of these projects. For our readers that don’t know it, UNIX time is the number of seconds since 00:00 on January 1st 1970. The clock that [James] designed is based on an Arduino Pro Mini board, an RTC chip to store the time, a custom made display board and two buttons to set the date/time.
One of the mistakes that [James] made was designing the boards on which will be soldered the seven-segment displays before actually choosing the ones he’ll use, as he was thinking they’d be all the same. The displays he ended up with had a different pitch and needed a different anode voltage, so he had to cut several traces on the PCBs and add another power supply. It also took [James] quite a while to remove the bits that his hackerspace’s laser didn’t cut through. We strongly advise a good look at his very detailed write-up if you are starting in the electronics world.
If you find this Unix time display too easy to read here’s
one that’s a bit more of a challenge
. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1117154",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T21:35:53",
"content": "Why ? Has he never heard of the Y2K38 bug.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1117158",
"author": "Sven",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T21:41... | 1,760,376,383.462829 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/30/gravity-powered-generator-real-or-fake/ | Gravity-Powered Generator: Real Or Fake? | Marsh | [
"Engine Hacks"
] | [
"gravity",
"perpetual motion",
"real or fake"
] | You thought we forgot about your favorite Hackaday comment game, didn’t you? Well, not only is ‘Real or Fake?’ back with a new installment, but this time it concerns everybody’s favorite impossibility: perpetual motion machines! It’s likely that you’ve already seen the photos of Brazilian energy group RAR Energia’s
generator “powered exclusively by gravity”
(
translated
). If you’re rolling your eyes and exclaiming “this is so last year..” you might want to scroll down to the bottom of the page; they’re
still building this monstrosity
and they’ve included some
diagram images
.
Perhaps someone who reads Portuguese can better translate the claim that the devices are “demonstration models with capacity to generate 30kW.” Oh, didn’t you know? There are two of them now: one in Brazil that is presumably functioning, and a second under construction in Gilman, Illinois.
Now, before you all scream “Photoshopped,” take a gander at a
FotoForensics
analysis of
one of the images
, where ELA (error level analysis) seems to indicate
consistent levels of compression
.
EXIF data shows
the pictures were shot with a Sony DSC-WX5 and saved in PhotoScape. It may be simpler than that: you can easily recognize the same employees in different shots from different angles, and there are quite a lot of photos. RAR Energia’s most recent endeavor
—a second machine in Gilman Illinois
—seems to have been erected in the past two months. The Gilman warehouse is located on property belonging to bio-diesel manufacturing firm
Incobrasa Industries
(named a “Company of the [RAR Energia] group” on the RAR Energia site). Here’s a little internet sleuthing for your consideration: a
photo of the completed warehouse
and a
Google maps link to the location in question
(
40.763176, -88.012706)
. Note the distinctly shaped building in the background (another view
here, during construction
), which can be found due south of the location indicated in the Google maps link. We’re not suggesting that you completely rule out image manipulation, but if it’s Photoshopped, it’s a damned elaborate job.
Unfortunately, there aren’t any videos demonstrating motion or any explanation for how the system works other than vagaries about perpetual energy. So, does this thing exist—and did this company really build two of them? Does it work…or, well, somehow do something? | 293 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "1116916",
"author": "six677",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T18:07:30",
"content": "Of course it doesnt work, friction will sap energy, rotation of the generator will sap energy, the energy required to lift the masses back up again ignoring any resistive force will be the same as you woul... | 1,760,376,383.882511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/30/2-5-mm-jack-adapter-for-the-xbox-one-headset/ | 2.5 Mm Jack Adapter For The Xbox One Headset | Todd Harrison | [
"Xbox Hacks"
] | [
"2.5 mm adapter",
"adapter",
"headset",
"xbox one"
] | As most everyone knows the Xbox One came out last week and if you were one of the lucky few to get one you might have noticed the headset is quite uncomfortable and covers only one ear. [octanechicken] has a possible
adapter solution that lets you plug-in an older more comfortable chat headset
like a
Turtle Beach
. It is being reported as a functional hack by others in the comments; however it may still be questionable. We say questionable because the first release of this Instructable clearly had a flaw in the wiring, but updated text seems to have fixed that problem. Using a female 2.5 mm stereo inline jack [octanechicken] was able to get the Xbox One headset controller to work with older Xbox 360 chat headsets having a male 2.5 mm plug.
