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Adding Smarts To Dumb Brushed Motors

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A big part of the Hackaday Prize this year is robotics modules, and already we’ve seen a lot of projects adding intelligence to motors. Whether that’s current sensing, RPM feedback, PID control, or adding an encoder, motors are getting smart. Usually, though, we’re talking about fancy brushless motors or steppers. The humble DC brushed motor is again left out in the cold.

This project is aiming to fix that. It’s a smart motor driver for dumb DC brushed motors. You know, the motors you can buy for pennies. The motors that are the cheapest way to add movement to any project. Those motors.

The Smart Motor Driver for Robotics allows a DC brushed motor to be controlled by a host microcontroller over I2C, and sends back the speed and direction of the motor. PID is implemented, and the motor can maintain its own speed, independently of a lot of difficult control on the host system.

The guts of this motor controller are made of a PIC 12F microcontroller, a H-bridge motor driver, a Hall-effect sensor, and a neat magnetic encoder disc. Ultimately, this project will simply bolt onto the back of a cheap brushed motor and give it the same capabilities as a fancy servo or stepper. It’s never going to have the same torque or power handling as a beefy NEMA 17 stepper, but sometimes you don’t need that, and a simple brushed motor will do. A great project, and an excellent entry for the Hackaday Prize.


Apple Coin Bank Plants the Seed of Saving

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Consider the piggy bank. Behind that innocent, docile expression is a capitalistic metaphor waiting to ruin your fond memories of saving for that BMX bike or whatever else it was that drove home the value of a dollar. As fun as it is to drop a coin in a slot, the act of saving your pennies and learning financial responsibility could be a bit more engaging.

It seems like [gzumwalt] feels the same way. He’s designed a coin bank for his grand-kids that takes a more active role in the deposit process—it straight up eats the things. Put a coin on the platform and the upper half of the apple’s face is pushed open by an arm that pulls the coin inside on its return path.

Continuing with the money-saving theme, [gzumwalt] didn’t use a micro or even a 555. No, the core of this project is a pair of micro lever switches, a small gear motor, and 4.5V DC. When a coin hits the platform, the first switch engages the motor. The motor drives a 3-D printed mechanism modeled after Hoeckens’ linkage, which converts rotational motion to (nearly) straight-line motion. The second switch stops the cycle. Confused? You can sink your teeth into it after the break.

Don’t worry, the kids don’t have to slice up the apple when it’s time to go to the candy store, ’cause there’s a screw-in hatch on the bottom. This is because [gzumwalt] is a wizard of 3-D printing and design. Not convinced? Check out his balloon-powered engine or his runs-on-air plane.

Makerbot Printer Reborn As PCB Engraver

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Makerbot 3D printers were among the first to hit the market, so it makes sense that old and broken ones now litter the shelves of hackerspaces and home workshops alike. Rather than throw his one out, [Foaly] saw an opportunity to convert it to some sort of CNC machine. Given its lack of inherent rigidity and relatively weak motors, he opted to make a low-impact circuit board engraver which he appropriately calls the MakerbotCNC. We like the thought he put into this project, and it was clearly backed by plenty of experience.

Fortunately, his Makerbot Replicator 2 stemmed from a …read more

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PIC Powered PicoBat Picks Up Pulsed Power

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In 2012, [Bruno] wanted to detect some bats. Detect bats? Some varieties of bat (primarily the descriptively named “microbats”) locate themselves and their prey in space using echolocation, the same way your first robot probably did. The bat emits chirps from their adorably tiny larynx the same way a human uses its vocal cords to produce sound. The bat then listens for an echo of that sound and can make inferences about the location of its presumed prey in the volume around it. Bat detectors are devices which can detect these ultrasonic sounds and shift them into a range that humans can hear. So how would you build such a device? [Bruno]’s PicoBat probably sets the record for component count and code simplicity.

With no domain expertise the most conspicuous way to build a bat detector is probably to combine the glut of high performance microcontrollers with a similarly high performing analog to digital converter. With a little signal processing knowledge you sample the sounds at their native frequency, run them through a Fast Fourier transform, and look for energy in the ultrasonic frequency range, maybe about 20 kHz to 100 kHz, according to Wikipedia. With more knowledge about signal interference it turns out there are a surprisingly large number of ways to build such a device, including some which are purely analog. (Seriously, check out the Wikipedia page for the myriad ways this can be done.)

[Bruno] did use a microcontroller to build his bat detector, but not in the way we’d have expected. Instead of using a beastly high performance A/D and a similarly burly microcontroller, the PicoBat has a relatively tame PIC12 and a standard ultrasonic transducer, as well as a piezo buzzer for output. Along with a power rail, that’s the entire circuit. The code he’s running is similarly spartan. It configures a pair of GPIOs and toggles them, with no other logic. That’s it.

