Oinker Is Twitter For HAMs

May 12, 2014 by Rick Osgood 57 Comments

Have you ever wanted to send a quick message to your HAM radio buddies over the air but then realized you forgot your radio at home? [Troy] created Oinker to remedy this problem. Oinker is a Perl script that turns emails into audio.

The script monitors an email account for new messages and then uses the Festival text-to-speech engine to transform the text into audio. [Troy] runs Oinker on a Raspberry Pi, with the Pi’s audio output plugged directly into an inexpensive ham radio. The radio is then manually tuned to the desired transmit frequency. Whenever Oinker see’s a new email, that message is converted into speech and then output to the transmitter.

The script automatically appends your HAM radio call sign to the end of every message to ensure you stay within FCC regulations. Now whenever [Troy] runs into some bad traffic on the road, he can send a quick SMS to his email address and warn his HAM radio buddies to stay clear of the area.

Injection Molding With Hot Glue

May 12, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

Injection molding is simply forcing a melted thermoplastic into a mold of some sort, letting it cool, and then prying the mold apart to get to the finished piece. Hot glue guns are basically handheld thermoplastic extruders, so when [scorch] dug up some old injection molds he had sitting around, it didn’t take long to put two and two together.

Injection molds aren’t something any normal person has sitting around, but a few years ago [scorch] found two books published by Gingery, the same people who have published instructions on how to build a metalshop from scrap. [scorch] created his molds on a small CNC mill – a Sieg X3 – and his initial experiments with injection molded plastic were fairly successful, even if the molds were made from self-cast billets.

After molding a few hot glue LEGO parts with his equipment, [scorch] had a look around the Internet and noticed this was nothing new. One company even sells a hot glue gun-based injection molding kit using polyethylene glue sticks. Their demo video (seen below) seems much more complicated than [scorch]’s efforts, so we’ll say he came out ahead on this one.

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Hardware Startup Review: Spark

May 12, 2014 by Aleksandar Bradic 12 Comments

Like it or not, a whole new wave of Hardware Startups is coming our way. Crowd Funding campaigns are making it possible for everyone with an idea to “test the waters”, tech-savvy Angel investors are eager to help successful ones cross over, and Venture Capitalists are sitting on the other side, always on the lookout for potential additions to their “hardware portfolio”. It’s these billion-dollar acquisitions that made everyone jump on the bandwagon, and there’s no going back. At least for now.

That’s all great, and we want to believe that good things will come out of this whole frenzy. But instead of staying on the sidelines, we thought Hackady should get involved and start asking some hard questions. After all, these guys didn’t think they’d be able to get away with some nicely produced videos and a couple of high-res photos, right?

For our first issue, we picked a relatively innocent target – Spark, the team behind the Spark Core development board. By embracing Open Source and Open Hardware as the core part of their strategy, Spark has so far been a positive example in the sea of otherwise dull (and potentially creepy) IoT “platforms”. So we thought we should give [Zach Supalla], CEO of Spark a call.

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Intelligent Roadways Pave Way To The Future

May 12, 2014 by Will Sweatman 126 Comments

smart roadway with illuminated tiles

The idea of a road is relatively simple – a durable path from point A to point B. Development of roadways usable for wheeled carriages has been perfected over the centuries. The Romans, for instance, used a base layer of crushed limestone that would let water flow out, preventing clay soil from turning into mud. Some Roman roads were topped with six sided capstones, also known as pavers, many of which still exist today.

The invention of the horseless carriage necessitated roadways that could be used at high speeds. Tarmac, asphalt and concrete roads followed, and thus ends our short venture into the history of roads. Roadways simply haven’t changed much since then. Sure, we’ve painted some lines on them, even etched grooves in some to prevent accidents, but the core technology of the road is the same as it was a hundred years ago. Until now. Consider the Intelligent Roadway.

[Scott] is an electrical engineer, and had dreamed of solar powered roadways as a child. But it wasn’t until the realization of global warming did [Scott] and his wife, [Julie] start to take the concept seriously. Stick around after the break to find out just how smart [Scott’s] roadway of the future is.

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Repairing A Damaged RC Rx Due To Reverse Polarity Power Input

May 12, 2014 by Rich Bremer 21 Comments

Rx Receiver Repair

Once in a while all of us technocenti get a little complacent and do something that may be considered ‘dumb’ while working on a project…. like cutting the wrong side of a piece of wood or welding a bracket on in the wrong direction. [Santhosh] is human like everyone else and plugged in the power connector to his RC Receiver incorrectly, rendering the receiver useless. How will his Arduino-controlled Robot work without a functioning receiver?

[Santhosh] started by opening up the case to expose the circuit board and checking out the components inside. The first component in the power input path was a voltage regulator. Five volts DC was applied to the input side of the 3.3-volt regulator but only 1.21 came out the other end. Now that the problem was quickly identified the next step was to replace the faulty regulator. Purchasing an exact replacement would have been easy but cost both time and money. [Santhosh]’s parts bin contained a similar regulator, a little larger than the original but the pinout was the same.

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Not Your Typical ATX Power Supply Hack

May 12, 2014 by James Hobson 39 Comments

Power supplies are essential for at home tinkering and electronics hacking. Unfortunately, they’re really quite expensive, and a bit out of reach for most hobbyists. Computer ATX power supplies are a cheap alternative, although they usually tend to lack the features of real bench power supplies… unless you hack yours like [Mark Schoonover]!

When [Mark] set out on this project he wanted to use as many recycled components as possible, but still come up with an extremely functional bench top power supply. He snagged a 500W ATX power supply from one of his kid’s old desktop PC’s, grabbed some old wall-warts for individual current limited supplies (apparently ATX PSU’s don’t have 5V rails anymore?), and put it all into a nice big project box.

He’s even thrown in a voltage regulator with current metering and a nice set of 7-segment displays!

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Black Knight Transformer — A Military Octorotor You Can Ride In

May 11, 2014 by James Hobson 54 Comments

fig3-sm

We saw this pop up a few times before and to be honest, we weren’t sure if it was actually real or not. This is the Advanced Tactics Black Knight Transformer — the world’s first VTOL (vertical take off and landing) aircraft that also doubles as an off-road vehicle.

Designed and built in California, it just received government approval and Advanced Tactics has released the first driving and flight test video. It was apparently designed as a rapid-response evacuation vehicle for wounded soldiers in war affected zones. It features a whopping eight individually driven rotors that swing out on “transforming” arms during flight. It also has a removable ground drive-train which can be swapped out for an amphibious boat hull, or even a cargo pod!

At the forefront of large-scale multicopter design and manufacturing, we poked around Advanced Tactic’s website a bit and found another one of their projects, the Transformer Panther sUAS — a miniature version of the Black Knight, designed as a small unmanned aircraft system that is also capable of land and sea use.

Stick around after the break to see them in action — and let us know what you think!

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