Hackaday Prize Entry: Portable LED Flash For Photography

April 21, 2017 by Lewin Day 24 Comments

Photography is all about light. It’s literally right there in the name – stemming from the Greek word, photos. This is why photographers obsess over the time of day of a shoot, why Instagrammers coalesce around landmarks at sunset, and why a flash helps you take photos in darkness. Historically, flashes have worked in all manner of ways – using burning magnesium or xenon lamps for example. For this Hackaday Prize entry, [Yann Guidon] is developing a portable flash using LEDs instead.

By this point in time, you might be familiar with LEDs as flash units from your cellphone. However, [Yann] is taking this up a notch. The build is based around 100W LED modules, which obviously can pump out a lot of light. The interesting part of the build is its dual nature. The LEDs are intended to operate in one of two ways. The first is in a continuous lighting mode, running the modules well below their rated power to reduce the stress on the LEDs and power supply, and to enable the flash to run on the order of an hour. In this mode, temperature feedback will be used to control the LEDs to manage power use. The other is a pulsed mode, where the LED will be overvolted for a period of milliseconds to create a much more powerful flash.

It’s this dual nature which gives the LED-based flash a potential advantage over less versatile xenon-based units, which are limited to pulsed operation only. We can see the continuous lighting mode being particularly useful for videographers needing a compact, cheap lighting solution that can also work as a pulsed unit as well.We’re excited to see how [Yann] tackles the packaging, thermal and control issues as this project develops!

Ask Hackaday: Why Did Modular Smart Phones Fail?

April 21, 2017 by Jack Laidlaw 96 Comments

Remember all the talk about modular smart phones? They sounded amazing! instead of upgrading your phone you would just upgrade the parts a bit like a computer but more simplistic. Well it seems modular phones are dead (video, embedded below) even after a lot of major phone manufacturers were jumping on the bandwagon. Even Google got on-board with Google Ara which was subsequently cancelled. LG released the G5 but it didn’t fare too well. The Moto Z from Motorola seemed to suffer from the same lack of interest. The buzz was there when the concept of these modular phones was announced, and people were genuinely exited about the possibilities. What went wrong?

For a start people expect their phones to have everything on board already, whether it be cameras, GPS, WiFi, high-capacity batteries or high-resolution screens. Consumers expect these things to come as standard. Why would they go out and buy a module when other phones on the market already have these things?

Sure you could get some weird and wonderful modules like extra loud speakers or perhaps a projector, but the demand for these items was small. And because these extras are already available as separate accessories not locked down to one device, it was a non starter from the beginning.

When we did our user studies. What we found is that most users don’t care about modularizing the core functions. They expect them all to be there, to always work and to be consistent. — Lead engineer Project Ara

The hackability of these phones would have been interesting to say the least, had they come to the mainstream. It just seems the public want thin sleek aluminum phones that they treat more as a status symbol than anything else. Modular phones have to be more bulky to accommodate the power/data rails and magnets for the modules, so they’ll lose out in pocketability. Still, we hope the idea is revisited in the future and not left on the scrap-heap of obsolescence.

Would you buy a modular smart phone? Even if it is bigger or more expensive? Is that really why they failed?
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Do Something Constructive Tomorrow

April 21, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

This Saturday is a great day to change the world. It’s Earth Day. There’s a National March for Science where millions will demand evidence-based change. We’re doing our own thing. We’re leading a World Create Day, where hackers gather ’round the soldering iron and find solutions to problems we all face.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been getting Hackaday readers to organize meetups in their hometowns, encouraging them to get a few people over, and sending them a bit of neat Hackaday swag. We couldn’t do this without the community leaders out there, and we’d just like to take a moment and recognize a few of the fablabs and hackerspaces that are making World Create Day possible.

A keyfob that makes turning a lock easier for those with limited mobility

Up in Vancouver, the folks at the Spinal Cord Injury Forum will be spending their World Create Day building tools that make life easier for people with limited mobility. Already they’re doing some awesome work with 3D printing, and with a few more minds tackling these problems, they’re sure to come up with something good.

This is a worldwide event, and we have hackerspaces from Cairo to Osaka taking part. Do you know where Tenerife is? There’s a World Create Day meetup there, too.

To give you a little more encouragement to attend a World Create Day meetup near you, just remember we’re still at the start of the Hackaday Prize, a competition where we’re giving away a quarter million dollars to build hardware that will change the world. Even if there isn’t a World Create Day meetup near you, you can always start your own meetup for tomorrow, or just go solo. And don’t forget to show off what’s going on using the #WorldCreateDay hashtag.

This isn’t an event to miss. When else will you be able to come up with creative solutions to problems with a worldwide audience? Find a meetup near you and do something constructive tomorrow.

Automated Parts Counter Helps Build A Small Business

April 21, 2017 by Dan Maloney 28 Comments

We love to see projects undertaken for the pure joy of building something new, but to be honest those builds are a dime a dozen around here. So when we see a great build that also aims to enhance productivity and push an entrepreneurial effort along, like this automated small parts counter, we sit up and take notice.

