Preparing Your Product For The FCC

September 19, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 49 Comments

At some point you’ve decided that you’re going to sell your wireless product (or any product with a clock that operates above 8kHz) in the United States. Good luck! You’re going to have to go through the FCC to get listed on the FCC OET EAS (Office of Engineering and Technology, Equipment Authorization System). Well… maybe.

As with everything FCC related, it’s very complicated, there are TLAs and confusing terms everywhere, and it will take you a lot longer than you’d like to figure out what it means for you. Whether you suffer through this, breeze by without a hitch, or never plan to subject yourself to this process, the FCC dance is an entertaining story so let’s dive in!

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New Part Day: A Truly Secure Workstation

September 19, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 87 Comments

There is a chain of trust in every modern computing device that starts with the code you write yourself, and extends backwards through whatever frameworks you’re using, whatever OS you’re using, whatever drivers you’re using, and ultimately whatever BIOS, UEFI, Secure Boot, or firmware you’re running. With an Intel processor, this chain of trust extends to the Intel Management Engine, a system running independent of the CPU that has access to the network, USB ports, and everything else in the computer.

Needless to say, this chain of trust is untenable. Any attempt to audit every line of code running in a computer will only be met with frustration. There is no modern Intel-based computer that is completely open source, and no computer that can be verified as secure. AMD is just as bad, and recent attempts to create an open computing platform have met with frustration. [Bunnie]’s Novena laptop gets close, but like any engineering task, designing the Novena was an exercise in compromise. You can get around modern BIOSes, coreboot still uses binary blobs, and Libreboot will not be discussed on Hackaday for the time being. There is no modern, completely open, completely secure computing platform. They’re all untrustworthy.

The Talos Secure Workstation, from Raptor Engineering, an an upcoming Crowd Supply campaign is the answer to the untrustworthiness of modern computing. The Talos is an effort to create the world’s first libre workstation. It’s an ATX-compatible motherboard that is fully auditable, from schematics to firmware, without any binary blobs.

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Real, Life-Sized Transformers

September 19, 2016 by Moritz Walter 23 Comments

Ever dreamed of a real, life-sized Transformer in your garage? The Turkish startup Letrons now offers you exactly that: Their animatronic Autobot drives like a car, transforms like a Transformer, and supposedly fights off space threats with its built-in smoke machine and sound effects.

Letrons’s Transformer seems to be built upon a BMW E92 coupé chassis. According to the company, the beast is packed with powerful hydraulics and servo motors, allowing it to transform and move fast. Sensors all around the chassis give it some interactivity and prevent it from crushing innocent bystanders when in remote-control mode. Interestingly, its movable arms aren’t attached to the body, but to its extendable side-wings and feature hands with actuated wrists and fingers. The Autobot also can move its head, which pops right out of the hood.

Admittedly, Letrons must have spent a lot of time on the dark side of the moon and working in secrecy before they released footage of a working and polished prototype. It’s unclear if Letron’s Transformers will cooperate with the US military in solving armed conflicts, but they are certainly good for a show. Enjoy the video below!

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Text To Speech The Hard Way

September 18, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

Studies have shown reading to children leads to improved academic performance later in life, a trait that will make them more competitive in the workforce, and ultimately happier human beings. It follows, then, that having a robot read to children will also lead to happier and more productive adults, while normalizing the cyborg uprising takeover of the AI apocalypse of 2037.

It’s a good thing the above paragraph is a complete non-sequitur and has nothing to do with this Hackaday Prize entry. The TextEye, [Markus]’ entry for the Assistive Technology portion of the Hackaday Prize, is a handheld device that translates the written word into speech, useful for anyone who either can’t see well or can’t read gooder. Yes, it will also read to children, but so did Teddy Ruxpin.

If you’re keeping track, this isn’t the first time [Markus] has entered this project in a Hackaday Prize contest. The first time was six months ago in the Hackaday / Adafruit Raspberry Pi Zero contest. [Markus] was inspired by a group of blind computer science students using specialized hardware that allowed them to study the same thing as everyone else.

Since the first few project logs, a lot has changed in this project. You can buy a Pi Zero easily, and the updated Pi Zero 1.3 now comes with a camera connector. [Markus] is swapping out his Pi Model A and USB webcam for the Pi Zero and Pi camera. The software remains the same — GraphicsMagick, Tesseract OCR, Festival and Wiring Pi handle reading text and turning those words into speech — with a slight refactoring of the code. It’s a great use for the Pi Zero, and an excellent example of an Assistive Technology, and we’re happy to see it again in the Hackaday Prize.

