Hackaday Retro Edition Roundup

August 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

In case you’ve forgotten about it, we still have a retro edition of Hackaday. It’s our simple, hand-coded HTML site featuring a few random hacks from Hackaday’s 8-year history. There’s also a retro successes page where our readers can log on with their old boxxen and claim their prize as a master of retrocomputing. Here’s a few retro successes that came in over the past month or so:

Our second OS/2 Warp submission comes from [Chris]. He got an HP Omnibook 800CT running OS/2 Warp 4 to load up our retro site.

A few of you may be wondering what the upper bound of what we consider a retro computer is. [Witek] used a Wyse thin client from the year 2000 to pull up our retro edition. These terrible computers used a Compact Flash card plugged directly into an IDE port to load up Windows CE. Yeah, it’s technically a SSD. [Witek] put the GRUB bootloader on one and loaded up our retro edition with Debian Squeeze. We have too many bad memories of these thin clients, and we’ve got to commend [Witek] for putting the effort into doing something useful with one.

[leadacid] is on a roll. He gave us our first OS/2 Warp submission and has since moved onto an IBM RS/6000. Previously, he got a Macintosh 8100 and a Quadra 840AV to pull up the retro site. Nice job.

Those are all the retro submissions for now, but if you have an old computer lying around, try pulling up our retro site and send it in.

Sadly, You Can’t Buy This Hoverbike

August 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

The LA Times posted a story about a company called Aerofex that built a real-life hover bike very reminiscent of the vehicles embedded in the redwoods of the forest moon of Endor.

The bike itself is a pair of ducted fans, with the pilot straddling the craft amidship. Aerofex claims the ducts on their hoverbike prevent the recirculating flow of air that causes dust or snow to completely obscure a helicopter pilot’s vision when landing.

From the Times’ article, Aerofex doesn’t have any plans to make this hoverbike commercially available and is instead meant to be a concept vehicle for future UAVs.

On the Aerofex blog, there’s a ton of videos showing off the capabilities of this bike. From what we can gather, it doesn’t seem like this hoverbike can climb higher than a few inches off the ground, so it’s of questionable utility when not flying around a dry lake bed.

Surprisingly, Aerofex says their bike doesn’t require any artificial stabilization or software; it’s controlled by the pilot leaning front to back and side to side. We’ll take that as an indication this hoverbike may be easy for someone to build in a garage, and we’ll be sure to post the first Aerofex hoverbike clone that shows up on our tip line.

You can check out a video of the hoverbike in action after the break.

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Hacking The AR Drone: Intro

August 23, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 46 Comments

Ever since we played with the original AR drone back at CES a few years ago, we’ve been keeping an eye on them. While we all agree there are better quadcopters out there, the price point for a ready-to-fly quadcopter of this size is really great with these.

When the fake video from FPS Russia of the weaponized drone made the rounds earlier this year, we were surprised at how people reacted. Anyone who has messed with quadcopters recognized it as fake right off the bat (not to mention the overly cliche fake russian character).

We won’t be adding a full fledged firearm to this. Mainly because it simply can’t lift the weight (There are ones that can, but we couldn’t justify the cost just for that). We do have some ideas though.

Lets go over the specs of the AR Drone 2.0 first.

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More Small Radio Modules For Your Wireless Needs

August 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

In the never-ending pursuit of cheap wireless communication for your microcontroller projects, [kiu] came up with a small board that allows for serial communication via a 433MHz radio link.

[kiu]’s transceiver uses an RFM12 wireless module available online for just a few dollars. Alongside this module is an ATMega8 and a USB to serial FTDI chip. When [kiu] plugs this board into his computer, he’s able to run a terminal, connect to this board, and receive and transmit hex values at 115,200 bps from another one of these boards.

According to [kiu]’s BOM, 10 boards only cost him 180 Euros, or about $225 USD. Considering off-the-shelf solutions such as an XBee could easily cost twice as much, we’re thinking [kiu] did a very nice job here.

[kiu] put all the board files, schematics, and code up on his GitHub, ready for your perusal. A very cool build, and very useful for a high altitude balloon, rocket, or wireless sensor build.

Programming The ATtiny10 With An Arduino

August 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

The ATtiny10 – along with its younger siblings that go by the names ATtiny 4, 5, and 9 – are the smallest microcontrollers Atmel makes. With only 32 bytes of RAM and 1 kB of Flash, there’s still whole lot you can do with this tiny six-pin chip. [feynman17] figured out a way to program this chip using an Arduino, allowing him to throw just about anything at this absurdly small microcontroller.

The ATtiny10 doesn’t use the familiar ISP programming header found on other Atmel-based boards. Instead, it uses the exceedingly odd Tiny Programming Interface to write bits to the Flash on the chip. [feynman17] realized he could use the Arduino SPI library to communicate with this chip and built a small programming shield with just a few resistors and a 8-pin DIP socket to mount an ATtiny10 breakout board.

After writing a sketch to upload a .hex file from the Arduino serial console, [feynman] had a programmed ATtiny10, ready to be dropped into whatever astonishingly small project he had in mind.

As for what you can do with this small microcontroller, chiptunes are always an option, as is making a very, very small Simon clone. It may not be a powerhouse, but there’s still a lot you can do with this very inexpensive microcontroller.

Hackaday Links August 23, 2012

August 23, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 8 Comments

PS3 Controller Cell Phone Mount

Although the details of this build are quite scarce, not much is needed considering all that this cell phone/PS3 controller “mount” is made of is 3 binder clips and a few rubber bands. A very ingenious solution.

Overengineered Throwie

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve spent way too much time overengineering the throwie (eventually it ended up using a ping-pong ball). Be sure to watch the first video at 0:32 for an impressive horizontal placement, or check out the baloon throwies at the end of the post for even more fun!

Chinese Noodle Slicing Robot

This robot may be appropriately engineered in function, but the form of this noodle-slicer has a distinctly Asian style. We think it may have been designed as a prop for a Godzilla movie originally.

2D Glasses

3D glasses may have been all the rage in 2009, but it’s 2012 so you may want to get your hands on a pair of 2D glasses. These instructions will tell you how to make glasses to convert a 3D film into 2D if the third dimension annoys you or makes you dizzy. Thx [Brian] and [Victor]!

As seen in this post from the Bacteria forum, the test box originally featured at [HAD] has now been updated to include variable regulators, volt meters and an LED tester. Check it out on it’s source, [Downing’s Basement]. Thx [Mike]!

Help Us Decide If This Huge Reprap Array Is The Largest Fleet To Date

August 23, 2012 by Mike Nathan 27 Comments

30-repraps

Take a minute to think about what your dream job might be.

Done imagining you are a ridiculously wealthy bachelor? Good.

Back here in the real world, [Caleb Cover] has come into what might be one of the coolest hacking-related jobs we’ve seen in awhile. He recently snagged a gig working for Aleph Objects as the fleet master for a large array of 3D printers. His duties include the care and feeding of 30 MiniMax-style repraps, a job description we sure wouldn’t mind having.

Aside from merely gloating about his newfound employment, [Caleb] wrote in asking if we knew of a reprap setup larger than the one he is responsible for. We couldn’t come up with one, but perhaps you can.

Right now, [Caleb] says that he’s working on seeing how well the machines can produce parts to replicate themselves, which will certainly make this the largest collective set of production 3D printers sooner or later.

While you hunt down other large reprap setups at your monotonous desk job, check out the video below to hear the symphony of 3D printing that greets [Caleb] at the door each day.

Think you might have seen a 3D printing setup more massive than this one? ~~Pics~~ Vids or it didn’t happen. Seriously, we want to see em!

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