The photos on the instructable are still incorrect so following the text instructions one simply unsolders the wires from within the ear piece and then solders the white wire to the tip connector, blue wire to the middle ring connector and the bare wire to the rear sleeve connector of the female 2.5 mm stereo inline jack. Remember to leave the black wire disconnected and covered with a bit of tape. If you cut the wires instead of unsoldering them, remember to scrape any varnish off before soldering. But what about that black wire?
Following this hack does seem to give you the ability to plug in one of the older chat headset while retaining the full functionality of the Xbox One headset volume and mute. The unused black wire is still a bit of a mystery, when others had connected it with the bare wire it would drain the batteries and cause volume problems. Clearly the controller uses the black wire differently than a simple circuit common. Any hack that actually leaves you with a working solution is still a good hack even if the full understanding isn’t there.
We’d love to hear from other readers that want to take some time to disassemble the headset and evaluate the electronics in order to see if a better more complete DYI adapter solution can be derived. For the microphone side this application note (PDF) from Analog Devices for
using MEMS mic with 2-wire
could be a good research starting point along with having an example for ECM mic. In the meantime this does seem to be working for others.
Seeing brave people disassemble and hack new and very expensive products to meet their needs, comfort and usability never ceases to amaze. As a good example here is a shameless link to a previous featured article
moving the headphone jack on a new Yamaha DGX-630 keyboard
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1116803",
"author": "fartface",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T15:28:04",
"content": "the amplifier is a “push pull” type and the black wire is the speaker’s negative run, it’s for the speaker and is what is incorrectly called “floating ground” by car stereo people. it can actually driv... | 1,760,376,383.667652 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/30/the-flow-of-time-draws-on-a-river/ | The Flow Of Time Draws On A River | Brian Benchoff | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"piezo",
"pump",
"river"
] | You would think Hackaday would see more projects from public art exhibitions. They really do have everything – the possibility to mount electronics to just about anything in a way that performs interesting but an ultimately useless function. So far, though, [Richard Schwartz’s]
Flow of Time
is on the top of a very short list of public art installations we like.
The idea behind the build is a German phrase that means something similar to ‘time trickles away’. [Richard]’s project implements this by printing the current time onto the surface of a flowing river in [Richard]’s native Innsbruck.
The build uses five micro piezo pumps to dispense food coloring from a bridge. Every minute, an Arduino pumps this food coloring in a 5×7 pixel digit to ‘write’ the time onto the surface of a river.
Surprisingly, [Richard]’s installation doesn’t require much upkeep. The pumps only use about 70ml of food coloring a day, and the entire device – including the Raspi WiFi webcam – is solar powered with a battery backup.
You can see a video of the time printing on a river below. | 23 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1116713",
"author": "aztraph",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T13:12:31",
"content": "it’s a neat idea, too bad the dpi sucks",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1116729",
"author": "strider_mt2k",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T13:34:35... | 1,760,376,383.943572 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/30/a-raspberry-pi-arcade-stick/ | A Raspberry Pi Arcade Stick | Marsh | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"arcade",
"arcade button",
"arcade controller",
"jamma",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspi"
] | There are plenty of Raspberry Pi arcade builds out there, but rarely do we come across something as sleek as
[Jochen Zurborg’s] RasPi Arcade Stick
. The build combines everything you’d expect from other RasPi arcade projects, but manages to pack everything into the form factor of a portable stick modeled on the Neo Geo 4’s button layout. It may not be as small as
the tiny MAME cabinet from last year
, but it definitely delivers a more authentic arcade experience.
