Hackaday Links: October 15, 2017

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For the last few months we’ve been running The Hackaday Prize, a challenge for you to build the best bit of hardware. Right now — I mean right now — you should be finishing up your project, crossing your t’s and dotting your lowercase j’s. The last challenge in the Prize ends tomorrow. After that, we’re going to pick 20 finalists for the Anything Goes challenge, then send the finalists off to our fantastic team of judges. Time to get to work! Make sure your project meets all the requirements!

It’s been a few weeks, so it’s time to start talking about Star Trek. I’m paying ten dollars a month to watch Star Trek: Discovery. I was going to pay that anyway, but I think this might actually be worth it. Highlights include Cardassian voles and Gorn skeletons. Also on the Star Trek front is The Orville, [Seth MacFarlane]’s TNG-inspired show. The Orville has far surpassed my expectations and is more Star Trek than Discovery. Leave your thoughts below.

It’s a new edition of Project Binky! Two blokes are spending years stuffing a 4WD Celica into a Mini. It’s the must-watch YouTube series of the decade.

AstroPrint now has an app. If you’re managing a 3D printer remotely and you’re not using Octoprint, you’re probably using AstroPrint. Now it’s in app format.

Have fifty bucks and want to blow it on something cool? A company is selling used LED display tiles on eBay. You get a case of ten for fifty bucks. Will you be able to drive them? Who knows and who cares? It’s fifty bucks for massive blinkies.

[Peter] is building an ultralight in his basement. For this YouTube update, he’s making the wings.

Oh it’s deer season, so here’s how you make deer jerky.

If you’re messing around with Z-Wave modules and Raspberry Pis, there’s a contest for you. The grand prize is an all-expense paid trip to CES2018 in Las Vegas. Why anyone would be enthusiastic about a trip to CES is beyond me, but the Excalibur arcade has Crazy Taxi, so that’s cool.

Go is the language all the cool kids are using. GoCV gives Go programmers access to OpenCV.

32 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: October 15, 2017

  1. Actually I’ve already spent my fifty dollars. Someone I know from the Parallax Forum, (who didn’t comment when the BASIC Stamp returned.). Basically he’s no longer with the company, and, ah, selling parts of his collection. One of the two things I bought was an OEM BS1 device. If the comments as responses are nice I might even submit it to the tip line and it might even be showing later this year.

    1. That was my thought. Surprisingly, it’s more like TNG with extra levity. I was pleasantly surprised and actually enjoyed it. It’s the first project from McFarland without over-the-top and raunchy jokes.

      1. Cleveland in Space. And the couple in an alien zoo rehashing the divorce. More like Voyager- which had great theme music except for the parts taken from Silence is Golden. And still no seatbelts. Two episodes where more than enough.

  2. Well as a long time Star Trek fan, I have a prediction. Michael Burnam. At first I thought it might be like calling women “Sir” — names aren’t necessarily tied to gender anymore. But in a recent episode the roommate said, “I’ve never heard of a woman named Michael except for [one]..” or words to that effect.

    Therefore. Michael was born a boy. Sarek and Amanda realized that he was a girl trapped in a boy’s body and had surgery done on him. And, of course, it is illogical to change her name after the surgery. I have little doubt of this.

    As for Orville, I agree it is more Star Trek than Discovery although the slapstick humor gets a little annoying.

        1. Well it seems in 2255 they still don’t have hologram technology that isn’t terrible… but hey, at least they figured out that it’s helpful to have “Red Alert” written across the face of any android on a ship that goes into red alert.

        2. I would hope they have proper mental care and we don’t need to cater to certain disorders.
          But seeing this show, I guess not on the part of mental health care, they are all a bit.. uptight.

    1. Just wanted to add to my somewhat cynical comments that in case you are yourself one of those who struggles with such feelings/thoughts or has a past related to the subject (gender issues I mean), don’t let us get you down. It’s not like we, I think it’s OK to say we, but at least I, don’t have their own weirdness and issues, and just because I think it’s nonsense should not affect you too much. Do what you want and just accept some people disagree.

  3. Man, those barco panels are attractive, but even at 99% off retail (a few places sell these same panels $500 ea, and here you get them 10 for $50) it is a gamble. No controller, no cables, no grid to mount it on. 99W per panel, and you have to figure out powersupply, data signalling, etc. Each panel is meant to use a controller that provides power and data to the modules inside the panel. The controllers interconnect with hdmi cables but use a proprietary (NNI) barco protocol. And then they need a “digitizer” (video processor, since they would normally be fed video that’s already digital) to feed signal to the controllers. It is a gamble I’m taking, but I really hope I can use them somehow (maybe a good project for that ICE40 I just bought…)

    1. Panels arrived. Very nice construction. I did a quick tear down of one to see what I have bought. A pod on the back contains power components, ram and a spartan 3 fpga. The LED board has some buffers, a temperature sensor, 37 tlc5941 led driver chips, a 64KB eeprom, and a Xilinx CPLD. This might take some time…

    2. Now I’m wishing I had bought 10 boxes. Each module has a Xilinx Spartan 3e 250, 512K of SRAM, and some FLASH. $5 each was cheap for FGPA dev boards, even considering the surface mount connector to breakout the I/O. Reading up on the modules, they have two firmware images stored in flash, and boot load another over the data connection it seems. Sadly the official route seems stupidly expensive, as the controller to power 9 modules and make up one 96×108 pixel tile list price is $470, and the video processor to split the image out over an entire wall is about $23,000.

  4. The Orville is absolutely my favorite thing on TV right now, (Until Stranger Things S2 starts).
    Despite not usually being a fan of Seth Macfarlane’s work, I’ve greatly enjoyed The Orville.

    It’s refreshing to see an “almost” Star Trek that doesn’t have the best of the best as its crew. The episodes have continued to get better and better, and it has everything that I loved about TNG, the optimistic outlook of the future, and social commentary.

    Anybody who either hasn’t given it a shot, or bailed after the pilot, owes it to themselves to watch the most recent couple of episodes. It’s certainly more Star Trek than Discovery is or could ever hope to be.

    1. It’s OK, but one of my annoyances is all the joking references to things that even people now under a certain age can’t place, but people hundreds of years in the future should get them, that’s a bit breaking the suspension of disbelief.
      But at least it’s (part) comedy so they have an excuse. But still though, it’s jarring at times.

      1. As for discovery, it’s watchable but it’s deep in current thinking rather than set in some future time where you’d hope people would have developed a bit.
        And once a in while a plot line comes off as very cartoonish.

  5. std is terrible. ive made a point to go buy weed every time the show comes on so that the plot kind makes sense. i mean its clear that they are ripping off dune, or at least filling the show with dune references. if you want to do that why not just do a dune series. i cant really resolve this ship with its place in the timeline. i want a star trek series and it doesn’t look like im going to get one.

    as for the orville, i only watched the pilot. i was not impressed. it had too much of a sitcom vibe to it and the humor left something to be desired.

    you have a chance to do better scifi and yet you give us this garbage. stop it. stop rebooting franchises just to fuck them up.

    1. Dune? WTF, the only link to Dune is a creature that vaguely look like some renditions of the Dune worms, but it isn’t even a worm.
      Oh and in the beginning they happen to be on a planet with some sand. But come on, absolutely nothing Dune about it

    1. I’m planning to tear one apart to see what makes them tick. The other ones will be weatherproofed (thinking clear epoxy encapsulation) to make colored stepping stones or borders with varying colors.

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