Many Gave Their Lives For This Cargo Bike To Be Re-Born

September 4, 2014 by Rich Bremer 27 Comments

Cargo bikes are very specialized and you don’t see too many of them out on the streets because of that fact. Being uncommon also means they’re rather expensive if you wanted to buy a new one. Like any hardcore bike DIYer, [Mike] got around this issue by building his own out of a couple old bikes. His goal is to show car-dependent people that you can get away with biking most of the time, even if you need to move some stuff from place to place. The build process for this monster was so involved that it required two pages of documentation; Part 1 and Part 2!

There are a few types of cargo bikes. There is the trike (seen often in regular or reverse trike varieties) with a bin between the 2 adjacent wheels. Two-wheeled options are usually either front loaders (the storage area between the rider and the front wheel) or those with rear racks. Mike’s bike is the latter.

He started with a 26″ wheeled bike that was already a Frankenbike of sorts, even the frame alone was a conglomeration of two separate bikes! To start, the rear wheel and chain was discarded. A kid’s mountain bike with 20″ wheels was disassembled and the head tube was cut off. The top and down tubes of the smaller bike were notched so that they fit nicely with the seat tube of the larger bicycle. The two frames were then welded together along with several pieces of support to make sure the bike stayed together through the rigors of riding. The rear rack is made up of some old bike frame tubes and some metal from the frame of a sofa that was being thrown out. Nothing goes to waste at Mike’s place! The 20″ kids bike rear wheel already had a 5 speed cassette so that was a no brainner to re-install. In the end, Mike has a bike that cost him zero dollars and shows the world it is possible to build a utilitarian bike and reduce your dependence on automobiles.

If cargo bikes are your thing, you may be interested in this up-cycled cargo bike, this one with a huge front bucket or maybe even this nifty bike trailer.

Levitating Speaker Plays Back Eerie Recordings

September 4, 2014 by James Hobson 50 Comments

Let’s face it, levitating anything is pretty fascinating — especially when you think there should be wires. This project puts a new spin on magnetic levitation by using a PID controller to levitate a speaker while it plays music!

It uses the standard levitation setup — an electromagnet, a permanent magnet, and a hall effect sensor. A microcontroller implements the PID system, varying the current supplied to the electromagnet to keep the speaker floating at just the right height. Music is wirelessly transmitted to the speaker via Bluetooth, but unfortunately the speaker’s power is not. It features a small lithium ion battery which has a run-time of around 5 hours before it has to be recharged manually.

As you’ll notice in the following video, having a floating speaker has a pretty interesting effect — especially when it starts spinning.

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Scribble And The Failings Of Tech Journalism

September 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 79 Comments

The Scribble Pen, you may remember, is a project by bay area startup Scribble Technology that puts a color sensor and multiple ink reservoirs in a pen. We’ve talked about it before, right after they cancelled their Kickstarter campaign after netting 366% of their original goal.

Yes, they cancelled their campaign after being successfully funded. To Kickstarter’s credit, the Scribble team was asked to provide a better video of the pen demonstrating its capabilities. The team pulled the plug on the campaign, saying they’ll be back soon.

Here is the new campaign. The attentive reader will notice the new campaign is not a Kickstarter project; instead, it is a Tilt campaign. What is Tilt? It’s a platform that allows for crowdfunding, fundraising, pooling, and other ‘many wallets into one’ Internet-based projects. It’s actually not a bad idea if you’re raising funds for a charity or the Jamaican bobsled team. For crowdfunded product development, caveat emptor doesn’t quite cover it.

With more than $200,000 in the bank, you would think the questions asked in many comments on the old Kickstarter would be answered. They were. Scribble put up a new video showing the pen drawing different colors of ink on a piece of paper. This video was faked. [Ch00f] at Drop Kicker took apart the new video frame by frame and found these – ahem – scribbles were inserted in post production. The video has since been replaced on the Tilt campaign page, but evidence of Scribble deleting comments questioning this exists.

Any idea of the Scribble pen being real has been put to bed. Kickstarter threatened to remove the campaign if a better video could not be produced within 24 hours. The Scribble team cancelled their campaign to regroup and put together a better video. In two weeks, the team was only able to produce a faked video. The Scribble pen does not exist.

Case closed, you might think. Digging into videos frame by frame will tell you a lot, but it won’t give you the full picture. We know what happened with the Scribble pen, but very little about the who, why, and how this huge, glaringly obvious fraud occurred. Before we get to that, hold on to your hats – it only gets shadier from here on out.

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Ping Pong For The IT Office

September 4, 2014 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

The office environment over at [Adam]’s place of employment has recently become one of the many IT-related offices with a ping pong table, a cliché that he readily points out. However, [Adam] and the other folks at the office decided to step up their game a little bit by making this automated ping pong table.