So how does this work? The ultrasonic transducer is designed mechanically to only receive sounds in the desired frequency range. Being piezoelectric, when enough sound pressure is applied the stress causes a small voltage. That voltage is fed into the PIC not as a GPIO but as a clock input. So the CPU only executes an instruction when ultrasonic sound with enough intensity hits the transducer. And the GPIO toggling routine takes four clock cycles to execute, yielding a 1:4 clock divider. And when the GPIOs toggle they flip the potential across the buzzer, causing it to make human-audible sound. Brilliant!

Check out [Bruno]’s video demo after the break to get a sense for how the device works. You might be able to do this same trick with other components, but we’re willing to be that you won’t beat the parts count.

LEGO: The Kristiansen Legocy

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Whether you are young, old, or a time traveling Vulcan, something unites all of us globally: the innocent LEGO blocks that encourage creativity over spoon-fed entertainment. Have you noticed the excess of zombified children and adults alike drooling over their collective screens lately? Back in the ancient times, all a child needed to create hours of joy were plastic interlocking bricks and a place for their parents to trip over them. The LEGO Group harbored the inspiration of our childhood inventiveness, and none of it would have been possible without the founder, Ole Kirk Kristiansen (or Christiansen). The humble carpenter from Denmark forever made his mark on the little Scandinavian country, one brick at a time.

Well, maybe not at first. You see the plastic LEGO bricks we all know and love were initially made of wood. And they were also not actually bricks.

History Lesson

The year was 1932 and the Great Depression was taking its toll on the majority of the world’s inhabitants. After losing his job, Ole Kirk did what any sane man would in his situation — he began his wooden toy business. Initially, his venture was having a hard time making money, as one might expect due to the unfortunate circumstances. Keeping cost efficient designs in mind, he focused his efforts on simple wooden blocks, ducks, and tractors.

Then, things took a turn for the better and Denmark’s economy slowly but surely bounced back. The children loved Kristiansen’s wooden toys so much that his business started to prosper. Then his son, Godtfred, joined the company. Several wood factory fires later, they acquired a plastic injection molding machine to open up new materials options in 1947. It was a few years after this that we saw the inevitable system begin to take place. The LEGO system entails perfectly sized and shaped blocks that all fit together to create an ideal world. The system is still very much active in the LEGO design, and it will continue to be until the end of time. However, the end of Ole Kirk’s time came too soon. What he left behind for his son was the beginnings of a toy empire.

It’s Patent Time

Interlocking LEGO Patent

Initially, the plastic LEGO blocks that came out were not interlocking. Can you imagine LEGO blocks today not snapping together? There would never be the issue of the tiny flat pieces snapping together for eternity. Alas, it was figured out rather quickly that they needed to engineer a more sturdy design so that the block creations would not be destroyed by siblings so easily. In 1958, the same year that the father of LEGO ended up dying, they submitted the patent for an interlocking plastic LEGO block. Three years later it was approved, and they had lift-off. Fast forward three more years, and manuals started showing up in LEGO kits. The kits were becoming progressively more complicated, to the point that children would have a harder time figuring out how to build the bloody thing without the manual. This increase in difficulty for specific kits perhaps increased the enjoyment once the kit was complete; as we all know, the harder it is to do something, the more satisfying it is when you do it. The addition of the interlocking feature in the bricks truly was the turning point for the toy.

Minifigure LEGO Patent

In the early 70’s, Godtfred’s son, Kjeld, joined the family business. He created a research and development center that was essential to updating the LEGO kits as time went on. The designs of the kits kept evolving, and research showed that additional parts needed to be created to bring the sets to life even more. The next revolutionary addition to the LEGO toys was the minifigure, shown to the left. These adorable smiling figures truly brought the LEGO scenes to life, which is the whole point of this company.

Syntax and Semantics

As I am sure most LEGO buffs already know, the word “LEGO” comes from the Danish words leg and godt, literally meaning “play well”. This phrase encapsulates the company almost as much as their official slogan, det bedste er ikke for godt, or “only the best is the best”. But how does it work, anyway? Is it LEGO? Legos? Eggo? The grammatical confusion of how to properly write the word LEGO — both singular and plural — has frustrated a surprising amount of people. It seems that the LEGO authorities want the form of the adjective to always be singular and capitalized. Lots of American citizens, on the other hand, seem to enjoy practicing their freedom of English speech and use a plural form of the word un-capitalized. The fight on how to display the word seems to be never-ending, for some reason. Maybe it’s just because people like to argue for the sake of arguing (we’re looking at you, commenters).