[Jochen] had previously developed an add-on PCB for the Pi called
the PiJamma
, which simplifies connections from the RasPi’s GPIOs by providing a JAMMA interface for the controller(s). The Pi and the PiJamma sit inside a custom-made acrylic enclosure and hook up to the buttons and joystick above. Rather than try to fit the Pi directly against a side panel for access to the various outputs, [Jochen] rerouted the USB, HDMI, and headphone jacks and arranged them into a tidy row on the back side of the box. The top piece of the enclosure consists of a sheet of aluminum wrapped in custom artwork, with an additional sheet of acrylic on top for protection. [Jochen] also modified each of the arcade buttons to include LEDs that illuminate the buttons’ acrylic holder, and the case itself appears to have been cut into slats on each side to provide better ventilation.
Check out his project blog for further details and for a huge gallery of progress photos, then see a quick video of the RasPi Arcade Stick after the break. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1116626",
"author": "Flame Soulis",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T11:22:09",
"content": "That looks amazing! Well made!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1116707",
"author": "reggie",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T13:06:07",
"co... | 1,760,376,384.032677 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/29/nose-cone-parachute-deployment-from-a-soda-bottle-rubber-band-and-servo/ | Nose Cone Parachute Deployment From A Soda Bottle, Rubber Band, And Servo | Mike Szczys | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"deployment",
"nose cone",
"parachute",
"soda bottle",
"water rocket"
] | This piece of engineering is so simple and elegant, you’ll want to build a pretty serious water rocket just so you can try it out. It’s
an automatic parachute deployment system
that you build into the nose-cone of your rocket. The main portion of the build is made out of plastic soda bottles (2 liter size) to end up with a chamber to store the chute, as well as a friction joint that holds the thing together.
The video after the break shows a complete tutorial on how to build one of these. It starts by tracing out a sine-wave-like pattern on the wall of the bottle. The staggered tongues that are left after cutting along this line make up the friction joint. After gluing a cone (the blue thing) to the bottom of the bottle, it receives the parachute and is then slipped over another bottle that makes up the body of the rocket. The rubber band wraps around the outside of the chassis, holding those plastic tongues in place. The loose end of the rubber band is hooked around the horn of a servo motor, which can then be triggered remotely, or by using a sensor of your choosing. There is even a spring made out of a loop of plastic bottle — you can see it just on top of the chute in the image above.
Need a launching system that is as fancy as the parachute system?
Here you go
. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1116453",
"author": "kel",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T06:56:30",
"content": "Why is this featured on hack a day. this is how these cheap rockets’ parachutes have worked for as long as there have been hobbyists.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,376,384.083617 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/01/arduino-christmas-lights/ | Arduino Christmas Lights | James Hobson | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Holiday Hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"arduino christmas lights",
"Christmas Light",
"christmas lights"
] | Here’s a cool hack to get you in the December holiday mood!
Arduino controlled Christmas lights
!
It all started because [Anx2k] had some leftover LED’s from one of his other projects, so he decided to make use of them as permanently mounted Christmas lights. He’s installed them underneath his tiled roof, and run all the wires into his attic where he has an electrical box serving as the main control hub. He uses an Arduino Uno to control them, and a 460W computer power supply to provide the juice. The LED modules themselves are Adafruit RGB pixel strings. There’s actually three of the LED modules per tile — two shining up to illuminate the tile, and one shining out.
He’s set up a ton of different patterns to run, and they are pretty awesome! Check out the video after the break.
While it doesn’t look that weather proof, it’s a nice unobtrusive way of putting up lights!
[Thanks for the tip David!] | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1118263",
"author": "lja",
"timestamp": "2013-12-01T22:12:39",
"content": "Nice, I’d keep this there as a permanent feature ready for the following year.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1118280",
"author": "mikemac",
... | 1,760,376,383.985596 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/01/diy-thermal-imaging-camera/ | DIY Thermal Imaging Camera | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware"
] | [
"ir camera",
"thermal imaging",
"thermopile"
] | Thermal imaging cameras – those really useful devices that give you
Predator
vision – are incredible tools. If you’re looking for heat escaping your house through a window, or just trying to figure out where your electronics project will explode next, they’re invaluable, if expensive, tools. [Kaptein QK] figured out
an easy and cheap way to make your own thermal imaging camera
using nothing just a few dollars worth of parts.
