Day: March 21, 2017

Scratch-built Camera Gimbal For Photographer With Cerebral Palsy

March 21, 2017 by 14 Comments

We so often hack for hacking’s sake, undertaking projects as a solitary pursuit simply for the challenge. So it’s nice to see hacking skills going to good use and helping someone out. Such was the case with this low-cost two-axis handheld camera gimbal intended to help a budding photographer with a motion disorder.

When [Tadej Strah] joined his school photography club, a fellow member who happens to have cerebral palsy needed help steadying cameras for clean shots. So rather than shell out a lot of money for a commercial gimbal, [Tadej] decided to build one for his friend. A few scraps of aluminum bar stock were bent into the gimbal frames and camera mount. Two hobby servos take care of the pitch and roll axes, controlled by an Arduino talking to an MPU-6050. Mounted to a handle from an angle grinder with the battery and electronics mounted below, the gimbal looks well-balanced and does a good job of keeping the camera level.

Hats off to [Tadej] for pitching in and solving a real world problem with his skills. We like to see people helping others directly, whether it’s building a gyroscopic spoon for Parkinson’s sufferers or vision enhancement for a nearly blind adventurer.

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Ask Hackaday: Frequency Hopping On The NRF24l01+?

March 21, 2017 by 50 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of hacks with the nRF24l01+ 2.4 GHz radio modules. The tiny chips pack a lot of bang for the buck. Since the radios can switch frequencies relatively quickly, [Shubham Paul] decided to take advantage of this feature to make a rudimentary frequency-hopping communications channel.

The code is actually incredibly simple. Both the transmitter and receiver simply scan up and down over the defined channels. Because the clock speeds of any given pair of Arduinos are likely to be slightly different, it’s not a surprise that the radios eventually drift out of sync. Right now, as a quickie solution, [Shubham] is using a serial-port resynchronization: both are connected to the same computer, and he just tells them to get on the same channel. That’s not a horribly satisfying workaround. (But it’s a great start!)

Keeping two radios that are continually swapping channels in sync is no easy task, but it could possibly be made easier by taking advantage of the nRF’s acknowledge mode. If the delay between a sent acknowledge message and a received one were constant, these events (one on TX and one on RX) could be used to re-sync the two hopping cycles. All of this would probably require more temporal resolution than you’re going to get out of a microprocessor running Arduino code, but should be possible using hardware timers. But this is pure speculation. We briefly looked around and couldn’t find any working demos.

So Hackaday, how would you remotely sync two nRF24s on the cheap? Or is this a crazy idea? It might help to make transmissions more reliable in the face of 2.4 GHz band interference. Has anyone implemented their own frequency hopping scheme for the nRF24l01+?