The Key to Surviving as a Billion Dollar Toy Empire

LEGO has a way of catering to its customers. If you don’t have the 4016 piece LEGO Death Star proudly assembled on your coffee table right now, then can you really call yourself a true Star Wars fan? One of the many reasons that the LEGO Group was — and still is — so successful is because they knew how to evolve when times changed. Their core beginnings were very simple, but as the toy business grew more complex, so did their marketing strategies. How many of you have a LEGO Millennium Falcon sitting at home? A LEGO Indiana Jones Temple Escape set? What about the LEGO Ghostbusters Firehouse Headquarters? I am willing to bet that at least one of our readers has each of these. Let me know in the comments if I’m wrong. Alternatively, are there any antique LEGO Space Shuttles out there? A classic castle set, perhaps? These are two of the most iconic LEGO sets ever created, and the company admits to often going back to these bread and butter kits for stability. The LEGO Group does a very good job of integrating both of these components into their model to ensure that the company will continue on while being able to take risks.

The 1998 LEGO Mindstorms series is the best-selling LEGO line of all time. Instead of selling to kids, the majority of buyers for this specific product were PhD students and professional coders that wanted to mess with them, at least at first. However as time has progressed, this has been an invaluable learning tool for students and adults alike. Homebrew interfaces and designs were created, physical modifications were made, and bricks were “bricked”. We featured an article earlier about a LEGO exoskeleton controlling a robot that uses a LEGO Mindstorms NXT system. Before that even, the FIRST LEGO League was created. It draws students in to hack the Mindstorms and get more comfortable with hardware/software in general. Learning about robotics/computer science for the first time can be daunting, but it’s a lot easier when working with something you’re comfortable with. Who isn’t comfortable with LEGO?

The LEGO Group has effectively made its presence known to all the far reaches of the world, but none of that would have been possible without the ingenuity and sincerity of Kjeld, his father Godtfred, and his father’s father Ole Kirk Kristiansen. Their goal of giving every child the opportunity to have a meaningful playtime is being achieved everyday by the company that they built from the ground up.

Now, sit back and get nostalgic about the good ole days with this compilation of the classic Space LEGO toys:

Controlling Robotics Visually

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The world — and the Hackaday Prize — is filled with educational robots. These are small, wheeled robots loaded up with sensors, actuators, a few motor drivers, and some sort of system that is easy to program. The idea behind these educational robots is to give students an easy-to-use platform to test out code, learn inverse kinematics, and realize odometry is a lot harder than you think it is. Give these kids some time and patience, and you’ll have a fleet of Battlebots at the end of the semester, if the teacher is cool.

But there’s a problem with all educational robots. The programming. For someone just starting out in robotics club, being able to code isn’t a guarantee. You need an easy to use programming interface. This project for the Hackaday Prize gives all students a great visual programming interface. It’s basically like the first generation of Lego Mindstorms, only you don’t need a weird IR tower attached to a serial port.

Of course you can’t program a robot without a board, and this project brings it in spades. The brain for this platform is built on an ARM microcontroller, has Bluetooth, supports up to six DC motors, twelve analog inputs, PWM and serial ports, and all the ports are color-coded for kids who can’t read so good.

This is a visual programming environment, though, and with that, you get a fancy IDE filled with loops that wrap around commands, IO access that’s in easy to read blocks, and control software that gives students a dashboard filled with buttons and odometers and the video feed from the camera. It’s a great Hackaday Prize entry, and an excellent way to introduce kids to robotics.

Building A Mini Electric Bike In Between Projects

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What do you do when you suddenly find you have some free time because you’re waiting on parts or have run up against other delays for your current project? If you’re [James Bruton], you design and build a mini electric bike.

Being a prolific builder, [James] already had the parts he needed. Some of them were left over from previous projects: a small motor, a 24 volt LiPo battery, an SK8 electronic speed controller, and a twist grip for the handlebars. He cut a wooden frame using his CNC machine and 3D printed various other components. Normally he uses ABS for motor mounts but this time he went with PLA and sure enough, the motor heated up and the mounting screws got hot enough to melt the plastic. But other than that, the bike worked great and looks like a polished, manufactured product. How many of us can say the same for our own unplanned projects using only parts from around the workshop? Check out his build and watch him whizzing around on it in the video below.

As for the former projects from which he had leftover parts, he says that some came from skateboard projects such as his pimped out electric LEGO longboard.

Hackers Want Cambridge Dictionary to Change Their Definition

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Maybe it’s the silly season of high summer, or maybe a PR bunny at a cybersecurity company has simply hit the jackpot with a story syndicated by the Press Association, but the non-tech media has been earnestly talking about a call upon the Cambridge Dictionary to remove the word “illegal” from their definition of “Hacker”. The weighty tome from the famous British university lists the word as either “a person who is skilled in the use of computer systems, often one who illegally obtains access to private computer systems:” in its learners dictionary, or as “someone who illegally uses a computer to access information stored on another computer system or to spread a computer virus” in its academic dictionary. The cybersecurity company in question argues that hackers in fact do a lot of the work that improves cybersecurity and are thus all-round Good Eggs, and not those nasty computer crooks we hear so much about in the papers.

