Tube Map Radio And Denki Puzzles

April 2, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 5 Comments

Sometimes, awesomeness passes us by and we don’t notice it until a while later. This is from 2012, but it’s so friggin’ insane we just have to cover it even if it’s late. Yuri Suzuki is an installation artist who designed the Tube Map Radio and Denki Puzzles.

The Tube Map Radio is inspired by a diagram created by the original designer of the London Tube map, Harry Beck, which shows the lines and stations of the London Underground rail network as an annotated electrical circuit. Iconic landmarks on this map are represented by components relating to their functions, including a speaker where Speaker’s Corner sits, battery representing Battersea Power Station and Piccadilly Circus marked as Piccadilly Circuit. The work was commissioned by the Design Museum London, and the PCB layout was done by Masahiko Shindo (Shindo Denki Sekkei). The idea was to bring the electronics out of the “black box” and not just display it, but to have it laid out in a fashion that people could try to understand how it really works.

The other project called Denki Puzzles is equally remarkable. It’s a kit meant to teach electronics, using a set of snap-fit components. But instead of having all “bricks” or units of the same shape, the Denki Puzzles are a collection of printed circuit board pieces whose form indicate a particular function. Fit the pieces together as a sort of physical circuit diagram and you’ll be able to build working electronics. For example, the LED unit looks like a 8 pointed star, and the resistance unit looks like a resistance symbol. Check out some pictures and a video after the break

Photo’s Credit : Hitomi Kai Yoda.

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The Best Project We Never Did Yet

April 2, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 97 Comments

Back when [Caleb] was around here at Hackaday, he was tasked with making a few YouTube videos. His Portal Gun got 1.6 Million views, and we got a takedown request because of this video even though that company was more than willing to use [Caleb] as a guinea pig at CES.

This post is not about those videos. This post is about the best project we never did yet.

The grand plan for The Best Project was a zombie survival van. It’s exactly what you think it is: a van armored and armed for driving through a herd of walkers. Proposed mods included a cow catcher and roof rack, a motorized turret, a poofer (propane tanks shooting fire from underneath the van), a bartender that launches molotov cocktails, and a beautiful little contraption called an ankler. The Ankler is just a pair of chainsaws that fold out from under the van.

The base vehicle would be a 60s VW bus. [Caleb]’s a big fan of aircooled stuff, and if you think about it, 60s VWs are pretty good for the zombie apocalypse. If you’re doubting that, just ask how many tools it would take to change out the engine in your car.

Although the dream of a Hackaday aircooled zombie apocalypse van died when [Caleb] left, that doesn’t mean we’re still not considering an official Hackaday ride. All of this is still in the planning stages, but we have a few ideas; the first, and biggest, is a mobile hackerspace on a trailer. This would be a standard semitrailer, loaded up with tools, 3D printers, a laser cutters, and a couch. It would be the perfect thing to load up with swag and haul to events.

We’re considering another more sensible vehicle, and right now the top contender is an early 2000s Astro or Safari cargo van. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: the coolest vehicle we could come up with is a minivan. There’s actually some logic to this, so hear me out.

The Astro/Safari shares a lot of parts with the S10, and that means parts are everywhere. The Astro has an AWD variant, and with a 4″ lift, upgraded suspension and big, knobby tires the Hackaday van would be very, very fun to take out into the desert. It can haul eight foot sheets of plywood, they’re cheap, everywhere, and they just don’t die.

While the best idea right now is an Astro van, we’re also considering other AWD vehicles: an AMC Eagle would be cool, and I think RedBull has a few Suzuki X-90s sitting around. An M35 Deuce And A Half would be fun. A US Mail Truck would probably last forever, and if we go with the semi-trailer concept we would probably want a smaller vehicle on site wherever we park the truck. Current options for this parasitic vehicle include a Nash Metropolitan, a Trabant, a Citroen 2CV, a Renault Dauphine, a Lada, or a Yugo. Yes, they’re all ridiculous but they’re small and can fit in the back of a semi trailer.

