Tiny Improvised Grinder/Saw Packs A Punch

March 12, 2014 by Kristina Panos 29 Comments

They say necessity is the mother of invention. Sometimes the necessity is simply avoidance of unpleasant tasks such as cutting down 3500 header pins by hand. [Nixieguy] and his coworkers were faced with 50 prototype boards bearing 70 overly long pins apiece. He saved them from cutting them all down by hand by making a tiny improvised circular saw/grinder.

[Nixieguy] started by laser-cutting a combination tool holder and grinding platform. His laser failed before he could fashion a guard to keep the pin bits out of the motor or cut all the pieces he had in mind. The grinder is made from a 10A brushless RC motor, a motor driver, and a servo tester. [Nixieguy] machined an adapter to connect the disc to the shaft.

The transformer is there to hold the thing down during use since it’s so lightweight. He’s wearing two pairs of gloves because the pin cuttings were hot enough to sear skin. [Nixieguy] is planning on a complete redesign including a motor guard and the ability to adjust the depth. Maybe he can turn it into a chainsaw, maybe not.

An Open Source IPad Display Adapter

March 12, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 45 Comments

Those fancy 2048×1536 pixel resolution displays found in the iPad 3 and 4 can be used for much more than high def Candy Crush and Netflix viewing. [Freddie] over in Southampton, UK built his own adapter to connect these high-resolution LCD panels to anything with a DisplayPort connection. It’s called OSCAR, and it’s the open source way to add a whole lot of pixels in a second (or third, or fourth….) monitor.

The LCD panels found in the iPad 3 and 4 don’t use the usual LVDS connection found in just about every other LCD panel ever made. It uses an extension of the DisplayPort protocol, meaning any graphics card with one of these ports already does the heavy lifting for this panel. The only other thing that’s needed is an adapter to control the power and backlight, which is easily handled by an ATMega32U4. This makes OSCAR Arduino compatible, making it easy to add sensors and USB playthings.

OSCAR is available on Kickstarter for £65 (~$100 USD) for the board itself. Adding to that, you’ll need to grab an iPad retina display through the usual channels for about $65. Not exactly cheap, but try finding another better-than-1080p display for that price.

Prop Replica Tesseract Case Has Some Serious Tech Inside

March 12, 2014 by James Hobson 4 Comments

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[Dustin Evans] is a big fan of the recent Avengers movies — heck, we are too! So he decided to make this awesome Tesseract Case prop replica!

Tesser-what? A tesseract, or cubic prism is a geometric shape that is technically a four-dimensional hypercube — in the Avenger’s movie, it is an incredibly powerful and unstable alien energy source.

To make the replica, [Dustin] picked up a cheap aluminum tool case from the hardware store, took some measurements and began designing the inside of it using SketchUp. He’s crammed in an Arduino with a spectrum shield, a BlueSmirf Bluetooth modem, a Raspberry Pi, a 7″ LCD, speakers and an amp, a WiFi card for the Pi, and a few strips of Neopixels. It is running Raspbian with a stand-alone version of XBMC, which means using AllCast he can wirelessly control the box from a phone or tablet — now all he’s missing is a mini-generator that can put out a few million watts!

Continue reading “Prop Replica Tesseract Case Has Some Serious Tech Inside” →

New Version Of Energia Supports Wolverine And Connected

March 11, 2014 by Nick Conn 14 Comments

Energia Update There is something to be said about how easy it is to write Arduino code. For those of who you are big fans of the MSP430 and Texas Instrument’s LaunchPad series, an upcoming release of Energia brings Arduino style coding to the two newest member of the LaunchPad family: the TivaC Connected LaunchPad EK-TM4C1294XL and Wolverine FRAM LaunchPad MSP-EXP430FR5969LP.

