Aircraft Hackchat This Thursday

December 9, 2015 by Adam Fabio 6 Comments

This Thursday, December 10th at 5pm PST we will be hosting a live HackChat about aircraft. If it’s man-made and it files, it’s on topic! Full scale and model planes, helicopters, multicopters, gyros, blimps and gliders will be on the agenda. Our host this week will be Hackaday Community Editor [Adam Fabio] who is also the author of this well-written blog entry. In addition to being an electrical engineer, [Adam] brings 30 years of experience as a Radio Control model enthusiast. Over the years he’s worked as a professional R/C Blimp Pilot for the New York Islanders Hockey team and as an aerial photographer. On the full-scale aircraft side, he’s designed radar and air traffic control software used to keep the skies safe over land and sea.

Aircraft HackChat starts Thursday at 5pm PST (here’s a timezone cheat sheet if you need it). Participating in this live chat is very simple. Those who are already part of the Hacker Channel can simply click on theTeam Messaging button. If you’re not part of the channel, just go to the hacker Channel page, scroll to the bottom of the “TEAM” list in the left sidebar and click “Request to join this project”.

HackChat takes place in the Hacker Channel every few weeks and is a friendly place to talk about engineering and the projects you’re working on.

Impressive NFC Controlled Infinity Mirror Table Cuts No Corners

December 9, 2015 by James Hobson 14 Comments

If you’re looking to add a bit of the future to your living room, you might want to look at this tutorial to build a very professional infinity mirror table.

It’s an IKEA RAMVIK coffee table, modified to include RGB LEDs and a one-way mirror for that ever-so-awesome infinity effect. And technically, you only have to cut one hole in the table.

By placing a large mirror underneath the glass, wrapping the inner edge with a strip of RGB LEDs and coating the original glass top with a reflective car tint, it’s a pretty simple hack that results in a very polished product — not something that can be said for most of our projects! But to make it even better, [Pierre] added an NFC chip under the table, allowing you to control the color with just a tap.

Continue reading “Impressive NFC Controlled Infinity Mirror Table Cuts No Corners” →

Noah Feehan And The Mind Of The Maker

December 9, 2015 by Sonya Vasquez 4 Comments

Too often we find ourselves featuring projects on these pages without giving much thought behind the people who made them. Nevertheless, behind the LED panels, github pages, and PCBs that make the hardware magic happen, there’s a person. And not just one person but an entire culture of people who let their conscious hours bleed late into the night over software bugs and bad solder joints. Noah Feehan is one of these veterans, and at this year’s Hackaday SuperConference, he reached out to this culture. Noah comes armed not with projects but with design tips and an infectious enthusiasm that will make you rethink how you use your time and space in the land of DIY. Armed with ten years of experience in art and engineering design, Noah delivers his best tips for fellow hackers. Spare yourself hours of confusion during future builds; kick back, and treat yourself to a few tips from a pro on keeping things together.

Continue reading “Noah Feehan And The Mind Of The Maker” →

Raspberry Pi $2 WiFi Through Epic SDIO Hack

December 9, 2015 by Elliot Williams 99 Comments

These are the times that we live in: the Raspberry Pi Zero comes out — a full freaking Linux computer on a chip for $5 — and people complain that it doesn’t have this or that. Top place on the list of desiderata is probably a tie between audio out and WiFi connectivity. USB is a solution for both of these, but with one USB port it’s going to be a scarce commodity, so any help is welcome.

Hackaday.io hacker [ajlitt] is looking for a way out of the WiFi bind. His solution? The Raspberry Pi series of chips has a special function on a bunch of the GPIO pins that make it easier to talk to SDIO devices. SDIO is an extension of the SPI-like protocol that’s used with SD memory cards. The idea with SDIO was that you could plug a GPS or something into your PDA’s SD card slot. We don’t have PDAs anymore, but the SDIO spec remains.

[ajlitt] dug up an SDIO driver for the ESP8089 chip, and found that you can liberate the ESP8266’s SPI bus by removing a flash memory chip that’s taking up the SPI lines. Connect the SPI lines on the ESP8266 to the SDIO lines on the Raspberry Pi, and the rest is taken care of by the drivers. “The rest”, by the way, includes bringing the ESP’s processor up, dumping new firmware into it over the SPI/SDIO lines to convince it to act as an SDIO WiFi adapter, and all the rest of the hardware communication stuff that drivers do.

The result is WiFi connectivity without USB, requiring only some reasonably fine-pitch soldering, and unlike this hack you don’t have to worry about USB bus contention. So now you can add a $2 WiFi board to you $5 computer and you’ve still got the USB free. It’s not as fast as a dedicated WiFi dongle, but it gets the job done. Take that, Hackaday’s own [Rud Merriam]!

