Month: May 2017

From Amritsar To Busselton; More World Create Day Stories

May 13, 2017 by 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, we took Hackaday IRL and into hackerspaces around the globe. This was World Create Day, a community effort to come together and build something that matters. Think of it as the pre-game for the Hackaday Prize, our online competition to change the world by building hardware. The groups at these hacker meetups have sent in pictures and reported on what they created. What happened during this worldwide hacker meetup? So much awesome stuff.

The SupplyFrame Design Lab

Did you know Hackaday has its own Hackerspace? It’s true! We have an eight-foot ShopBot, a Tormach, we just got a rig to do injection molding, and apparently, the intern is busy setting up a resin printer.

There are a ton of really talented people associated with the Design Lab, and they were out in full force on World Create Day. [Diego] from Deezmaker has been working on robot muscles and customizable linear actuators for a while, so that was obviously the focus of his World Create Day. Everyone needs mirrored LED-equipped welding/steampunk goggles, so that was [Rich Cameron]’s build, pictured to the right.

A fabulous time was had by all, but just because this was only one of three World Create Day meetups hosted ‘officially’ by Hackaday doesn’t mean it was the biggest or the best. There was plenty of fun the world over.

Amritsar, India

World Create Day is a worldwide event, so of course we had a few events in the second most populous country on Earth. [Inderpreet], [Shubham], [Simrat], and [Navjeet] put together a World Create Day event at the Department of Electronics Technology at GNDU Amritsar, their local university. A slew of people showed up, [Inderpreet] gave a talk on The Hackaday Prize, and much fun was had by all.

FabLab San Diego

The Fab Lab in San Diego also hosted a World Create Day event, Projects that made the cut included a real time, IRL closed captioning device. Think of this one as a universal translator, but only one language, with a screen. Or a voice to text thing running on a phone. Either way. Other ideas included an improved mobility cart, an underwater autonomous robot, wireless communication nodes, pressurized algae incubators, and a whole bunch more.

The folks at the San Diego Fab Lab also produced a short video of their World Create Day activities, you can check that out below.

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Say Hello To This Cortana Hologram

May 13, 2017 by 27 Comments

Halo’s Cortana enters the real world with this internet appliance. [Jarem Archer] has built an amazing “holographic” home for Cortana of Halo and Windows fame. The display isn’t really a hologram, it uses the age-old Pepper’s ghost illusion. A monitor reflects onto 3 angled half mirrored panels. This creates a convincing 3D effect. Cortana herself is a 3D model. [Jarem’s] wife provided gave Cortana her moves by walking in front of dual Kinect depth-sensing cameras. This motion capture performance drives the 3D Cortana model on the screen.

The brain behind this hack is the standard Windows 10 Cortana voice assistant. Saying “Hey Cortana” wakes the device up. To make the whole experience more interactive, [Jarem] added a face detection camera to the front of the device. When a face is detected, the Cortana model turns toward the user. Even if several people are watching the device, it would seem as if Cortana was “talking to” one person in the audience.

The cherry on top of this hack is the enclosure. [Jarem] 3D printed a black plastic stage. An Arduino drives RGB LEDs whenever Cortana is activated. The LEDs project a blue glue that works well with the Pepper’s ghost illusion. The result is a project that looks like something Microsoft might have cooked up in one of their research labs.

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Transparent 3D Printing?

May 13, 2017 by 12 Comments

Transparent plastic is nothing new. However, 3D prints are usually opaque or–at best–translucent. [Thomas Sanladerer] wanted to print something really transparent. He noticed that Colorfabb had an article about printing transparent pieces with their HT filament. [Thomas] wanted to try doing the same thing with standard (and cheaper) PETG, which is chemically similar to the HT. Did he succeed? Watch the video below and find out.

You can get lots of clear plastic filament, but the process of printing layers makes the transparency turn cloudy, apparently mostly due to the small gaps between the layers. The idea with the HT filament is to overextrude at a high enough temperature that the layers can fuse together.

[Thomas] wanted to create some clear parts and diffusers for lamps. The diffusers print using vase mode and the lamps he creates when them look great even without clear diffusers.

His first experiments involved layer height and extrusion rates. He tried to determine what was making things better and worse and modifying his technique based on that. There were also some post-processing steps he tried.

