Hackaday Podcast 203: Flashlight Fuel Fails, Weird DMA Machines, And A 3D Printed Prosthetic Hand Flex

January 27, 2023 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi meet up virtually to talk about all the hacks that are fit to print. This week’s episode starts off with a discussion about the recently unveiled 2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge, and how hackers more often than not thrive when forced to work within these sort of narrow parameters. Discussion then continues to adding a virtual core to the RP2040, crowd-sourced device reliability information, and mechanical Soviet space computers. We’ll wrap things up by wondering what could have been had Mattel’s ill-fated ThingMaker 3D printer actually hit the market, and then engage in some wild speculation about the issues plaguing NASA’s latest Moon mission.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Available in the cloud, or as download!

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Camping For $25: Thrift Store Hacks To Keep Cozy

February 5, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 18 Comments

A hacker is somebody who’s always thinking creatively to solve problems, usually using what they have on hand. Sometimes that means using a 555 to build a CPU, and other times it means using a dead flashlight to start a fire. In the video below the break, [Kelly] shows us a series of hacks you can use while camping in the woods for a night to keep you warm, dry, and well fed!

[Kelly] started his camping trip not in the woods, but rather at a local thrift store. Instead of packing along hundreds of dollars in gear, his aim was to keep costs low. Very low. With some searching he was able to find a blanket, cooking utensils, rope, knife, tarp, and several other camp necessities for just $25.

A good campfire is a necessity of course, and [Kelly]’s full of great ways to start a fire even if all you have is a lighter with no butane or an old flashlight with dead batteries. The purpose of the video is to show how anyone can get their bush craft on even when all they have is a few dollars and a little know-how, which he generously shares. And after watching, we’re sure you’ll agree that he met his mark.

Will you raid the local second hand store before your next camping trip? After seeing this video, you just might! And while you’re there, make sure to grab the things you’ll need to make your own camping-friendly French press so you have some good coffee while you’re out camping in your… uh… Corolla?

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The Amazing Hacks Of World Create Day

April 4, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

For this year’s Hackaday Prize, we started an amazing experiment. World Create Day organized hundreds of hackerspaces around the world to come together and Build Hope for the future. This was an experiment to bring community shops and workspaces together to prototype their entries for the Hackaday Prize, and boy was it a success. We had hackerspaces from Portland to Pakistan taking part, and these are just a few of the amazing hacks they pulled off.

Students In Canada Repairing LipSyncs!

The theme of this year’s Hackaday Prize is to Build Hope, and students in Burnaby, British Columbia worked on some very cool projects that did just that. They created custom video game controllers, prototyped a few exoskeleton arms, and repaired LipSyncs. A LipSync is a mouth-operated joystick that allows a person to control a cursor on a computer with a minimum amount of head and neck movement. The idea behind the LipSync is to give wheelchair-bound people access to computers. This is important because an estimated one million people in Canada and the United States have limited or no use of their arms, rendering touchscreens inoperable.

The LipSync was an entry into the 2016 Hackaday Prize, and while it didn’t win the grand prize, it did bring a device that usually costs $3,000 down to about $300. That’s an order of magnitude of cost reduction that Builds Hope for the future. It’s amazing!

Raspberry Pis and Tschunk Slushies!

You might think that mixing alcohol and electronics might be dangerous, but not the people of kraut space, the hackerspace in Jena, Germany. For their World Create Day adventures, they made Tschunk Slushies! What is Tschunk? It’s rum and Club Mate, the definitive hacker drink! You might even say the addition of ethanol made it even more of a hacker drink. Ha ha.

While the Tschunk Slushies were mixing up, the team at the Jena Hackerspace set to work on their World Create Day project, an interface that logs their electricity usage. In reality this is just a photosensor taped to their power meter, but they’ve hooked everything up to a Raspberry Pi, giving them the ability to monitor electricity consumption over the Internet. That’s amazing. Governments and utility companies have spent billions of dollars developing ‘smart’ electricity meters, but a few ‘hackers’ have created their own in just hours! It’s almost as if that ‘hacker’ title isn’t bad at all, and being a ‘hacker’ is a good thing!

Making Laser Cutters Safe And Soldering Keychains

You’ll shoot your eye out, kid! Or at least you stand a decent chance of suffering irreversible eye damage if you’re running a laser cutter with the lid open. And for some reason, most of the cheap laser cutters out there come without safety interlocks if you can believe it. For his World Create Day Project, [RoboterFreak] made a laser cutter more secure. By putting a relay, microswitch, and Arduino in line with the laser tube, you can safely modify an off-the-shelf laser cutter to be vastly safer.

It’s not much, but it goes a long way toward making a laser cutter safe. With the simple addition of a switch, this laser cutter is now a machine that can be used within a quarter mile of children. This is something simple that you should do at your own hackerspace.

