Year: 2016

Meet Up With Hackaday This Saturday In San Mateo

May 16, 2016 by 5 Comments

We’ll be at Bay Area Maker Faire and we want to have a beer with you on Saturday night.

Two years ago we headed off to the Bay Area Maker Faire and thought we’d invite friends and acquaintances to congregate at a bar on Saturday night. Anyone who’s been to the Faire (or been through a harrowing weekend of working a booth) knows that a bar stool and frothy beverage are a great way to recuperate. The turnout was amazing, we easily filled up O’Neill’s Irish Pub with that first meetup, and the Hackaday BAMF Meetup was born. Last year we packed it to the seams. This year we’re planning for an even bigger turnout that will go late into the evening.

I’ve only ever heard one complaint about this event; the band is too loud. This year O’Neill’s doesn’t have a band lined up so everything seems to be coming up roses. Come hang out with us! If you RSVP we’ll buy your first beer. Bring your stories, your easily transported hacks to show off, and have fun with the eclectic and enthralling community that turns out for this, the greatest meetup on earth.

Hackaday Letter from the Editors

If this is the first you’ve heard about this year’s meetup, you should subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Every week, a Hackaday Editor writes about what’s been going on that week, and shares a few of the most interesting posts from the past seven days. You can sign up for it in the sidebar to the right or with that signup link I just shared. If you’d like to know what you’re getting yourself into, here’s the most recent newsletter which we sent out on Friday. It’s a mini Hackaday delivered to your mailbox.

Why Kickstarter Products Fail

May 16, 2016 by 68 Comments

It seems every week we report on Kickstarter campaigns that fail in extraordinary fashion. And yet there are templates for their failure; stories that are told and retold. These stereotypical faceplants can be avoided. And they are of course not limited to Kickstarter, but apply to all Crowd Funding platforms. Let me list the many failure modes of crowdfunding a product. Learn from these tropes and maybe we can break out of this cycle of despair.

Failure Out of the Gate

You don’t hear about these failures, and that’s the point. These are crowd funded projects that launch into the abyss and don’t get any wings through printed word or exposure. They may have a stellar product, an impressive engineering team, and a 100% likelihood of being able to deliver, but the project doesn’t get noticed and it dies. Coolest Cooler, the project that raised $13 million, failed miserably the first time they ran a campaign. It was the second attempt that got traction.

The solution is to have a mailing list of interested people are ready to purchase the moment you launch, and share to everyone they know. Reach out to blogs and news organizations a month early with a press package and a pitch catered to their specific audience. Press releases get tossed. Have a good reason why this thing is relevant to their audience. Offer an exclusive to a big news site that is your target market.

Continue reading “Why Kickstarter Products Fail” →

A Dis-Integrated 6502

May 16, 2016 by 57 Comments

The 6502 is the classic CPU. This chip is found in the original Apple, Apple II, PET, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Atari 2600, and 800, the original Nintendo Entertainment System, Tamagotchis, and Bender Bending Rodriguez. This was the chip that started the microcomputer revolution, and holds a special place in the heart of every nerd and technophile. The 6502 is also possibly the most studied processor, with die shots of polysilicon and metal found in VLSI textbooks and numerous simulators available online.

The only thing we haven’t seen, until now, is a version of the 6502 built out of discrete transistors. That’s what [Eric Schlaepfer] has been working on over the past year. It’s huge – 12 inches by 15 inches – has over four thousand individual components, and so far, this thing works. It’s not completely tested, but the preliminary results look good.

The MOnSter 6502 began as a thought experiment between [Eric] and [Windell Oskay], the guy behind Evil Mad Scientist and creator of the discrete 555 and dis-integrated 741 kits. After realizing that a few thousand transistors could fit on a single panel, [Eric] grabbed the netlist of the 6502 from Visual6502.org. With the help of several scripts, and placing 4,304 components into a board design, the 6502 was made dis-integrated. If you’re building a CPU made out of discrete components, it only makes sense to add a bunch of LEDs, so [Eric] threw a few of these on the data and address lines.

This is the NMOS version of the 6502, not the later, improved CMOS version. As such, this version of the 6502 doesn’t have all the instructions some programs would expect. The NMOS version is slower, more prone to noise, and is not a static CPU.

So far, the CPU is not completely tested and [eric] doesn’t expect it to run faster than a few hundred kilohertz, anyway. That means this gigantic CPU can’t be dropped into an Apple II or commodore; these computers need a CPU to run at a specific speed. It will, however, work in a custom development board.

Will the gigantic 6502 ever be for sale? That’s undetermined, but given the interest this project will receive it’s a foregone conclusion.

Correction: [Eric] designed the 555 and 741 kits

Making A Fixed Voltage Power Supply Adjustable

May 16, 2016 by 33 Comments

Switch-mode power supplies are ubiquitous. Standard off-the-shelf modules in a consistent range of form factors available from multiple manufacturers. Globalized manufacturing and trade has turned them from expensive devices into commodity parts, and they long ago replaced iron-cored transformers as the go-to choice when a high-current low-voltage mains supply is required.

