Month: February 2013

The Nottingham Hackspace

February 17, 2013 by 28 Comments

nottinghack

Hackerspaces (or hackspace in this case) come in all shapes and sizes, from those just starting up, to some that are very impressively equipped. [Dominic] wrote in to tell us about the Nottingham Hackspace, which would fall solidly into the second category. We’d invite you to take a look at their intro video after the break, but be prepared to wish you lived near their location.

If you do happen to live there, in addition to a nicely polished website and intro video, they have nearly 4500 square feet of space at their facility. Naturally they have the now ubiquitous 3D printers, but they also have an impressive array of more traditional as well as computer-controlled tools. These include a lathe, welders, CNC router, laser cutter, and even basic PCB-making facilities. Storage space is also included, both for member projects and bicycles.

So be sure to check them out. They have around 130 members right now, but naturally would love to see you there! Continue reading “The Nottingham Hackspace” →

Making A Better, MIDI Controlled Leslie Stompbox

February 17, 2013 by 7 Comments

mint

Way back before the advent of commercial DSP, musicians had really cool looking gear. One of these devices to change the sound of organs, guitars, and other electronic instruments was a Leslie speaker – a speaker cabinet with rotating horns that gives that wonderful warm warble heard on so many classic recordings. [Nigel] doesn’t have an original Leslie, but he does have a much less expensive and lighter digital effect that emulates the original Leslie sound very well. The only problem, though, is the requirement for a proprietary footswitch. No problem, then, because a transistor, a resistor, and a mint tin can take care of that.

[Nigel]’s Leslie simulator – a Neo Instruments Ventilator – has a foot switch to control the speed of the emulated rotary speakers. There are three possible states for the speakers, fast, slow, and brake, all controlled with a TRS phono connector. Possibly in an attempt to price gouge consumers on a proprietary footswitch, Neo Instruments decided they would use the ring and tip of the phono connector to control the speed. They did so in a way that made it impossible for a single relay or switch to change the speed, however.

No problem for [Nigel], then, because with a very simple circuit consisting of just a transistor and resistor he can use any footswitch he wants with his Leslie simulator. The build doesn’t support the brake function, but he doesn’t use that anyway. Not bad for less than a dollar in parts, and a buck fifty in mint tins.

Bringing The Zach Morris Phone Into The 21st Century

February 17, 2013 by 27 Comments

DSCF7247

With the gravitas of [Michael Douglas] in Wall Street and the technological amazement of [Zach Morris] on Saved By The Bell, the classic 1980s ‘brick’ cell phone has a lot to offer these days. Not only is it large enough to be used as a blunt weapon, it’s also useful as an anchor and more durable than an old-school Nokia. Most, if not all of these phones have gone silent since analog cellular service went dead a few years ago, but that didn’t stop [Andrew] from bringing his back to life.

The core of this build is a 128×64 OLED screen that replaced the old seven-digit, seven-segment display and a very small GSM module. The ancient PCB was discarded and a new hardware revision was created in Eagle based on an Arduino-powered microcontroller. The buttons from the original phone remained, thanks to a custom designed resistive button footprint on the PCB and a bit of conductive ink.

What’s surprising is this phone actually works. [Andrew] can not only receive texts on his phone, but also send them using his own implementation of a number pad keyboard. It’s an awesome build, and from what we can tell, the first proper DIY cell phone we’ve ever seen. About time someone got around to that, and we couldn’t have hoped for a better form factor.

Custom 3D Printed Designs With Makerbot’s Customizer

February 16, 2013 by 14 Comments

custom

Although having a 3D printer means you can create custom object of your own design, that doesn’t change the fact that most object printed on Makerbots and RepRaps are copies, or slight derivations, of already existing object. If you need a gear, just go grab an OpenSCAD file for a gear, and a custom smart phone case can be easily made by modifying an already existing one. The problem with this approach, though, is you’ll need to learn OpenSCAD or another 3D design tool. Enter the Makerbot Customizer, a web app that allows you to create custom versions of other people’s work right in your browser.

The idea behind Customizer is simple: someone creates an OpenSCAD file with a few variables like the number of teeth on a gear or the number of turns on a screw. Customizer takes this OpenSCAD file, puts sliders and radio buttons on a web page, and allows you to create custom objects based on user-created templates.

Already we’ve seen a lot of Hackaday readers send in some pretty cool customizable things, like [Bryan]’s coil form for DIY inductors and [Greg]’s customizable PVC pipe couplers. If you already know OpenSCAD, it’s easy to create your own objects that are customizable by anyone on the Internet.

R2D2 Collects Valentine’s Cards Like A Boss

February 16, 2013 by 14 Comments

r2d2-valentines-card-box

Think back to your school days when each student would make a box which would receive Valentine’s cards from their friends. We have fond memories of buying cards with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on them. We guess this tradition is still going strong. Instead of making a receptacle out of a shoe box  [Dr Franken Storer] helped his seven-year-old build this remote control R2D2 with sounds and lights. Yeah, it’s totally cheating. But who can begrudge a hacker dad a little fun?

The bot started as a desktop trash can. It features a domed top which looks just like the droid, but also has a hinged opening where the cards can be placed. To the lid he attached a tilt switch that triggers a Radio Shack sound player to provide the sounds. These sound modules are popular in a lot of projects like this doorbell hack. The final touch (aside from the droid decor on the outside) was to add a remote control car that lets his son drive R2 around.

We asked for more details and he delivered. You’ll find his lengthy description of the project after the jump.

Continue reading “R2D2 Collects Valentine’s Cards Like A Boss” →

Turning An $8 RFID Reader Into Something Useful

February 16, 2013 by 37 Comments

[Fabien] ran across a very, very inexpensive RFID reader on Deal Extreme a while ago and with money to burn, added it to his cart. When the USB RFID reader arrived, he noticed something fairly odd about it (French, Traduction). The RFID reader presented itself to his computer as a USB HID device that spit out characters into a text editor whenever an RFID card was waved above the coil. The only problem was these characters weren’t the hex values recorded on the RFID card. So what’s going on here?

As it turns out (Anglais), this random piece of Chinese electronica sends 10 bytes of data to the computer, just like this well-documented RFID reader. Apparently, both these RFID readers take the hex value of an RFID card, convert those bytes to base 10, and pass each digit through a lookup table. Exactly why it does this is anyone’s guess, but since [Fabien] figured out how it worked, he could also figure out how to reverse the process.

Unfortunately, the RFID reader in question is currently out of stock at Deal Extreme. Seeing as how most of the electronics available there are remarkably similar and differ only in the name printed on the enclosure, though, we wouldn’t be surprised if a nearly identical RFID reader was available elsewhere.

Playing With The Minecraft API And A Raspberry Pi

February 16, 2013 by 8 Comments

mine

It hasn’t been a week since Minecraft for the Raspberry Pi has been released, and already we’re seeing some cool builds that bridge our analog world with Minecraft voxel land. [Martin] got his hands on the Raspi version of Minecraft and decided to take advantage of the API Mojang threw into the build by making a huge analog block clock that keeps real world time in the Minecraft universe.

Basically, [Martin] created a small Python script that draws the face and hands of a clock in a Minecraft world. The Minecraft API comes with neat functions such as drawCircle, and drawLine, so making a real clock face is as simple as getting the system time and doing a bit of trig.

After the break you can check out [Martin]’s Minecraft clock in action. If you’re running the Pi version of Minecraft, you can also get this running on your machine with the code on [Martin]’s git.

Continue reading “Playing With The Minecraft API And A Raspberry Pi” →