[Kaptein] based his camera off of a non-contact IR temperature gun. This device is useful for spot checking temperatures, but can’t produce an IR image like it’s $1000 cousins. By taking the thermopile out of this temperature gun, adding an op-amp, an A/D converter, and connecting it to an Arduino Nano with pan and tilt servos, [Kaptein] was able to slowly scan the thermopile over a scene and generate an image.
In the video below, you can see [Kaptein]’s scanning camera in action reading the ambient temperature and creating an imaging program for his PC. It works very well, and there a lot more [Kaptein] can improve on this system; getting rid of the servos and moving to mirrors would hopefully speed everything up, and replacing the 8-bit grayscale display with colors would give a vastly improved dynamic range. | 51 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "1118089",
"author": "LK",
"timestamp": "2013-12-01T18:30:27",
"content": "Well, has been done before some times (f.e.http://publiclab.org/wiki/scanning-thermal-camera), but still nice.But damn, I want an affordable real thermal camera :(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,376,384.170947 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/01/levitating-wireless-led-ring/ | Levitating Wireless LED Ring | James Hobson | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"electromagnetism",
"hall effect",
"Magnetic levitation",
"Wireless power"
] | Here’s an impressive example of a completely home built
magnetic levitation setup
… with wireless power transmission to boot!
[Samer] built this from scratch and it features two main sub-systems, a electromagnet with feedback electronics and a wireless power transfer setup.
The ring of LEDs has a stack of neodymium magnets which are levitated in place by a varying magnetic field.
This levitation is achieved by using a Hall effect sensor and a PID controller using a KA7500 SMPS controller.
The wireless power transmission uses a Class E DC/AC inverter that operates at 800KHz. Two coils of wire pass the current between the stand and the LEDs.
It’s very similar to a build we
featured last year
, but it’s a great hack, so we had to share it! Check out the video after the break.
Interested in more magnetic levitation? How about designing
your own system using an Arduino?
Or you can’t forget Hack a Day’s very own
Portal Gun! | 10 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "1118016",
"author": "voxnulla",
"timestamp": "2013-12-01T16:41:32",
"content": "Wouldn’t it be fun if this was powered by that Brazilian big-ass gravity generator!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1118017",
"author": "Pixel P... | 1,760,376,384.218553 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/01/a-shell-for-the-stellaris-tiva/ | A Shell For The Stellaris & Tiva | Brian Benchoff | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"cli",
"command line interface",
"stellaris",
"tiva"
] | When [antoker] is working on a microcontroller project, he often has to write short bits of test code to make sure everything in his circuit is working properly. This is a time-consuming task, and a while back he started on a small side project. It’s
a command line interface for a microcontroller
that allows him to send short commands to the uC over a serial connection to play around with the ADC, UART, and GPIO pins.
[antoker]’s tiny Unix-like environment is based on modules that can keep track of the time, print the current commands and stack to a terminal, and query things like the current speed of the uC and the available Flash and RAM.
This tiny shell also has scripting capabilities and a jump function, making this a true programming language, however minimal it is. Right now [antoker]’s work is available for the TI Stellaris and Tiva series microcontrollers, and a video of a scripted Larson scanner is available below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBu9Q8zHPFk | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1117949",
"author": "Alexander Rossie",
"timestamp": "2013-12-01T14:52:11",
"content": "This is great. Seriously needed if you spend anytime on microcontrollers you’re unfamiliar with.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1118018",
... | 1,760,376,384.264737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/12/01/diy-pringles-can-speaker/ | DIY Pringles Can Speaker | James Hobson | [
"how-to"
] | [
"diy speaker",
"instructables",
"pringles can speaker"
] | Looking for a fun weekend project? How about
making your own speaker from scratch
using some very basic materials?
[Go Repairs] makes a bunch of how-to videos for
Instructables
in a style very reminiscent of the classic Art Attack from the 90’s — very clear, concise and he’s even got the accent!
