1575 Bottles Of Beer On The (LED) Wall

June 3, 2016 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Say hello to my little friend, lovingly named Flaschen Taschen by the members of Noisebridge in San Francisco. It is a testament to their determination to ~~drink Corona beer~~ get more members involved in building big displays each year for the Bay Area Maker Faire. I pulled aside a couple of the builders for an interview despite their very busy booth. When you have a huge full-color display standing nine feet tall and ten feet wide it’s no surprise the booth was packed with people.

Check out the video and then join me after the break for more specifics on how they pulled this off.

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Designing Circuits With Switching Algebra

June 3, 2016 by Rud Merriam 18 Comments

We return once again to the work of Dr. Claude E. Shannon, this time to his Masters thesis on relay switching circuit design. This thesis introduced switching algebra that allows the systematic design and optimization of logical circuits. While Shannon’s work applied to switches and relays, it is equally applicable to all the modern forms of digital circuits. His thesis received widespread notice when published as “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” in 1938. This work built on the Boolean algebra developed by George Boole and an analysis of logic by Augustus De Morgan which these mathematicians published nearly simultaneously in 1847. To some extent, it was the beginning of the age of modern digital logic. Continue reading “Designing Circuits With Switching Algebra” →

Morse Code: Paris In The Mint Box

June 3, 2016 by Al Williams 4 Comments

[Rob Bailey] likes to build things and he likes ham radio. We are guessing he likes mints too since he’s been known to jam things into Altoids tins. He had been thinking about building a code practice oscillator in a Altoids Smalls tin, but wasn’t sure he could squeeze an Arduino Pro Mini in there too. Then he found the TinyLily Mini. The rest is history, as they say, and 1CPO was born.

The TinyLily Mini is a circular-shaped Arduino (see right) about the size of a US dime. most of the pads are arranged around the circle and there is a small header that takes a USB programmer. A small rechargeable battery can run the device for a long time.

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Hands-On With The BBC Micro:Bit

June 3, 2016 by Jenny List 199 Comments

It’s been a long wait, but our latest single board computer for review is finally here! The BBC micro:bit, given free to every seventh-grade British child, has landed at Hackaday courtesy of a friend in the world of education. It’s been a year of false starts and delays for the project, but schools started receiving shipments just before the Easter holidays, pupils should begin lessons with them any time now, and you might even be able to buy one for yourself by the time this article goes to press.

It’s a rather odd proposition, to give an ARM based single board computer to coder-newbie children in the hope that they might learn something about how computers work, after all if you are used to other similar boards you might expect the learning curve involved to be rather steep. But the aim has been to position it as more of a toy than the kind of development board we might be used to, so it bears some investigation to see how much of a success that has been.

Opening the package, the micro:bit kit is rather minimalist. The board itself, a short USB lead, a battery box and a pair of AAA cells, an instruction leaflet, and the board itself. Everything is child-sized, the micro:bit is a curved-corner PCB about 50mm by 40mm. The top of the board has a 5 by 5 square LED matrix and a pair of tactile switches, while the bottom has the surface-mount processor and other components, the micro-USB and power connectors, and a reset button. Along the bottom edge of the board is a multi-way card-edge connector for the I/O lines with an ENIG finish. On the card edge connector several contacts are brought out to wide pads for crocodile clips with through-plated holes to take 4mm banana plugs, these are the ground and 3V power lines, and 3 of the I/O lines.

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Pi Zero Digital Frame Kiosk Uses OTG Right

June 3, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 14 Comments

USB On-The-Go (OTG) is one of the fun aspects of the USB standard. There are feelings about the other aspects, but that one is alright. Regardless, [Francesco] realized one day that the £3 digital picture frames he purchased at a charity sale really didn’t care if the files on the thumb drive mysteriously changed all the time. It would just keep pulling and displaying the latest file at a blistering 0.2 frames per second. That’s right, the concept [Francesco] went after is to show changing data, even animations, with an update of one frame every five seconds!

His initial tests showed good for the concept — the Pi can easily emulate a mass storage device, feeding in data whenever the picture frame looks for it. In addition to the Pi Zero board he added an Ethernet shield, a voltage regulator, a camera, and even some infrared LEDS. We suppose there are dreams for the future.

He has been developing scripts for this rig by logging in through a VNC. A cron job runs his scripts at regular intervals, grabbing useful data and making it available as an image. For example, one script opens up the weather in Epiphany (a web browser), takes a screenshot, and saves that screenshot to the mass storage being emulated using USB OTG. The digital picture frame blissfully updates, unaware of its strange appendages. Now the real limiting factor is how much you can accomplish with your mad Bash skills.

Flying Balls Of Molten Aluminum!

June 3, 2016 by Elliot Williams 47 Comments

We’re replacing “holy moley” in our vocabulary. Levitating globs of molten aluminum are that much more amazing. It’s not that we couldn’t believe it would work — we understand the physics after the fact. It’s just that we never would have thought to build an induction forge that can simultaneously melt and levitate a chunk of aluminum. (Video embedded below.)

[imsmoother] has had plans for 3 kW and 10 kW induction heaters online since at least 2011, and we’re wondering how we haven’t covered it before. Anyway, in the video, he’s using the smaller of the two to melt a chunk of aluminum. Continue reading “Flying Balls Of Molten Aluminum!” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Glow In The Dark Plotting

June 2, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 79 Comments

We like big displays, whether they’re gigantic LED displays, CNC whiteboards, or a gigantic laser projectors. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [nilo] has come up with an easy way to create a huge graphical display. It might only work at night, but the Glowboard Plotter is still really cool.

[nilo]’s display is simply a very large glow in the dark sheet wrapped around two rollers, controlled by a stepper motor. By running the motor, the blank glow in the dark sheet slowly scrolls across.

To add some color to this display, [nilo] fixed 64 UV LEDs to one end of the display. By lighting these LEDs up at specific intervals and specific intensities, a ghostly green glowboard image appears across this display. Is it useful? About as much as any other gigantic LED matrix. Is it cool? About as much as any other gigantic LED matrix.

Right now, [nilo] is working on mk. 2 of the Glowboard Plotter, upgrading the control system and increasing the number of UV LEDs to 128. It may seem useless, but it’s still very cool and an excellent entry into the Anything Goes portion of this year’s Hackaday Prize.

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