Year: 2011

Adventures In Resurrecting A No-name IP Webcam

November 23, 2011 by 7 Comments

webcam-repair

As many of us do, [Steaky] serves as a kind of on-call help desk for his family. His father in law recently contacted him because his pan and tilt webcam died, and he wanted to see if it could be fixed. Never turning down a challenge, [Steaky] decided to give it a shot.

He ended up having to disassemble it since the camera was completely unresponsive, and what he found inside piqued his interest. The no-name camera sported an ARM microprocessor at its core, and it seems that some of its pins were damaged due to a poorly designed case. He figured resoldering the pins would do the trick, but that wasn’t the end of his adventures.

As he dug deeper into the device, he found that the camera essentially killed itself, reading and writing data to the wrong places due to the damaged pins on the processor. After plenty of searching around, he was able to find a somewhat compatible firmware image, though not everything worked properly.

His father in law was so impressed with his work that he asked for the camera back, even though [Steaky] hadn’t fully repaired it yet. While he bid the camera goodbye, we’re pretty sure he’d be more than happy to reclaim it for a few days if any of our readers had some additional insight or resources that might help him finish the job.

Kitchen Hacks: Home Made Meat Smoker

November 23, 2011 by 21 Comments

 

[Matt] noticed an overabundance of sous vide builds in the past week, so he decided to throw his Home made meat smoker into the ring. There’s not many things more delicious than a nice cut of smoked meat, and the fact that it’s very similar to the sous vide hacks we’ve seen is an added bonus.

[Matt] decided to build a ceramic smoker like a Big Green Egg. He took a cue from [Alton Brown] and used two terracotta planters and a hot plate for the smoker. For controlling the hot plate, the cheap $35 PID controller we’ve seen in a few sous vide builds was used. The PID can’t control the 7 amps of AC that the hot plate needs, so [Matt] used a solid-state relay he had lying around.

A stainless steel mixing bowl was placed on the hot plate for wood chips. So far, [Matt] has run his smoker for more than 12 consecutive hours, and the results are really promising – there wasn’t much change in temperature between the chill of the morning and the heat of afternoon. [Matt]’s build is great and perfect for venison jerky now that deer season is coming up.

Oh Boy Do We Want To Ride A Giant Inflatable Robot

November 23, 2011 by 11 Comments

We’ve seen videos of people attaching chairs to gigantic welding robots and riding them around the shop, and while that would be fun for a little bit, the joy would be fleeting. Flight simulators built on a Stewart Platform are becoming old hat. Now there’s a new robot we want to ride.

[Saul Griffith] from Otherlab has been working on pneumatic robots for some time now, and he just wrapped up his Ant-Roach build seen above. It’s a 15-foot-long cross between an anteater and a cockroach that’s completely inflatable and can actually walk with the help of an air compressor.

The ‘muscles’ of the ant-roach are fabric actuators that contract when inflated. Of course this makes the mechanics look like something out a biology book, but the robot is still a neat piece of engineering. The ant-roach weighs in at 70 pounds but could probably support a half-ton of riders.

From the videos after the break, we can see that the ant-roach looks a little clumsy when walking. [Travis Deyle] sent in his contribution that details an amazing inflatable robotic arm that can beat any human in an arm wrestling match. Now we can’t wait for a giant anthropomorphized bouncy castle to start lumbering to a children’s carnival.

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Auto-Focus Assist Hack Keeps Improving

November 22, 2011 by 15 Comments

[Adrian Onsen] keeps making improvements on his auto-focus assist hack for DSLR cameras. The module seen above is version 3.0, which makes a few changes to the previous hardware and also presents a much more finished look.

With version 2 [Adrian] was using a defocused laser to illuminate dark subjects so the DSLR auto-focus could be used. It worked, but wasn’t really ideal. This time around he’s swapped out the laser diode for an autofocus assist lamp salvaged from a Canon 550EX he picked up ‘as is’ on eBay. It is mounted on the front of his project enclosure, using two alkaline batteries for power. It sounds like [Adrian] is struggling a bit with his circuit design. He want’s to make it work with either alkaline or rechargeable AA batteries (just two, down the from four AAAs used in version 2) but so far the rechargeable are a no-go. They power the circuit, but must not put out enough light for the sensor to work.

Future plans include getting rid of the external cords by adding a hot shoe connector.

Simple Low Toner Workaround Squeezes Out A Few Extra Pages When Your Printer Refuses

November 22, 2011 by 88 Comments

low-ink-hacking

[Andrew] was getting ready to print out an assignment when his Samsung printer suddenly started blinking a red error light at him. Unable to find any documentation explaining the issue, he called Samsung directly and found that it was indicating the toner cartridge was nearly empty.

He held down the button that prints a test page, which came out just fine despite the printer’s insistence that there was not enough toner left. Annoyed at the fact that he felt Samsung was trying to strong arm him into buying another pricey toner cartridge, he looked for a way around the restriction.

He discovered that his printer’s software allowed him to specify a custom test page document, though it required that the document be in PostScript format. After a few shell commands, he had his document converted and was on to bigger and better things.

While a bit time consuming, his workaround should let him get by on this toner cartridge at least for a little while longer. We imagine that since he’s using Linux, the process could probably be scripted to save time, though we’re not sure if the same can be said for Windows-based PCs.

A Doorbell Pleasing To Both The Ears And Eyes

November 22, 2011 by 15 Comments

campanello-doorbell

When [David] moved into his new house, one of the things he noticed was that his doorbell was pretty lame. Coming from a home equipped with a solenoid and chime bell, his new wireless solid state doorbell sounded terrible to him.

Crummy sound aside, the doorbell hardly ever worked properly, but alas, other projects cropped up and years went by before [David] addressed his doorbell problem. Like many things that take a long time to come to fruition, we think his resonator bell based solution was well worth the wait.

One of his main goals was to make a nice sounding doorbell that also looked great. He mounted a kid’s resonator bell toy on a sheet of wood, creating his own wooden mallets for the job. He initially had a tough time locating actuators for his doorbell, but found a solution in geared pager motors as featured in another xylophone hack on Make. With the hardware taken care of he focused on the electronics, which consist of a pair of Arduino clones – one on the display and one in his basement.

Stick around to see [David’s] Campanello doorbell in action, and be sure to check out his site for more details if this sounds like something you would like to have in your home.

[via Make]

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C Bit Field Structures For Microcontroller Multitasking

November 22, 2011 by 27 Comments

So you’re getting better at programming microcontrollers and now you want to do several things at once? You know better than that, microcontrollers are only capable of processing one thing at a time. But if you’re clever with your coding you can achieve something that behaves as if several things are going on at once. The most common way to do this is to set a flag using an interrupt, then use the main loop to check for that flag. [S1axter] posted a tutorial on this topic where he uses bit field structures to help simplify time sensitive events.

We think [S1axter] did a fantastic job of explaining this moderately difficult topic clearly and quickly. In the video after the break he begins by explaining what a bit field is and how it is defined. Basically you’re using a C structure to track a flag using just one bit of storage. This way the flag is either set or not. We suggest you pay careful attention to how he declares the structures as volatile, so you don’t have unexpected behavior when you try it yourself.

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