Month: November 2013

Hacking And Philosophy: Crackdown Part II

November 18, 2013 by 13 Comments

hnpHackerCrackdownP2

This week we’re back with Hacker Crackdown: Part II! The caliber of last week’s comments was exceptional, but the level of participation planed off, and I’ll risk a guess: The Mentor’s Manifesto was more likely encountered as part of any given reader’s childhood—or, if not, easily skimmed at just over one page long—and therefore drew more interest. Crackdown, however, is perhaps less familiar. You also needed to read over 50 pages for last week (100 for this week). I list these things not as an apology or a rationalization, but as an attempt to better serve the community by providing accessible content. If you can’t commit to a lengthy reading, that shouldn’t exclude your participation.

This week, I’m adjusting the format to focus on key quotations from the text. Never even heard of Hacker Crackdown? No problem! Stick with us after the break where you’ll find all the relevant issues in a brief outline, then join us in our discussion!

Continue reading “Hacking And Philosophy: Crackdown Part II” →

Interview: New Mill CPU Architecture Explanation For Humans

November 18, 2013 by 48 Comments

Hackaday had an amazing opportunity to sit down with [Ivan Godard] who discussed the Mill CPU development which his company — Out of the Box Computing —  has been working on for about a decade. The driving force behind Mill development is that optimizations to existing architectures can only get you so far. At some point you need to come up with a new processor that builds on success and failure of its predecessors.

Ivan’s team has put out several lecture videos linked from their site that dig really deep into the inner workings that give Mill an advantage over currently available chips. We covered one of them recently which prompted [Ivan] to reach out to us. But what if you aren’t working on your advanced degree in semiconductor design? Our interview certainly isn’t for the laymen, but any engineering enthusiast should find this a refreshing and delightful conversation. After the jump you can see the first two installments of the four part interview.

Continue reading “Interview: New Mill CPU Architecture Explanation For Humans” →

A POV Spinner Display With Arduino

November 18, 2013 by 3 Comments

pov-display

[Martin2250] has been working on a spinning disc style POV display. He’s posted his progress up on reddit. This hack is a great example of using what you have at your disposal. [Martin2250] is using an IR LED and photodiode to determine the rotational speed of the disc. He tried using the Arduino micros() function to delay between the photodiode pulse and turning on his LEDs. As [Martin2250] found out, micros() isn’t quite accurate enough for this purpose.  He’s since switched over to using the AVR’s native timers, and is getting much better results.

The disc in this build is actually a CD. [Martin2250] sanded away the label, then masked out his digits. He “painted” the CD with a black marker. Peeling off the tape revealed his stylized digits. Cardboard, hot glue, and visible LEDs were used to create four light boxes for the digits. The disc can display any four digits at once – perfect for a POV clock. We love the use of on-hand materials in this hack – bits of hard and balsa wood, liberal use of hot glue, and of course cardboard. The only thing missing in our eyes is some duct tape!

How To Fix Low Speaker Volume On The Nexus 5

November 18, 2013 by 13 Comments

The much-anticipated Nexus 5 starting shipping out a few weeks ago, and like many new products, some people have received phones with manufacturer defects. This is always unfortunate, but [Adam Outler] over at the XDA Developer forums thinks he’s found a solution to one of the ailments — a low speaker volume fix!

[Adam] noticed that his phone wasn’t quite as loud as he was used to, so he decided to take it apart and see if there was something causing the muffled sound quality. He assumes glue seeped into part of the speaker where it’s not suppose to during assembly, and what he discovered was, you can increase the audio output by opening up the speaker chamber. He found you can easily port the speaker chamber by popping a few holes in it using a hot needle, which helps increase the volume of the phone. It’s not exactly a confirmed hack, but he will be featuring it on XDA-TV in a few weeks, and hopefully a few more cases pop up in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the hack — it might even help users whose phone isn’t unusually quiet!

Now, most people will just return the phone under warranty, which makes sense. But this is Hackaday and XDA we’re talking about. It’s probably less effort to just suck it up, and fix it ourselves. Who cares about warranties?

[via XDA Developers]

Heirloom Chemistry Set

November 18, 2013 by 57 Comments

heirloom chemistry set

We try not to share too many crowd funding projects, but when a tipster sent us to this Heirloom Chemistry Set we knew some would-be chemistry hackers might just want to see it!

[John Farrell Kuhns] runs a small science store with his wife in Kansas City called the H.M.S. Beagle, where young scientists (and adults!) can buy professional lab supplies, equipment, and the resources to study all things from chemistry to physics!

It all started when [John] was a child in the 1950’s and he received the classic Gilbert Chemistry Set as a Christmas present, which help set him on the course of becoming a professional research chemist. Now, wanting to share his love of chemistry with his children, he realized there just isn’t the same kind of chemistry sets available commercially!

Since the opening of his store he has made many custom chemistry sets very similar to the originals, but these were almost all one-off’s and very time consuming to make. So recently he decided to try making a set that he can produce in fair numbers to meet the demand, and so he started this Kickstarter to help it get off the ground. It’s already surpassed its goal by two times!

We wish we had one when we were growing up!

[Thanks Jeremy!]

DIY Bluetooth Home Automation

November 17, 2013 by 20 Comments

blueboard

Interested in a bit of home automation? Don’t know where to start? We just found a great Instructable on making your own bluetooth controlled relay module!

[Kyle’s] been working on this for a while, and finally at his 5th iteration he’s ready to share it with the public. It’s a project you can make from scratch, and each unit will cost approximately ~$25 in components — which can control up to two outputs. He’s included an inkscape PCB layout which you can easily etch on your own using the toner transfer method. The heart of the build is an Atmega328, which helps keep the costs down — after all, it is only controlling two outputs! Then it’s just a matter of adding the components, a bit of soldering, and uploading the firmware! 

The entire design is open source, and [Kyle] would love some feedback to continue improving upon it. The write-up is quite thorough, so if you’re interested, take a look and leave him a comment!

Building A More Nyan Planet

November 17, 2013 by 11 Comments

Video

In an effort to give salespeople something impressive to hand out, IBM recently had a bunch of very cool promotional materials printed up. It’s basically a greeting card-sized cardboard folder with a bit of text, an LCD screen, buttons, battery and display controller. This video in print device is meant to display how IBM is building a smarter planet, but [Cookie] and [Stitch] over at the Hack42 hackerspace in The Netherlands decided Nyan Cat would be a much better use of this free, portable video player. (Google translation) UPDATE: Site has gone down. Here’s the Google Cache but you’ll need a browser like Chrome that can do the translation for you (we can’t figure out how to link a translation of cache).

This video card uses tech licensed from Americhip, a company that has been putting video in magazines for a few years now. By connecting the USB charging port up to his computer, the guys were able to switch the device over to USB mode where the actual video files could be read and rewritten.

By encoding a few videos to match the format of what was on the card – including some old IBM promotional material by [Jim Henson] – the team were able to get videos playing on a hackable flyer. Very cool, and if you can get your hands on some sales brochures, a free source of tiny displays.