Childhood Tech Exposure Is Slowly Killing The Keyboard

July 20, 2015 by Mike Szczys 113 Comments

I see the disturbing trend of moving away from keyboards as input devices — and I’m talking about a real, physical keyboard. This isn’t a matter of one decision that kills the keyboard, but an aggregate that is slowly changing the landscape. If you blink, you’ll miss it. We will not find ourselves in a world without keyboards, but in one where most of the available keyboards suck.

Rise of the Virtual Keyboard Generation

Is swipe-style keying the future of coding?

Tablets are great for screwing around, but when you want to get real work done in a reasonable amount of time, you grab a physical keyboard. In this scenario I don’t see the problem being those in the workforce going away from keyboards; it’s how the younger generations are learning to interact with technology that is troubling. The touchscreen is baby’s first computer. Families gather and the kids are handed their parent’s tablets while the grown-ups watch the game. More and more schools are outfitting classrooms with tablets, and for this I’m an advocate. Getting kids involved early in technology is imperative; knowledge evolves much more rapidly than printed textbooks. The tablet is a powerful tool in both of these areas. But most of the screen time kids get is with touchscreens and no physical keyboard.

How much time are K-12 kids spending in front of a physical keyboard? In the United States, if keyboard (typing) classes exist at all in a public school’s curriculum they’re usually only one-semester. Students who spend half of Elementary school using a tablet, and just one semester at a keyboard, are bound to prefer touchscreen-based entry over a physical keyboard.

Keyboard Erosion

We’ve already seen a strong push into touch-screens on laptops as the tablet market has grown. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Think of the computer mouse, it didn’t replace the keyboard, but augmented it and now is seen as a tool that itself is a necessity.

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Meetup In Boston This Thursday

July 20, 2015 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

Hackaday is headed to Boston this week. Meet up with us on Thursday at 6pm to show off your projects and meet other hackers in the area. Admission is free, just tell us you’re coming.

We’re hosting a Hackaday meetup at Artisan’s Asylum hackerspace. That name should sound familiar. This is the group that decided to throw down the robot gauntlet with Japan. We can’t wait to see what that’s all about first hand!

While in town we’ll also be stopping by the MIT Media Lab, a legendary den of cutting edge research that springs forth wave after wave of awesome inspiration. If you know of any projects going on there that we just shouldn’t miss please let us know below. We’re also looking for suggestions of other places we should check out while in town.

See you Thursday!

Police LiDAR Tear Down

July 20, 2015 by Al Williams 48 Comments

Most police departments made a big switch from RADAR to LiDAR after consumers starting buying RADAR detectors. A lot of those LiDAR units are now out there on the surplus market. If you don’t have $500 or so to buy a LiDAR gun just to see what makes it tick, you are in luck. [Alexei Polkhanov] spent an hour tearing down a UltraLyte LTI 20-20 LR 100 so you don’t have to.

An hour seems like a lot for a tear down video, but [Alexei] speeds up through the boring parts, and spends a lot of time talking about the optics and how the device works (with a lot of hand drawn diagrams). He also puts it back together and connects a scope to show the electronic operation of the device.

He mentions the display and control board uses a serial interface to talk to the controller board. There is also an unpopulated header on the main board that is clearly a serial port, probably for reprogramming the onboard microcontroller. With a little reverse engineering work, this LiDAR gun ought to be highly hackable.

In addition to the display and control board, the unit contains a high voltage supply for the laser and the photodiode. Making a power supply to drive the laser that is clean enough not to disturb the sensor is one of the design drivers and it shows. The power supply is a large and complex board by comparison to the other boards in the system.

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Scrappy RGB Binary Clock From The Parts Bin

July 20, 2015 by Kevin Dady 3 Comments

Sometimes you just want to make something, and not spend any money doing it. That’s what [Evan] had in mind when setting out to make this cool RGB LED binary Clock.

The project box is made from scrap pieces of balsa wood, with the front being a scrap of acrylic. Multiple layers of the balsa wood were glued up to thickness and drilled to hold the LED’s, some paper was added on top then the acrylic to give everything a frosty diffused look.

LED’s are controlled by the good ‘ol 74HC595 serial to parallel shift register, and a ATTiny84 micro all set on scraps of perf board [Evan] had kicking around. Time is kept by an off the shelf RTC module and everything is point to point wired together .

Once the glue dried and a lid added, [Evan] has a colorful and fun looking 4 bit per digit binary clock that always takes us a few moments to read.

Hackaday Prize Entry: An Arduino Alarm System

July 19, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

The last few years have seen an incredible increase in the marketing for home automation devices. Why this tech is just picking up now is something we’ll never understand – home automation systems have been around for decades, mostly in the form of security systems. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [IngGaro] is building an Arduino-based security system that does everything you would expect from a home automation system, from closing the shutters to temperature monitoring.

[IngGaro]’s system is built around a shield for an Arduino Mega. This shield includes connections to an alarm system, a GSM modem, temperature and humidity sensors, an Ethernet module, and IR movement sensors. This Arduino Mega attaches to a control box mounted near the front door that’s loaded up with an LCD, an NFC and RFID reader, and a few buttons to arm and disarm the system.

This project has come a long way since it was featured in last year’s Hackaday Prize. Since then [IngGaro] finally completed the project thanks to a change in the Ethernet library. It’s much more stable now, and has the ability to completely control everything in a house that should be automated. Now all [IngGaro] needs to do is create a cool PCB for the project, but in our opinion you can’t do much better than the mastery of perfboard this project already has.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Boca Bearings Innovation Competition Prizes

Mech Engineers: Win 5k For Using A Bearing

July 19, 2015 by James Hobson 9 Comments

Another year, another Boca Bearings Innovation Competition! Boca Bearings is a US based ball bearing manufacturer and distributor. They make bearings for anything from RC cars, to bicycles, to fishing reels — and even industrial applications as well. And they’re one of those companies that actually cares about the tinkerers at home.

They sponsor a lot of community events like RC derbies, but our favorite is their yearly Innovation Competition; which allows anyone around the world to enter their project — so long as it uses a bearing somewhere. And it doesn’t even have to be one of their bearings.

With all these fantastic entries we’ve been having into the Hackaday Prize, maybe if your entry features bearings, you can enter this competition too! What do you have to lose?

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Hackaday Links: July 19, 2015

July 19, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Everybody needs an external USB drive at some time or another. If you’re looking for something with the nerd cred you so desperately need, build a 5 1/4″ half height external drive. That’s a mod to an old Quantum Bigfoot drive, and also serves as a pretty good teardown video for this piece of old tech.

The Woxun KG-UV2D and KG-UV3D are pretty good radios, but a lot of amateur radio operators have found these little handheld radios eventually wear out. The faulty part is always a 24C64 Flash chip, and [Shane] is here to show you the repair.

Last year there was a hackathon to build a breast pump that doesn’t suck in both the literal and figurative sense. The winner of the hackathon created a compression-based pump that is completely different from the traditional suction-based mechanism. Now they’re ready for clinical trials, and that means money. A lot of money. For that, they’re turning to Kickstarter.

What you really need is head mounted controls for Battlefield 4. According to [outgoingbot] it’s a hacked Dualshock 4 controller taped to a bike helmet. The helmet-mounted controller has a few leads going to another Dualshock 4 controller with analog sticks. This video starts off by showing the setup.

[Jan] built a modeling MIDI synth around a tiny 8-pin ARM microcontroller. Despite the low part count, it sounds pretty good. Now he’s turned his attention to the Arduino. This is a much harder programming problem, but it’s still possible to build a good synth with no DAC or PWM.