The necessity that birthed this invention is [Ryan Bates’] business of building DIY arcade game kits. The mini consoles seen in the video below are pretty slick, but kitting the nuts, bolts, spacers, and other bits together to ship out orders was an exercise in tedium. Sure, parts counting scales are a thing, but that’s hardly a walk-away solution. So with the help of some laser-cut gears and a couple of steppers, [Ryan] built a pretty capable little parts counter.

The interchangeable feed gears have holes sized to move specific parts up from a hopper to a chute. A photointerrupter counts the parts as they fall into plastic cups on an 8-position carousel, ready for bagging. [Ryan] also has a manual counter for wire crimp connectors that’s just begging to be automated, and we can see plenty of ways to leverage both solutions as he builds out his kitting system.

While we’ve seen more than a few candy sorting machines lately, it’s great to see someone building hardware to streamline the move from hobby to business like this. We’re looking forward to seeing where [Ryan] takes this from here.

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IoT Security Is Hard: Here’s What You Need To Know

April 21, 2017 by Jack Laidlaw 69 Comments

Security for anything you connect to the internet is important. Think of these devices as doorways. They either allow access to services or provides services for someone else. Doorways need to be secure — you wouldn’t leave your door unlocked if you lived in the bad part of a busy city, would you? Every internet connection is the bad part of a busy city. The thing is, building hardware that is connected to the internet is the new hotness these days. So let’s walk through the basics you need to know to start thinking security with your projects.

If you have ever run a server and checked your logs you have probably noticed that there is a lot of automated traffic trying to gain access to your server on a nearly constant basis. An insecure device on a network doesn’t just compromise itself, it presents a risk to all other networked devices too.

The easiest way to secure a device is to turn it off, but lets presume you want it on. There are many things you can do to protect your IoT device. It may seem daunting to begin with but as you start becoming more security conscious things begin to click together a bit like a jigsaw and it becomes a lot easier.

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Simple Scanner Finds The Best WiFi Signal

April 21, 2017 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Want to know which way to point your WiFi antenna to get the best signal? It’s a guessing game for most of us, but a quick build of a scanning WiFi antenna using mostly off-the-shelf components could point you in the right direction.

With saturation WiFi coverage in most places these days, optimizing your signal might seem like a pointless exercise. And indeed it seems [shawnhymel] built this more for fun than for practical reasons. Still, we can see applications where a scanning Yagi-Uda antenna would come in handy. The build started with a “WiFi divining rod” [shawnhymel] created from a simple homebrew Yagi-Uda and an ESP8266 to display the received signal strength indication (RSSI) from a specific access point. Tired of manually moving the popsicle stick and paperclip antenna, he built a two-axis scanner to swing the antenna through a complete hemisphere.

The RSSI for each point is recorded, and when the scan is complete, the antenna swings back to the strongest point. Given the antenna’s less-than-perfect directionality — [shawnhymel] traded narrow beam width for gain — we imagine the “strongest point” is somewhat subjective, but with a better antenna this could be a handy tool for site surveys, automated radio direction finding, or just mapping the RF environment of your neighborhood.

Yagi-Uda antennas and WiFi are no strangers to each other, whether it be a WiFi sniper rifle or another recycling bin Yagi. Of course this scanner isn’t limited to WiFi. Maybe scanning a lightweight Yagi for the 2-meter band would be a great way to lock onto the local Ham repeater.

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Put Plasma To Work With This Basic Toolkit

April 21, 2017 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

Fair warning: [Justin Atkin]’s video on how to make plasma, fusors, and magnetrons is a bit long. But it’s worth watching because he’s laying a foundation for a series of experiments with plasma, which looks like it will be a lot of fun.

After a nice primer on the physics of plasma, [Justin] goes into some detail about the basic tools of the trade: high voltage and high vacuum. A couple of scrap microwave oven transformers, a bridge rectifier, and a capacitor provide the 2000 volts DC output needed. It’s a workable setup, but we’ll take issue with the incredibly dangerous “scariac” autotransformer, popularized by [The King of Random]. It seems foolish to risk a painful death mixing water and line current when a 20-amp variac can be had for $100.

A decent vacuum pump will be needed too, of course; perhaps the money you can save by building your own Sprengel vacuum pump can be put toward the electrical budget. Vacuum chambers are cheap too — Mason jars with ground rims and holes drilled for accessories like spark plugs. Magnets mounted below one chamber formed a rudimentary magnetron, thankfully without the resonating cavities needed for producing microwaves. Another experiment attempted vapor deposition of titanium nitride.

It’s all pretty cool stuff, and we’re looking forward to more details and results. While we wait, feel free to check out the tons of plasma projects we’ve featured, from tiny plasma speakers to giant plasma tubes.

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