Fresh hacks every day
Sometimes we like to take a few minutes away from Hackaday to spend time with our families. But just when you take your eyes off of the incoming comments, Trolls are bound to strike. Well, [Caleb] and I found a solution to the problem in the form of a troll sniffing rat. This beady-eyed vermin sits on my desk and waits. When a trolling comment is detected its eyes glow red and an alarm is sounded. Join us after the break for more about this silly project.
Almost a month ago I started trying to reverse engineer an inexpensive LED color changing light bulb. With your help I’ve mapped out the circuit, and taken control of the bulb. But there’s still a few mysteries in this little blinker. Join me after the break to see what I’ve done so far, peruse the schematic and source code, and to help solve the two remaining mysteries.
Here’s a blacksmith turning 4 inch framing nails into buckles. In the clip after the break he starts by heating and bending the nail around a square form. Next the excess gets cut off and both sides of the square frame are ground flat while in a vise. A smaller nail serves as the prong and a flat piece of metal is shaped so that this can be connected to a leather strap. This ends up as part of the support system for a full suit of armor.
We’ve seen a lot of great welding projects over the years, but today’s blacksmithing video leaves us wanting. If you’ve got a favorite project that involved this kind of work tip us off about it and we’ll see if we can get some more hacks for the Smithies out there.
[Bissinblob] has about 70 of these WYSE 3125SE thin clients and is offering them up at $15 a piece plus shipping. That’s quite a steal!
The specs are as follows:
Be sure to let us know what you’re doing with them if you happen to get one. If you have something lying around that needs to go, feel free to post it on our classifieds.
This isn’t a hack. But it is a decidedly interesting piece of mechanical technology. The Whiffletree shown above is a way to turn binary data into a mechanical analog value. [Bill Hammack] explains how this assembly is used in a typewriter and how a whiffletree can convert binary data to a set of analog outputs.
These linkages are what makes an IBM Selectrix Typewriter work. You know, the one with the globe stylus instead of individual hammers for each key? [Bill] uses the typewriter as the example in his illustrations that show how each bit of data positions the output in a predictably different location. We’re familiar with other mechanical representations of binary data but converting to an analog value mechanically is a new concept for us. Lukily, the videos that [Bill] put together are fantastic at explaining the concepts. Not surprising, since he is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . See them both after the break.
I went to the last monthly meeting of Sector 67, a hackerspace in Madison, WI. One of the things shown off was a color changing LED light bulb that Menards was clearing out for $1.99. Inside there’s two RGB LEDs controlled by an ATtiny13 and powered by an AC/DC buck converter. An ATtiny13 will run you around $1.25 by itself so this price is quite amazing. I grabbed a couple of these bulbs and set to work on them. Join me after the break to see what I’ve got so far.
Update: read a follow-up to this post.
If you’ve ever designed an embedded system with at least one button you’ve had to deal with button debouncing. This is also know as contact bounce, a phenomenon where a button press can be registered as multiple button presses if not handled correctly. One way to take care of this is with a hardware filter built from a resistor-capacitor setup, or by using a couple of NAND gates. We find that [Jack Ganssle] put together the most comprehensive and approachable look at contact bounce which you should read through if you want to learn more.
We’re interested in software solutions for debouncing buttons. This seems to be one of the most common forum questions but it can be hard to find answers in the form of reliable code examples. Do you have debounce code that you depend on in every application? Are you willing to share it with the world? We’d like to gather as many examples as possible and publish them in one-post-to-rule-them-all.
Here’s some guidelines to follow:
As an example we’ve included one of our favorite sets of debounce code after the break. Please note how it follows the guidelines listed above.
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