The project requires only what you see in the photo above. The lid forms a simple plastic cone of the speaker, the magnets are the core, and using some paper, tape, and enamelled wire a very basic voice coil is constructed. Don’t expect amazing sound quality out of it, but it certainly looks like a fun project for junior hackers as it requires no fancy tools or equipment!
Stick around after the break to watch the video — does it remind you of Art Attack also?
Looking for a bit more of an advanced speaker hack? How about making your own
reverb plate speaker? | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "1117792",
"author": "Greenaum",
"timestamp": "2013-12-01T10:43:21",
"content": "Gods, I HATED Art Attack! Are you talking about the UK one with the smarmy scouse tosser? Did they have foreign versions with a different presenter? He made my blood itch!Meanwhile in other news, you can... | 1,760,376,384.305236 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/30/arduino-powered-steampunk-steam-gauge/ | Arduino-Powered Steampunk Steam Gauge | Marsh | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"Arduino Uno",
"bourdon tube",
"gauge",
"leds",
"pressure gauge",
"steampunk"
] | [Murphy’s_Lawyer] had some empty space on the wall in his kitchen, so he decided to fill it with a whirring Steampunk gizmo:
an Arduino-driven steam gauge
.
The build began as an old 10″ Ashcroft pressure gauge sourced from eBay, which [Murphy’s_Lawyer] dissected to determine the state of its guts. Finding the gauge’s
Bourdon tube
intact, he got to work constructing a method of generating motion without the need for actual steam. The solution was to mount a continuous rotation servo between the tube and the case. The servo lacked the strength to flex the tube on its own, so [Murphy’s_Lawyer] fashioned a simple lever out of brass to help it along.
The electronics consist of an Arduino Uno and an accompanying homemade PCB. The code for the Uno generates random motion for twirling the servo, and three LEDs built into the face reflect values generated for speed, pause and run time. The final upgrade came in the form of a new dial face, which provides some updated text as well as a cutout square that lets you see the previously obscured gears in action. Check out the video below, then see another Steampunk overhaul:
the Edwardian Laptop. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1117638",
"author": "MRE",
"timestamp": "2013-12-01T07:23:19",
"content": "I dunno.. Seems a shame to take a functional gauge and “punk” it.. ie BREAK it. Especially when if all you are after is the brass housing and the gear look inside, that should be easy enough to replicate.",
... | 1,760,376,384.354475 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/30/smartphone-controlled-paper-plane/ | Smartphone Controlled Paper Plane! | James Hobson | [
"Crowd Funding",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"rc paper plane"
] | We’ve heard of making remote controlled paper airplanes before, but it looks like someone finally figured out one of the best ways to do it. It’s called the
PowerUp 3.0
, and it’s a smartphone controlled plane module you can strap to almost any paper plane you make.
[Shai Gotein] is the inventor and is both a pilot and an aviation enthusiast, with over 25 years experience. Back in 2008 he was volunteering to teach Aerodynamics to kids, and he realized how handy it would be to have a small plane capable of indoor flight to explain aviation concepts — so he started designing one. The first iteration (PowerUp 1.0) received the ATA Best Hobby Award, but he didn’t stop there! Continuing to refine his design, version 3.0 is now controllable via an iPhone or Android device using low-energy Bluetooth communications. This gives it about a 55 meter range, and the tiny battery lasts 10 minutes per charge. The best part is you get to design the plane!
Stick around after the break to see a paper plane do things you’d never expect!
https://d2pq0u4uni88oo.cloudfront.net/assets/001/318/223/f343ca3ce8d452cf47a7036881f7bbec_h264_high.mp4
All in all, it’s a reasonably priced toy and looks like a lot of fun, but… Remember the
DIY RC Blimp
we shared last week? Would it be possible to turn one of the 1:64 scale RC cars into an RC paper plane? | 26 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "1117493",
"author": "matthew venn",
"timestamp": "2013-12-01T03:40:16",
"content": "instant buy!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1117501",
"author": "Wretch",
"timestamp": "2013-12-01T03:50:39",
"content": "Cool bit ... | 1,760,376,384.605859 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/29/improving-a-cheap-guitar-pedal/ | Improving A Cheap Guitar Pedal | Brian Benchoff | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"Danelectro",
"effects pedal",
"guitar",
"guitar effect",
"guitar pedal"
] | If something doesn’t suit your needs, just change it. That’s a motto we live by, and it looks like [Doug] took up the same creed when he
modified a cheap effects pedal
.
