Slack, Backwards Compatible With 1982

November 29, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Slack is great, but there are a few small problems with the current implementations. There isn’t a client for Palm, there isn’t a client for the Newton, and there isn’t a client for the Commodore 64. The last of these severe oversights was recently fixed by [Jeff Harris]. He built a native Slack client in 6502 assembly for the Commodore 64.

When dealing with network applications and the C64, the first question that comes to mind is how to talk to the outside world. There are C64 NICs, and ESP dongles, but for this build [Jeff] turned to the C64 Userport. This card edge combination of a serial and parallel port allows the C64 to talk to anything with RS-232, and with a simple adapter, [Jeff] got his old computer talking to a Raspberry Pi connected to the Internet.

The C64 Slack client itself is written in 6502 assembly, and features everything you would expect. The Pi is required to talk to the Slack API, though, and uses a NodeJS app to translate the bits from the C64 to something the API can understand.

Does it work? Of course it does. Slack is just text, after all, and there doesn’t seem to be any PETSCII weirdness here. You can check out a video of the build in action below.

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Game Controller Cuts The Rug

November 29, 2016 by Al Williams 1 Comment

There’s an iconic scene from the movie Big where [Tom Hanks] and [Robert Loggia] play an enormous piano by dancing around on the floor-mounted keys. That was the first thing we thought of when we saw [jegatheesan.soundarapandian’s] PC joystick rug. His drum playing (see the video below) wasn’t as melodious as [Hanks] and [Loggia] but then again they probably had a musical director.

At the heart of the project is, of course, an Arduino. An HC-05 provides a Bluetooth connection back to the PC. We thought perhaps an Arduino with USB input capability like the Leonardo might be in use, but instead, [jegatheesan] has a custom Visual Basic program on the PC that uses SendKeys to do the dirty work.

The switches are more interesting made with old CDs, foil, and sponges. The sponge holds the CDs apart until you step on them and the foil makes the CDs conductive. He uses a lot of Fevicol in the project–as far as we can tell, that’s just an Indian brand of PVA glue, so Elmer’s or any other white glue should do just as well.

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Drop-in Laser Cutter Alignment Beam Works Like A Charm

November 29, 2016 by Sonya Vasquez 33 Comments

Every laser cutter enthusiast eventually pops the question: how on earth do I align an invisible beam that’s more-than-happy to zap my eyeballs, not to mention torch everything else in its path? We hate to admit it, but laser cutter beam alignment is no easy task. To greatly assist in this endeavor, though, some folks tend to mix a red diode laser into the path of the beam. Others temporarily fixture that diode laser directly in the beam path and then remove it once aligned.

One deviant has taken diode laser mixing to the next level! [Travis Reese] has added a servo-driven diode laser that dynamically drops into the path of the laser tube when the lid pops up, and then tilts comfortably out of the laser path when the lid closes again.
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Fail Of The Week: Pinewood Derby Cheat Fails Two Ways

November 29, 2016 by Dan Maloney 85 Comments

Would you use your tech prowess to cheat at the Pinewood Derby? When your kid brings home that minimalist kit and expects you to help engineer a car that can beat all the others in the gravity-powered race, the temptation is there. But luckily, there are some events that don’t include the kiddies and the need for parents to assume the proper moral posture. When the whole point of the Pinewood Derby is to cheat, then you pull out all the stops, and you might try building an electrodynamic suspension hoverboard car.

Fortunately for [ch00ftech], the team-building Derby sponsored by his employer is a little looser with the rules than the usual event. Loose enough perhaps to try a magnetically levitating car. The aluminum track provided a perfect surface to leverage Lenz’s Law. [ch00ftech] tried different arrangements of coils and drivers in an attempt to at least reduce the friction between car and track, if not outright levitate it. Sadly, time ran out and physics had others ideas, so [ch00ftech], intent on cheating by any means, tried spoofing the track timing system with a ridiculous front bumper of IR LEDs. But even that didn’t work in the end, and poor [ch00f]’s car wound up in sixth place.

So what could [ch00ftech] had done better? Was he on the right course with levitation? Or was spoofing the sensors likely to have worked with better optics? Or should he have resorted to jet propulsion or a propeller drive? How would you cheat at the Pinewood Derby?

Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which celebrates failure as a learning tool. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your own failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.

Awarding The 2016 Hackaday Prize

November 29, 2016 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Saturday evening at the Hackaday SuperConference is reserved for the Hackaday Prize Party. Our engineering initiative each year, The Hackaday Prize, starts in the spring and ends in the fall. What happens in between is magic: thousands of engineers and engineering enthusiasts focus their skills on building something that matters. The top entries take home some pretty amazing prizes. At this year’s prize ceremony (seen below) we announced the five top entries which took home $200,000 in addition to the $100,000 already awarded to 100 final projects.

Check out the presentation which includes appearances by several of our amazing judges, then join us after the break for a bit more about this year’s Hackaday Prize.

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Controlling Your Instruments From A Computer: Doing Something Useful

November 29, 2016 by Jenny List 6 Comments

Do you know how to harvest data from your bench tools, like plotting bandwidth from your oscilloscope with a computer? It’s actually pretty easy. Many bench tools make this easy using a standard protocol with USB to make the connection.

In the previous installment of this article we talked about the National Instruments VISA (Virtual Instrument Software Archetecture) standard for communicating with your instruments from a computer, and introduced its Python wrapper with a simple demonstration using a Raspberry Pi. We’ll now build on that modest start by describing a more useful application for a Raspberry Pi and a digital oscilloscope; we’ll plot the bandwidth of an RF filter. We’ll assume that you’ve read the previous installment and have both Python and the required libraries on your machine. In our case the computer is a Raspberry Pi and the instrument is a Rigol DS1054z, but similar techniques could be employed with other computers and instruments.

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Flip Dot Displays Appear With Modernized Drivers

November 29, 2016 by Mike Szczys 52 Comments

Admit it, you’ve always wanted to have your own flip-dot display to play with. Along with split-flap displays, flip-dots have an addictive look and sound that hearkens back half a century but still feels like modern technology. They use a magnetic coil to actuate each pixel — physical discs painted contrasting colors on either side. It means that you really only need electricity when changing the pixel, and that each pixel makes a satisfyingly unobtrusive click when flipped. The only problem with the displays is that they’re notoriously difficult to get your hands on.

Breakfast, a Brooklyn-based hardware firm known for creative marketing installations, unveiled their Flip-Disc Display System this morning. Used displays have come up on the usual sites from time to time, but often without a controller. Traditional flip-dot manufacturers haven’t sought out the individual hacker or hackerspace, and a click-to-buy option has been difficult if not impossible to find.

Breakfast’s offering modernizes the driver used to manage all of those electro-mechanical pixels. Whether this will make the displays more accessible is a question that still needs to be answered.
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