Year: 2015

Hackerspace Map of Europe

Finally A Hardware Hackerspace Map For The Apocalypse

April 2, 2015 by 5 Comments

In case you don’t know, our hacker brethren in Europe are pretty darn sophisticated with their hackerspaces — most of them even implement the Hackerspace API which tells the public when they are open, or closed. This allows them to tap in with hardware to create a fancy notifications for when the spaces are open!

Shackspace, the place to be in Stuttgart, had a nice big map of Europe destined for world domination in their lounge. They thought it could use an upgrade, so have been adding LEDs to represent each hackerspace. They glow green when open, and red when closed. And they built it all in one weekend flat.

If your space is not on the map, start using the Space API and let them know so they can update their project!

Sadly Shackspace in Stuttgart was not one of the hackerspaces we had the pleasure of touring during our European Hackerspace Tour!

[Thanks Momo!]

We Have A Problem: Food Supply

April 2, 2015 by 190 Comments

Hackaday, we have a problem. Supplying fresh, healthy food to the world’s population is a huge challenge. And if we do nothing, it will only get more difficult. Rising water prices and (eventually) rising fuel prices will make growing and transporting food more costly. Let’s leverage our collective skill and experience to chip away at this problem. We hope this will get you thinking toward your entry for the 2015 Hackaday Prize.

There are big science breakthroughs that have taken us this far. For instance, The Green Revolution developed wheat with stronger stalks to support the weight of higher kernel yields. If you’re equipped to undertake that kind of bio-hacking we’d love to see it. But the majority of us can still work on ideas to make a difference and (heartwarming moment approaching…) feed the world.

As with the shower feedback loop and electricity monitoring installments of We Have a Problem, I’ll start you off with an uber-simple idea. It’s up to you to think further and wider to get at solutions that are worth more exploration.

Can Technology Give Me a Green Thumb?

warm-dirt-greenhouse-controller-e1332183513993We see it all the time around here, people are building projects to monitor and control their own gardening projects. The one shown here couldn’t be simpler, it’s a hot-box which lets your gardening continue through the winter. It uses heat tape to keep the soil warm, and features a motorized lid which actuates to regulate humidity and temperature.

This concept is a good one. It doesn’t take up a lot of space and it tackles the easy part of automation (how hot is it? how wet is it?). But does it have the potential to make an impact on the source of your household’s food? Maybe the concept needs to be applied to community garden areas so that you can achieve a larger yield.

Robots

robot-weed-pickerPerhaps robots are an answer to a different problem. This little bot, already entered in the 2015 Hackaday Prize, is an experiment with automatic weed elimination versus the use of herbicides.

But it does get us thinking. One of the problems you need to overcome when trying to achieve wide adoption of local food supply is that not everyone enjoys the work that goes into it. Do you have an idea of how your mad robot skills can do the work for us?

buckybotStepping back onto the side-track of changes to industrial farming, let’s take a look at one of the way-out-there-ideas from last year. A huge amount of water usage is in food production. What if we turned entire farms into greenhouses in order to capture and reuse water that is normally lost into an all-to-dry atmosphere? Domes my friends, domes. A swarm of 3D printing robots given locomotion and unleashed to print out translucent covers over the fields on the kilometer-scale. Hey, doesn’t hurt to dream (and do some back of the envelope calculations to gauge how wild that idea actually is).

Your Turn

That should be enough to get the conversation started. Toss around some ideas here in the comments, but don’t let the brainstorm stop there. All it takes to enter the Hackaday Prize is an idea. Write it down as a project on Hackaday.io and tag it “2015HackadayPrize” to get your entry started.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Caption CERN Contest Is A GO For Week 9

April 2, 2015 by 10 Comments

Thanks for another week of great entries in the Caption CERN Contest over at Hackaday.io! We still aren’t sure if our CERN staffer is looking at that machine pensively, amorously, or with a bit of confusion, but you all found some great words to go with the image!

The Funnies:

  • “Dr. Breman’s early attempts to create the perfect robot woman had some early success, but was later scrapped do to a tragic input/output error.” – Terry Davis
  • “You were supposed to be intelligent, my dear. What do you mean by segfault?” –elias.alberto
  • “CERN’s pioneering computer dating service didn’t quite work out as expected.” – Nick Johnson

The winner for this week is Stripeytype with the quote seen in the top image of this article. Stripeytype will be sporting a CRT head T-Shirt From The Hackaday Store at their next hackerspace meeting.

cern-9-smWe’re not done searching out they mysteries of CERN’s history. Week 9 of the Caption CERN Contest has just begun! 

Some of CERN’s experiments take place in the miles of tunnels below their labs in and around Meyrin, on the border of France and Switzerland. It looks like this image was taken in one of those tunnels. It’s definitely an interesting shot. CERN’s documentation for the image has been lost to history, so it’s up to you to explain what’s going on here! Add your humorous caption as a comment to the project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the log, not on the project itself. As always, if you actually have information about the image or the people in it, let CERN know on the original image discussion page.

