Day: March 5, 2014

Here’s The Dirt On Printing With Pollution

March 5, 2014 by 34 Comments

[Anirudh] and his friends were sitting around reminiscing about India. In particular, they recalled riding around in auto-rickshaws in stifling heat, watching their skin turn black from the exhaust. They started thinking about all of the soot and pollution in crowded cities the world over and wondered whether the stuff could be re-purposed for something like printer ink. That’s how they came up with their soot/pollution printer.

They created a soot-catching pump which they demonstrate with a burning candle. The pump mixes the soot particles with rubbing alcohol and an oil substrate and sends the ink to an HP C6602 inkjet cartridge. They used [Nicolas C Lewis]’s print head driver shield for Arduino to interface with the cartridge, turning it into a 96dpi printing head that uses only five pins.

[Anirudh] and his friends plan to design a carbon separator using charged plates to capture the soot particles from pollution sources and filter out dust. Be sure to check out their demonstration video after the jump.

Update: In response to [Hirudinea]’s comment about mining the carbon from cars, [Anirudh] is now looking for collaborators (tinkerers, filmmakers, DIY enthusiasts) to move forward with the idea of re-purposing carbon. Email him at anirudhs@mit.edu.

 

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From Wireless Soundbar To Portable Boombox

March 5, 2014 by 5 Comments

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[Frank] had wanted a portable Bluetooth boombox for a while, but when he did some price comparisons he found that they are pretty expensive. He decided to take matters into his own hands and modify two products he already had — into what he wanted.

The guts of his Frankenstein-boombox come from a Toshiba 3D Soundbar — a great product, but not as durable or portable as he needed. He then took an old mini guitar amp and started hacking the two together.

The soundbar features 4 speakers and a sub woofer — plus the amp and wireless capabilities of course — so [Frank] opted to just use the case of the guitar amp with the soundbar’s innards. He took some measurements and then built up a wooden support for the speakers inside the amp. He’s also sealed off the tweeters sound cavity from the main SUB to keep the sound nice and clear.  Continue reading “From Wireless Soundbar To Portable Boombox” →

Hackaday Scouts For Hacks At SXSW

March 5, 2014 by 7 Comments

It seems like everyone is going to South by Southwest this year. We even heard about it on The Today Show this week. But we still have hope that there’s awesomeness to be found. A few of our crew will be there this year and they’re on the lookout for something special. The festival starts on Friday and runs more than a week to the following Sunday but our guys will be on the ground Sunday, March 9th through Tuesday the 11th.

Sure, we’ll take a gander at the interactive hardware areas, but preliminary research tells us these may be watered down to the lowest common denominator. What we really want to see is if a Burning-Man-like culture is beginning to coalesce around SXSW. Are you carrying around your own hacked hardware at this year’s event? Do you roll up in a custom party-mobile and spend the week trying to keep the 24-hour tailgate alive with your fold out pig roaster and awning-based entertainment system? We’d like to check that out.

[Eren], [Alek], and [Ivan] are handling coverage of the event. They’ve been killing themselves making Hackaday Projects an awesome place to share and interact. What they wanted was a bit of down time, but handing out T-shirts and Stickers in exchange for a look at your hacks doesn’t get in the way of that. Connect with them on Twitter using the hash tag #HaD_SXSW. They’ll be using it to tweet their activities but of course it works both ways. Your best bet of just crashing into these guys is to check out [Alek’s] talk on StageTwo.

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Bench Power Supply Constant Current EZ-SET

March 5, 2014 by 17 Comments

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Here is a nice hack you may find very useful if you have a cheaper bench power supply that supports constant current limit protection (CC mode) and the only way to set or check your max current limit is to disconnect your circuit, short the power supply outputs and then check or set your limit. Yes, what a pain! [Ian Johnson] was enduring this pain with a couple of Circuit Specialist bench power supplies and decided to do something about it. After finding a download of the circuit diagram for his CSI3003X-5 supply he was able to reverse engineer a hack that lets you press a new button and dial-in the max current setting. Your first guess is that he simply added a momentary button to short the power supply outputs, but you would be wrong. [Ian’s] solution does not require you to remove the load, plus the load can continue running while you set your current limit. He does this by switching the current display readout from using 0–3 volts off an output shunt resistor to using the 0-3 volts output from a digital potentiometer which is normally used to set the power supplies’ constant current limit anyway. So simple it’s baffling why the designers didn’t include this feature.

