Hacking A Fluke Multimeter To Serve Readings Over WiFi

June 7, 2016 by Jenny List 47 Comments

Your multimeter is probably your most useful instrument if you work regularly with electronics. It goes with you everywhere, and is your first port of call in most cases when you are presented with a piece of equipment. And when you think about it, it’s a pretty amazing instrument. Multimeter technology has advanced to the point at which even an inexpensive modern device has functions that would have required a hefty budget a few decades ago.

There is still one thing affordable multimeters remain unable to do: they can’t log their readings for analysis on a computer. They’re an instantaneous instrument, just as they always have been.

Lord of Hackaday [Sprite_TM] decided to hack his multimeter to serve its readings over Wi-Fi. Rather than start with a throwaway meter from the bargain bin, he did it with a Fluke. The meter he chose was a Fluke 15B+, the company’s budget offering for the Indian and Chinese markets, since he had one spare.

Opening up the 15B+, he was presented with its processor concealed under a blob of epoxy and thus unidentifiable. Armed with the knowledge that other similar Flukes contain Fortune Semiconductor parts, he investigated as many data sheets as he could find from the same company and finally identified it as an FS98O24 one-time-programmable microprocessor. Sadly this chip has no serial port, but he did find an I2C EEPROM which he correctly guessed held calibration settings. Removing this chip gave him a meter with slightly off calibration, but also gave him a serial port of sorts.

Further detective work allowed him to identify the baud rate, and supplying random commands delivered him some that returned data packets. Eventually he identified a packet containing the states of the LCD’s segments, from which he could derive its displayed value. Connecting an ESP8266 module with appropriate software left him with a Wi-Fi connected multimeter. There was a little more refinement to his hack, he created a power management board to activate the ESP when needed, and a neat hack to display its IP address on the screen.

Multimeter hacks have featured several times here at Hackaday. We’ve had another serial port hack, or how about a remote display for another Fluke on a Gameboy Advance?

Retrotechtacular: 6207, A Study In Steel

June 7, 2016 by Jenny List 47 Comments

If you ever encounter railroad or railway enthusiasts, you may have heard the view that at some point in the past there was a golden age of rail transport that has somehow been lost. It’s something that’s up for debate as to when that age was or even whether with a selection of new super-high-speed trains snaking across our continents we’re in a golden age now, but it’s true to say that the rail business has had its fair share of decline in the last half-century.

It’s quite likely that when they talk of a golden age, they really mean a golden age of steam rail transport. At which point depending on where you live in the world it’s easier to put your finger on a decade. For UK residents a good candidate would be the 1930s; steam locomotive design had reached its peak, the rail network hadn’t been worn out by the demands of wartime, and private car ownership hadn’t eaten into their passenger numbers. The country was divided up into a set of regional rail monopolies, each of which had their own locomotive works and designers who were in fierce competition to show that their machines were the best and the fastest.

The LMS, the London Midland and Scottish railway company, served the northwestern segment of the country, North Wales, and the West of Scotland. Their high-speed express trains were in hot competition with those of the LNER, the London and North Eastern Railway, who served the eastern side of the country, to offer the fastest service from London to Scotland. It’s difficult to grasp through an 80-year lens, but this battle was one of national excitement, with the fastest locomotives becoming household names nationwide. The railway companies were justifiably proud of their engineering expertise, and so featured their locomotives as a key part of their marketing to the general public.

And so we come to the subject of today’s Retrotechtacular piece, a film below the break from 1935 following the construction of a high-speed express locomotive from start to finish in the LMS’s Crewe railway works. 6207 was one of a class of thirteen 4-6-2 Pacific locomotives designed by the company’s chief engineer [William Stanier], built between 1932 and 1935 and known as the Princess Royal class, all being named for princesses. In the film we see the various parts of the locomotive being cut, cast and forged from raw metal before being assembled in the Crewe plant. All the machinery is human controlled, and one of the surprises is sometimes the number of people involved in each task. The level of skill and experience in precision metalworking to be found in plants like Crewe was immense, and in some cases it is very difficult to find its equivalent in our own time.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: There’s An Elephant In The Room

June 6, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Elephants and people don’t mix as well as you’d hope. Human-elephant conflict causes deaths of both pachyderms and man alike. Elephants raid crops. Elephants are killed by trains. Obviously, where elephants are is useful knowledge. This is the problem [Neil] is solving for his entry into the Hackaday Prize. His project detects elephants, whether they’re on a railroad, in a field gorging on crops, or… in the room.

[Neil]’s goal is simple – he’s building a distributed elephant detection system that can be deployed at railway crossings, between forests and farmland, and along established elephant trails. This gives [Neil] exactly two problems: detecting elephants, and communicating that information to humans.

To detect elephants, [Neil] is relying on a webcam and Raspberry Pi 3 running OpenCV vision processing. He’ll either be comparing histograms, for faster and less resource intensive image processing, or feature matching. Each detector is equipped with a PIR sensor, so at the very least the Pi won’t be looking for elephants all the time.

