WiFi Controlled Power Outlets With Raspberry Pi

February 11, 2015 by Rick Osgood 39 Comments

[Tim] was looking for a way to control his power outlets using WiFi. He looked into purchasing a WeMo but he realized that he could build something even better with more bang for his buck. He started out by purchasing a five pack of Etekcity wireless remote control outlet switches. These are kind of like the WeMo, only they aren’t controlled via WiFi. Instead, they come with an RF controller. [Tim] just needed to find a way to bridge the gap between the RF remote and WiFi.

[Tim] decided to use a Raspberry Pi as the brains of the controller. He also purchased a SMAKN 433MHz RF receiver and transmitter for communicating with the wireless outlet switches. The wiring for the modules is pretty simple. There are only four wires. There are power and ground wires for each module. Then the transmitter needs two GPIO pins while the receiver only needs one.

[Tim] began with a fresh installation of Raspbian. He then installed Wiring Pi, which gives you the ability to interface with the GPIO pins in a way that is similar to Arduino. He also installed Apache and PHP to create a web interface for switching the outlets. The last step was to write some custom software. The software included a script that allowed [Tim] to sniff out the controls of his RF remote. The correct codes are entered into the “toggle.php” file, and everything is set. All [Tim] has to do now is browse to his Pi’s web server and click a button. All of the custom code is available via git.

Clocked 8-Bit Random Pattern Generator For A CMOS Synth

February 11, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 33 Comments

A random noise generator is pretty handy when working with music, and building one using a micro-controller can be pretty trivial. So it’s nice when someone comes along and builds it from a few analog and digital parts. [acidbourbon] built his Clocked 8-BIT Random Pattern Generator for CMOS Synth inspired and motivated by the recent article Logic Noise: Sweet, Sweet Oscillator Sounds by [Elliot Williams]. It’s 8-bit output can be used as a random sequencer for DIY CMOS synths.
This pattern generator is suited to to be used in combination with a 4051 8-channel analog multiplexer. But it sounds quite interesting on it’s own (best enjoyed in stereo, check out the video after the break). After building some CMOS synth circuits, [acidbourbon] moved on to make some sequencers and multiplexers which then let him to devise this random pattern generator which could be gated using a clock signal.

The basic principle is straight forward – generate noise, amplify it, apply a clock to get the gated noise output. His design choices for the various sections are well explained, based on constraints that he had to work with. Everything needs to work at 5V, but his noise generator circuit requires 12V to work. He choose to use a charge pump to generate -5V, resulting in a 10V supply, which was barely enough, but worked. A boost regulator might probably have served better to generate 12V, but maybe he already had the ICL7660 charge pump IC lying around in his parts bin. The rest of the circuit uses standard CMOS/TTL devices, and [acidbourbon] provides all of the design files for what looks like a neat, single sided PCB that can easily be made using the toner-transfer method.

Video below.

Continue reading “Clocked 8-Bit Random Pattern Generator For A CMOS Synth” →

Omnibus Seen In The Wild

February 11, 2015 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

February 9th has come and gone and the Hackaday Omnibus 2014 is now shipping. If you were one of the early adopters who pre-ordered, thank you very much it should be in your hands shortly! If you missed out on the Pre-Order, don’t worry you can still get a copy of your very own but we only ordered a small over-run so don’t wait too long.

The Omnibus celebrates the best our writers and illustrators published in 2014 with an 80-page full color volume printed on premium paper. From tales of technology past, to current events, the Omnibus tells the story of what the high points in hardware were last year. We have fallen in love with having a physical version of this content since the proof copies hit our hands a month ago. We believe that this is a conversation waiting to happen — set it out and watch your friends gravitate toward it.

We’ve already seen them popping up on Twitter and we’d love to see more. Make sure to Tweet a picture of your copy to @Hackaday with hashtag #hadOmnibus. We’re happy to see any pictures shared, but if you’re one of the lucky souls who works with awesome hardware make sure to take some ‘extreme’ shots. For instance, reading while you wait for the cyclotron to warm up, the nuclear sub to surface, or your ride to pick you up from Amundsen-Scott.

This is our first ever print edition and we’ve gone to great lengths to make sure it’s something you’ll be proud to have on your coffee table, bookshelf, or anywhere for years to come.

[Photos via @jbdatko, @JeremySCook, @rdcampbell13, @ToddTerrazas]

Tindie, The Etsy And Yelp For Electronics

February 11, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

For one reason or another, Tindie has become known as the Etsy for DIY electronics, tinkering, and all things that are regularly featured on Hackaday. Now [Emile] over at Tindie is tackling another problem faced by homebrew electronic wizards: finding good middlemen, board houses, places that do assembly, and machinists. The answer to that is Tindie Biz, something that [Emile] is calling the ‘Yelp for electronics.’

