Year: 2017

DIY Illuminator For UV Fluorescence Photography

July 24, 2017 by 15 Comments

The image shown is the mineral Hackmanite, which fluoresces under ultraviolet lighting. However, not all UV is created equal, and that makes a difference if you’re into UV imaging. The image for this article is from [David Prutchi] and shows the striking results of using different wavelengths of UV. [David] goes into detail on how to make your own DIY Long, Medium, and Short-wave UV Illuminator complete with part numbers and wiring diagram. The device isn’t particularly complicated; the real work was determining the exact part numbers and models of lamp, filters, and ballasts required to get the correct results. [David] has done that work and shared it for anyone interested in serious UV fluorescence photography, along with a white paper on the process.

We’ve seen [David]’s work before. We featured his DIY short-wave UV imager in the past, and his DOLPi camera project was a 2015 Hackaday Prize finalist. It’s clear he really knows his stuff, and genuinely enjoys sharing his discoveries and work.

The Perfect Tourist Techno-Cap

July 24, 2017 by 21 Comments

How many times are you out on vacation and neglect to take pictures to document it all for the folks back at home? Or maybe you forgot just exactly where that awesome waterfall was. [Mark Williams] has made a Raspberry Pi Zero enabled cap that can take photos and geotag them with the location as well as the attitude of the camera.

The idea is to enable the reconstruction of a trip photographically. The hardware consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero W coupled with a Raspberry Camera V2 and a BerryGPS-IMU. Once activated, the system starts taking photos every two minutes. Within each photograph, the location of the photographer is recorded like most GPS enabled camera.

An additional set of data including yaw, pitch, and roll along with direction is also captured to understand where the camera is pointing when the image was taken. Even if he’s tilting his head at the time the photo was taken, the metadata allows it to be straightened out in software later.

This information is decoded using GeoSetter which puts the images on a map along with the field of view. Take a peek at the video below for the result of a trip around Sydney Harbour and the system in action. The Raspberry Pi Zero and camera combo are useful for a lot of things including this soldering microscope. Hopefully, we will be seeing some DIY VR gear with stereo cameras in the near future. Continue reading “The Perfect Tourist Techno-Cap” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Don’t Build This

July 24, 2017 by 28 Comments

The ESP8266 is a remarkable piece of hardware. What we originally thought — and what was originally marketed as — a simple UART to WiFi bridge with Hayes modem commands has turned into one of the best embedded platforms around. It’s a powerful little microcontroller, it has WiFi, and it can send raw frames. That last bit is awesome, because it allows for some mischief or mirth making, depending on your point of view.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Tejas] is building a WiFi Jammer with an ESP8266. It’s a small device that is able to disconnect anyone from a WiFi AP. Should you build it? No. Can you? Sure, why not.

The code for this WiFi hacking tool is taken from the creator of the ESP8266 deauth toolkit, [spacehuhn], although [Tejas] is violating the license for [spacehuhn]’s (non-Open Source) code. This fantastic piece of firmware uses management packets to send a deauthentication frame, effectively allowing anyone to disconnect any device from a WiFi router. Why would anyone want to do this? Mischief, of course, but there are also a few techniques that could allow an attacker to get a password for the WiFi.

While there are ways to protect against deauth attacks, most routers don’t have management-frame protection enabled. In any event, we’re going to see exactly how annoying deauth attacks can be this week at DEF CON. The smart money is on a small percentage of DEF CON attendees lulzing about with ESPs and the Caesar’s CTO being very, very unhappy.

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Monster Mindstorms Delta Bot Delicately Picks Candy

July 24, 2017 by 6 Comments

A group of embedded developers from Sioux Embedded Systems in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, wanted to get experience working on Microsoft .Net. To make it fun they made it their project to produce a LEGO train with visitors at LEGO World, the official LEGO convention in the Netherlands. The team developed an application in C# to fully automate the train, with Mindstorms NXT and EV3 bricks as well as LEGO Power Functions motors controlling everything.

