NES Annoyance Timer Makes No Friends At Your Work

March 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

Still trying to solidify that reputation as the office Grinch? This project will let everyone know you’re a complete jerk in no time. It’s called the 8-bit Annoying Person Remover. It detects when someone enters your office at which point it starts to play the Super Mario Bros. theme song while the display counts down 400 seconds. Just like in the game the music gets faster at the end and when it stops they know it’s time to get the heck out.

The hardware inside isn’t too complicated. An Arduino and a Wave shield do most of the work. The song played is stored on an SD card and can easily be changed. There’s a speaker mounted under the top heat vent of the enclosure. The device defaults to displaying the time of day, but monitors a motion sensor on one side to detect when someone comes through the door. This also works when someone leaves, cutting off the music and resetting the display. Don’t miss a video of it in action after the break.

It’s as if this was made specifically for the Comic Book Guy

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Viscerally Pleasing Electromechanical Doorbell

March 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

steam-punk-doorbell

Sure, we could just slap the steam-punk label on this doorbell hack, but we think that cheapens it. The rig uses a combination of mercury switch and creative mechanics to form a doorbell. And we think it goes beyond aesthetics to a statement of who you are starting with the front door of your house. No wonder [Nick Normal] has moved it along with him from home to home over the years.

The portion to the right is the ringer itself. Pulling on the lever moves the chain through an eyelet to affect the mercury switch mounted above. That switch completes the circuit which drives the motor on the “bell” unit. We use quotes because instead of ringing a bell it’s striking the large valve control wheel which looks like it came straight from the same industrial plant where The Joker took his unfortunate fall into a vat of acid.

This certainly gives you something to aspire to. And if you think you’ve already achieved a doorbell setup on similarly-geeky footing why haven’t you tipped us off about it?

SparkFun Takes Their Educational Show On The Road

March 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

sparkfun-national-education-tour

They’ve bought an RV and are headed for your state with buckets full of hobby electronic hardware. It’s SparkFun’s National Education tour and if you want them to host a workshop for kids in your area now’s the time to sign up!

It’s no stretch to say that our everyday lives are tightly bound with technology. Chances are every one of the kids in this picture will walk around with an embedded system in their pockets by the time they hit middle school if not earlier (seriously, many of them have the newest generation of high-end smart phones). The sad fact is that nearly 100% will never have any idea how the hardware in those devices functions. And that’s where we think this program really shines.

SparkFun is scheduling 50 stops where $1000 of the cost is subsidized. The team will work with each school/organization to come up with an appropriate workshop for the age of the students and their base knowledge on the topic. Hopefully this will inspire a new generation of hardware hackers who will eventually contribute to using technology to solve world issues. Check out their promo clip after the jump.

We mentioned subsidized visits. The program still costs $1500 and will go up to $2500 after the first 50 stops. But the hardware used in the workshop stays with the kids. And we hope that the $37.50-$125/head price tag will be seen as a worthwhile investment in getting kids interested in more than just entertaining themselves with the social medial offerings running on the hardware.

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Digging Deep Into How The 8085 Processor’s Registers Were Designed

March 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

Hardware design enthusiasts should already be salivating just looking at this image. But [Ken Shirriff’s] write-up on how the 8085 processor’s registers were designed will put you in silicon reverse-engineering heaven. He manages to get to the bottom of the tricks the designers used to make register access as efficient as possible, like routing some through the ALU on their path elsewhere.

We’re certainly not experts in studying dies like the one seen above. Luckily [Ken] does a great job of zooming in on important parts, then dissecting how they work by representing the silicone image as a functional flow chart. One of the parts which we found most interesting is the WZ temporary registers. These are a set of internal registers that are not accessible to the programmer. They’re only used internally by the chip. They act as temporary storage for multiple operand functions, and also hold register addresses for a handful of instructions (JMP, CALL, RST, etc.).

If you’re more interested in how images of these chips are attained you should do some searching on Hackaday. Just last week we featured one such project in a links post.

[via Reddit]

Turning The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Into A Proper Linux Box

March 5, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

Over on the xda developers forum, [exception13] shows us the work he’s put into geting Debian running on his Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, allowing him to dual boot Android and Linux on a single device.

The project is still in a fairly early state, but so far [exception13] has most of the goodies required for a decent Linux experience running already. There’s WiFi, bluetooth, sound, usb-otg and touchscreen support, as well as support for the Note’s S Pen, the Wacom digitizer that basically turns the Galaxy Note 10.1 into an Intuos touch pad.

There’s still a lot of work work to be done, including getting the camera up and running, as well as enabling the GPS receiver. Still, it’s a very cool project that puts the power of a proper desktop interface into a tablet with enough horsepower to get something useful done.

If you’d like to get this running on your Galaxy Note, [exception13] has a download avaiable over on Google Code. There’s also a video [exception13] put together demoing all the cool stuff his Note can do, you can check that out after the break.

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Finally, A Machine That Makes Cheap 3D Printer Filament.

March 5, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 104 Comments

If there’s one problem with the RepRap, it’s the cost of filament. Sure, there’s also the computationally difficult problem of slicing 3D models, but a 5 to 10 times markup on turning plastic pellets into filament is the biggest problem. It’s even a bigger problem than the problems of compatibility and interchangeable parts that comes with everyone forking a ‘standard’ printer design dozens of times. The cost of filament, though, is the biggest problem, right up there with RepRap developers focusing nearly entirely on different printer designs instead of the software, firmware, and electronics that are also vitally important to the RepRap project.

Nearly a year ago, we caught wind of a competition to create a home-based filament manufacturing station that takes cheap plastic pellets available for about $5/kg and turns them in to 3D printer filament that usually sells for $50/kg. A winner for this competion has finally been announced. The winner, [Hugh Lyman] just won $40,000 for his home filament creation station, the Lyman Filament Extruder

The goal of the Desktop Factory Competition was to create a machine that produces filament suitable for 3D printers with a total build cost of under $250 USD. [Lyman] met the goal by using a few motors, 3D printed parts, a PID controller, and off the shelf auger drill bit (that’s the actual model and supplier he used, by the way) that is able to reliably churn out plastic filament.

If you want to build your own Lyman Extruder, all the plans are up on Thingiverse, but LulzBot, the awesome people who gave us a 3D printer, hope to sell a pre-assembled version of this extruder sometime in the future, hopefully with a chain guard around that sprocket.

Programmable Computer Built From A Humble ATtiny84

March 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

attiny84-computer

Here’s a way to play around with simple computing concepts without going too crazy with the hardware side of things. [John Eisenmann] calls it the DUO tiny. It’s a programmable computer based around the ATtiny84. He wrote the operating system himself, building in a set of commands that make it quite functional, but allow the user to manipulate or even write the programs using the four button interface. Editing and running programs (which include some games) is demonstrated in the clip after the break.

The three major components used in the system are the ATtiny84, and EEPROM chip with 64 KB capacity to hold the programs, and the 102×64 pixel LCD screen seen above. The project began on a breadboard, but as he brought each part into being it transitioned to a strip-board prototype and finally this fab-house version.

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