Granted this is a simple modification anybody can implement, however [Ian] still wasn’t happy. A comment by [Gerry Sweeney] set him on the path to eliminate the tedious multi-button pressing by implementing a 555 momentary signal to switch the circuit from current load readout to current set readout. This 2nd mod means you just start pressing your up-down CC set buttons and it momentarily switches over the display to read your chosen max current and a few moments later the display switches back to reading actual load current. Brilliant! Just like the expensive big boy toys.

[Ian] doesn’t stop with a simple one-off hack job either. He designed up a proper PCB with cabling and connectors, making an easy to install kit that’s almost a plug-in conversion kit for Circuit Specialist bench power supplies (CSI3003X-5, CSI3005X5, CSI3003X3, CSI3005XIII). It is not a 100% plug-in kit because you do have to solder 3 wires to existing circuit points for signal and ground, but the video covering that task seemed trivial.

This hack could very well work with many other power supplies on the market being Circuit Specialist is just rebadging these units. For now, only the models listed after the break are known to work with this hack. If you find others please list in the comments.

After the break we will link to all three progressive mod videos incase you want to learn how to mod your own power supply or you could just order a prebuilt kit from [Ian].

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Hackaday 68k: Blinking An LED

March 5, 2014 by 47 Comments

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Time for another update for the Hackaday 68k, the 16-bit retrocomputer developed on Hackaday to show off both our love for vintage hardware and our new project hosting site. There’s still invites to be had, people. Get ’em while they’re hot.

This post is going to cover exactly how complex a simple 68000 system is. The answer is, “not very.” A simple 68k system is at least as simple to design than some other homebrew systems we’ve seen around here. Yes, a 16-bit data bus means there’s more wires going everywhere, but like she said, just because it’s bigger doesn’t mean it’s harder.

There is some progress to report on the construction of the Hackaday 68k. The processor has been verified as working with a blinking LED. It’s the ‘Hello World’ of computer design, and it’s at least as complex as blinking a LED with an Arduino.

You’re gonna want to click that ‘Read more’ link.

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A Low Cost Arduino FPGA Shield

March 5, 2014 by 46 Comments

[technolomaniac] is kicking butt over at Hackaday Projects. He’s creating a low cost Arduino based FPGA shield. We’ve seen this pairing before, but never with a bill of materials in the $25 to $30 range. [technolomaniac’s] FPGA of choice is a Xilinx Spartan 6. He’s also including SDRAM, as well as an SPI Flash for configuration. Even though the Spartan 6 LX9 is a relatively small FPGA, it can pack enough punch that the Arduino almost becomes a peripheral. The main interconnect between the two will be the Arduino’s ability to program the Spartan via SPI. Thanks to the shared I/O pins though, the sky is the limit for parallel workflow.

[technolomaniac] spent quite a bit of time on his decoupling schematic. Even on a relatively small FPGA power decoupling is a big issue, especially when high speed signals come into play. Thankfully Xilinx provides guides for this task. We have to mention the two excellent videos [technolomaniac] created to explain his design. Documenting a project doesn’t have to be hours of endless writing. Sometimes it’s just easier to run a screen capture utility and click record. As of this writing, the schematic has just been overhauled, and [technolomaniac] is looking for feedback before he enters the all important layout stage. The design is up on his github repository in Altium format. Due to its high cost, Altium isn’t our first pick for Open Hardware designs. There are free viewers available, but [technolomaniac] makes it simple by putting up his schematic in PDF format (PDF link). Why not head over to projects and help him out?

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Make Your Electronics Lab In A Box

March 5, 2014 by 27 Comments

Unless your lucky enough to have a big personal workshop where you can have dedicated stations for all kinds of different tools, you’re probably like most of us here at Hack a Day — lots of projects, but never enough space.

[McLovinGyver] lives in a small flat, and finds setup and cleanup time often take longer than the project itself — so he’s come up with this handy dandy Electronics-Lab-in-a-Box (trademark pending).

The guide is really more of a series of pictures of his process of building the portable lab, but he shows off some great ideas of things you might want to include in your own personal version of it. The first step is deciding what tools you need in the lab. In general, your power supply unit, soldering iron, hot air re-flow and fume exhaustion are going to dictate the general size and shape of your lab — from there, it’s just a matter of filling in the gaps with the rest of your small tools.

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