The train project carries a simple premise: the visitor chooses one of four colors, and the train goes and picks up a piece of simulated candy with the matching color. Called Sioux.net on Track, the project has produced a new train every year since 2012 with improvement goals in place to add features with every version. Ironically, the least interesting part of the setup is the actual train and track. The team’s creativity comes to the fore in two areas of the project: the method by which the candy color is selected, and the assembly that dispenses the correct color into the train car.

Team member [Hans Odenthal] has built candy-grabbers for various years’ trains. He learned about the ABB FlexPicker and this year decided to build a delta robot for the layout. It consists of huge girders constructed from 5×9 and 5×11 Technic beam frames held together with more Technic beams and hundreds of connector pegs. The three arms each move on a pair of turntables which are geared down to provide as much torque as possible — the fake candy pieces are light, but the arms themselves weigh a lot. [Hans] ended up revamping the gearboxes to up the ratio from 1:5 to 1:25.

Continue reading “Monster Mindstorms Delta Bot Delicately Picks Candy” →

Hackaday’s Assistive Technology Challenge Begins Now

July 24, 2017 by 4 Comments

This morning marks a new challenge in the Hackaday Prize: we want to see what you can do with Assistive Technology. Twenty entries will win $1000 each, becoming part of the final round for a chance at the top prizes ranging from $5,000 to $50,000.

Assistive Technology means things that help people by improving their quality of life. This can take so many forms but broadly speaking this could make aging easier, turn disabilities into abilities, or enhance the access and delivery of health care.

We’ve seen great things in this area from the Hackaday community. The Grand Prize for the 2015 Hackaday Prize went to an assistive technology that linked motorized wheelchairs to gaze-controlled computers, called Eyedrivomatic. And at the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference we learned how common tools and crowd sourced skills can lead to a new take on physical rehabilitation with a robot-assisted elbow.

The Hackaday Prize challenges us all to Build Something that Matters. It’s hard to argue that there is a better place to take on this challenge than with Assistive Technologies. Enter your project today!

Simple Shop-made Taps For Threading Wood

July 24, 2017 by 19 Comments

Wood can be the material of choice for many kinds of projects, but it often falls out of the running in favor of metal or plastic if it needs to take a threaded fastener. But with a little ingenuity you can make your own wood taps and cut threads that will perform great.

Making wood do things that wood isn’t supposed to do is [Matthias Wandel]’s thing. Hackers the world over know and use his wood gears designer to lay out gears for all kinds of projects from musical marble machines to a wooden Antikythera mechanism. Woodworkers have been threading wood for centuries , so making wood take a decent thread isn’t exactly something new. But doing it on the cheap and making the threads clean and solid has always been tricky. The video after the break shows [Matthias]’ method of cutting a tap out of an ordinary threaded rod or even off-the-shelf lag screws. He uses a simple jig to hold the blank so that flutes can be cut with an angle grinder. The taps work well in the materials he tested, and a little informal stress testing at the end of the video shows promise for long service life of the threads.

Wood threads aren’t suitable for every project, but knowing that you can do it might just open the path to a quick, easy build. This is a great tip to keep in mind.

Continue reading “Simple Shop-made Taps For Threading Wood” →

Review: TS100 Soldering Iron

July 24, 2017 by 87 Comments

Temperature-controlled soldering irons can be cheap, lightweight, and good. Pick any two of those attributes when you choose an iron, because you’ll never have all three. You might believe that this adage represents a cast-iron rule, no iron could possibly combine all three to make a lightweight high-performance tool that won’t break the bank! And until fairly recently you’d have had a point, but perhaps there is now a contender that could achieve that impossible feat.

The Miniware TS100 is a relatively inexpensive temperature-controlled soldering iron from China that has made a stealthy entry to the market, and which some online commentators claim to be the equal of far more expensive professional-grade irons. We parted with just below £50 (around $60) to place an order for a TS100, and waited for it to arrive so we could see what all the fuss was about. Continue reading “Review: TS100 Soldering Iron” →