We’re right behind them on the point about illegality, because while there are those who adopt the hacker sobriquet that wear hats of all colours including black, for us being a hacker is about having the curiosity to tinker with anything presented to us, whatever it is. It’s a word that originated among railway modelers (Internet Archived version), hardly a community that’s known for its criminal tendencies!

Popular Usage Informs Definition

It is however futile to attempt to influence a dictionary in this way. There are two types of lexicography: Prescriptive and Descriptive. With prescriptive lexicography, the dictionary instructs what something must mean or how it should be spelled, while descriptive lexicography tells you how something is used in the real world based on extensive usage research. Thus venerable lexicographers such as Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster told you a particular way to use your English, while their modern equivalents lead you towards current usage with plenty of examples.

It’s something that can cause significant discontent among some dictionary users as we can see from our consternation over the word “hacker”. The administration team at all dictionaries will be familiar with the constant stream of letters of complaint from people outraged that their pet piece of language is not reflected in the volume they regard as an authority. But while modern lexicographers admit that they sometimes walk in an uneasy balance between the two approaches, they are at heart scientists with a rigorous approach to evidence-based research, and are very proud of their efforts.

Big Data Makes for Big Dictionaries

Lexicographic research comes from huge corpora, databases of tens or hundreds of millions of words of written English, from which they can extract the subtlest of language trends to see where a word is going. These can be interesting and engrossing tools for anyone, not just linguists, so we’d urge you to have a go for yourself.

Sadly for us the corpus evidence shows the definition for “Hacker” has very firmly trended toward the tabloid newspaper meaning that associates cybercriminality. All we can do is subvert that trend by doing our best to own the word as we would prefer it to be used, re-appropriating it. At least the other weighty tome from a well-known British university has a secondary sense that we do agree with: An enthusiastic and skilful computer programmer or user“.

Disclosure: Jenny List used to work in the dictionary business.


ESP8266 Home Computer Hides Unexpected Gems

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With a BASIC interpreter and free run throughout their hardware, home computers like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 used to be a pervasive way to light that hacker fire. With the advent of cheap single board computers like the Raspberry Pi, devices purpose built to emulate these classic systems have become fairly commonplace. [uli] built a device in this vein called the BASIC Engine which is driven by a microcontroller and a handful of hardware peripherals. Like other examples it can be attached to a keyboard, programmed in a BASIC, play video and sound, etc. But digging into the BASIC Engine reveals that it’s similarity to other devices is only skin deep.

The current version of the BASIC Engine (“rev2”) lives in a Raspberry Pi 3 case for convenience. It has RCA connectors for NTSC or PAL video output and mono audio, plus a bank of headers to tap into GPIOs, connectors for a keyboard, and more. [uli] wanted to aim for extreme low cost so a relatively beefy board like a Raspberry Pi didn’t fit the bill, and we expect it was an enjoyable challenge. Instead its interpreter runs atop an ESP8266 but with the networking stack removed. [uli] was disheartened by how bloated even a “Hello world” program was and ripped it out, discovering that hidden beneath was a very powerful and disproportionately inexpensive general purpose microcontroller. The video is driven by a VS23S010, sold as a 1 Mbit parallel SRAM with a neat trick; it also includes a composite video controller!

The real treat here is [uli]’s history writeup of how the BASIC Engine came to be. We’d recommend brewing a cup of coffee and sitting down for a full read-through. The first version was inspired by the PlayPower project, which was repurposing clones of Nintendo’s Famicom (NES to Americans) game console to make low cost home computers, complete with keyboard and gamepad input. [uli] started out by building a custom cartridge for a particular Famicom clone that ran a BASIC interpreter but after showing it to disinterested adults the project was left fallow. Years later, [uli] was encouraged to pick up the project again, leading down a twisted rabbit hole to where we are today.

If you want to build a BASIC Engine for yourself, Gerbers and build instructions are available on the pages linked above.

Thanks for the tip [antibyte]!

After The Sun Set On San Mateo, LED Takes Over Hackaday’s BAMF Meetup

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After this Spring’s Bay Area Maker Faire closed down for Saturday night and kicked everybody out, the fun moved on to O’Neill’s Irish Pub where Hackaday and Tindie held our fifth annual meetup for fellow Maker Faire attendees. How do we find like-minded hackers in a crowded bar? It’s easy: look for tables lit by LEDs and say hello. It was impossible to see everything people had brought, but here are a few interesting samples.