[Emile], the owner and creator of Tindie used to work for Yelp, something that got him more than a few “boo”s at last week’s Hackaday Omnibus Launch Party. Despite the community’s inexplicable hatred of Yelp, [Emile] actually learned a lot; verification is the ultimate problem of user-submitted reviews, and his solution to that problem is to put proof of a transaction in with the review, lest Tindie Biz fall into a disarray of spam and astroturfing.

Already there are over 1,400 manufacturers on Tindie Biz, but [Emile] said right now, his new manufacturer review site needs input from DIYers; the real value is in getting people who have done business with manufacturers around the globe to submit reviews. It needs reviewers, and that’s where you come in. It’s all free, and like most good ideas, something that makes you say, ‘I should have thought of that first.’

Caption CERN Contest Turns Out Big Brains And Comic Brilliance

February 11, 2015 by Adam Fabio 7 Comments

Week 1 of Hackaday’s Caption CERN Contest is complete. We have to say that the Hackaday.io users outdid themselves with funny captions but we also helped CERN add meaning to one of their orphan images. First a few of our favorite captions:

The Funnies:

If you adjust that scope again, when I haven’t touched the controls, I’m donating you to a city college. – [Johnny B. Goode]

SAFTEY FIRST – The proper way to test a 6kv power supply for ripple on the output. – [milestogoh]

Dr. Otto Gunther Octavius – R&D some years before the accident. – [jlbrian7]

The prize though, goes to Hackaday commenting superstar [DainBramage], who proved he knows us all too well with his Portal inspired caption:

Here we see Doug Rattmann, one of Aperture’s best and brightest, perfecting our neurotoxin prior to delivery.

Congrats [DainBramage], enjoy your shirt from The Hackaday Store!

The Meaning of the Image:

Funny captions weren’t the only thing in the comments though – the image tickled [jlbrian7’s] memory and led to a link for CERN Love. A four-year old blog entry about robots at CERN turned out to be the key to unraveling the mystery of this captionless photo. The image depicts [Robert Horne] working with a prototype of the MANTIS system. MANTIS was a teleoperation manipulator system created to work in sections of the CERN facility which were unsafe for humans due to high levels of radioactivity. The MANTIS story is an epic hack itself, so keep your eyes peeled for a future article covering it! We’ve submitted the information to CERN, and we’re giving [jlbrian7] a T-shirt as well for his contribution to finding the actual caption for this image.

Get Started on Next Week:

The image for week 2 is already up, so head over and see for yourself. We’re eager for your clever captions. Ideally we can also figure out the backstory for each week’s randomly chosen image.

Learning Single-Filament Printing Strength From Arachnids

February 11, 2015 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

If you can get over how creepy spiders can be there’s a lot to learn from them. One of nature’s master-builders, they have long been studied for how they produce such strong silk. What we hadn’t realized is that it’s not strictly cylindrical in nature. The spider silk exhibits intermittent expansions to the diameter of the — for lack of a better word — extrusion. This project uses biomimickry to replicate the strength of that design.

The print head is actually four extruders in one. In the clip after the break you can see the black center filament’s rigidity is augmented with three white filaments positioned around it radially. The use of this knowledge? That’s for you to decide. As with some of the most satisfying engineering concepts, this is presented as an art installation. As if the rhythmic movements of that print head weren’t enough, they mounted it on a KUKA and plopped the entire thing down in the center of a room for all to see.

The demo isn’t the only awesome bit. You’ll want to click the link at the top to see the exploded-parts diagram porn found half-way down the page. All is beautiful!

Continue reading “Learning Single-Filament Printing Strength From Arachnids” →

Circuit Love With Multicolor Solder Masks

February 11, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

The cheapest PCBs – and therefore most common – are green solder mask with white silkscreen. It works, but it’s also incredibly boring. This is the way things were done up until a few years ago with the explosion of board houses trying to compete for your Yuan, and now getting a red, yellow, black, blue, green, and even OSH purple is possible. This doesn’t mean multiple solder masks aren’t possible, as [Saar] demonstrates with his demonstration of multicolor solder masks and circuit love.

We’ve seen a lot of [Saar]’s designs, including a mixing desk, a cordwood puzzle, and an engineer’s emergency business card, but so far his artistic pieces have been decidedly monochromatic. For this build, [Saar] teamed up with Eurocircuits to create a board that exploits their capabilities.

Althought Eurocircuits has PCB PIXture, a tool for putting graphics on PCBs, [Saar] made this with his own tool, PCBmodE. The design of both the red and yellow variants are abstract, and only meant to be a demonstration of what can be done with multicolor solder mask. It looks great with five backlit LEDs, and with an acrylic top and bottom, makes a great coaster or art piece.

We like [Saar’s] work so much that we put his Cordwood puzzle in the Hackaday Store.