But World Create Day and the Hackaday Prize isn’t only about fretting over safety concerns. The folks at Thimble.io had fun soldering their own keychain flashlight. This is an awesome way to learn how to solder and hardware development. That’s exactly what we’re looking for in this year’s Hackaday Prize, by the way. We want people who will Build Hardware to Change The World.

The Hackaday Prize is running until November, and there’s still plenty of time to get your entry in. It doesn’t even have to be related to World Create Day, the most amazing virtual congregation of hackerspaces the world has ever seen. You can start your entry for the Hackaday Prize right here, build a project that will Build Hope, and be in the running to win tens of thousands of dollars. It’s an amazing contest, and we couldn’t have done it without the support of our amazing online community.

A Simple LED Flashlight Composed Of A Relay And A Magnet

January 13, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 22 Comments

In our tips line we sometimes receive hacks that are amazing just because of their ingenuity. This relay-powered flashlight is definitely one of them. It has been named RattleGen by its creator [Berto], who apparently often makes simple hacks used in his everyday life (have a look at his YouTube channel).

To understand this hack, you first need to know (in case you didn’t already) that a magnet moving near a conductor (here a coil) induces a voltage at its terminals. This is called electromagnetic induction. In the picture you see above, you may distinguish a disassembled relay with a magnet located on the lever’s end. As a ferromagnetic metal is already placed inside the coil, the lever is by default ‘stuck’ in this position. By continuously pressing the latter on its other end, important voltage spikes are created at the coils terminals. [Berto] therefore used a bridge rectifier to transform the AC into DC, and a 1000uF capacitor to smooth the power sent to his super bright LED. A video of the system in action is embedded after the break.

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Automatic Flashlight Tag Damage Sensor

December 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

You’re out at night and playing a boisterous game of flashlight tag. But how can you tell if you’ve been mortally wounded by your opponents light beam? [Kenyer] solved this problem by building a flashlight tag damage sensor which is worn by each participant. It adds a bit of the high-tech equipment used with laser tag while keeping a low-tech price tag.

The sensor relies on a light dependent resistor to register hits when a flashlight beam passes through the round window. It will only register one hit in a three-second time period. At the end of the game, the total number of hits recorded can be flashed back using an on-board LED to see who is the victor. You can see a demo of this functionality in the clip after the break.

[Kenyer] started with a breadboard prototype using an Arduino as the driver. Obviously the cost of an Arduino for every player is a bit ridiculous. He scaled down the project, running the Arduino code on an ATtiny microcontroller. Continue reading “Automatic Flashlight Tag Damage Sensor” →

Share Your Projects: Take Pictures

April 7, 2023 by Arya Voronova 38 Comments

Information is diesel for a hacker’s engine, and it’s fascinating how much can happen when you share what you’re working on. It could be a pretty simple journey – say, you record a video showing you fixing your broken headphones, highlighting a particular trick that works well for you. Someone will see it as an entire collection of information – “if my headphones are broken, the process of fixing them looks like this, and these are the tools I might need”. For a newcomer, you might be leading them to an eye-opening discovery – “if my headphones are broken, it is possible to fix them”.

There’s a few hundred different ways that different hackers use for project information sharing – and my bet is that talking through them will help everyone involved share better and easier. Let’s start talking about pictures – perhaps, the most powerful tool in a hacker’s arsenal. I’ll tell you about all the picture-taking hacks and guidelines I’ve found, go into subjects like picture habits and simple tricks, and even tell you what makes Hackaday writers swoon!

To start with, here’s a picture of someone hotwiring a car. This one picture conveys an entire story, and a strong one.

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A vintage film camera with a bright light emitting diode shining through it, next to electronic equipment to measure the shutter speed

Clock Your Camera With This Shutter Speed Tester

February 7, 2023 by Chris Wilkinson 25 Comments

Camera shutter speed is an essential adjustment in photography – along with the aperture, the shutter moderates the amount of light entering the camera. Older cameras (and some newer ones) use mechanical shutters that creep out-of-spec over the years, so [Dean Segovis] built a handy shutter speed tester.

With just a handful of basic components, this project is a great one for beginners to sink their teeth into. The tester is based around a photoresistor that measures light from another source (a flashlight) that travels through the camera body. When the shutter on the camera is released, the shutter speed can be measured and displayed on the OLED screen. An Arduino naturally handles all the computational duties. The whole thing can be easily assembled on a breadboard in just a couple of minutes.

The original project by [hiroshootsfilm] is over on Project Hub, however [Dean] takes a deeper dive with some code troubleshooting, as well as trying out a variety of old film cameras with the breadboard tester. His testing revealed that the photoresistor was better able to detect shutter speed when the camera lens was removed, which is a hot tip for anyone else that wants to try this.

While it’s not surprising that these older cameras are having trouble with their mechanical shutters, this little tester would be an invaluable tool when it comes time to start tweaking shutter mechanisms. If this project has brought out the shutterbug in you, make sure to check out this brain transplant for a Polaroid 100-series Packfilm camera that we covered way back in 2011.

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