nRF04L01+

4 Articles

akurobatto clock

Unique Clock Is All Hands, No Dial, And Does The Worm

February 17, 2022 by 12 Comments

Back in the old days, we didn’t have fancy digital clocks. No, we had good analog clocks with a big hand and a little hand, and if you wanted to know the time you had to look at the clock and figure out which number each hand was pointing at, or kind of pointing at. It wasn’t easy, and we liked it that way.

So now, along comes an analog clock that’s nothing but the hands — no dial, no numbers, just hands. How is such a thing possible? The clue is in the clock’s name: AKUROBATTO, and in the video below, which shows the acrobatic movements of the clock’s hands as it does its thing. Serial improbable-clock maker [ekaggrat singh kalsi] clearly put a lot of thought into this mechanism, which consists of the hands and a separate base. The hands are joined together at one end and powered by small stepper motors. The base has two docking areas, where servo-driven claws can grasp the hand assembly, either at the center pivot or at the tip of either hand. With a little bit of shuffling around at transition points, the hands sweep out the hours and minutes in a surprisingly readable way.

For as cool as the design of AKUROBATTO is, the internals are really something else. There are custom-built slip rings to send power to the motors and the Arduinos controlling them, sensors to determine the position of each hand, and custom gearboxes for the steppers. And the locking mechanisms on the base are worth studying too — getting that right couldn’t have been easy.

All in all, an impressive build. Whether displaying the time on a phosphorescent screen or a field of sequins, it seems like [ekaggrat] has a thing for unique clocks. Continue reading “Unique Clock Is All Hands, No Dial, And Does The Worm” →

Fixing NRF24L01+ Modules Without Going (Too) Insane

January 22, 2021 by 24 Comments

Good old nRF24L01+ wireless modules are inexpensive and effective. Well, they are as long as they work correctly, anyway. The devices themselves are mature and well-understood, but that doesn’t mean bad batches from suppliers can’t cause hair-pulling problems straight from the factory.

[nekromant] recently got a whole batch of units that simply refused to perform as they should, but not because they were counterfeits. The problem was that the antenna and PCB design had been “optimized” by the supplier to the point where the devices simply couldn’t work properly. Fortunately, [nekromant] leveraged an understanding of the problem into a way to fix them without going insane in the process. The test setup is shown in the image above, and the process is explained below. Continue reading “Fixing NRF24L01+ Modules Without Going (Too) Insane” →

Ask Hackaday: Frequency Hopping On The NRF24l01+?

March 21, 2017 by 50 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of hacks with the nRF24l01+ 2.4 GHz radio modules. The tiny chips pack a lot of bang for the buck. Since the radios can switch frequencies relatively quickly, [Shubham Paul] decided to take advantage of this feature to make a rudimentary frequency-hopping communications channel.

The code is actually incredibly simple. Both the transmitter and receiver simply scan up and down over the defined channels. Because the clock speeds of any given pair of Arduinos are likely to be slightly different, it’s not a surprise that the radios eventually drift out of sync. Right now, as a quickie solution, [Shubham] is using a serial-port resynchronization: both are connected to the same computer, and he just tells them to get on the same channel. That’s not a horribly satisfying workaround. (But it’s a great start!)

Keeping two radios that are continually swapping channels in sync is no easy task, but it could possibly be made easier by taking advantage of the nRF’s acknowledge mode. If the delay between a sent acknowledge message and a received one were constant, these events (one on TX and one on RX) could be used to re-sync the two hopping cycles. All of this would probably require more temporal resolution than you’re going to get out of a microprocessor running Arduino code, but should be possible using hardware timers. But this is pure speculation. We briefly looked around and couldn’t find any working demos.

So Hackaday, how would you remotely sync two nRF24s on the cheap? Or is this a crazy idea? It might help to make transmissions more reliable in the face of 2.4 GHz band interference. Has anyone implemented their own frequency hopping scheme for the nRF24l01+?

Reverse Engineering Quadcopter Protocols

June 28, 2016 by 21 Comments

Necessity is the mother of invention, but cheap crap from China is the mother of reverse engineering. [Michael] found a very, very cheap toy quadcopter in his local shop, and issued a challenge to himself. He would reverse engineer this quadcopter’s radio protocol. His four-post series of exploits covers finding the right frequency for the radio, figuring out the protocol, and building his own remote for this cheap toy.

[Michael] was already familiar with the capabilities of these cheap toys after reading a Hackaday post, and the 75-page, four language manual cleared a few things up for him. The ‘Quadro-Copter’ operated on 2.4GHz, but did not give any further information. [Michael] didn’t know what channel the toy was receiving on, what data rate, or what the header for the transmission was. SDR would be a good tool for figuring this out, but thanks to Travis Goodspeed, there’s a really neat trick that will put a 2.4GHz nRF24L01+ radio into promiscuous mode, allowing [Michael] to read the transmissions between the transmitter and quadcopter. This code is available on [Michael]’s github.

A needle in an electromagnetic haystack was found and [Michael] could listen in on the quadcopter commands. The next step was interpreting the ones and zeros, and with the help of a small breakout board and soldering directly to the SPI bus on the transmitter, [Michael] was able to do just that. By going through the nRF24 documentation, he was able to suss out the pairing protocol and read the stream of bytes that commanded the quadcopter.

What [Michael] was left with is a series of eight bytes sent in a continuous stream from the transmitter to the toy. These bytes contained the throttle, yaw, pitch, roll, and a ‘flip’ settings, along with three bytes of ‘counters’ that didn’t seem to do anything.  With that info in hand, [Michael] took an Arduino Nano, an nRF04L01+ transceiver, and a Wii nunchuck to build his own transmitter. If you’re looking for a ‘how to reverse engineer’ guide, it generally doesn’t get better than this.

You can check out a video of [Michael] flying his Wiimoted quadcopter below.

Continue reading “Reverse Engineering Quadcopter Protocols” →