Hybrid Raspberry Pi + PIC32 = Oscilloscope And Function Generator

The PicBerry is a student final project by [Advitya], [Jeff], and [Danna] that takes a hybrid approach to creating a portable (and affordable) combination digital oscilloscope and function generator. It’s based on the Raspberry Pi, features an intuitive Python GUI, and can generate and measure simultaneously.

But wait! The Raspberry Pi is a capable little Linux machine, but meeting real-time deadlines isn’t its strong suit. That’s where the hybrid approach comes in. The Pi takes care of the user interface and other goodies, and a PIC32 over SPI is used for 1 MHz sampling and running a DAC at 500 kHz. The idea of combining them into PicBerry is to get the best of both worlds, with the Pi and PIC32 each doing what they are best at. The readings are sent in batches from the PIC32 to the Pi, where the plot is updated every 30 ms so that user does not perceive any visible lag.

The project documentation notes that improvements can be made, the speeds are a far cry from regular bench equipment, and the software lacks some typical features such as triggering, but overall not bad at all for under $50 of parts. In fact, there are hardly any components at all beyond the Raspberry Pi, the PIC32, and a MCP4822 digital-to-analog converter. A short demo video is embedded below.

Continue reading “Hybrid Raspberry Pi + PIC32 = Oscilloscope And Function Generator”

Make Your Own Arduino Header Pins

There are two kinds of people in the world (and, no, this isn’t a binary joke). People who love the Arduino, and people who hate it. If you’ve ever tried to use a standard prototype board to mount on an Arduino, you’ll know what kind of person you are. When you notice the pins aren’t on 0.1 inch centers, you might think, “What the heck were those idiots thinking!” Or, you might say, “How clever! This way the connectors are keyed to prevent mistakes.” From your choice of statement, we can deduce your feelings on the subject.

[Rssalnero] clearly said something different. We weren’t there, but we suspect it was: “Gee. I should 3D print a jig to bend headers to fit.” Actually, he apparently tried to do it by hand (we’ve tried it, too). The results are not usually very good.

He created two simple 3D printed jigs that let you bend an 8-pin header. The first jig bends the correct offset and the second helps you straighten out the ends again. You can see the result in the picture above.

Continue reading “Make Your Own Arduino Header Pins”

All I Want For Christmas Is A 4-Factor Biometric Lock Box

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! No, we’re not talking about the holiday season, although that certainly has its merits. What we mean is that it’s time for the final projects from [Bruce Land]’s ECE4760 class. With the giving spirit and their mothers in mind, [Adarsh], [Timon], and [Cameron] made a programmable lock box with four-factor authentication. That’s three factors more secure than your average Las Vegas hotel room safe, and with a display to boot.

Getting into this box starts with a four-digit code on a number pad. If it’s incorrect, the display will say so. Put in the right code and the system will wait four seconds for the next step, which involves three potentiometers. These are tuned to the correct value with a leeway of +/- 30. After another four-second wait, it’s on to the piezo-based knock detector, which listens for the right pattern. Finally, a fingerprint scanner makes sure that anyone who wants into this box had better plan ahead.

This project is based on Microchip’s PIC32-based Microstick II, which [Professor Land] starting teaching in 2015. It also uses an Arduino Uno to handle the fingerprint scanner. The team has marketability in mind for this project, and in the video after the break, they walk through the factory settings and user customization.

We have seen many ways to secure a lock box. How about a laser-cut combination safe or a box with a matching NFC ring?

Continue reading “All I Want For Christmas Is A 4-Factor Biometric Lock Box”

Bitbanging Qualcomm Charge Controllers

With more and more manufacturers moving to USB-C, it seems as though the trusty USB port is getting more and more entrenched. Not that that’s a bad thing, either; having a universal standard like this is great for simplicity and interconnectability. However, if you’re still stuck with USB 2.0 ports on your now completely obsolete one-year-old phone, there’s still some hope that you can at least get rapid charging. [hugatry] was able to manipulate Qualcomm’s rapid charging protocol to enable it to work with any device.