“Energia is an open-source electronics prototyping platform … with the goal to bring the Wiring and Arduino framework to the Texas Instruments MSP430 based LaunchPad.” The newest release of Energia is exciting for the sole reason that the new TivaC Connected LaunchPad and Wolverine FRAM LaunchPad are supported. The TivaC Connected LaunchPad is a $20 development board for TI’s low-power ARM processors that has Ethernet connectivity. The MSP430 at the heart of the Wolverine FRAM LaunchPad uses up to 250x less power than flash based MCUs at low speeds in addition to many other cool benefits.

Be sure to keep an eye out for the new version of Energia, it should be arriving sometime next week. Now is a better time than ever to try out the Tiva C or the MSP430 MCUs!

LED Throwies Turn Statues Into Heart Attack Risks

March 11, 2014 by James Hobson 42 Comments

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[Mike] has just put a new spin on LED throwies — turning innocent statues into scary possessed demons of the night. He calls them Statueyes, and while it’s not quite vandalism, you might still cause a public disturbance.

If you’re not familiar, magnetic LEDs throwies are a fun little way to add some light to the city at night. They’re a little bit wasteful (sometimes you can’t retrieve them), but so cheap to make it’s sometimes worth it. Depending on what you’re using them for they can open up a whole world of possibilities — like this location tracking augmented reality using IR LED throwies!

Anyway, the main difference with [Mike’s] take on the project is he’s using home-made play-dough which allows him to stick these creepy eyes on non-metallic statues. The Play-Doh in question has an interesting ingredients list: flour, water, salt, vegetable oil and… cream of tartar? It’s the classic edible Play-Doh recipe, but to the unfamiliar it certainly sounds odd.

How cheap do you think we could make these with a simple dimming circuit? Imagine seeing a statues eyes light up as you’re walking by…

Custom Mechanical Keyboards

March 11, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

[Wyager] was shopping around for a mechanical keyboard, and after noticing custom PCB manufacturing had come down in price so much, he decided to build his own. The end result is a keyboard that’s so elegant in its design, that it could, with a little work, become a very interesting Kickstarter project.

The design had three requirements: cheap, mechanical switches, and extremely customizable. The cheap requirement was solved by splitting the keyboard into two parts with a master/slave arrangement. The boards are connected by a 1/8″ TRRS jack conveying an I2C bus. Since both boards are identical except for the code running on the Teensy dev boards, [Wyager] saved a bit of cash by using two of the three PCBs that came with his OSHPark order.

The mechanical switches – Cherry MX Blues – are rather expensive parts for a failed project. For fear of failure, [Wyager] first ordered a PCB containing the footprint of only one key. With the footprint correct, he graduated to a 2×2 matrix. Once that was verified, the 6×5 matrix was ordered. Everything worked perfectly the first time, something we can’t say about many of our projects.

The code, board files, and schematics are available over on the github

SOAP Drama: An Interview With The SOAP Creators

March 11, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 59 Comments

A few days ago, we caught wind of SOAP, a Kickstarter project for an Android-based home automation router. With a quad-core ARM, quad gigabit Ethernet ports, 802.11ac, SATA, and every radio under the sun – all for $100 (sans display, $170 with display), it seemed too good to be true. At the time, it probably was: the images from the PCB prototype were taken from [Bunnie Huang]’s open source laptop, there weren’t enough Ethernet ports for a router, and the hardware just seemed all wrong.

The guys behind SOAP have decided to respond to these accusations by posting a huge update on their Kickstarter page and answering a few questions from me. Interview follows below.

HaD: There’s a BOM/cost analysis breakdown for the Essentials package (the SOAP sans display) that puts the total cost at about $130. This is the reward for pledging at the $100 level. How accurate is this cost analysis, and how do you plan on meeting that reward level?

SOAP: This cost analysis that you mention is very accurate. We will not profit on the early release pricing of $60.00 we have taken the loss leader pricing to attract backers and press (and we think we have done a good job). We are working with a large router manufacturer and this is really the link that makes the pricing possible without them we couldn’t do this.

