Month: May 2014

10,000 Hackers

May 28, 2014 by 8 Comments

 

Our little community might not be so very little. Today the 10,000th Hacker registered an account on Hackaday.io! You may remember that we just launched our project hosting site at The Gathering on January 21st and made it public in February. There were a few pre-Alpha testers already registered, but still, that’s 10k people in four months. Why? Because hacking is awesome and it’s made better if you show off what you do!

Of course we’re not anywhere near done yet (technically we’re still in Alpha). We want help shaping the existing features and developing new ones. Share your ideas as comments on the Feedback project; we read those.

Hackaday.io is also the gathering point for The Hackaday Prize. Give the interface a whirl, contribute to open hardware, and win a trip into space or hundreds of other prizes. What are you waiting for?

Oh, one last thing, if you’re wondering what 10,000 Hackers looks like, we have a Jolly Wrencher for every one of you after the break.

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Sense & Spray Air Freshener Says Cheese

May 28, 2014 by 4 Comments

manual-release

What happens when you take a remote controlled tarantula, an automatic air freshener, some PVC tube and a mechanical trigger release for a camera? Well, it’s definitely a hack, that’s for sure — you get a remote camera shutter release!

[Michael] loves his Panasonic LX7, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have a trigger release! It does however except a hot shoe adapter to use with a manual release. All [Michael] had to do now was make it remote controlled.

If you’ve ever taken apart an automatic air freshener you know that they are a treasure trove of parts, ripe for the hacking. Specifically, they have a very nice linear actuator which can be used for all kinds of fun things. In this case, it works great for pressing the manual shutter release cable. The next step is controlling it. To do this, [Michael] found a cheap RC toy, a $10 stuffed tarantula oddly enough — By taking it apart he was able to make use of its controller to turn on the air freshener, effectively turning his contraption into a remote controlled shutter release.

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Interview: Inventing The Unix “sudo” Command

May 28, 2014 by 114 Comments

It was just one of these nights. We were sitting at the O’Neil’s San Mateo Pub, taking a break after a long day at the Maker Faire. Hackaday was hosting an informal drink-up and a steady stream of colorful characters has just started flowing in. That’s when we met [Robert Coggeshall].

XKCD comic #149
[xkcd, 149]
It started off as a normal discussion – he runs Small Batch Assembly and does a lot of interesting things in the maker space. Then he brought up a fascinating detail – “Oh, did you know I also co-invented sudo back in the 80’s?”

If you ever did as much as touch a Unix system, you’ll know this is a big deal. What came as an even bigger surprise was that something like sudo had to be “invented” in the first place. When thinking about the base Unix toolkit, there is always this feeling that it all emerged from some primordial soup of ideas deep inside of Bell Labs, brought to life by the infinite wisdom of [Ken Thompson] and the rest of the gang. Turns out that wasn’t always the case. We couldn’t miss asking [Bob] for an interview, and he told us how it all came about…

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OpenExposer, The DIY SLA Printer

May 28, 2014 by 25 Comments

printer

Precisely applied ultraviolet light is an amazing thing. You can expose PCBs, print 3D objects, and even make a laser light show. Over on the Projects site, [Mario] is building a machine that does all of these things. It’s called the OpenExposer, and even if it doesn’t win the Hackaday Prize, it’s a great example of how far you can go with some salvaged electronics and a 3D printer.

The basic plan of the OpenExposer is a 3D printer with a small slit cut into the bed, and a build platform that moves in the Z axis. The bed contains a small UV laser and a polygon mirror ripped from a dead tree laser printer. By moving the bed in the Y direction, [Mario] shoot his laser anywhere on an XY plane. Put a tank filled with UV curing resin on the bed, and he has an SLA printer. Put a mounting bracket on the bed, and double-sided PCBs are a cinch.

The frame is made of 3D printed parts and standard RepRap rods, with the only hard to source component being the polygonal mirror. These can be sourced from scrounged laser printers, but there’s probably some company in China that will sell them bulk. The age of cheap SLA printers is dawning, friends. Video below, github here.

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A Smart Clothes Dryer

May 28, 2014 by 52 Comments

dryer6 Here’s a question that will rack your brain: does your clothes dryer stop when the clothes are dry? It seems if you have a machine that guzzles power for one single purpose, you’d like it to stop when its job is done, or for the sake of convenience, keep going until the clothes are dry. Temperature and humidity sensors are cheap, and if you don’t have an auto sensing clothes dryer, a DIY smart clothes dryer seems both efficient and convenient. [Editor from the future: link rot, seems to be here now.]

[Andy] figured when clothes are dry, they stop emitting moisture. Based on that premise, he could monitor the operation of a clothes dryer and either shut off the machine or send a message that it’s time to take the clothes out. It’s a simple enough idea, and with an Arduino and a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, it was pretty easy to put together.

The clothes dryer used for this experiment was a self-ventilating model that doesn’t vent to the outside. Instead, it condenses the water in your towels and jeans into a tub to be emptied by hand later. This might introduce a little error into tests, but [Andy] did come up with a way to mount the temperature sensor without modifying his dryer in any way. From the initial data, the ventless dryer might be introducing a little experimental error, but it’s still too good of an idea to not try out with a traditional dryer that vents to the outside. Here’s the code should you want to try this yourself.

Mechanical Clock Relies On Marbles To Tick

May 28, 2014 by 25 Comments

As fun as micro-controllers and RTCs are, sometimes it’s truly fascinating to see a completely mechanical clock. Using only gravity this Pendulum Marble Clock (German version) by [Turnvater Janosch] runs for 12 hours at a time and has an accuracy error of less than one second per day!

It works by raising a 2.5kg weight which sinks approximately 1 meter during that 12 hours. A series of steel ball bearings count the minutes, 5 minute increments, and hours. Every minute one ball is released on the track — when the track fills up, trap doors open releasing the balls to the next level. The first level is minutes, the second, 5 minutes, and the third, hours.

The entire thing is made out of wood, plastic gears, brass and steel wire, and an old flat iron (although we’re really not too sure what that’s used for…)

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A Huge, Lightweight Wooden Quadrotor

May 27, 2014 by 15 Comments

quad_1

[Robert] once built a quadcopter frame by sawing laminate floor tile. It worked, we’re taking the lack of pictures of this build as evidence of how ugly it was. His latest design used a much better looking material – laser cut plywood – and the finished product is very strong and lightweight, even compared to commercial frames made with glass or carbon fiber and epoxy.

Although the design went smoothly thanks to some Solidworks skills, actually cutting the frame from 3mm birch ply resulted in a few issues. The cheap laser cutter used for cutting include some bottom of the line software called LaserWorksV5. There is a kerf compensation feature, called ‘sew compensation’ in the software’s native Chinglish. The software would always crash whenever it tried to calculate the compensation for circles. [Robert] spent two hours figuring this problem out, and in the end needed to break out a piece of sand paper to get a nice interlocking fit.

The completed frame bolts together without any glue at all, and the best part about it is the weight – only 167 grams. Compare that to a similarly sized glass fiber frame, and [Robert]’s shaved at least 200 grams off his finished build.