Good Luck!

More MRRF, This Time A Roundtable

April 2, 2015 by 5 Comments

Ah, you thought we were done with our coverage of the Midwest RepRap Festival, didn’t you? No, there’s still more, thanks to [Timothy Koscielny] sending in some digital assets that were required to put this post together. This time, it’s the RepRap roundtable with [Johnny Russell] from Ultimachine, [Shane Graber] from MakerJuice, [Lars Brubaker] from MatterHackers, [Sanjay Mortimer] from E3D-Online.

The first video covers the introductions for these very prominent 3D printer developers and their views on what future advances in 3D printers will be, the differences between Delta, Cartesian, and Polar bots (there aren’t many), and when resin printers will start to pick up.

In the Q&A session, the panel fielded a few questions from the audience. Questions included how to get people into 3D modeling, an amazing question dealing with what we should be making (with the implication that we’re only making stupid plastic trinkets), and what needs work to bring 3D printing to the masses.

Special thanks to [Casey Hendrickson] from ninety two point three WOWO for MC’ing the RepRap roundtable and to [Timothy Koscielny] for the audio work. This isn’t it, though: I still need to dump a bunch of pictures after the break.

Continue reading “More MRRF, This Time A Roundtable” →

Building A 20 Inch Disk Sander

April 2, 2015 by 25 Comments

A small disk sander is a useful and cheap addition to the shop. For about $100, you can buy a cheap combination 6″ disk/belt sander that’s extremely useful. The size and cost of power tools does not scale linearly, and if you want a big disk sander you might as well make your own.

The motor for this build is a 1kW single phase motor pulled from a floor polisher found in the trash. That’s enough to push a sanding disk around, but when you get to tools this large, you need a good base, good tilt mechanism, and everything should be extremely heavy.

This build meets all those requirements while still using mostly recycled components. The work table is actually made of three pieces of recycled aluminum epoxied together. Yes, you should cringe at this, but it actually makes a little bit of sense: thinner pieces can be cut on a table saw, and if you’re extremely careful during the glue-up, you can cut the mitre slot without a mill. This frame attaches to a frame made from aluminum extrusion and filled with a homebrew epoxy granite mix. Remember, heavy is better here.

In keeping with making a huge disk sander out of stuff pulled out of the trash, the trunnions and motor hub were cast out of aluminum melted in an old propane tank furnace. Once these were cleaned up, a disk was mounted on the hub and trued up in the most unsafe manner possible.

With a few additions including a machined mitre gauge, dust collector, and legs made out of wood that’s far too pretty for a simple shop tool, this huge assemblage of trash turned out to be a great sander. You can see a few videos of it below.

Continue reading “Building A 20 Inch Disk Sander” →

Use The Internet To Get Your Kadabra To Evolve

April 1, 2015 by 13 Comments

If you grew up playing Pokemon Red or Blue, you might have moved far away from your childhood friends by now. If you’re still playing Pokemon Red or Blue, you can now literally reconnect with these friends using [Pepijn]’s new and improved Game Boy link that lets players trade Pokemon over the internet.

Based on [Pepijn]’s previous work building an Arduino-based Pokemon storage system (which was inspired by a separate project that was able to spoof trades), the device allows a Game Boy (including Pocket, Color, and Advance versions) to connect to the Internet via a Teensy shield. The online waiting room software is called TCPoke which facilitates the Internetting of the Game Boys. From there, all you have to do is connect via the project’s wiki!

The TCPoke software is available on the project’s site. Also, be sure to check out the video below which shows a demonstration of how the software works. There is noticeable delay compared to a direct link between Game Boys, but it functions very well. We didn’t see this link system work for a battle, but it would be interesting to see if it is possible. If so, you might never have to go to a Pokemon League meeting again!

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A Stack Of Boards For An Edison Breadboard Adapter

April 1, 2015 by 15 Comments

The Intel Edison is a neat piece of hardware, but the connector for the Edison is extremely intimidating and the Mini breakout board is incompatible with breadboards. What’s [Federico], a builder of Internet of Things to do? Etch their own breakout board.

The Mini Breakout board for the Intel Edison is the official ‘minimal’ offering for getting the Edison up and running with a mess of jumper wires and LEDs. While this breakout board handles the USB to UART bridge, power regulation, and exposes all the pins on the Edison connector, it is terrible for prototyping. It’s a 4×14 array of holes on a 0.1″ grid that are hidden underneath the Edison.

[Federico] handled this problem with a copper clad board and a little bit of ferric chloride. He jumped into Eagle and created a breakout board to turn the 4×14 pin grid into a more sensible breadboard-friendly layout.

The breadboard-friendly adapter doesn’t have level shifters, but by using the mini-breakout board between the Edison and the breadboard adapter [Federico] still has the UART to USB hardware and a battery charging circuit. Still, there’s room for improvement and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.