HaD: You’re using a Quad Core Freescale i.MX processor for SOAP, and putting a four port Gigabit router in there. The Quad core i.MX chips only have one Gigabit port, and that’s limited to 470 Mbps. How are you solving this problem, and what are you using as a MAC/PHY?

SOAP: First off let me state that we are very aware of the CPU limitations and we have done a lot of work on finding a solution and we do have a unique solution. We have support from a big player in the router industry that has offered us a unique solution that we have been working on to bypass this issue. We will post more on this after our trip to San Jose. This is our fallback method and yes its benchmarks are not as pretty as we want them but they are getting there and we feel with enough tweaks we can get this to decent level.

This is from our layout guy: We are planning I.mx processor’s gigabit port will be connected to external IC working as a switch. 1Gb ethernet -> 1 to 4 switch -> 4x Gb Ethernet ports. Possible http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tnetx4090.pdf. Use 4 ports from there plus put RGMII Ethernet transceiver from Marvell for each ETH port and we will have on board Ethernet switch.

HaD: What WiFi chipset/chipsets are you using? Will that/they be able to do 802.11ac at full speed, and how are you doing this with (I think) only one antenna on the updated board images?

SOAP: The speeds have varied greatly on the chipset and how buggy the software was for the day but we have clocked speeds over 1 gigabyte per second and we will continue to develop this further to achieve maximize speeds this is where our new Union with the guys over at Droidifi will help.

In our prototype we tested Avastar 88W8864, Broadcom 4360 , and a couple more that failed to actually work. We didn’t get those all functioning like we would have wanted as there is little support for android and router chipsets to date. We demo with a Broadcom chipset.

We want to use Quantenna QAC2300 but at current funding we will be using the Broadcom we have received a lot of suggestions from our backers and a new big player behind us that thinks they have the right match we are waiting to announce this after our meeting in San Jose.

We have one antenna on the most current design but we are planning on adding two more for the final design. We didn’t place them on the most recent design because we are waiting to see how much funding we get to finalize the wifi chipset. We didn’t want antenna design that worked best with a Broadcom when we switch to Marvel or Quantenna.

HaD: What is the status of the software? Do you have a repo somewhere that people could look over?

SOAP: We have been working with a new player from the older kickstarter project called Droidifi. We will be working with them on the software. This is a something we haven’t been able to announce till we lock it down but you are the first to know about this union. Check out our update later today.

HaD: Finally, do you have a functional prototype with the quad-core i.MX, four Ethernet ports, and WiFi? Can we see a video?

SOAP: If you mean a mass production ready device that can be used by an end user then no. We have a solid functioning proof of concept prototype. We have a lot of Demo videos of our POC that show what we have developed so far. We have to have the current PCB design manufactured to get down to the more rigorous testing and qualifying. All the specs listed on our kickstarter are what we currently are planning and we hope to fulfill the tech specs.

HaD: There are some other questions in the Kickstarter comments section, but honestly I don’t care about how many Twitter followers you have.

SOAP: Twitter was our marketing company. We thought people actually were following us but we have since found out that half of them are not real. Check this out though.

All in all we understand how ambitious this project looks and we also know that it technology development can run into roadblocks and things but we want to be clear we are not a scam and we are quite aware where these attacks have originated. We will continue to work hard on this project, we will not be running off to Costa Rica and we plan on seeing everyone at CES next year.

The TL;DR for everyone without an attention span:

Yes, the $100/$170 price is too good to be true. It’s called a loss leader to generate interest. This part was a success. The SOAP guys are partnering with the DroidFi guys for the operating system. The Gigabit Ethernet will probably work, and the WiFi is limited by *nix chipset support. No complete functional prototypes yet.

So there you go. It’s not the ideal update with the SOAP crew showing off a shipping container of units ready to be shipped, but the project isn’t in as bad a shape as I originally thought.