TRINKET EDC CONTEST DRAWING #4 RESULTS

December 23, 2014 by Adam Fabio No comments

The fourth of five random drawings for Hackaday’s Trinket Everyday Carry Contest was held tonight. The winner is [davish] with his entry, Trinket Watch.

[davish] loves the current crop of smartwatches, but he wants one he can truly call his own. He’s using the Pro Trinket along with an Adafruit 1.3″ OLED for display duties. That little OLED can show a lot more than just numbers though. [davish] already has Adafruit’s logo demo running on the device. Trinket Watch is going to start out as a simple Arduino coded “dumbwatch”. After the basics of time and date are out of the way, [davish] hopes to add a Bluetooth module and turn Trinket Watch into a full-fledged smartwatch.

We hope [davish] enjoys his new Cordwood Puzzle from The Hackaday Store. No jigsaws here, cordwood is a puzzle that involves solder! If you get a piece wrong, it’s time to break out that solder wick and fix your mistake. The puzzle is built using the cordwood assembly technique which was popular in the 1950’s and 1960s. We’re not kidding about it being a puzzle either – there are no instructions for this kit! [davish] will know he’s got it right when all 3 LEDs light up.

If you didn’t win this week, all is not lost, you still have one more chance to win a random drawing! Our next drawing will be on 12/30/2014 at 9pm EST. The prize will be a Teensy 3.1 and audio adapter as a prize. To be eligible you need to submit your project as an official entry and publish at least one project log during the week.

The main contest entry window closes on January 2, 2015 – but don’t wait for the last minute! Hit the contest page and build some awesome wearable or pocketable electronics!

Real-Time Thermal Projection Saves Your Tastebuds From The Hot Stuff

December 23, 2014 by Sonya Vasquez 18 Comments

With another wave of holiday parties about to land on our doorstep, we still haven’t found a great way to stop scalding our tongues each time [Uncle Dave] pours us an enticing cup of boiling cocoa.

Thankfully, [Ken] has both you and your holiday guests covered with a clever trick that takes the data from a FLIR ONE and projects a heat profile onto the surface it’s observing. Here, [Ken] has superimposed his FLIR ONE data onto his kitchen table, and he’s able to visualize 2D heat profiles in near-real-time.

If you haven’t started quantifying yourself recently (and what are you waiting for?), the FLIR ONE is yet another opportunity to help you become more aware of your surroundings than you are now. It’s a thermal camera attachment for your iPhone, allowing you to see into the infrared band and look at the world in terms of heat. We’ve covered the FLIR ONE before, and we’ve seen ways of making it both clearer and more hacker-friendly.

As we tip our hats to [Ken], we’d say he’s a generous fellow. This hack is a clever inversion of the normal use case where you might whip out your FLIR-ONE-enabled iPhone and warn your cousins not to try the hot chocolate for a few more minutes. With [Ken’s] solution, the data is right there on your condiments and in plain sight of everyone, not just for you with your sweet, Star-Trek-augmented iPhone.

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HamRadioTweets Gets The Word Out

December 23, 2014 by Rick Osgood 24 Comments

In times of crisis, or extreme government control, it can be difficult to spread critical information to people who can help. A good example of this was during the Arab Spring in 2011. When your Internet connection is taken away, it can feel as though all is lost. Unless you have a ham radio, that is.

For many people the thought of ham radio conjures up images of old guys twisting knobs listening to static, but it’s actually come a long way in our modern digital age. For example, you can now send tweets via ham radio. This project was actually started in 2011 by [Bruce Sutherland]. The Egyptian government had shut down the country’s Internet access after citizens were posting information about the extreme violence they were facing. [Bruce] wanted a way to help others get the word out, and he came up with HamRadioTweets. This system allows a user to send tweets via ham radio.

The system actually piggybacks off of a ham radio service called APRS. This service is most often associated with GPS tracking systems, such as those found in nearspace balloons, but it can also be used to send simple text messages over the air. APRS works thanks to the vast network of receiving stations setup all around the world. These stations can receive messages and then re-transmit them, greatly extending the reach of the original transmitter. Some of them are even hooked up to the Internet to get the messages to go distances that would be extremely difficult and unreliable by traditional means.

[Bruce’s] system hooked into the Internet component and watched for messages being sent specifically to “TWITR”. The Python based system would then read these messages and re-transmit them over Twitter. The project died out a while back after Twitter updated their API. Now, it’s been rebuilt on Ruby by [Harold Giddings]. The project website was handed over to [Harold] and he is currently maintaining it. Hopefully you’ll never need to use this software, but if the time comes you will be glad it’s available. You can watch [Harold] bounce an APRS message off of the International Space Station and on to Twitter in the video below. Continue reading “HamRadioTweets Gets The Word Out” →

Arduino Plays White Tiles On Your Mobile Touchscreen

December 23, 2014 by Adam Fabio 13 Comments

Like many mobile gamers, [Daniel] has found himself caught up by the addictive “White Tiles” game. Rather than play the game himself though, [Daniel] decided to write his own automatic White Tiles player. While this hack has been pulled off before, it’s never been well documented. [Daniel] used knowledge he gleaned on Hackaday and Hackaday.io to achieve his hack.

