Imaging And Emulating An HP-IB Disk Drive

June 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

If you look on the back of old, old test equipment, you’ll find a weird-looking connector that’s either labeled IEEE-488, GPIB, or HP-IB. It’s a very old interface designed by HP for their test equipment, and it was licensed to other manufacturers for everything from power supplies to logic analyzers. Hewlett-Packard also made computers and workstations once upon a time, and it’s no surprise this interface also made it into these boxes. They even had external hard drives that operated over the HP-IB interface.

[Chris] has a few of these old computers, and wanted to see if he could emulate one of these HP-IB hard drives. There is a project to emulate these hard drives, but the electrical connection is a bit tricky; you need an IEEE-488 card, and those really aren’t made anymore.

Nevertheless, [Chris] found an old ISA IEEE-488 last year, and installed it in the PC system he’s using for all his retro explorations. After getting the card and cable to fit in the case of his PC, [Chris] connected a real HP-IB disk to his modern computer running HPDrive, made an image, and connected an old HP 150 computer. The image was read by the HP 150, and [Chris] had a vintage computer running off an emulated drive.

An Electronic Woodwind With An Onboard Synthesizer

June 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

About a year ago, we saw a project on Hackaday.io for a MIDI wind controller. Keyboard MIDI controllers are a dime a dozen, but if you want something that actually sounds like a brass or woodwind instrument, you need something that’s controlled by a breath sensor. Since then, this project has been updated with an onboard synthesizer. It sounds great, and thanks to some interesting components, the part count is actually really low.

The synthesizer used for this project is just a single chip – the DSP-G1 from [Jan Ostman]. This isn’t a custom ASIC or anything fancy; it’s just an 8-pin ARM microcontroller in DIP format, the LPC810.

The rest of the instrument is just a series of pressure sensors along the body, and a breath sensor. The plan is to stuff all the electronics – a microcontroller to read the touch and breath sensors, the DSP-G1 chip, and the battery – inside the body of the instrument. That’s something that would be incredibly cool, and much more capable than the wind controllers that are available today.

You can see a few videos of the wind controller below.

Continue reading “An Electronic Woodwind With An Onboard Synthesizer” →

Making A Bobblehead Of You

June 20, 2015 by Rich Bremer 9 Comments

Bobbleheads, you remember them, small figures with a spring-mounted comically large head. They brought joy to millions of car drivers every day as at least 97.5% of all registered cars in the 1960’s had bobbleheads mounted to the dash. Years later bobblehead popularity has waned but [Luis] is trying to bring them back, this time not as your iconic sports hero but as YOU!

[Luis] uses software called Skanect along with his Kinect to scan a persons geometry. There is a free version of Skanect but it is limited to exporting STL files no larger than 5,000 faces. That means that scans of large objects (including people) come out looking noticeably faceted. [Luis] came up with a work-around that results in a much finer detailed scan. Instead of scanning an entire person with one scan, he would do 4 separate scans. Since each individual scan can support 5,000 faces, the resulting merged model can be up to 20,000 faces. Check out the comparison, the difference between the two scanning methods is quite noticeable. MeshMixer is the software used to merge the STL files of the 4 separate scans.

Once the full body is assembled in MeshMixer, it is time to separate the head from the body. A cylindrical hole is then made in the bottom of the head and the top of the body. This hole is just slightly larger than the spring used to support the head. The parts are then printed, painted and assembled. We have to say that the end result looks pretty darn good.

The First PipBoy We’ll See This Year

June 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

You heard that we’re shutting down Hackaday on November 11, 2015, right? That’s the release of Fallout 4, and trust me: I’m not getting anything done that day. A new game in the Fallout series means more power armor cosplay builds, and hundreds of different wearable electronics from the friendly folks at Vault-Tec. I speak of the PipBoy, the wrist-mounted computer of the Fallout series, and [THEMCV] built the first one we’ll see this year. It won’t be the last.

The PipBoy [THEMCV] created is the 3000a model, the same one found in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. We’ve seen a few real-live versions of the PipBoy before; this one used the PipBoy prop that came with the Amazon exclusive special edition of Fallout 3. Things have changed in the years since the release of Fallout 3, and to build his PipBoy, [THEMCV] just bought one from Shapeways.

The electronics consist of a Raspberry Pi Model A, 3.5″ LCD, a battery pack, and a great piece of software to emulate the software of the PipBoy 3000. It looks great, but [THEMCV] still needs to find a few retrofuturistic buttons and dials to complete the PipBoy experience.

Video below.

