Year: 2015

Adafruit And The Arduinos At Maker Faire

May 18, 2015 by 67 Comments

The apparent lull on the Arduino front the last few weeks was just the calm before the storm that is the Bay Area Maker Faire (BAMF). Both companies claiming the Arduino name were there over the weekend, with news and new products in tow. Ironically, you could see from one booth straight over to the other. Small world.

Perhaps the biggest news from Arduino LLC is that hacker-friendly Adafruit is now going to be making officially-licensed boards in the US. Competing with this news, Arduino SRL brought its new boards, including the Yun Mini and ARM-powered Arduino M0. And [Massimo Banzi] and Arduino LLC seem to be taking an end-run around the Arduino SRL trademark by announcing the “Genuino” brand for European production. For all the details, read on!

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Large Seven-Segment Clock Build Takes Time To Perfect

May 18, 2015 by 20 Comments

[Kevin Rye] built a discrete TTL based seven-segment clock, and he wasn’t too happy with the ugly insides compared to the nice enclosure he built for it. He embarked on creating another large seven-segment clock to put inside that enclosure.

Clocks, and specifically seven-segment based ones, aren’t anything new to write about. This particular project, which is still work in progress, is interesting. [Kevin] is an experienced hacker, but the problems he encountered and resolved along the way could prove useful to a fellow hacker someday.

To start with, he tried rectifying his old build. But in his own words “You can polish a turd, but it’s still a turd.” Five years later, he’d had enough. He’s built a lot of other clocks, but rather than repurposing them, he decided to start from scratch. He quickly breadboarded an Arduino, some displays and drove them using the Multiplex7seg library. That library supports only four characters, so he was back to the drawing board. With a fresh start, his design is now moving along nicely. For now, he’s designed three boards for the display, two boards for the colons between digits, the main Arduino-clone controller board and a 3D printed front frame to hold the displays. It will be nice to finally see that enclosure receive some fitting occupants and bring this build to closure.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Source Hydroponic Monitoring System

May 17, 2015 by 10 Comments

A few months ago, [Adam] was building a controller system for a small hydroponic system he had set up in his basement. Since then, the Hackaday Prize was announced, and given the theme – saving the world one plant at a time – he’s renvisioning his garden control and monitoring system as a Hackaday Prize entry.

While the mechanical and green part of the build is exactly what you would expect from something designed from hardware store parts, the electronics are rather interesting. All the plants in either a hydroponic or dirt-based setup will have their moisture level and PH monitored by a a set of electronics that push data up to the cloud.

The current hardware setup includes a DyIO, a very cool dev platform with 24 digital I/Os and 24 servo outputs, a Raspberry Pi, and a few module boards loaded up with ARM microcontrollers and an ESP8266. [Adam] is hitting all the hardware on this build.

So far, [Adam] has a few boards sent out to a board fab, including an analog sensor module, a digital sensor module. a WiFi module hub, and a few bits and bobs that make integration into an existing garden or hydroponic setup easier. It’s a great project for this year’s Hackaday Prize, and proof that you don’t need to come up with a new build to submit something.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

A Jet Powered Go Kart

Do Not Try This At Home: A Jet Powered Go Kart

May 17, 2015 by 42 Comments

[Colin Furze] is at it again. This time he’s built a freaking jet-engine powered go kart.

In case you’re not familiar with [Mr. Furze], he’s no stranger to building high-speed vehicles, like the fastest baby stroller in the world. And he’s also got a bit of an obsession with pulse jet engines. He’s even made one out of a toilet roll holder. He was a plumber — but now he’s one of the best mad scientist YouTube creators around. We just hope he doesn’t kick the bucket too soon with one of his extreme projects, because his safety tie probably won’t save him!

This month’s project is no exception — he’s strapping his giant pulse jet engine he used to fart on France onto the frame of a tiny go kart. “As you can see the jet to kart ratio is pretty good”. No kidding — the engine has gotta be 2.5 times as long as the go kart’s frame!

Stick around after the break to see him risk his neck for our own amusement.

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Hackaday Links: May 17, 2015

May 17, 2015 by 17 Comments

Here’s a worthwhile Kickstarter for once: the Prishtina Hackerspace. Yes, that’s a Kickstarter for a hackerspace in Kosovo. Unlike most hackerspace Kickstarters, they’re already mostly funded, with 20 days to go. If we ever get around to doing the Istanbul to Kaliningrad hackerspace tour, we’ll drop by.

Codebender is a web-based tool that allows you to code and program an Arduino. The Chromebook is a web-based laptop that is popular with a few schools. Now you can uses Codebender on a Chromebook. You might need to update your Chromebook to v42, and there’s a slight bug in the USB programmers, but that should be fixed in a month or so.

Here’s a great way to waste five minutes. It’s called agar.io. It’s a multiplayer online game where you’re a cell, you eat dots that are smaller than you, and bigger cells (other players) can eat you. [Morris] found the missing feature: being able to find the IP of a server so you can play with your friends. This feature is now implemented in a browser script. Here’s the repo.

The FAA currently deciding the fate of unmanned aerial vehicles and systems, and we’re going to live with any screwup they make for the next 50 years. It would be nice if all UAV operators, drone pilots, and everyone involved with flying robots could get together and hash out what the ideal rules would be. That’s happening in late July thanks to the Silicon Valley Chapter of AUVSI (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International).

SOLAR ROADWAYS!! Al Jazeera is reporting a project in the Netherlands that puts solar cells in a road. It’s just a bike path, it’s only 70 meters long, and it can support at least 12 tonnes (in the form of a ‘fire brigade truck’). There’s no plans for the truly dumb solar roadways stuff – heating the roads, or having lanes with LEDs. We’re desperately seeking more information on this one.

Master Combination Lock Cracker

Cracking A Combo Lock In Under 30 Seconds

May 17, 2015 by 21 Comments

Forget the combination to your combo lock? Well if you’ve got a 3D printer, an Arduino, a servo and a stepper motor handy — you can build your own Combo Breaker pretty easily. It’s capable of solving any Master combination lock in 8 tries or less.

The creator [Samy Kamkar] is a privacy and security researcher, who absolutely loves finding holes in security. We actually just heard from him at our very own Hack a Day Prize: Los Angeles event, where he talked about his wireless keyboard sniffer he built into a cellphone charger.

He’s previously shown us how to crack a combo lock in 8 tries or less using an online calculator he made. This project is just an extension of that to automate the whole process.

As always he gives an extremely thorough explanation of the project in his build log video — including designing the 3D printed parts! If you wanna build your own it’ll cost just under $100 and you can grab all the necessary info and source files from his GitHub.

[Thanks for the tip Justin!]

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The Biggest Day At Hamvention

May 17, 2015 by 6 Comments

We capped off day-2 of the Hamvention with an unexpected rain shower, and some arcing back in the hotel room.  Historically, Saturday is the best attended day of the show.  As normally, we spent most of the day outside in the flea market.  One of our friends allowed us to use his AN/GRC-9 army surplus radio to check into one of the nets.  The radio was powered by hand-crank.  Later, we attended a forum on the construction of HF antennas for camping trips, and obtained parts for our project back in the room. More about that later?  Overall, a great day.

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