It’s still an idea we’re throwing around, but we really need a reason to have a van before we go out and build a hackaspace on wheels, a zombie survival van, or something to launch off some sweet ramps. We don’t go to that many events, and driving a crappy old van across the country a few times a year sounds like fun but surely isn’t.

You can check out [Caleb]’s pitch video for the zombie survival van below.

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Manual Data Recovery With A Hex Editor

April 2, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

Let’s say you use an SD card-base portable audio recorder for work – doing an interview, perhaps. Things go well until one day, you turn the recorder off before stopping the recording. Without pressing that big red Stop button, the file doesn’t close, and you’re left with a very large 0kB file on the SD card. How do you get it back? There are tools that will do it for you, but they cost money. You can do it yourself with a hex editor, though, and it’s actually pretty easy.

The software required for this feat of data recovery is Roadkil’s Disk Imager to dump all the bits on the SD card to an image file, the free version of ISO Buster to show the block addresses and length of each file, and the hex editor of your choice. The process starts as simply an experiment for hot to create an MP3 file by cutting and pasting bits into a hex editor. A good file was found in the hex editor, copied to a new file, and played. Everything works so far; great.

For the actual data recovery, a spreadsheet was created to make an educated guess as to where the lost file should be. Starting at this address, about 90MB of data was copied into a new hex editor window. This is where the recovery hit a snag. Because the SD card was plugged into a Mac before, a bunch of data was written on the card. This went into the first available place on the disk, which just happened to be the header of the lost MP3 file.

That’s not a problem; there’s already the header from an MP3 file sitting in a hex editor from the first experiment to see if this was possible. By copying a few hundred bytes to the front of the lost file, the file was corrected just enough that an MP3 player could reconstruct the file.

It’s not perfect – the first fifty seconds of the interview was garbled. The rest of the interview was saved, though, and that’s much better than losing the entire thing. Thanks [Lewin] for sending this one in.

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Finally A Hardware Hackerspace Map For The Apocalypse

April 2, 2015 by James Hobson 5 Comments

In case you don’t know, our hacker brethren in Europe are pretty darn sophisticated with their hackerspaces — most of them even implement the Hackerspace API which tells the public when they are open, or closed. This allows them to tap in with hardware to create a fancy notifications for when the spaces are open!

Shackspace, the place to be in Stuttgart, had a nice big map of Europe destined for world domination in their lounge. They thought it could use an upgrade, so have been adding LEDs to represent each hackerspace. They glow green when open, and red when closed. And they built it all in one weekend flat.

If your space is not on the map, start using the Space API and let them know so they can update their project!

Sadly Shackspace in Stuttgart was not one of the hackerspaces we had the pleasure of touring during our European Hackerspace Tour!

[Thanks Momo!]

We Have A Problem: Food Supply

April 2, 2015 by Mike Szczys 190 Comments

Hackaday, we have a problem. Supplying fresh, healthy food to the world’s population is a huge challenge. And if we do nothing, it will only get more difficult. Rising water prices and (eventually) rising fuel prices will make growing and transporting food more costly. Let’s leverage our collective skill and experience to chip away at this problem. We hope this will get you thinking toward your entry for the 2015 Hackaday Prize.

There are big science breakthroughs that have taken us this far. For instance, The Green Revolution developed wheat with stronger stalks to support the weight of higher kernel yields. If you’re equipped to undertake that kind of bio-hacking we’d love to see it. But the majority of us can still work on ideas to make a difference and (heartwarming moment approaching…) feed the world.

As with the shower feedback loop and electricity monitoring installments of We Have a Problem, I’ll start you off with an uber-simple idea. It’s up to you to think further and wider to get at solutions that are worth more exploration.

Can Technology Give Me a Green Thumb?

We see it all the time around here, people are building projects to monitor and control their own gardening projects. The one shown here couldn’t be simpler, it’s a hot-box which lets your gardening continue through the winter. It uses heat tape to keep the soil warm, and features a motorized lid which actuates to regulate humidity and temperature.