The team from Misty Robotics brought their namesake product to the meetup and carried Misty when there wasn’t enough room to let the robot run. Here [Ben Edwards] is answering questions about Misty’s capabilities. The team wants their product to appeal to a wide spectrum of budding roboticists: from beginners who need a gentle on-ramp to seasoned veterans interested in modifying Misty for their own needs.

Since those who would attend a Hackaday + Tindie meetup trend towards the latter, Misty arrived with a demonstration of hackability: a 3D-printed beer glass holder has replaced the standard left arm, fitting in with the meetup’s location. It was fun to see the robot’s personality as Misty looked around and occasionally reacted to being patted on top of the touch-sensitive head.

Longtime Hackaday.io participant Joshua Snyder brought his projects RGB LED matrix and Neopixel pocket watch, giving people who have only read about his projects an opportunity to play with them in person. The Neopixel pocket watch seen below is quite the stealthy transformer — when closed and inactive, it blends in with wardrobe of another era. But when active, it is very definitely a 21st century timepiece.The RGB LED matrix also shown was pressed into service as an impromptu bar arcade.

Some of the attendees had problem finding enough table space in a crowded bar to set up, but the crew of TinyCircuits had no such worry. They were able to put their entire product line on a little round bar table and still leave plenty of room for everyone’s beer. If you’ve only seen these creations in pictures, it’s hard to appreciate how tiny they actually are. It takes some hands-on time for the size to really sink in, and this table is always crowded with people clicking tiny buttons with their fingernails.

Hackaday’s own Kerry Scharfglass is local and brought his sympetrum boards to show during the evening. Based on Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age, these badges will synchronize their colors when in the same room together. Kerry built version 2 of the badge for last year’s DEF CON but what is show here is the work-in-progress version 3. And we also got to see a bit of behind-the-scenes of building blinky LED badges as Kerry brought a development tool featuring 3D-printed jig holding pogo pins to interface with his v3 board.

We invited Hackaday Prize participants to bring their entries, and Michael Graham is among those who answered the call. His Mug-O-Matic is a demonstration piece for his linear actuator module, one of twenty winners of our Robotics Module challenge! Sadly we didn’t get a chance to see Mug-O-Matic in action as Michael’s beverage came in a small plastic cup instead of a suitable mug. But the cup was enough to fuel the main purpose of the night: chatting about hacks and hacking.

The further back you go into the room, the more crowded and louder it got, but the effort will be rewarded with projects plugged into power outlets on the back wall. A spectacular example was the Volumetric POV Display by Jamal Davis. His project has everything — custom LED circuit boards, wires to power them, motor to spin them, micro controller to orchestrate everything, all housed inside a 3D-printed enclosure.

It was impressive enough to look at even before it was turned on. Once it started spinning, the light show stole all the attention.

The above are just a sample of creations lighting up tables at this year’s Hackaday x Tindie BAMF meetup. The projects get more amazing every year. Join us next year to see what wonderful creations show up!

Improving Indoor Navigation of Robots With IR

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If the booths at CES are to be believed, the future is full of home robots: everything from humanoid robots on wheels to Alexas duct taped to a Roomba. Back in reality, home robots really aren’t a thing yet. There’s an obvious reason for this: getting around a house is hard. A robot might actually need legs to get up and down stairs, and GPS simply doesn’t exist indoors, at least to the accuracy needed. How on Earth does a robot even navigate indoors?

This project for the Hackaday Prize solves the problem of indoor navigation, and it does it in an amazingly clever way. This is using QR codes for navigation, but not just any QR codes. They’re QR codes read by an infrared camera, and painted on the walls and ceilings with a special IR sensitive paint that’s invisible to the human eye. It’s navigation for robotic vision, and it’s a fantastic idea.

The basic idea behind this project is to use an IR camera — or basically any webcam with the IR blocking filter removed — and a massive amount of IR LEDs to illuminate any target. So far, the proof of concept works. A computer can easily read QR codes, and if paint is invisible to the human eye but visible to an IR camera, the entire project is merely a matter of implementation.

There have been a number of projects that try to add indoor navigation to robots. Some of them use LIDAR, some use computer vision and SLAM. These are computationally expensive. Some even use wireless beacons to navigate indoors like the SubPos Ranger from the 2016 Hackaday Prize. Using IR and QR codes is just so simple and hacker-friendly, and we think it’s fantastic.

Pool Ball Return System Chalked Up To Ingenuity

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Do you play pool? If so, you probably take the automatic ball return systems in bar and billiard hall tables for granted. [Roger Makes] was tired of walking around his home table to collect the balls every time he wanted to play, so he designed a time-saving ball return system.