The victim of [Doug]’s soldering iron is a Danelectro BLT Slap Echo – a tiny, cheap pedal in Danelectro’s mini ‘food named’ pedal series. Stock, this pedal’s slap back echo is set to a fixed amount of time. [Doug]’s mod changes that.
The mod consists of desoldering a single SMD resistor and replacing that with a 50k pot [Doug] had lying around. After mounting the pot between the two stock knobs, the new and improved pedal had a variable length echo. There are a few more mods possible with this pedal – changing some of the resistors on the filter for a better sound, or even connecting the rate pot to a wah-style rocker pedal for some wobbly Echoplex or Space Echo action.
You can check out [Doug]’s gallery of pics
here
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "1116448",
"author": "notabena",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T06:50:02",
"content": "Way Cool… +1",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1116524",
"author": "Bigredlevy",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T08:51:36",
"content": "“If some... | 1,760,376,384.754555 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/29/sterling-engine-kludged-together-from-whatever/ | Sterling Engine Kludged Together From Whatever | Mike Szczys | [
"Engine Hacks"
] | [
"stirling engine"
] | Watching [Jam BD]
build this working Sterling Engine from nothing
is awe-inspiring. He literally did with what he had on hand. Even his build log forgoes phrases like “I ordered a…” in exchange for “I didn’t have any so…”.
The cylinder heated by a candle is a pipe stuffed with aluminum foil which was hammered flat to get the best seal possible. The CDs prominently featured on the final product act as the fly-wheel. To ensure that there is enough mass [Jam] ganged three of them together. There is also a counter-weight affixed just off-center to help keep the wheel turning. The gears shown above were actually used more like mounting plates to build a cam. Looking at the body and frame of the device makes us wonder how in the heck this thing actually came together?
We can’t get enough of these kinds of hacks, which is why we had to go back and
watch the tuna can Sterling Engine
one more time. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1116223",
"author": "Miroslav",
"timestamp": "2013-11-30T01:01:54",
"content": "Stirling not Sterling. It would be nice if it produced Sterlings, though :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1116243",
"author": "Parmin",
... | 1,760,376,384.549736 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/29/bypassing-seagate-ata-security-lock/ | Bypassing Seagate ATA Security Lock | Brian Benchoff | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"ata",
"ATA security",
"hard drive",
"seagate"
] | Here’s a common story when it comes to password retrieval: guy sets up a PC, and being very security-conscious, puts a password on his Seagate hard drive. Fast forward a few months, and the password is, of course, forgotten. Hard drive gets shuffled around between a few ‘computer experts’ in an attempt to solve the problem, and eventually winds up on [blacklotus89]’s workbench.
Here’s how he solved this problem
.
What followed is a walk down Hackaday posts from years ago. [blacklotus] originally found
one of our posts
regarding the ATA password lock on a hard drive. After downloading the required tool, he found it only worked on WD hard drives, and not the Seagate sitting lifeless on his desk.
Another Hackaday post
proved to be more promising. By accessing the hard drive controller’s serial port, [blacklotus] was able to see the first few lines of the memory and the buffer.
Two hours and two Python scripts later, [blacklotus] was able to dump the contents of his drive. He then took another Seagate drive, locked it, dumped it, and analyzed the data coming from this new locked drive. He found his old password and used the same method to look for the password on the old, previously impenetrable drive. It turns out the password for the old drive was set to ‘0000’, an apparently highly secure password.