A Robotic 808 Drum Machine

September 18, 2016 by Jenny List 14 Comments

If you spent the 1980s hanging out at your local record store, and you don’t have a hankering for spandex and bouffant rock-god hairstyles, the chances are you’ll have more than a few pieces of electronic music from the period in your collection. The proliferation of electronica during that era came through the arrival of relatively inexpensive mass-market digital polyphonic instruments, edging out the sounds of monophonic analog synthesisers for a subsequent generation to rediscover in a later decade. Individual instrument models became icons and entered the musical vernacular of the day, the Ensoniq Mirage sampling synthesiser, the Yamaha DX7 FM synthesiser, or the Roland TR-808 drum machine.

It is the Roland TR-808 that inspired today’s subject, the MR-808 robotic drum machine, from [Moritz Simon Geist]. A percussion sequencer featuring real instruments all built into a cabinet styled to resemble a huge Roland 808. Originally built as a performance instrument, but since reinvented as a piece of installation artwork that visitors can program for themselves.

There is a comprehensive description of the machine’s design and build on the creator’s website, as well as a more high-level introduction. A significant amount of effort was put in to creating mechanical instruments as close as possible to the Roland sounds, with each instrument being operated by solenoids driven by a MIDI-controlled Arduino Mega. A second Arduino, this time an Uno, controls lighting that follows the instruments.

The interactive part of the installation comes from a sequencer front-end running in a web browser on a Nexus 7 tablet, this appears to be served from a Raspberry Pi which supplies MIDI to the MR-808.

The results can be seen in the video below the break, and judging by the reaction of the audience the machine is rather popular.

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Hackaday Links: September 18, 2016

September 18, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

No Star Trek until May, 2017, at which time you’ll have to pay $5/month to watch it with ads. In the meantime, this is phenomenal and was shut down by Paramount and CBS last year ostensibly because Star Trek: Discovery will be based around the same events.

Tempest in a teacup. That’s how you cleverly introduce the world’s smallest MAME cabinet. This project on Adafruit features a Pi Zero, a 96×64 pixel color OLED display, a few buttons, a tiny joystick, and a frame made out of protoboard. It’s tiny — the height of this cabinet just under two wavelengths of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. Being based on the Pi Zero, it’s a capable arcade cabinet, although we would struggle to find a continuous rotation pot small enough to play Tempest the way it should be played. Check out the video.

[Graham] sent an interesting observation in on the tip line. It’s an election year in the US, and that can mean only one thing. It’s coroplast season. Coroplast is that strange material used for political signage, famous for its light weight, being waterproof, and reasonably strong, depending on how you bend it. There is a severe lack of coroplast builds, but if you have some be sure to send them in.

The ESP32, the followup to the hugely popular ESP8266 , is shipping. [Elliot] got his hands on one and found it to be a very promising chip, but the ESP3212 modules I bought from Seeed haven’t arrived yet. That hasn’t stopped [Ptwdd] from making a breakout board for the ESP3212, though. We don’t know if it works, but it’s just a breakout board, anyway.

The usual arguments for drones involve remote sensing, inspection, and generally flying around for a very long time. Quadcopters don’t do this, but fixed wings can. Over on DIYDrones, [moglos] just flew 425km on a single charge. The airframe is a 3 meter Vigilant C1 V tail, using the stock 300kV motor. The battery is a bunch of Panasonic 18650 cells arranged in 6S 9P configuration for 30600mAh. The all-up weight is 5.7kg. This is significant, and we’re seeing the first glimmer of useful tasks like pipeline monitoring, search and rescue, and mapping being done with drones. It is, however, less than half the range a C172 can fly, but batteries are always getting better. Gas goes further because it gets lighter as you fly.

Spectrum Analyzer With 555 Fits In A Tin

September 18, 2016 by Al Williams 13 Comments

[VK2ZAY] has a thing for 555 chips. Before the ready availability of microcontrollers, the 555 was the hardware hacker’s swiss army knife. After all, even though the chip is supposed to be a timer, it is really a bunch of simple pieces you can use to make a timer: a pair of comparators, a few transistors, and a flip-flop. You can use those parts in many different ways, and a timer is just one of them.

[VK2ZAY] used one as a key component in a simple spectrum analyzer. The 555 generates a ramp voltage which alters the frequency of an oscillator. The oscillator mixes with the input signal and a fixed-frequency superregenerative detector creates an output voltage proportional to the input signal strength. You can see a video of the whole setup, below.

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