Instead of falling into the little netted baskets that came with the table, the balls now drop into 3D-printed pockets and ride along dowel rod rails into a central collection box, which is suspended by straps beneath the rack-em-up end of the table. The rails themselves are fortified with ABS ribs that keep the balls from falling through.

Pool is all about geometry, and this really hit home when [Roger] was trying to merge the funnel part of the pocket with the exit chute in the design phase. He covered all the angles with a modular design that lets the chute rotate freely, which takes a lot of stress away from the dowel rods. We’ve got the video cued up after the break, so don’t bother with getting out your film canister full of quarters.

We can’t wait to see what [Roger Makes] next. Maybe it’ll be something like this OpenCV score-keeping system.

Via [r/functionalprint]

A Different Use For Microwave Oven: Melting Aluminum

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Microwave ovens are a treasure trove of useful parts: transformers, an HV capacitor, a piezo speaker, and a high torque motor, to name just a few. In a new twist, [Rulof Maker] strips all that out and uses just the metal case to make a furnace for melting aluminum, copper and bronze.

His heat source is a quartet of 110 volt, 450 watt quartz heating elements which he mounts inside in the back. To reduce heat loss, he lines the walls with ceramic fiber insulation. Unfortunately, that includes covering the inside of the window, so there’s no pressing your nose against the glass while you watch the aluminum pieces turn to liquid. If you’re going to try making one of these yourself then you may want to consider adding a fuse.

It does the job though. In around nine minutes he melts enough scrap aluminum in a stainless steel bowl to pour into a mold for a test piece. But don’t take our word for it, see for yourself in the video below.

If want more information on what useful parts are inside then check out this primer. Or you can leave the parts in and use the oven as is for melting lead, but keep a fire extinguisher handy.

Next Weekend: Beginner Solar Workshop

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Next week, Hackaday is hosting a workshop for all you hackers ready to harness the power of the sun. We’re doing a Beginner Solar Workshop at Noisebridge in San Francisco. You’re invited to join us on July 7th, we’ll provide the soldering irons.

The instructor for this workshop will be [Matt Arcidy], avid Hackaday reader and member of Noisebridge. He’s contributed to the incredible Noisebridge Gaming Archivists Live Arcade Cabinet, given talks on electronic components for the Arduino ecosystem, and now he’s hosting a workshop on the basics of solar charging.

This workshop will cover the theory of solar charging, how solar cells convert light into electricity, when and where this technology is appropriate, and the safe handling of lithium-ion batteries. At the end of the workshop, every attendee will have built a system that captures power from the sun and charges a battery, ready to be used in any future projects.

This is a big deal. Right now, the Hackaday Prize is in the middle of its third challenge, the Power Harvesting Module Challenge. This is a big part of the prize, and already there are some fascinating projects which harvest electricity from stomach acid, and even the gravitational potential of the Earth. Of course, some of those are more practical than others, and we’re really interested to see where this Power Harvesting Challenge goes and what great projects will be created.

Rachel Wong Keynote: Growing Eyeballs in the Lab and Building Wearables that Enhance Experience

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The keynote speaker at the Hackaday Belgrade conference was Rachel “Konichiwakitty” Wong presenting Jack of All Trades, Master of One. Her story is one that will be very familiar to anyone in the Hackaday community. A high achiever in her field of study, Rachel has learned the joy of limiting how much energy she allows herself to expend on work, rounding out her life with recreation in other fascinating areas.

There are two things Rachel is really passionate about in life. In her professional life she is working on her PhD as a stem cell researcher studying blindness and trying to understand the causes of genetic blindness. In her personal life she is exploring wearable technology in a way that makes sense to her and breaks out of what is often seen in practice these days.

Wearables That Create Experience

Rachel makes a really interesting observation about where we are right now with wearables. On the one hand you can find a lot of negativity out there about this branch of technological exploration. On the other hand, the commercial offerings that are available are closely related in design and function with little variety. You’ll more often than not find products that are black, and focused on health technology like counting your steps, or measuring your heart beat.

Wearable fashion is an opportunity to break out of these confines. Rachel sees it as adding purpose to what we wear in a way that enhances the user’s experience. Knowing the calories burned or your BPM are just magic numbers that don’t have an intuitive value to most of us. Focusing on things that enhance an experience gets out of this trap and it’s more approachable for everyone. Rachel makes the point that we’re all making fashion choices on a daily basis as we clothe ourselves and this just adds to that palette.

The demos for this part of her talk include a floral necklace and a headpiece that also leveraged her jewelry making skills. The necklace uses Neopixel rings and a Raspberry Pi zero to animate soft color changes to the flower petals. It’s not a screen you look at, but an enhancement to something you would already wear. The headpiece does include an LED matrix screen, clutched tightly by Hello Kitty which is an homage to her screen name Konichiwakitty, but keeps the pleasing effects of LED glow under the flowers that make up the majority of the piece.