[Lindsay Wilson] faced a power supply problem for a motor he was working with, it required 7.4V and no off-the-shelf power supplies were to be found with that voltage. His solution was to take a 12V supply and modify it to deliver a variable voltage so he could dial in his requirement. A Chinese-made 12v 33A switch-mode supply was purchased, and he set to work.

In the event he was able to design a replacement feedback divider incorporating a rotary potentiometer, and achieve a voltage range of 5 to 15V. A small LED voltmeter mounted next to it in the PSU case gave him a very neat result.

Modifying a switch-mode supply to deliver a different voltage is a well-worn path we’ve covered at least once before. What makes Lindsay’s article worth a read is his reverse-engineering and examination in detail of the PSU circuit. If you’d like to learn more about all the different facets of design that go into a switch-mode PSU, it’s a detailed yet readable primer. We’d suggest reading our recent series on mains and high voltage safety before cracking open a switch-mode PSU yourself, but even if you’re never going to do it there’s something to be gained from knowing in detail how they work.

We’ve featured [Lindsay]’s work here at Hackaday a few times over the years. Check out his ultrasonic transducer power supply, which might be of use were you were building the ultrasonic soldering iron we featured not long ago, his laser stripping of ribbon cables, and his tale of decapping a USB isolator chip.

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Cute Synthesizer

May 15, 2016 by 11 Comments

For electronics aficionados, there are few devices cooler than music synthesizers. The first synths were baroque confabulations of opamps and ladder filters. In the 70s and 80s, synths began their inexorable march toward digitization. There were wavetable synths that stored samples on 27-series EPROMs. Synths on a chip, like the MOS 6581 “SID chip”, are still venerated today. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Tim] is building his own synthesizer from scratch. It isn’t a copy of an old synth, instead it’s a completely modern synthesizer with a classic sound.

[Tim] is a former game developer and has already released a synthesizer of sorts. Rhythm Core Alpha 2 for the Nintendo DSi and 3DS is a fully functional synthesizer, but the limitations of the Nintendo hardware made [Tim] want to build his own synth from scratch.

The specs for the synth are more of a wish list, but already [Tim] has a few design features nailed down. This is a virtual analog synth, where everything is digital and handled by DSP algorithms. It’s polyphonic and MIDI capable, with buttons and dials for almost every parameter. For the few things you can’t do with a knob, [Tim] is including a touch screen display.

[Tim] already has the synthesis model working, and from the videos he’s put together, the whole thing sounds pretty good. The next step is turning a bunch of wires, breadboards, and components into  something that looks like an instrument. We can’t wait to see how this one turns out!

You can check out a few of [Tim]’s synth videos below.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: A Cute Synthesizer” →

Madison Maker Faire

May 15, 2016 by 14 Comments

Saturday was the first Madison Mini Maker Faire. In this case, it’s Madison, Wisconsin (sorry Madison, SD I didn’t mean to get your hopes up) where I live. Of course I’m not the only crazy hardware hacker in the area. As soon as I got there I almost tripped over Ben Heckendorn who also lives in the area.

ben-heck-gameboy

Check out that incredible Giant Game Boy the he was exhibiting. Okay, you think to yourself: Raspberry Pi and an LCD. Wrong! He’s actually using an FPGA to drive the LCD. Even cooler, it’s using an original Game Boy brain board, which the FPGA is connected to in order to translate the handheld’s LCD connector signals to work with the big LCD.

Continue reading “Madison Maker Faire” →

Electronic Driver Replaces Master Clock

May 15, 2016 by 13 Comments

In these days of cheap microprocessors and easy access to accurate timing through NTP or from the likes of MSF, WWVB, or DCF77, it’s no problem to ensure that any number of clocks keep the same time. In a simpler age though they didn’t have these tools at their disposal, so when a large organisation wished to ensure that all its parts ran on the same time they used an electromechanical solution. A master clock of as high a quality as the clockmakers of the day could build was fitted with a microswitch. The switch would send pulses to slave clocks which had a solenoid where a traditional clock has a pendulum. Thus every clock in the system lost or gained time at the same rate.

[Edo Lelic] has a rather nice Iskra slave clock, but unfortunately not the master that once drove it. Undeterred by this setback, he’s created an electronic driver board that generates the required 100mS pulses. His weapon of choice was a PIC microcontroller and an H-bridge driver to deliver their required voltage and polarity. The clock was designed to accept 100V pulses, but since it has an internal series resistor he determined that the solenoid was happy with a mere 24V. Source code is available, downloadable at the bottom of the linked article.

These clocks are an unseen piece of technology that is disappearing without our noticing. If you find one – or even better if you find a master clock – you’ll find it to be a very high quality timepiece indeed. A master clock would be well worth snapping up. At least now you won’t have to look too far for a driver for it.

We haven’t seen too many projects like this here at Hackaday. Save for a rather nice digital master clock build, it’s uncharted territory. Almost justification for a Retrotechtacular piece, perhaps.

Thanks [Muris Pučić] for the tip.