Day: November 3, 2014

Checking Email With The ESP8266

November 3, 2014 by 29 Comments

Ever so slowly, everyone’s favorite WiFi adapter is making its way into Internet-enabled projects. [jimeer01] created a device that reads the subject and sender lines from the latest email in his inbox and displays it on an LCD using the ESP8266 WiFi chip.

[jimeer] is using a ByPic for writing to the LCD and querying an inbox through an ESP8266 module. The ByPic is a board built around the BV_Basic firmware, stuffing a PIC microcontroller in an Arduino form factor and giving it a BASIC interpreter. Because this board isn’t ‘compile and flash’ like an Arduino, it’s perfectly suited for changing WiFi configurations and IMAP server credentials on the fly.

The device grabs the latest email in an inbox and displays the date, sender, and subject on the display. After scrolling through those lines, the PIC hits the ESP8266 to query the server again, grabbing the latest email, and repeating the whole process again, all without needing to connect the device to a computer. Video below.

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Low-Voltage Tube Amp Is Great For Beginners

November 3, 2014 by 39 Comments

If you ever wanted to build your own tube amplifier but you were intimidated by working with high voltages, [Marcel]’s low-voltage tube amp design might spark your interest. The design operates with a B+ (plate) voltage of only 40v, making it less intimidating and dangerous than many other amps that operate over 300V. It’s also incredibly easy to build—the whole design uses only 11 components.

The amplifier is designed around the ECL82 tube, which includes both a triode and a pentode in one package. The ECL82 is practically an amplifier in a tube: it was designed for low-cost electronics like record players that needed to be as simple as possible. The triode in the ECL82 is used as a pre-amplifier for the incoming signal. The pentode is controlled with the pre-amplified signal and acts as a power amplifier.

[Marcel]’s amplifier also uses a PY88 tube rectifier instead of semiconductor diodes, making it an entirely silicon-free design. Although [Marcel] hasn’t posted up detailed build instructions yet, his simple schematic should be all you need to get started. If you want some more background information about tube amps but you don’t know where to start, check out our post on basic tube amp design from earlier this year.

Stereo Vision And Depth Mapping With Two Raspi Camera Modules

November 3, 2014 by 16 Comments

The Raspberry Pi has a port for a camera connector, allowing it to capture 1080p video and stream it to a network without having to deal with the craziness of webcams and the improbability of capturing 1080p video over USB. The Raspberry Pi compute module is a little more advanced; it breaks out two camera connectors, theoretically giving the Raspberry Pi stereo vision and depth mapping. [David Barker] put a compute module and two cameras together making this build a reality.

The use of stereo vision for computer vision and robotics research has been around much longer than other methods of depth mapping like a repurposed Kinect, but so far the hardware to do this has been a little hard to come by. You need two cameras, obviously, but the software techniques are well understood in the relevant literature.

[David] connected two cameras to a Pi compute module and implemented three different versions of the software techniques: one in Python and NumPy, running on an 3GHz x86 box, a version in C, running on x86 and the Pi’s ARM core, and another in assembler for the VideoCore on the Pi. Assembly is the way to go here – on the x86 platform, Python could do the parallax computations in 63 seconds, and C could manage it in 56 milliseconds. On the Pi, C took 1 second, and the VideoCore took 90 milliseconds. This translates to a frame rate of about 12FPS on the Pi, more than enough for some very, very interesting robotics work.

There are some better pictures of what this setup can do over on the Raspi blog. We couldn’t find a link to the software that made this possible, so if anyone has a link, drop it in the comments.

Hackaday’s 48-Hour Tokyo Speedrun

November 3, 2014 by 29 Comments

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed,” goes the clichéd [William Gibson] quote. Growing up on all the Cyberpunk literature and spending a more-than-healthy amount of time obsessing over [Fred Gallagher’s] Megatokyo series, I always imagined Japan to be at the very tail of this distribution. The place where the Future lives. Though it has been decades since the Bubble burst, and there’s no way this could still be the case, there was something romantic about believing it just might be. Thus, I opted for keeping the dream alive and never actually visited the place.

Not until a few weeks ago — [Bilke], one of our crazy sysadmin guys that keeps Hackaday.io alive, made me do it. He found these cheap tickets from LA, and the next thing you know – we were flying out for a 48-hours-in-Tokyo weekend. With no time to prepare, we reached out to [Akiba] from Freaklabs and [Emery] from Tokyo Hackerspace for some tips. By the time we landed, emails were waiting for us, with our full schedule completely worked out. It’s great to know that no matter where you are, there’s always a friendly local hacker willing to help.