Notifying humans of the existence of elephants is the next step of the project, and one that might even be harder than finding the elephants in the first place. [Neil] settled on using ZigBees on each Pi to talk to at least one base station. This base station then sends a message to the local human population over a much longer-range radio link. Networking a bunch of Pis in the middle of the African savanna is a hard problem, but by separating the communication aspect of this project into two radio links, [Neil] has a fairly robust solution.

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Sending Data Using Cheap RF Modules

June 6, 2016 by Rud Merriam 38 Comments

Wireless is easier today than ever, with many standards to choose from. But you don’t need anything elaborate if you simply want to cut the cord. A few years back, [Roman Black] experimented with the cheap RF modules you can find on auction sites and from surplus electronics vendors for only a few dollars, and wrote up his findings. They’re well worth a look.

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This DLP 3D Printer Build Is Going Really Well

June 6, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 11 Comments

We suppose [Dan Beaven] got up one day and said, “I’ll make my own resin 3D printer, with resin management and an advanced separation mechanism!” It’s a build log that shows just how possible it is to roll your own resin printer.

The machine isn’t finished yet, but the example prints coming off it are already very impressive. [Dan] stopped the print midway to get this photo of the detail on the stairs in the standard rook torture test.

[Dan] wants a lot of features from his machine that some of the more polished commercial printers are only now offering. One really nice one is the sliding and twist separation instead of tilt. This will allow for cleaner separation between layers during a print, a lower failure rate, and also faster print times.

He also added resin management with a peristaltic pump. This reduces the size of the build vat, and less resin will be exposed to the elements and wasted. It also means that the printer can run unattended. In the resin handling area of the printer he’s also added a carbon air filter. This lets him run higher performing resins without gassing him out of house and home with fumes.

We like how [Dan] just runs right ahead and puts the printer together. He even points out kludges on the machine that are holding it together long enough for him to print a more functional part for the 3D printer– on the 3D printer. We look forward to the next installment.

Mining Platinum From The Road

June 6, 2016 by Jenny List 94 Comments

For several decades now all petrol-driven motor vehicles have had to feature a catalytic converter in their exhaust systems to meet the requirements of emissions legislation. These feature a high surface area coated with platinum, palladium, and rhodium, which catalyses the high-temperature breakdown of the exhaust gasses.

When a vehicle reaches the end of its life its catalytic converter is recycled and those metals are recovered, but this recovery does not account for all the metal. [Cody Reeder] noticed that the weight of platinum in a catalytic converter taken from a scrap vehicle is significantly less than that of a new one. Some of that metal has escaped, so where has it gone?

The answer to that question is that it has become detached from the converter and blown out through the rear of the exhaust pipe. Therefore in the area around a busy highway with many thousands of cars passing there must be a reasonable concentration of platinum. The video below the break details [Cody]’s quest to verify that theory, and it opens with him and a friend sweeping dust from beside a freeway in the early hours. The resulting bags contain a lot of gravel and bits of tire, plus a few cigarette butts and a large amount of very fine dust. He sieves away the debris, and heats a sample of dust in a furnace with a flux mixture containing lead oxide. He hopes that as this oxide degrades to metallic lead it will dissolve any platinum and settle in the bottom of his crucible, and indeed when he pours out the resulting slag there is a bead of lead. Taking away the lead reveals a speck of impure platinum, which he further purifies and assays to determine the percentage of platinum and to detect the other catalyst metals.

He finally arrives at a figure of 6.7 g per ton of his fine-sifted roadside dirt “ore”, a figure which as he points out would be considered quite valuable were it to be encountered in a mine. His process might be a little difficult for individuals with sweeping brushes to hit pay dirt and a modern gold rush to descend on their local Interstate, but it’s not impossible that a highways agency equipped with sweeper trucks could have the metal extracted at a more profitable level.

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Power Glove Takes Over Quadcopter Controls

June 6, 2016 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

Gerrit and I were scoping out the Intel booth at Bay Area Maker Faire and we ran into Nolan Moore who was showing of his work to mash together a Nintendo Power Glove with an AR Drone quadcopter. Not only did it work, but the booth had a netted cage which Nolan had all to himself to show off his work. Check the video clip below for that.

The control scheme is pretty sweet, hold your hand flat (palm toward the ground) to hover, make a fist and tilt it in any direction to affect pitch and roll, point a finger up or down to affect altitude, and point straight and twist your hand for yaw control. We were talking with Nolan about these controls it sounded sketchy, but the demo proves it’s quite responsive.

The guts of the Power Glove have been completely removed (that’s a fun project log to browse through too!) and two new boards designed and fabbed to replace them. He started off in Eagle but ended up switching to KiCAD before sending the designs out for fabrication. I really enjoy the footprints he made to use the stock buttons from the wrist portion of the glove.

A Teensy LC pulls everything together, reading from an IMU on the board installed over the back of the hand, as well as from the flex sensors to measure what your fingers are up to. It parses these gestures and passes appropriate commands to an ESP8266 module. The AR Drone 2.0 is WiFi controlled, letting the ESP8266 act as the controller.