Off-Road Quad Uses… A Pneumatic Drive?

May 2, 2014 by James Hobson 35 Comments

AirQuad_Outside

Now here’s a really cool engineering degree project — a team of students from a university in Vienna have made a pneumatically driven motor — and fitted it into a quad! (Translated)

The team consists of [Simon Friesacher], [Simon Schedl], [Christoph Sieber] and [Manuel Streith] who all happen to be in the same class as [Maximilian] and [Sebastian] the duo who brought us the VoLumen display, and [Max’s] Ripper CNC!

For their main project, the goal was to create an alternative and innovative motor — one that runs off of compressed air, using firefighter’s air tanks. Once they had that figured out, they decided to have some fun with it and put together the Air Quad. It only has a range of a few kilometers, and doesn’t perform quite as well its original gasoline counterpart, but we have to admit, it’s a very slick proof of concept!

Stick around after the break to see a promotional demo of the Air Quad in action!

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Raspi, GPS, USB hub and battery hooked together

NSA Technology Goes Open Hardware

May 2, 2014 by Will Sweatman 27 Comments

When [Edward Snowden] smeared the internet with classified NSA documents, it brought to light the many spying capabilities our government has at its disposal. One the most interesting of these documents is known as the ANT catalog. This 50 page catalog, now available to the public, reads like a mail order form where agents can simply select the technology they want and order it. One of these technologies is called the Sparrow II, and a group of hackers at Hyperion Bristol has attempted to create their own version.

The Sparrow II is an aerial surveillance platform designed to map and catalog WiFi access points. Think wardriving from a UAV. Now, if you were an NSA agent, you could just order yourself one of these nifty devices from the ANT catalog for a measly 6 grand. However, if you’re like most of us, you can use the guidance from Hyperion Bristol to make your own.

They start off with a Raspi, a run-of-the-mill USB WiFi adapter, a Ublox GY-NEO6MV2 GPS Module, and a 1200 mAh battery to power it all. Be sure to check out the link for full details.

Thanks to [Joe] for the tip!

Japanese Edition: 3Dプリンターで24時間以内に住宅建設。しかもリサイクル材料を用いたエコ建築。

May 2, 2014 by Mike Szczys 68 Comments

3d printed house in china

by: [Hideyuki Yamamoto] based on this feature.

3Dプリンターメーカーが小さくて精度が高いプリンターを開発するのに躍起になっている中でShanghai WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Companyという中国にある会社がオリンピックプールの半分程度の大きさの巨大な3Dプリンターで実験を重ねているとBBCなどは報じている。

http://3dprinterplans.info/3d-printer-plans-news-round-up-for-wednesday-16042014/

縦32m、横10m、高さ6.6mものマンモスプリンターで400m2の平屋一戸建て住宅がプリント出来る。FDM技術によりセメントと建築廃材混合の壁が作られ、その会社によると一軒あたり5000ドル以下で建てられ、１日あたりなんと10戸の製作が可能とのこと。

そのプリンターは数年前に設計され、WinSunが海外から部品を調達し、蘇州工場で組み立てられた。
この会社は街全体の家をプリントする計画を立てており、リサイクル施設を建設するための部材を集めているという。この家は、まずは青島にて販売される予定だ。

FDM技術を使えば軽量で耐久性のある家がプリント可能になる。この手法は間違いなくオランダのKamerMaker社による建築よりも早いであろう。耐久性や安全性に関してはまだまだ改善の余地があると思われるが、安くて短期間に家が建つ可能性が拡がる話題である。

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Star Wars Training Droid Uses The Force

May 2, 2014 by Adam Fabio 2 Comments

We all know the scene, Obi-Wan Kenobi gives Luke a helmet with the blast shield down. He tells Luke “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them. Stretch out with your feelings!” Easy for Obi-Wan to say – he doesn’t have a remote training droid flying around and shooting at him. [Roeland] and his team are working to create a real-life version of the training droid for Hackday’s Sci-Fi contest.

The training droid in Star Wars may not have had the Force on its side, but it was pretty darn agile in the air. To replicate this, the team started with a standard Walkera Ladybird micro quadcopter. It would have been simple to have a human controlling the drone-turned-droid, but [Roeland and co] wanted a fully computer controlled system. The Ladybird can carry a small payload, but it just doesn’t have the power to lift a computer and sensor suite. The team took a note from the GRASP Lab and used an external computer with a camera to control their droid.

Rather than the expensive motion capture system used by the big labs, the team used a pair of Wii Remote controllers for stereo vision. A small IR LED mounted atop the droid made it visible to the Wii Remotes’ cameras. A laptop was employed to calculate the current position of the droid. With the current and desired positions known, the laptop calculated and sent commands to an Arduino, which then translated them for the droid’s controller.

Nice work guys! Now you just have to add the blaster emitters to it!

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Reading Paper Tapes From Scratch!

May 2, 2014 by James Hobson 36 Comments

Home made tape reader

Feeling a little nostalgic? Dying to read some paper ticker tapes? You can do it manually, but that’d take forever! [NeXT] decided to make a little PCB to help him out.

Having searched for paper tape readers for years, and even getting halfway through building the mechanical portion of it in his high-school tech class, [NeXT] decided to take a serious stab at it — and by golly, it works!

The reason he finally decided to go down this route is because you just can’t buy them (well, for cheap), and even the DIY or hobby ones out there are notoriously slow — what better reason to design it from scratch?

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Hackaday Space: Final Transmission Minecraft Puzzles Explained

May 2, 2014 by Ben Delarre 9 Comments

This is the last part in our round up of the ARG that we ran throughout April. Just in case you’ve had your head buried in a hole this last week, it was a month-long series of puzzles that lead up to the announcement of the frankly awesome Hackaday Prize. During the week we’ve covered Transmissions 1, 2 and 3 detailing how we put the puzzles together and the things that went wrong. For the final stage we wanted something a bit different. Throughout the ARG we had been inspired by the book Ready Player One, so in this stage we wanted a high score table that people could compete over.

Since we’d managed to get reasonably far ahead of ourselves during Transmission 3 we had just over a week to plan this round. We pitched some ideas around the office for video games we could make with high score tables. None of these really stuck and we soon realized we didn’t have the resources to get the graphic design work done for most games. Someone suggested that we try making a MUD themed around a space port with rescue for Major Tom being the last stage. This seemed like a great idea at first and I began work on it using the RanvierMUD framework. It soon became clear however that writing all the text for a full featured MUD is actually a massive endeavor and I frankly am not that great of a writer.

Learn the secrets and watch a video tour of the Minecraft world below.

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This Weekend: Hackaday At The Southeast Vintage Computer Festival

May 2, 2014 by Marsh 1 Comment

VCF

The Vintage Computer Festival hits Roswell, GA this weekend for the second year, packed with museum displays dating back to the Kenbak 1 and hobbyist vintage exhibits. The Apple Pop-Up museum is back as well, along with last year’s popular retro gaming area and a maker-styled kit building area. Here’s an album packed with images from last year’s festival, so you know what you’re getting yourself into.

You can check out the scheduled speakers and workshops here. While you’re there, look for the short, nerdy guy wearing a Hackaday shirt and I’ll be sure to throw some Hackaday stickers at you.