Thanks [J0z0r] for the tip!

Embed With Elliot: Debounce Your Noisy Buttons, Part I

December 9, 2015 by Elliot Williams 98 Comments

“Psst…hey buddy! Wanna see the sweetest little debouncing routine this side of Spokane? C’mon over here. Step right over those bit-shift operators, they don’t bite. Now look at this beauty right here: I call her The Ultimate Debouncer(tm)!”

Everybody who works with microcontrollers eventually runs into the issue of switch bounce or “chatter”, and nearly everyone has their own favorite solution. Some fix it in hardware, others fix it in software. Some hackers understand chatter, and others just cut-and-paste the classic routines. Some folks even try to ignore it, and they might even get lucky, but everyone’s luck runs out sometimes.

In the next two “Embed with Elliot” installments, I’ll look a little bit at bouncing, look into doing hardware debouncing both the simple way and the right way, and build up a basic software routine that demonstrates some of the principles and which works just fine, though it’s not optimized. We’ll be laying the groundwork.

In the next installment, I’ll let you in on my personal favorite debounce routine. It’s a minor tweak on a standard, but with some special sauce that’s worth spreading around. I’ll call it the Ultimate Debouncer(tm), but will it stand up to the scrutiny of the Hackaday commenteers? (How’s that for a cliffhanger?!?)

For now, though, let’s look into switch bounce and the standard ways to fix it in hardware and software.

Continue reading “Embed With Elliot: Debounce Your Noisy Buttons, Part I” →

[Cody] Takes Us From Rock To Ring

December 9, 2015 by Adam Fabio 26 Comments

[Cody Reeder] had a problem. He wanted to make a ring for his girlfriend [Canyon], but didn’t have enough gold. [Cody and Canyon] spent some time panning for the shiny stuff last summer. Their haul was only about 1/3 gram though. Way too small to make any kind of jewelry. What to do? If you’re [Cody], you head up to your silver mine, and pick up some ore. [Cody] has several mines on his ranch in Utah. While he didn’t go down into the 75 foot deep pit this time, he did pick up some ore his family had brought out a few years back. Getting from ore to silver is a long process though.

First, [Cody] crushed the rock down to marble size using his homemade rock crusher. Then he roasted the rock in a tire rim furnace. The ore was so rich in lead and silver that the some of the metal just dropped right out, forming splatters on the ground beneath the furnace. [Cody] then ball milled the remaining rock to a fine powder and panned out the rest of the lead. At this point the lead and silver were mixed together. [Cody] employed Parks process to extract the silver. Zinc was added to the molten lead mixture. The silver is attracted to the zinc, which is insoluble in lead. The result is a layer of zinc and silver floating above the molten lead. Extracting pure silver is just a matter of removing the zinc, which [Cody] did with a bit of acid.

Cody decided to make a silver ring for [Canyon] with their gold as the stone. He used the lost wax method to create his ring. This involves making the ring from wax, then casting that wax in a mold. The mold is then heated, which burns out the wax. The result is an empty mold, ready for molten metal.

The cast ring took a lot of cleanup before it was perfect, but the results definitely look like they were worth all the work.

Continue reading “[Cody] Takes Us From Rock To Ring” →

Echo Of The Bunnymen: How AMD Won, Then Lost

December 9, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 177 Comments

In 2003, nothing could stop AMD. This was a company that moved from a semiconductor company based around second-sourcing Intel designs in the 1980s to a Fortune 500 company a mere fifteen years later. AMD was on fire, and with almost a 50% market share of desktop CPUs, it was a true challenger to Intel’s throne.

AMD began its corporate history like dozens of other semiconductor companies: second sourcing dozens of other designs from dozens of other companies. The first AMD chip, sold in 1970, was just a four-bit shift register. From there, AMD began producing 1024-bit static RAMs, ever more complex integrated circuits, and in 1974 released the Am9080, a reverse-engineered version of the Intel 8080.

AMD had the beginnings of something great. The company was founded by [Jerry Sanders], electrical engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor. At the time [Sanders] left Fairchild in 1969, [Gordon Moore] and [Robert Noyce], also former Fairchild employees, had formed Intel a year before.

While AMD and Intel shared a common heritage, history bears that only one company would become the king of semiconductors. Twenty years after these companies were founded they would find themselves in a bitter rivalry, and thirty years after their beginnings, they would each see their fortunes change. For a short time, AMD would overtake Intel as the king of CPUs, only to stumble again and again to a market share of ten to twenty percent. It only takes excellent engineering to succeed, but how did AMD fail? The answer is Intel. Through illegal practices and ethically questionable engineering decisions, Intel would succeed to be the current leader of the semiconductor world.

Continue reading “Echo Of The Bunnymen: How AMD Won, Then Lost” →