Year: 2015

Mechanical Keyboard Goes BLE

September 14, 2015 by 18 Comments

Like many programmers, [Daniel Nugent] loves his old mechanical keyboard (a WASD Code Keyboard). What he didn’t love was the cord. Sure, you can get a modern wireless keyboard, but it won’t be the same as the keyboard you’ve spent so much time with. Armed with a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) module, a rechargeable battery and some coding, he kept his keyboard but got rid of the wires.

Although he has some specific handling for the WASD, the code would very likely handle any PS/2 keyboard. The PS/2 interface is a simple synchronous serial port with a single clock and single data line. Handling it with a microcontroller isn’t very difficult.

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Full Size Custom Claw Machine Built With Parts On Hand

September 14, 2015 by 1 Comment

You know how it goes – sometimes you look at your social calendar and realize that you need to throw together a quick claw machine. Such was the dilemma that [Bob Johnson] found himself in during the run-up to the Nashville Mini Maker Faire, and he came up with a nice design that looks like fun for the faire-goers.

Seeking to both entertain and enlighten the crowd while providing them with sweet, sweet candy, [Bob] was able to quickly knock together a claw machine using mainly parts he had on hand in the shop. The cabinet is nicely designed for game play and to show off the gantry mechanism, which uses aluminum angle profiles and skate bearings as custom linear slides. Plenty of 3D printed parts found their way into the build, from pillow blocks and brackets for the stepper motors to the servo-driven claw mechanism. A nice control panel and some color-coded LED lighting adds some zip to the look, and a Teensy LC runs the whole thing.

Like [Bob]’s game, claw machines that make it to Hackaday seem to be special occasion builds, like this claw machine built for a kid’s birthday party. Occasion or not, though, we think that fun builds like these bring the party with them.

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Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: An Open Smartphone

September 13, 2015 by 22 Comments

One of the biggest trends in DIY electronics, both now and fifty years ago, is creating at home what is usually made in a factory. Fifty years ago, this meant radios and amplifiers. Today, this means smartphones. It used to be the case that you could pull out a Heathkit catalog and find kits for every electronic gadget imaginable. There are no kits for DIY smartphones.

For [Gerard]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize, he’s tapping into the spirit of the decades-old DIY movement and building his own cell phone. He’s calling it the libresmartphone, and it’s able to make calls and send emails, just like any other portable, pocketable computer.

The libresmartphone is built around a Raspberry Pi, with a large battery, HDMI display with touchscreen, and a GSM and GPS module rounding out the build. He’s also rolling his own software to make calls, read SMS, and take a peek into some of the phone’s hardware, like the charge state of the battery.

[Gerard]’s libresmartphone is one of the purest examples of modern DIY electronics you’ll find; it’s not about building something from a kit, but instead building something that’s needed out of the parts he has on hand. That’s the purest example of the DIY movement, and a great entry to this year’s Hackaday Prize.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Arduino Masters Ham Radio Digital Mode

September 13, 2015 by 26 Comments

[jmilldrum] really gets a lot of use out of his Si5351A breakout board. He’s a ham [NT7S], and the Si5351A can generate multiple square waves ranging from 8 kHz to 160 MHz, so it only stands to reason that it is going to be a useful tool for any RF hacker. His most recent exploit is to use the I2C-controllable chip to implement a Fast Simple QSO (FSQ) beacon with an Arduino.

FSQ is a relatively new digital mode that uses a form of low rate FSK to send text and images in a way that is robust under difficult RF propagation. There are 32 different tones used for symbols so common characters only require a single tone. No character takes more than two tones.

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Hackaday Links: September 13, 2015

September 13, 2015 by 9 Comments

One more go at new enclosures for the Amiga 1200. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter campaign, and we mentioned a similar the same campaign last month. The previous campaign received a little more than half of the desired funding in a 30-day campaign. The new campaign received half its funding in a week. The only difference? Now you can put a Raspberry Pi in a newly manufactured A1200 case. And they say Raspberry Pi consumerism isn’t a thing…

Cheap SLA printing service. [Ian] and Dangerous Prototypes have made a name for themselves with dirt cheap, acceptable quality PCBs. Now they’re going for custom prints on a resin machine. It’s $0.95 per gram (density is 1.3g/cc). That’s cheap.

[James Willis] built a floppy drive orchestra. There are 16 drives in this orchestra, all controlled by an FPGA. Here’s the writeup.

Here’s a video overview of a real, huge, rideable hexapod robot. ‘Wow’ is just about the only thing we got for this.

Western Digital introduced a hard drive made specifically for the Raspberry Pi. It’s a hard drive with a USB interface, and a USB cable that connects to the Pi, the drive, and a power adapter. In other news, externally powered USB hard drives exist. You can buy a 2TB drive for the price of the 1TB PiDrive. What was that thing about Raspi consumerism?

Next week is the Open Hardware Summit in Philadelphia. We’ll be there (or rather, I will). We’ll have a post on the OHS badge up on Monday. Would anyone like to go see the lady made out of soap? It’s right around the corner from the venue.

Brewing Tea Too Stressful? 3D Print A Tea Steeper

September 13, 2015 by 29 Comments

When you want to relax with a nice hot cup of tea, the last thing you need is the stress of dunking the teabag in and out of the hot water, right? [Andylear] got tired of it and he has a 3D printer, so he set about solving the problem.

The solution uses a standard mini servo and the VarSpeedServo Arduino library. This library uses interrupts to control speed and position of up to 8 servos. All servos can operate at once and you can control both the position of the servo and the speed of the motion required to get it there. Commands can be asynchronous or you can wait for them to complete and you can even send sequences of commands to each servo.

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Happy Programmer’s Day

September 13, 2015 by 40 Comments

Today (September 13, 2015) is Programmer’s Day — a recognition day that started in Russia, but has been adopted by many countries. While it is great that there is a day recognizing the contribution of programmers to society, the really interesting part is why it is on September 13 (except on leap years).

The leap year part should be a clue. Today is Julian day 256. We’ll guess that anyone reading Hackaday doesn’t need to be told the rest of the story. While it might not be as good of an in-joke as May the 4th (be with you), it is satisfying to know that it isn’t just a random date from the calendar. Now if we could only get the day off as paid vacation…

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