In going through a few forums, [blacklotus] found a lot of people asking for help with the same problem, and a lot of replies saying. ‘we don’t know if this hard drive is yours so we can’t help you.’ It appears those code junkies didn’t know how to unlock a hard drive ether, so [blacklotus] put
all his tools up on GitHub
. Great work, and something that didn’t end up as a Hackaday
Fail of the Week
as [blacklotus] originally expected. | 19 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1116132",
"author": "ArtemisGoldfish",
"timestamp": "2013-11-29T22:54:48",
"content": "0000? That’s the combination on my luggage!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "1116141",
"author": "cde",
"timestamp": "2013-1... | 1,760,376,385.124887 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/29/wifi-bluetooth-bot-control/ | WiFi & Bluetooth Bot Control | James Hobson | [
"Android Hacks",
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino robot control",
"bluetooth bot control",
"wifi bot control",
"wireless robot control"
] | Looking for an easy way to control that Arduino powered robot you built? We just caught wind of a pair of apps for Android that look pretty handy!
WiFi Bot Control
and
Bluetooth Bot Control.
So, what are they? They’re configurable apps that are capable of taking in an IPCam video signal, and sending various commands via a URL string (or a bluetooth signal) for an Arduino to interpret. It comes standard with a joystick control protocol and 8 customizable command buttons. On the robot end of things you’re looking at a fairly basic setup consisting of an Arduino, a WiFi module, a motor shield and motors, and an IP Camera. The rest is up to you!
It looks pretty easy to set up, and the
lite version is free
! That’s good enough reason for us to try it out. The full version is $1.99 which isn’t a bad price to pay for a nice GUI for your project. See it in action after the break with a robot called Eddie.
Speaking of WiFi controlled robots, remember our feature on
Tank Wars? | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "1115899",
"author": "Manishi Barosee",
"timestamp": "2013-11-29T18:29:29",
"content": "Dat 10fps refresh rate…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1115913",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2013-11-29T18:51:36",
"conten... | 1,760,376,384.987205 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/29/build-and-control-your-own-robot-army/ | Build And Control Your Own Robot Army | Adam Fabio | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"delta robot",
"hackerspace",
"Incandescent light bulb",
"robot",
"Robot Army",
"robotics"
] | [Sarah Petkus] has a simple dream. She wants to
build and command her own delta robot army
. It all began with an illustration she drew of a woman hovering over a field of flowers. The flowers in this case had incandescent light bulbs as blooms. [Sarah] decided to create her image in the real world as an interactive art installation. Her
first attempts at moving light flowers
were based on a pulley system, which was unreliable and not exactly the graceful movement she imagined. Eventually [Sarah] discovered inverted delta robots. She changed her flower design to a delta, and began
building her own delta robots
out of parts she had around the house.
A chance meeting with the folks at
SYN Shop hackerspace
in Las Vegas, NV kicked the project into high gear. [Sarah] switched from using R/C ball links as joints to a simple ball bearing joint. She created her entire design in CAD software and printed it on the hackerspace’s 3d printer. She now has six working prototypes. The robots are all controlled via I2C by an Arduino compatible Nymph board. Six robots doesn’t exactly constitute an army, so [Sarah] had to find a new way to fund her project. She’s currently setting up a project for Kickstarter. [Sarah] will be selling kits for her robots, with the proceeds going toward the realization of her dream of a field of robotic light bulb flowers – Assuming the deltas don’t become sentient and try to take over the world first. [Sarah]
posts progress updates to her blog
, and has a
dedicated site
(which we featured on Sunday
as part of a Links post
) for information about her upcoming Kickstarter campaign. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "1115699",
"author": "cptnemo7029",
"timestamp": "2013-11-29T15:45:30",
"content": "Awesome!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "1115730",
"author": "technodream",
"timestamp": "2013-11-29T16:18:03",
"content": "sweet",
... | 1,760,376,384.890988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/29/rfid-rgb-lamp-goes-the-distance/ | RFID RGB Lamp Goes The Distance | Mike Szczys | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"bandsaw",
"lamp",
"led strip",
"mosfet",
"rgb",
"woodworking"
] | [Philippe Chrétien’s] project makes it to our front page just based on its completeness. When you hear about a multicolored lamp which changes based on an RFID tag you might not get too excited. When you
look at the refined electronics and the quality of the wooden enclosure
it’s another story entirely.
As we’ve said many times before, coming up with the idea for a project is the hardest part… especially when you just want to start hacking. With his kids in mind [Philippe] figured this would be something fun for them to play around with, opening the door to discussing the electronics concepts behind it.