Continue reading “The First PipBoy We’ll See This Year” →

Altium Gives Away The Farm With New Circuit Maker Software

June 20, 2015 by George Graves 150 Comments

Things are about to get interesting in the world of PCB design software for the open source hardware community. This week, Altium launched the open public beta for its new Circuit Maker software, and it’s a major change from what we looked at previously. Everything is free.

You heard that right, free. Unlimited board size, and unlimited layers – all free. And this isn’t some stripped-down, bare-bones software here. They’ve thrown in almost everything under the sun; a 3D viewer, team project collaboration, EagleCAD and DFX import, integrated Octopart supplier and pricing information, no commercial usage limits, and project sharing. And if that isn’t enough, the “engine” seems to be the exact same back-end that is used in the full $10,000 Altium Designer as well(with a bit easier to use user interface on top). This is a major departure from the pre-beta we covered back in September. Altium was going have board size and layer limits, with the ability to “upgrade” at a cost. So by now you’re thinking to yourself “OK, what’s the catch?” Well there are a few gotchas – but only a few.

The software uses cloud based storage for your project files, and is community based. It won’t work without an Internet connection, there is no local storage, and it forces you to share your projects with the world. You do get two “Sandbox” designs that you can hide from the world before you generate your gerber files, but after that, your project is online for the whole world to see. Will that be a deal killer for the OSHW community? We’ll find out soon enough.

One thing is for sure, anyone with a doggy Internet connection is not going to enjoy using Circuit Maker (we’re hoping they remove that limitation in the final product). And as with any cloud based service, we wonder how many people will be willing to trust their designs to a free service that could be turned off on a whim? Or will the unlimited board size and layers, combined with Altium’s name and robust software win people over in the end?

If you want to see in-depth review of Circuit Maker, we highly recommend you watch the video after the break. [Dave Jones] of the eevblog, gives you a full rundown on the beta version. Dave’s in a unique place to review this software, not only has he been using Altium since the mid-80’s as a professional engineer, he’s also a former Altium employee.

Continue reading “Altium Gives Away The Farm With New Circuit Maker Software” →

Steering High Altitude Rockets With Cold Gas

June 20, 2015 by Ethan Zonca 23 Comments

Amateur rocketry has been popular for ages, with designs ranging from small toy-scale model rockets to large-scale liquid fuel designs with steerable fins. A team out of Portland State works on some large-scale amateur rockets that can fly to very high altitudes. Since the atmosphere is thin the further the rocket flies, steering fins aren’t incredibly effective once the rockets reach high altitude. A team of students tackled this problem by designing a cold-gas reaction module to steer high-altitude rockets.

The team chose nitrogen as their cold-gas propellant, which is stored in a carbon fiber tank. After passing through a regulator, the gas is routed to several gas solenoids and then to a custom 3d-printed de Laval nozzle. An Intel Edison is used to drive the system, which calculates the rocket’s orientation with a MPU-6050. Control loops use the orientation information and fire gas through any of several nozzle ports to steer the rocket.

The system does have some limits: the solenoids are either on or off, not variable, and they aren’t incredibly fast. Even with these limitations, the team is confident that their module will work great when it embarks on its maiden flight in a brand-new custom rocket next year. The team was also awesome enough to make all of their design files open-source so you can build your own (although they warn that it’s a bit complicated and dangerous). Check out the video after the break to see a test-run of the cold-gas reaction system.

Thanks for the tip, [Nathan]!

Continue reading “Steering High Altitude Rockets With Cold Gas” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: HOMER, A 2D GPU For Microcontrollers

June 19, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 37 Comments

Just about the hardest thing you’ll ever do with a microcontroller is video. The timing must be precise, and even low-resolution video requires relatively large amounts of memory, something microcontrollers don’t generally have a lot of. HDMI? That’s getting into microcontroller wizard territory.

Despite these limitations, [monnoliv] is working on a GPU for microcontrollers. It outputs 1280×720 over HDMI, has a 24 bit palette, and 2D hardware acceleration.

It’s a very interesting project; usually, if you want graphics and a display in a project, you’re looking at a Linux system, and all the binary blobs and closed source drivers that come with that. [monnoliv]’s HOMER video card doesn’t need Linux, and it doesn’t need a very high-powered microcontroller. It’s just a simple SPI device with a bunch of memory and an FPGA that turns the most minimal microcontroller into a machine that can output full HD graphics.

This isn’t the only open source graphics card for microcontrollers in the Hackaday Prize; just a few days ago, we saw VGAtonic, another SPI-controlled video card for microcontrollers, this time outputting VGA instead of HDMI. Both are excellent projects, and if either makes it into production, they’ll both be cheap: under $100 for both of them. Just the thing if you want to play around with high-resolution video without resorting to Linux.