If you want to see what the Colorfabb HT parts made by someone other than Colorfabb look like, check out the second video below from [3D Printing Professor]. The prints he is making don’t look very clear until he does some post processing. Even after the post processing, it isn’t going to fool anyone into thinking it is glass-clear. However, the parts that Colorfabb shows on their blog post about the material do look amazing. Between the overextrusion used to prevent gaps and the post processing steps, [3D Printing Professor] warns that it won’t be easy to get parts with precise dimensions using this technique.

If you have a big budget, you could try printing with actual glass. There seem to be several ways to do that.

Javascript Art Is In The URL

May 13, 2017 by 9 Comments

[Alexander Reben] makes tech art, and now he’s encouraging you to do the same — within a URL. The gimmick? Making the code small enough to fit the data portion of a link. And to help with that, he has set up a webpage that uncompresses and wraps code from the URL and inserts it into the HTML on the fly. His site essentially applies or un-applies all the tricks of JS minification in the URL, and turns that into content.

So, for instance,https://4QR.xyz/c/?eJzzSM3JyVcIzy_KSVEEABxJBD4 uncompresses to a webpage that says “Hello World!”. But the fun really starts when you start coding up “art” in Javascript or HTML5. There are a few examples up in the gallery right now, but [Alexander] wants you to contribute your own. The banner is from this link.

Something strikes us as fishy about passing JS code opaquely in links, but since the URL decodes on [Alexander]’s server, we don’t see the XSS attack just yet. If you can find the security problem with this setup, or better yet if you write up a nice animation, let us know in the comments.

Microcontroller Load Meter Tells You How Hard It’s Currently Working

May 13, 2017 by 19 Comments

Writing code for embedded applications can be difficult. There are all sorts of problems you can run into – race conditions, conflicting peripherals, unexpected program flow – any of these can cause havoc with your project. One thing that can really mess things up is if your microcontroller is getting stuck on a routine – without the right debugging hardware and software, this can be a tricky one to spot. [Terry] developed a microcontroller load meter just for this purpose.

It’s a simple setup – a routine named loadmeter-task on the microcontroller sends a train of pulses to a mechanical ammeter. The ammeter is then adjusted with a trimpot to read “0” when the chip is unloaded. As other tasks steal CPU time, there’s less time for loadmeter-task to send its pulses, so the meter falls to the left.

Overall it’s a quick and easy bit of code you could add to any project with a spare GPIO pin, that might help you debug. Plus it’s cool to know how hard your project is pushing the silicon.

If you’d like to know more about what your chip is doing, check out this post about the usefulness of in-circuit debugging, or read about Bil Herd’s experiments with ICE and OBD-II.

Hacklab’s Logo Changes With The Habitat Of A Beet Plant

May 12, 2017 by 2 Comments

Zaragoza, Spain hacklab La Remolacha (“The Beet”) sports a logo which responds to human interaction with a beet plant growing in the space. Sensors keep track of temperature as well as humidity for both air and ground, while buttons add more water, plant food, light, and music.

The shape and activity of the visualization responds to the sensors. The higher the temperature, the more folds in the shape. More distortions appear when there’s more humidity in the soil, while rotation speed increases with air humidity. Adding food increases the size of the visualization, and music triggers more vibrations.

An Arduino keeps track of the buttons and humidity sensors, while a nearby computer, connected via USB, sends the data to a node.js server. The data are displayed on the website through the torus visualization, which is done in WebGL.

The beet’s environment also signals the health of the space, because if no one is visiting, no one can feed the plant. On the other hand, could too many visitors actually kill the thing?

The project was created by [Innovart],  [Miguel Frago], and [Santi Grau] with help from other folks.

Thanks [Esther Borao Moros] for the tip!

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Son Of Sonoff

May 12, 2017 by 19 Comments

We’ve covered the Sonoff a few times–a very inexpensive box with an ESP8266, a power supply, and an AC relay along with a way to tap into a power cord. Very inexpensive means $5 or $6. The supplied software will work with several systems (including, recently, Alexa). But what self-respecting hacker wants to run the stock firmware on something with an ESP8266 inside?

[Tzapu] certainly didn’t. But he also knew he didn’t want to start from scratch every time he wanted to deploy a switch. So he built SonoffBoilerplate and put the code on GitHub. The code manages taking configuration (including network settings) using a web-portal, can update itself over the air, and integrates with Blynk and MQTT. If you don’t like that code base, there are other choices including one that has a failsafe reconfiguration mode.

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