This concept is a good one. It doesn’t take up a lot of space and it tackles the easy part of automation (how hot is it? how wet is it?). But does it have the potential to make an impact on the source of your household’s food? Maybe the concept needs to be applied to community garden areas so that you can achieve a larger yield.

Robots

Perhaps robots are an answer to a different problem. This little bot, already entered in the 2015 Hackaday Prize, is an experiment with automatic weed elimination versus the use of herbicides.

But it does get us thinking. One of the problems you need to overcome when trying to achieve wide adoption of local food supply is that not everyone enjoys the work that goes into it. Do you have an idea of how your mad robot skills can do the work for us?

Stepping back onto the side-track of changes to industrial farming, let’s take a look at one of the way-out-there-ideas from last year. A huge amount of water usage is in food production. What if we turned entire farms into greenhouses in order to capture and reuse water that is normally lost into an all-to-dry atmosphere? Domes my friends, domes. A swarm of 3D printing robots given locomotion and unleashed to print out translucent covers over the fields on the kilometer-scale. Hey, doesn’t hurt to dream (and do some back of the envelope calculations to gauge how wild that idea actually is).

Your Turn

That should be enough to get the conversation started. Toss around some ideas here in the comments, but don’t let the brainstorm stop there. All it takes to enter the Hackaday Prize is an idea. Write it down as a project on Hackaday.io and tag it “2015HackadayPrize” to get your entry started.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Caption CERN Contest Is A GO For Week 9

April 2, 2015 by Adam Fabio 10 Comments

Thanks for another week of great entries in the Caption CERN Contest over at Hackaday.io! We still aren’t sure if our CERN staffer is looking at that machine pensively, amorously, or with a bit of confusion, but you all found some great words to go with the image!

The Funnies:

“Dr. Breman’s early attempts to create the perfect robot woman had some early success, but was later scrapped do to a tragic input/output error.” – Terry Davis
“You were supposed to be intelligent, my dear. What do you mean by segfault?” –elias.alberto
“CERN’s pioneering computer dating service didn’t quite work out as expected.” – Nick Johnson

The winner for this week is Stripeytype with the quote seen in the top image of this article. Stripeytype will be sporting a CRT head T-Shirt From The Hackaday Store at their next hackerspace meeting.

We’re not done searching out they mysteries of CERN’s history. Week 9 of the Caption CERN Contest has just begun!

Some of CERN’s experiments take place in the miles of tunnels below their labs in and around Meyrin, on the border of France and Switzerland. It looks like this image was taken in one of those tunnels. It’s definitely an interesting shot. CERN’s documentation for the image has been lost to history, so it’s up to you to explain what’s going on here! Add your humorous caption as a comment to the project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the log, not on the project itself. As always, if you actually have information about the image or the people in it, let CERN know on the original image discussion page.

Good Luck!

More MRRF, This Time A Roundtable

April 2, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

Ah, you thought we were done with our coverage of the Midwest RepRap Festival, didn’t you? No, there’s still more, thanks to [Timothy Koscielny] sending in some digital assets that were required to put this post together. This time, it’s the RepRap roundtable with [Johnny Russell] from Ultimachine, [Shane Graber] from MakerJuice, [Lars Brubaker] from MatterHackers, [Sanjay Mortimer] from E3D-Online.

The first video covers the introductions for these very prominent 3D printer developers and their views on what future advances in 3D printers will be, the differences between Delta, Cartesian, and Polar bots (there aren’t many), and when resin printers will start to pick up.

In the Q&A session, the panel fielded a few questions from the audience. Questions included how to get people into 3D modeling, an amazing question dealing with what we should be making (with the implication that we’re only making stupid plastic trinkets), and what needs work to bring 3D printing to the masses.

Special thanks to [Casey Hendrickson] from ninety two point three WOWO for MC’ing the RepRap roundtable and to [Timothy Koscielny] for the audio work. This isn’t it, though: I still need to dump a bunch of pictures after the break.

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