He prototyped on a breadboard using three N-type MOSFETs to drive the colors of an RGB LED strip. The proven circuit was laid out and etched at home to arrive at the clean-looking Arduino shield shown off above. The entire thing gets a custom enclosure cut using layered plywood, a paper template, and a bandsaw.
Need a use for this once the novelty has worn off? Why not mod it to use as
a motion activated night light
? Alas the actual project link for that one is dead, but you get the idea. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "1115676",
"author": "me",
"timestamp": "2013-11-29T15:28:54",
"content": "Nicely done, but wouldn’t it be cheaper, easier, simpler and more versitile if you used a colour sensor? It appears to be matching to the colour of the tags anyway, and you could then just use a few discs of a... | 1,760,376,384.83654 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/29/ps4-controller-leds-suck-the-battery/ | PS4 Controller LEDs Suck (the Battery) | James Hobson | [
"Playstation Hacks"
] | [
"DualShock",
"PS4 controller battery life",
"PS4 controller LEDs"
] | The new Playstation 4 Dualshock controllers are super high-tech. They have bright shiny lights on them to prove it.
But [xn0] from neograf.com had a suspicion about these new-fangled controllers. That LED light bar is awfully bright,
how much power does it consume?
As it turns out, quite a bit. After dismantling one of his controllers he discovered the LEDs are connected to the main PCB with a ribbon cable — super easy to detach. He then performed some rather unscientific tests of leaving the controllers on over night. His empirical conclusion? If you leave the controller with lights on it will die within 24 hours, if you disable the lights, it will still be at approximately 66% battery capacity after the same amount of time.
Another user on the forums quickly pointed out that this test could have been as simple as using a multimeter — so he did that afterwards. The LEDs appear to draw around 40-50mA, which isn’t that much, but it is more than the controller uses while idle (30-40mA)!
We assume Sony will add a firmware option to turn these lights off in the future, but until then, if you’re really dying for an extra hour or so of gameplay, it’s a super easy modification.
[via
ps3hax.net
] | 30 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "1115357",
"author": "Garbz",
"timestamp": "2013-11-29T09:15:35",
"content": "Why assume Sony would add a firmware option to control the lights? This is Sony we’re talking about. I expect the next firmware update to disable half the buttons and make the battery only charge to 20%.",
... | 1,760,376,385.052826 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2013/11/28/8-bit-video-game-is-best-of-retro-gaming-on-a-shoestring-budget/ | 8-Bit Video Game Is Best Of Retro Gaming On A Shoestring Budget | Mike Szczys | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"8 bit",
"atmega328",
"chiptunes",
"nes",
"video game"
] | [Petri] wrote in to show off
the 8-bit gaming system and original platformer
which he and [Antti] developed. Don’t get us wrong now, it’s impressive that the duo were able to put together what looks like a very interesting game. But we’ve seen many industry-leading video games developed with just one or two people (we’re thinking
all the way back to the days of Atari
). Nope, what’s most interesting to us is that the console is also their creation. We should note that the title screen was the work of their friend [Juho].
Take this with a grain of salt, as the bottom right image in the vignette obviously includes an Arduino. But isn’t it a testament to the state of open hardware and the sharing of knowledge through the Internet that this is even possible on the hobby level? And just because we call it “hobby” doesn’t mean you have to lower your expectations. This thing is full featured. Watch the clip after the break to see the ATmega328 driving a 104×80 resolution screen with a 256 color palette, while using four audio channels for the chiptunes. The thing even utilizes an original NES controller port for user input.
And for those of you who are thinking
we’ve seen the same thing before
, we never get tired of seeing projects where a lot of hard work has obviously paid off! | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "1115260",
"author": "icanhazadd",
"timestamp": "2013-11-29T07:13:06",
"content": "That’s really neat, I’ll be building one myself! The only thing i don’t get is… why if they’re etching a custom PCB, did they not just etch the footprint for a SOIC-16 instead of buying an adapter?",
... | 1,760,376,384.944151 |
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