Rachel’s work in wearables has been widely recognized. She wrote a tutorial for Make magazine about resin casting electronics called Curing Cuteness. Using this process she created Maker Gummi Bears which look fantastic — she was showing them off at the con and you can get a closer look on Hackaday.io and at her Etsy page. Rachel has also received a 2018 Bright Sparks award for her work.

Growing Eyeballs in the Lab

It’s always fascinating to hear how people find their path through life. Rachel shared a really interesting insight into becoming a stem cell scientist. Many of her friends were going off into specialties that focus on studying diseases in search of a groundbreaking cure but to Rachel that didn’t seem like the place where the biggest impact will be made. Even if you cure the disease the organs that were afflicted are often already damaged. Rachel wants to make it possible to create brand new organs that can be swapped out as needed — and that’s already happening. Her area of research involves growing eye tissue in the lab and its use is already in clinical testing.

Scaffold for a liver. All DNA and cells have been washed away.

Stem cells are biological building blocks. If you give them a structure as a guide — called a scaffold — you can build anything you want with them. Once in place, they know what to do and can even specialize. In her case this means becoming light sensitive cells or pigmented eye cells.

The scaffolds themselves are fascinating. They can come from cadavers, plants, or other animals. Before the growing process begins these scaffolds are flushed thoroughly with detergents and enzymes until no DNA or other cells remain. The stem cells are then introduced and begin to grow on the structure. Once transplanted, the patient’s body will dissolve and replace the scaffold. And since there was no DNA or cellular material, other than stem cells from the patient’s own body, the new organ will not be rejected.

There’s even 3D Bioprinting technology at work in this field. It’s much like FDM 3D printers you’re probably familiar with, but these operate in a sterile environments building custom scaffolds and adding stem cells as the printing progresses. Rachel isn’t using this printing technology in her research though. In fact she considers her team lucky as they are able to grow the optic cups without need of scaffold at all.

Bring Balance to Your Life

The closing remarks on this keynote are quite powerful. Rachel has had a laser focus on her goals as she worked her way through school. The research she’s doing feels incredibly important — think of the power thaat stem cell scientists have to make people’s lives better — but only if that breakthrough can be reached.

The problem is, without balance in her life this wasn’t sustainable. It’s refreshing to hear Rachel speak candidly about her story and about bringing a cycle of work and recreation into her routine. Now, after a day of rigorous research, she goes home and changes over to her life of making wearables. It’s exercise for her creative side and a different way to stretch her mind that lets her feel refreshed when it’s time to start things again the next day. Carry this advice with you and put it to use when you’re feeling like life has become a grind.


Simple Quadcopter Testbed Clears The Air For Easy Algorithm Development

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We don’t have to tell you that drones are all the rage. But while new commercial models are being released all the time, and new parts get released for the makers, the basic technology used in the hardware hasn’t changed in the last few years. Sure, we’ve added more sensors, increased computing power, and improved the efficiency, but the key developments come in the software: you only have to look at the latest models on the market, or the frequency of Git commits to Betaflight, Butterflight, Cleanflight, etc.

With this in mind, for a Hackaday prize entry [int-smart] is working on a quadcopter testbed for developing algorithms, specifically localization and mapping. The aim of the project is to eventually make it as easy as possible to get off the ground and start writing code, as well as to integrate mapping algorithms with Ardupilot through ROS.

The initial idea was to use a Beaglebone Blue and some cheap hobby hardware which is fairly standard for a drone of this size: 1250 kv motors and SimonK ESCs, mounted on an f450 flame wheel style frame. However, it looks like an off-the-shelf solution might be even simpler if it can be made to work with ROS. A Scanse Sweep LIDAR sensor provides point cloud data, which is then munched with some Iterative Closest Point (ICP) processing. If you like math then it’s definitely worth reading the project logs, as some of the algorithms are explained there.

It might be fun to add FPV to this system to see how the mapping algorithms are performing from the perspective of the drone. And just because it’s awesome. FPV is also a fertile area for hacking: we particularly love this FPV tracker which rotates itself to get the best signal, and this 3D FPV setup using two cameras.

A Lightgun For LCDs – Thanks To Maths!

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Light guns were a fun way to learn to shoot things on consoles, enjoying their heyday in the 80s and 90s. The original designs largely relied on the unique characteristics of CRT televisions and the timing involved in the drawing of their frames. Unfortunately, due to a variety of reasons (dependent on the exact techniques used), they typically do not work at all with modern LCD & plasma screens.

The light gun contains a camera, and reportedly works by using the distortion of the rectangular image of the screen to calculate the position of the light gun itself.

