Observe A Satellite’s Morse Code Message Today!

December 12, 2012 by Mike Szczys 58 Comments

Niwaka1-satellite

If you live in the Eastern portion of the United States and the skies are clear you can see a student built satellite flashing LEDs in Morse Code today. But don’t worry. If you it’s cloudy or if you live elsewhere there are several other opportunities to see it in the coming days.

This is the Niwaka Fitsat-1. It was developed by students at the [Fukuoka Institute of Technology] and deployed from the International Space Station on October 4th. Included in the payload is an array of LEDs seen in the image above. On a set schedule these are used to flash a Morse Code message for two minutes at a time. That is what’s shown in the image on the upper right.

You can look up information on seeing Fitsat-1 in your own area using this webpage. All of the observation windows in our area require a pair of binoculars or better. We’re not sure if there is any case in which this can be seen by the naked eye.

[Thanks SWHarden and KomradBob]

Tablet Rig Takes Sheet Music Digital

December 12, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

music-stand-tablet-holder

[Bill Dudley’s] wife wanted to use a couple of different tablets for displaying sheet music. Sure, a proper music stand will have no trouble supporting the weight of the device, but if it’s not secured it place you may soon have a broken device. [Bill’s] solution was to build this tablet stand out of PVC.

The image above doesn’t tell the entire story of how he did this. But if you look really closely you’ll notice that the pipe is actually acting as a frame rather than a cradle. After measuring, cutting, and gluing all of the components together he cut a channel around the inside of the u-shaped PVC frame. The channel is the exact thickness of the tablet and holds the device securely. A base from a music stand makes up the rest of the rig.

Pages can be turned using a USB foot pedal. This is fantastic for gigging musician who use digital music collections like the Real Book.

Raspberry Pi Hacking, Commando Style

December 12, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 36 Comments

If you’re lacking useful equipment for your Raspberry Pi hacking adventure, such as an HDMI monitor or power supply, this handy write-up will show you how to continue your hacking. All you’ll need is a laptop, the Raspberry Pi itself, an SD card, and an Ethernet and micro-USB cable. As noted in the article, it’s not really recommended to power the ‘Pi off of USB only, so this could potentially be a source of problems.

This hack begins by installing Linux on an SD card per this setup page, then using a Virtual Network Computing [VNC] setup to work with your Raspberry Pi. There are a few steps in between being able to do this, like setting up network sharing, and sleuthing out the IP address of the new processor, but everything is explained in detail for Mac and Linux. Windows users will have to do a bit of “sleuthing” of their own, but if you have some more information on this process, we’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Digital IR Theremin

December 12, 2012 by Eric Evenchick 6 Comments

This Digital IR Theremin creates tones based on the distance of an object from its IR sensor. There’s no microcontroller here, since the project is part of an Introduction to Digital Electronics course. Instead, it uses a handful of comparators, transistors, AND gates, and a 555 timer to make noise.

The comparators are connected to create window comparators. This configuration will output a digital 1 if the input is between two reference voltages, and 0 if it is not. Using this, the analog output of the IR range sensor can be converted to digital values.

The 555 timer takes care of creating the output waveform. A specific resistor is switched in to the timer’s RC circuit depending on which window comparator is active. This allows for a different tone to be played depending on the distance from the IR sensor.

The result is a square wave, which has a frequency dependant on how close an object is to the IR sensor. By selecting the right resistances for each distance, the theremin can be tuned to play a specific scale.

This is a neat project for people looking to learn digital electronics, and the write up does a great job of explaining the theory. After the break, check out a video of the theremin generating some tones.

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Garage Door Opener Using Siri And Raspberry Pi

December 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

Screenshot from 2012-12-11 09:54:36

[DarkTherapy] wrote in to tell us about his garage door opener that works with Siri and a Raspberry Pi. It’s pretty hard to find a picture that tells the story of the hack, but here you can see the PCB inside the housing of the garage door opener. He patched the grey wires into the terminal block. On the other end they connect to a relay which makes the connection.

On the control side of that mechanical relay is a Raspberry Pi board. This seems like overkill but remember the low cost of the RPi and the ability to communicate over a network thanks to the WiFi dongle it uses. We think it’s less outrageous than strapping an Android phone to the opener. To make the RPi work with Siri he chose the SiriProxy package. We’ve seen this software before but don’t remember it being used with the Raspberry Pi.

There is certainly room to extend the functionality of a system like this one. It would be trivial to add a combination lock like this one we build using an AVR chip. It would also be nice to see a sensor used to confirm the door is closed. Even if you don’t need to control your garage this is a great reference project to get the RPi to take commands from your iOS devices.

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Virtual Chess Uses Glove Controllers

December 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

chess-using-glove-controllers

Check out the game of chess going on above. It’s a virtual game where each player uses a glove as the controller. Or course the game board and pieces are missing from this image. They’re displayed on a computer monitor which both players can see.

The hardware rather simple, and we think it would be a great project to challenge your microcontroller skills. Each glove has an accelerometer attached to it, as well as a ring of copper foil on the pointer finger and thumb. One ATmega1284 monitors both gloves. The accelerometer data is used to move the mouse cursor on the screen, while the contacts are used to grip or release a playing piece. The game board and pieces are displayed using MATLAB with controller commands fed to it via a USB connection.

If you’re more into building a mechanized game check out this pair of telepresence chess boards.

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Table Golf

December 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

table-golf

This could be the dawning of a new hackerspace sport. [Antoni Kaniowski] and [Rohit Sharma] came up with a delightful game of desktop golf. But the control scheme has a decidedly geeky flair. They’re using salvaged parts from an audio device and a hard drive to control the swing of the mechanical golfer just out of focus in the background of this image.

The game was built for a class project at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. Originally they wanted to have haptic feedback which would help you learn to tailor each shot for a perfect game. This proved to be impossible with the hardware they had on hand, but as you can see from the clip after the break the system still turned out just great. The audio slide which is taped to the underside of the table adjust the swing velocity. The hunk of hardware from an old hard drive acts the trigger for the swing.

The ‘hole’ is a laser cut ring of plywood. We’d love to see complicated courses designed in CAD and meticulously assembled for competition… but maybe we’re just getting carried away.

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