The table first keeps track of the players with specialized RFID tags that are placed in the handle of the paddles. The paddles are unique to each player, and when they are swiped past a reader on the table the scoring system registers the players at the table.

Small capacitive touch sensors on the underside of the table allow the players to increment their score when a point is made. The scoreboard is a simple but a very well-polished interface that has audio cues for each point. The system is also able to keep track of the winners and the overall records are tracked, allowing for office-wide rankings.

This is the best table-related game hack since the internet-connected foosball table, and should be welcome in any office for some extra break room fun at work! All of the code is available on the project site.

Ask Hackaday: Who Wants An All DC House?

September 4, 2014 by Will Sweatman 268 Comments

Sometimes when working on a righteous hack, we get goosebumps while watching our code execute faster than we could ever possibly comprehend. Seeing the pixels of the LCD come alive, hearing the chatter of relays and the hum of fans…it’s an amazing thing what electricity can do. And it is equally amazing when you realize that it all started one hundred and thirty five years ago, when [Thomas Edison] changed the world forever with the first practical electric light bulb.

That bulb was lit by a Direct Current – the same thing that runs the computer you’re reading this article on. The same thing that runs many of the hacks you read about here on Hack a Day, and almost all electronic devices in your house. But somewhere in the mix must exist a device that changes the Alternating Current from your wall outlet to the needed DC. Why? Why is it that we transport electricity as AC only to convert it to DC in our homes? You might answer:

“This argument was played out in the War of Currents back in the 1880’s.”

Indeed, it was. But that was a long time ago. Technology has changed. Changed so much to the point that the arguments in the War of Currents might no longer be valid. Join us after the break, where we rehash these arguments, and explore the feasibility of an all DC environment.

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Extrinsic Motivation: An Open, Modular Effects Pedal

September 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

Microcontrollers and Arduinos are cool and all, but dealing only in the digital domain does have its limitations. In fact, most of your electron heroes didn’t begin their electronics career by blinking pins on digital outputs; they were solely in the analog domain with their radios and, yes, guitar effects pedals.

[Josh]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize was by far the most analog project of the entire contest. It’s an open source effects pedal that takes advantage of the modular design of the most popular pedals in history.

A good number of the famous circuits for turning an electric guitar into an aural experimentation are based on small circuit modules, packaged and repackaged again until the desired tone is achieved. [Josh] wants to pack these modules separately on different boards, specifically shields, although no Arduino is used, so any sound can be created.

Already [Josh] has done some research to determine what circuits and circuit modules to clone. The list should be fairly familiar to anyone with a pedalboard – Tube Screamers, Fuzz Faces, Big Muffs, and Phase 90s are at the top of the list. He may not get to the complicated digital effects like pitch shifters and digital delays, but it’s still a great project for experimentation.

You can see [Josh]’s project video below.

This project is an official entry to The Hackaday Prize that sadly didn’t make the quarterfinal selection. It’s still a great project, and worthy of a Hackaday post on its own.

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Tricking Tinder With A 3D Printed Finger

September 3, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 19 Comments

Online matchmaking has taken the internet by storm as mobile dating applications like Tinder attempt to take the work out of locating a soul mate. As of mid-2014, Tinder is rumored to have around 10 million daily active users making it a prime target for automated spam bots. The real spammers surely use coded attacks, but this robot is a fun example of a hardware-based attack. [Andrew] built it to be an automatic heart-shaped, button presser.

The device began as a single finger robot-hand project that was inspired by ‘InMoov’, which as their website states is “the first life-size humanoid robot you can 3D print and animate.” An Arduino Uno and servo motor laid the foundation for the system. After which, the joints of the 3D printed finger were assembled in place so that a touchscreen stylus could be attached. Once coded, the little robot was able to ‘like’ a new profile every 4 seconds. This adds up to approximately 900 likes per hour.

The project is cute, and shows one way that fake profiles can be elevated on the Tinder platform. An article written on Symantec’s blog describes a few other instances of spammers flirting with you via the Android app. This post is a continuation of an article released a year prior, yet Tinder has not addressed the issues relating to fake profiles since then.

Let’s try to focus in on the good. With a bit of additional ingenuity, this device could be transformed into a love searching robot that could choose between people. Get a camera hooked up with a face-recognition program, and add some user preferences so that the robot isn’t just hitting ‘like’ over and over, and we might be able to get some interesting research done. Still, it feels like it would be better to go meet people face-to-face.

Check out the video of the bot in action after the break, then let us know what other silly things you could do by targeting different apps.

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