Recently, there has emerged a new project called the Sinden Lightgun. In the How It Works video, it seems to use a fairly standard 30fps camera inside the gun to image the television screen being used by the game. The display is then rendered in 4:3, letterboxed on a 16:9 aspect ratio display, within a rectangular bezel. The image from the camera is then processed, and the distortion of the game image is used to calculate the position of the gun and the direction of its aim. Processing is handled by the host computer running MAME and the requisite coordinates are fed back in to the game code.

The basic concept seems sound, though as always, there’s a healthy amount of skepticism around the project. We’d love to hear your take, on whether the concept is plausible, and whether the lag figures stated are cromulent. We’re always excited to see new developments in the lightgun space! Video after the break.

Our own [Will Sweatman] penned an excellent piece on a variety of ways one could resurrect the venerable game of Duck Hunt, too.

This Year, Badges Get Blockchains

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This year’s hottest new advance in electronics comes through wearable badges. You can’t have failed to notice another technology that’s getting really hot. It’s the blockchain. What is a blockchain? It’s a linked list where every item in the list contains a cryptographic hash of the previous item in the list. What is a blockchain in English? It’s the most revolutionary technology that’s going to solve every problem on the planet, somehow. It’s the basis for crypto (no not that one, the other one). The blockchain is how you add more Lamborghinis to your Lamborghini account. Even though we’re still trying to figure out how it solves a single problem, one thing is certain: blockchains solve every problem. We were born too late to explore the Earth, born too early to explore the Universe, but just in time for blockchain.

Independent badges are always looking at the latest technology, and perhaps this was inevitable. It’s a badge built on the blockchain. It’s a wearable sneakernet of mining. It’s a game with collaborative proof of work.

The blockchain badge from [Mr Blinky Bling] is an independent badge for this year’s Defcon, and like most independent badges it’s loaded up with RGB LEDs, microcontrollers, and exquisitely crafted FR4. What makes this badge different is the add-ons, or ‘blocks’ that attach to the main badge through 1/8″ phono jacks. These blocks form the basis of the social game, where two badge holders trade blocks for a while, allow their badges to perform a proof of work on each block, and finally, each block is hashed and the score increased. Yes, this is a blockchain, but it’s more of a block-tree, and it runs on sneakernet instead of the Internet.

Yes, this does indeed all sound like a joke. Make no mistake, though: this is real. This is a hardware game built on blockchain technology, that some lucky badge holders will be playing at this year’s Defcon. It’s filled with blinky and blockchain. It’s awesome.

[Mr. Blinky Bling] has already started a project for this badge over on hackaday.io, and right now they’re running a Kickstarter campaign for this badge with delivery at Defcon. This is one of the more interesting badges that will be floating around the con this year, and it has blockchain. This really isn’t one to miss.

When The Going Gets Tough, These Wheels Transform To Tracks

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When we want to build something to go where wheels could not, the typical solution is to use tracks. But the greater mobility comes with trade-offs: one example being tracked vehicles can’t go as fast as a wheeled counterpart. Information released by DARPA’s ground experimental vehicle technology (GXV-T) program showed what might come out of asking “why can’t we switch to tracks just when we need them?”

This ambitious goal to literally reinvent the wheel was tackled by Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center. They delivered the “Reconfigurable Wheel-Track” (RWT) that can either roll like a wheel or travel on its tracks. A HMMWV serves as an appropriate demonstration chassis, where two or all four of its wheels were replaced by RWTs. In the video (embedded below) it is seen quickly transforming from one mode to another while moving. An obviously desirable feature that looks challenging to implement. This might not be as dramatic of a transformation as a walking robot that can roll up into a wheel but it has the advantage of being more immediately feasible for human-scale vehicles.

The RWT is not the only terrain mobility project in this DARPA announcement but this specific idea is one we would love to see scaled downed to become a 3D-printable robot module. And though our Hackaday Prize Robotics Module Challenge has already concluded, there are more challenges still to come. The other umbrella of GXV-T is “crew augmentation” giving operators better idea of what’s going around them. The projects there might inspire something you can submit to our upcoming Human-Computer Interface Challenge, check them out!

[via The Drive]

How Etak Paved the Way to Personal Navigation

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Our recent “Retrotechtacular” feature on an early 1970s dead-reckoning car navigation system stirred a memory of another pre-GPS solution for the question that had vexed the motoring public on road trips into unfamiliar areas for decades: “Where the heck are we?” In an age when the tattered remains of long-outdated paper roadmaps were often the best navigational aid a driver had, the dream of an in-dash scrolling map seemed like something Q would build for James Bond to destroy.

And yet, in the mid-1980s, just such a device was designed and made available to the public. Dubbed Etak, the system …read more

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