Past the immigration, we took the JR Narita Express line into to the City that Friday evening. From there we grabbed a taxi because we couldn’t understand a word in katakana but then we hopped the JR Yamanote Metro line once we had figured things out. We checked out all the major places we had ever heard of (Shinjuku, Shibuya, Roppongi, Ginza…) because the jet lag was not letting us sleep anyway.

Sometime way past midnight, it hit me – Future Shock. But this was the kind I never expected…

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The Tale Of Two Wearable Game Boys

November 3, 2014 by 9 Comments

We’re well past the time when Halloween costume submissions stop hitting the tip line, but like ever year we’re expecting a few to trickle in until at least Thanksgiving. Remember, kids: documentation is the worst part of any project.

[Troy] sent us a link to his wearable Game Boy costume. It’s exactly what you think it is: an old-school brick Game Boy that [Troy] wore around to a few parties last weekend. This one has a twist, though. There’s a laptop in there, making this Game Boy playable.

The build started off as a large cardboard box [Troy] covered with a scaled-up image of everyone’s favorite use of AA batteries. The D-pad and buttons were printed out at a local hackerspace, secured to a piece of plywood, and connected to an Arduino Due. The screen, in all its green and black glory, was taken from an old netbook. It was a widescreen display, but with a bezel around the display the only way to tell it’s not original is from the backlight.

Loaded up with Pokemon Blue, the large-scale Game Boy works like it should, enthralling guests at wherever [Troy] ended up last Friday. It also looks like a rather quick build, and something we could easily put together when we remember it next October 30th.

[Troy] wasn’t the only person with this idea. A few hours before he sent in a link to his wearable Game Boy costume, [Shawn] sent in his completely unrelated but extremely similar project. It’s a wearable brick Game Boy, a bit bigger, playing Tetris instead of Pokemon.

[Shawn]’s build uses a cardboard box overlaid with a printout of a scaled-up Game Boy. Again, a laptop serves as the emulator and screen, input is handled by a ‘duino clone, and the buttons are slightly similar, but made out of cardboard.

Both are brilliant builds, adding a huge Game Boy to next year’s list of possible Halloween costume ideas. Videos of both below.

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The Hackaday Prize: The Hacker Behind The First Tricorder

November 3, 2014 by 38 Comments

Smartphones are the most common expression of [Gene Roddneberry]’s dream of a small device packed with sensors, but so far, the suite of sensors in the latest and greatest smartphone are only used to tell Uber where to pick you up, or upload pics to an Instagram account. It’s not an ideal situation, but keep in mind the Federation of the 24th century was still transitioning to a post-scarcity economy; we still have about 400 years until angel investors, startups, and accelerators are rendered obsolete.

Until then, [Peter Jansen] has dedicated a few years of his life to making the Tricorder of the Star Trek universe a reality. It’s his entry for The Hackaday Prize, and made it to the finals selection, giving [Peter] a one in five chance of winning a trip to space.

[Peter]’s entry, the Open Source Science Tricorder or the Arducorder Mini, is loaded down with sensors. With the right software, it’s able to tell [Peter] the health of leaves, how good the shielding is on [Peter]’s CT scanner, push all the data to the web, and provide a way to sense just about anything happening in the environment. You can check out [Peter]’s video for The Hackaday Prize finals below, and an interview after that.

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IPhone-Controlled Daft Punk Helmet

November 3, 2014 by 4 Comments

A few years ago, [Marc] had access to a really big, very expensive 3D printer. Daft Punk helmets were – and still are – extremely cool builds, so with a bit of modeling, [Marc] and his friend [Alex] put together a model and printed out a Daft Punk [Thomas] helmet with the intention of turning it into the keystone of a great costume. A few things got in the way, and the [Thomas] helmet was left on a shelf for a few years. Fast forward to a few months ago and [Marc] took up the project again. The result is a 3D printed Daft Punk helmet loaded up with 320 WS2811 LEDs.

The 3D printed helmet was modeled well and printed in polycarbonate, but with any extrusion-based printer, there will be ridges and layers to sand, fill, prime and paint. This task was delegated to another friend, [Shaggy], while [Marc] got busy on the electronics.

The LEDs for the visor and ‘earmuffs’ are WS2811 LEDs, but not the SMD versions we’re so used to seeing. These are 8mm through-hole LEDs mounted in a lasercut piece of acrylic. Control of the LEDs is done with a Teensy 3.1 with [Paul Stoffregen]’s OctoWS2811 library. With the matrix wired up, batteries installed, WiFi capability added, and the helmet painted (not chromed; that will probably happen later, though), [Marc] had a copy of the [Thomas] helmet controllable through an iPhone.

If you’d like to check out more of [Marc]’s work, we posted something on his RGB LED suit and pneumatic Star Trek doors a few years ago.

Video below.

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