The basic problem is sensing white vs black tiles and activating the iPad’s capacitive touch screen. On the sensing end, [Daniel] could have used phototransistors, but it turned out that simple CdS cells, or photoresistors, were fast enough in this application. Activating the screen proved to be a bit harder. [Daniel] initially tried copper tape tied to transistors, but found they wouldn’t reliably trigger the screen. He switched over to relays, and that worked perfectly. We’re guessing that changing the wire length causes enough of a capacitance change to cause the screen to detect a touch.

The final result is a huge success, as [Daniel’s] Arduino-based player tears through the classic game in only 3.9 seconds! Nice work [Daniel]!

Click past the break to see [Daniel’s] device at work, and to see a video of him explaining his creation.

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Retrotechtacular: Pascal Got Frustrated At Tax Time, Too

December 23, 2014 by Kristina Panos 13 Comments

While necessity is frequently the mother of invention, annoyance often comes into play as well. This was the case with [Blaise Pascal], who as a teenager was tasked with helping his father calculate the taxes owed by the citizens of Rouen, France. [Pascal] tired of moving the beads back and forth on his abacus and was sure that there was some easier way of counting all those livres, sols, and deniers. In the early 1640s, he devised a mechanical calculator that would come to be known by various names: Pascal’s calculator, arithmetic machine, and eventually, Pascaline.

The instrument is made up of input dials that are connected to output drums through a series of gears. Each digit of a number is entered on its own input dial. This is done by inserting a stylus between two spokes and turning the dial clockwise toward a metal stop, a bit like dialing on a rotary phone. The output is shown in a row of small windows across the top of the machine. Pascal made some fifty different prototypes of the Pascaline before he turned his focus toward philosophy. Some have more dials and corresponding output wheels than others, but the operation and mechanics are largely the same throughout the variations.

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graphic of man with cellphone linking to cell tower

Ask Hackaday: Stopping The Stingray

December 23, 2014 by Will Sweatman 119 Comments

There’s pandemonium on the streets. You look down from your 4 story apartment and see hundreds of people marching and chanting. You pick up your phone and call your buddy, expecting it to link up to the nearest cell tower which will route your call to where it needs to go. Instead, without your knowledge, you link to a tricked-out police surveillance truck a few blocks away. They intercept your call and listen to the conversation in hopes of tracking the protest.

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Rewritable ROM For The Mac Plus

December 23, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

The Macintosh Classic – a small all-in-one computer with a 9″ monochrome screen – was one of the more interesting machines ever released by Apple. It was the company’s first venture into a cost-reduced computer, and the first Macintosh to sell for less than $1000. Released in 1990, its list of features were nearly identical to the Macintosh Plus, released four years earlier. The Classic also had an interesting feature not found in any other Mac. It could boot a full OS, in this case System 6.0.3, by holding down a series of keys during boot. This made it an exceptional diskless workstation. It was cheap, and all you really needed was a word processor or spreadsheet program on a 1.44 MB floppy to do real work.

[Steve] over at Big Mess O’ Wires had the same idea as the Apple engineers back in the late 80s. Take a Macintosh Plus, give it a bit more ROM, and put an OS in there. [Steve] is going a bit farther than those Apple engineers could have dreamed. He’s built a rewritable ROM disk for the Mac Plus, turning this ancient computer into a completely configurable diskless workstation.

The build replaces the two stock ROM chips with an adapter board filled with 29F040B Flash chips. They’re exactly what you would expect – huge, old PDIPs loaded up with Flash instead of the slightly more difficult to reprogram EEPROM. Because of the additional space, two additional wires needed to connected to the CPU. The result is a full Megabyte of Flash available to the Macintosh at boot, in a computer where the normal removable disk drive capacity was only 800kB.

The hardware adapter for stuffing these flash chips inside a Mac Plus was made by [Rob Braun], while the software part of this build came from [Rob] and [Doug Brown]. They studied how the Macintosh Classic’s ROM disk driver worked, and [Rob Braun] developed a stand-alone ROM disk driver with a new pirate-themed startup icon. [Steve] then dug in and created an old-school Mac app in Metrowerks Codewarrior to write new values to the ROM. Anything from Shufflepuck to Glider, to a copy of System 7.1 can be placed on this ROM disk.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen ROM boot disks for old Macs. There was a lot of spare address space floating around in the old Mac II-series computers, and [Doug Brown] found a good use for it. Some of these old computers had optional ROM SIMM. You can put up to 8 Megabytes in the address space reserved for the ROM, and using a similar ROM disk driver, [Doug] can put an entire system in ROM, or make the startup chime exceptionally long.