Continue reading “Bitbanging Qualcomm Charge Controllers”

Computers For The Masses, Not The Classes

Retro is new again, and everywhere you look you’ll find films, documentaries, and TV shows cashing in on the nostalgia of their target audience. There is one inaccuracy you’ll find with this these shows: Apple computers are everywhere. This isn’t a historical truth – Commodore was everywhere, the C64 was the computer the nerds actually used, and to this day, the Commodore 64 is still the best-selling computer in history.

Commodore is gone, replaced with a superfund site, but the people who made the best computers in history are still around. At the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference, Bil Herd gave a talk on the second act of Commodore’s three-act tragedy. Bil is a frequent contributor around these parts, and as always he illuminates the 1980s far better than Halt and Catch Fire ever could.

Continue reading “Computers For The Masses, Not The Classes”

Compiling A $22 Logic Analyzer

On my way to this year’s Hackaday SuperConference I saw an article on EE Times about someone taking the $22 Lattice iCEstick and turning it into a logic analyzer complete with a Python app to display the waveforms. This jumped out as pretty cool to me given that there really isn’t a ton of RAM on the stick, basically none that isn’t contained in the FPGA itself.

[Jenny List] has also written about the this application as created by [Kevin Hubbard] of Black Mesa Labs and [Al Williams] has a great set of posts about using this same $22 evaluation board doing ground up Verilog design using open source tools. Even if you don’t end up using the stick as a logic analyzer over the long haul, it’ll be very easy to find many other projects where you can recompile to invent a new purpose for it.

Continue reading “Compiling A $22 Logic Analyzer”

Catching A Rogue Train With Data

If you have been a regular traveler on one of the world’s mass transit systems over the last few decades, you will have witnessed something of a technological revolution. Not necessarily in the trains themselves, though they have certainly changed, but in the signalling and system automation. Nineteenth and twentieth century human and electromechanical systems have been replaced by up-to-date computers, and in some cases the trains even operate autonomously without a driver. The position of every train is known exactly at all times, and with far less possibility for human error, the networks are both safer and more efficient.

As you might expect, the city-state of Singapore has a metro with every technological advance possible, recently built and with new equipment. It was thus rather unfortunate for the Singaporean metro operators that trains on their Circle Line started to experience disruption. Without warning, trains would lose their electronic signalling, and their safety systems would then apply the brakes and bring them to a halt. Engineers had laid the blame on electrical interference, but despite their best efforts no culprit could be found.

Eventually the problem found its way to the Singaporean government’s data team, and their story of how they identified the source of the interference makes for a fascinating read. It’s a minor departure from Hackaday’s usual  hardware and open source fare, but there is still plenty to be learned from their techniques.

They started with the raw train incident data, and working in a Jupyter notebook imported, cleaned, and consolidated it before producing analyses for time, location, and train IDs. None of these graphs showed any pointers, as the incidents happened regardless of location, time, or train.

They then plotted each train on a Marey chart, a graph in which the vertical axis represents time  and the horizontal axis represents stations along a line (Incidentally Étienne-Jules Marey’s Wikipedia entry is a fascinating read in itself). Since it represents the positions of multiple trains simultaneously they were able to see that the incidents happened when two trains were passing, hence their lack of correlation with location or time. The prospect of a rogue train as the source of the interference was raised, and analyzing video recordings from metro stations to spot the passing train’s number they were able to identify the unit in question. We hope that the repairs included a look at the susceptibility of the signalling system to interference as well as the faulty parts on one train.

We’ve been known to cover a few stories here with a railway flavor over the years. Mostly though they’ve been older ones, such as this film of a steam locomotive’s construction, or this tale of narrow gauge preservation.

[via Hacker News]

[Main image source: Singapore MRT Circle line trains image: 9V-SKA [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons]