Year: 2017

Meet The Video DJ Machine

July 24, 2017 by 6 Comments

Have you ever wanted to perform as a DJ but found the equipment expensive as well as intimidating? Well, your prayers have been answered by [Dror Ayalon] who has designed Nomnom 2. It is an open source, music mixing project that uses up to 16 video clips to give you control of your next hit album.

You are given charge of a physical control panel that has 16 buttons and four knobs. Each button can be used to turn on or off a particular clip while the knobs control the repetition rate, volume, speed and playable length of each track. An Arduino sits under the buttons and is responsible for sending the information to an application that runs in your web browser. The browser app uses the NexusUI library to control playback of the audio clips and bring to life the entire experience.

[Dror Ayalon] has been busy polishing his project and there are some neat videos of him demonstrating it so check out the videos below. The code is available for down from GitHub and the BOM is available at the Hackaday.io project page. The web app can be ported to a desktop app using electron and a PCB can be designed for the controller for future versions.

For now, it is incredible to see hardware and software, come together in such a harmonious fashion. This may be the start of something wonderful but if you are just looking for a way to annoy the neighbors, check out the Midi Musical Siren instead. Continue reading “Meet The Video DJ Machine” →

Controlling A Micro Helicopter With A PS2 Controller

July 24, 2017 by 10 Comments

The Syma S107G is a venerable stalwart of the micro helicopter market. Affordable, robust, and ubiquitous, the S107G relies on infrared to receive its control signals. Emboldened by the prior work of others, [Robert] set out to control his with a Playstation 2 controller.

In this project, [Robert] is standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak – we’ve seen others reverse engineer the S107G’s communications protocol before. [Robert] combined the efforts of several others to understand how to send commands to the helicopter, including use of two separate channels for controlling two at once.

With the knowledge of the necessary protocols, it’s then a matter of hooking up 3 LEDs in a somewhat unconventional series arrangement with a 9 volt supply, to be switched by an Arduino hooked up to a computer. A Javascript application running on the computer reads the state of a Playstation 2 controller, and spits it out over serial to the Arduino, which flashes the LEDs.

It’s not the neatest, most lightweight way of building a new controller for your remote control toy, but it does show how quickly one can throw together a project in a weekend by combining modern hardware and software tools. Plus, it’s a great learning experience on a platform that’s been experimented with the world over.

Simulating Snakes And Ladders For Fun, Not Profit

July 23, 2017 by 11 Comments

A great many of you will remember the game of Snakes and Ladders from your youth. It’s a simple game, which one grows to realise involves absolutely no skill – it’s purely the luck of the dice. [Alex Laratro] noticed that without player decisions to effect the outcome, the game was thus a prime candidate for simulation. 

[Alex] wanted to dive into the question of “Who is winning a game of Snakes and Ladders?” at any given point in the gameplay. A common approach would be to state “whoever is in front”, but the ladders might have something to say about that. [Alex] uses Markov analysis to investigate, coming to some interesting conclusions about how the game works, and how this compares to the design of more complex games like Mario Kart and Power Grid.

Overall, it’s a breakdown of a popular game that’s simple enough to really sink your teeth into, but has some incredibly interesting conclusions that are well worth considering for anyone designing their own board games. We love seeing math applied to novel and fun problems – and it can solve important problems, too.

Ok Google. Navigate To The International Space Station

July 23, 2017 by 18 Comments

If you’d have asked most people a few decades ago if they wanted a picture of every street address in the world, they would have probably looked at you like you were crazy. But turns out that Google Street View is handy for several reasons. Sure, it is easy to check out the neighborhood around that cheap hotel before you book. But it is also a great way to visit places virtually. Now one of those places is the International Space Station (ISS).

[Thomas Pesquet] in a true hack used bungee cords and existing cameras to take panoramas of all 15 ISS modules. Google did their magic, and you can enjoy the results. You can also see a video on how it was all done, below.

Continue reading “Ok Google. Navigate To The International Space Station” →

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Hackaday Links: July 23, 2017

July 23, 2017 by 21 Comments

Hey, you know what’s happening right now? We’re wrapping up the third round of The Hackaday Prize. This challenge, Wheels, Wings, and Walkers, is dedicated to things that move. If it’s a robot, it qualifies, if it’s a plane, it qualifies, if it passes butter, it qualifies. There’s only a short time for you to get your entry in. Do it now. Superliminal advertising.

Speaking of the Hackaday Prize, this project would be a front-runner if only [Peter] would enter it in the competition. It’s one thing to have a cult; I have a cult and a petition to ‘stop’ me.

We were completely unaware of this project, but a few weeks ago, a cubesat was launched from Baikonur. This cubesat contains a gigantic mylar reflector, and once it’s deployed it will be the second brightest object in the night sky after the moon. I don’t know why we haven’t seen this in the press, but if you have any pictures of sightings, drop those in the comments.

In a mere two years, we’ll be looking at the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. The mission control center at Johnson Space Center — where these landings were commanded and controlled — is still around, and it’s not in the best shape. There’s a Kickstarter to restore the Apollo Mission Control Center to its former glory. For the consoles, this means restoring them to Apollo 15 operational configuration.

We’ve seen 3D printed remote control airplanes, and at this point, there’s nothing really exceptional about printing a wing. This user on imgur is going a different direction with 3D printed fiberglass molds. Basically, it’s a fuselage for a Mustang that is printed, glued together, with the inside sanded and coated in wax. Two layers (3 oz and 6 oz) fiberglass is laid down with West Systems epoxy. After a few days, the mold is cracked open and a fuselage appears. This looks great, and further refinements of the process can include vapor smoothing of the inside of the mold, a few tabs to make sure the mold halves don’t break when the part is released, and larger parts in general.

The Darknet’s Casefile will take you to the limit of your existing knowledge. Join them, to go on a quest to improve your technical abilities.

This week is Def Con. That means two things. First, we’re on a hardware hunt. If you’ve been dedicating the last few months to #badgelife or other artisanal electronics, we want to hear about it. Second, [Joe Kim] made a graphic of the Tindie dog wearing a Hackaday hoodie and it’s adorable. There are a limited number of stickers of our hacker dog.

Gigabyte launched a single board computer with an Intel Apollo Lake CPU, discrete memory and storage, and a mini PCIe slot. Of course, this is being incorrectly marketed as a ‘Raspberry Pi competitor’, but whatever.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Minimalist HTTP

July 23, 2017 by 27 Comments

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Yann] is building something that isn’t hardware, but it’s still fascinating. He’s come up with a minimalist HTTP compliant server written in C. It’s small, it’s portable, and in some cases, it will be a bunch better solution than throwing a full Linux stack into a single sensor.

This micro HTTP server has two core modules, each with a specific purpose. The file server does exactly what it says on the tin, but the HTTaP is a bit more interesting. HTTaP is a protocol first published in 2014 that is designed to be a simpler alternative to WebSockets.

[Yann] has been experimenting with HTTaP, and the benefits are obvious. You don’t need Apache to make use of it, HTTaP can work directly with an HTML/JavaScript page, and using only GET and POST messages, you can control hardware and logic circuits.

As this is a minimalist HTTP server, the security is dubious at best. That’s not the point, though. This is just a tool designed for use in a lab or controlled environments with an air gap. Safety, scheduling, encryption, and authentication are not part of HTTaP or this micro HTTP server.

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Automatic Phone Dialer Illuminates Inner Workings

July 23, 2017 by 11 Comments

The invention of the transistor ushered in a lot of technologies that we now take for granted, and one of the less-thought-about areas that it improved living conditions worldwide was by making the touch-tone phone possible. No longer would the world have to fuss with dials to make phone calls, they could simply push some buttons. This technology is still in use today, and it is possible to build external phone dialers that use these tones to make phone calls, as [SunFounder] demonstrates with his latest project.

The tones that a phone makes when a button is pressed correlate with specific frequencies for each number. Automatic dialers like this one help when there are multiple carriers (like different long-distance carriers, for example) where different prefixes can be used to make calls cheaper depending on the destination of the call. A preprogrammed dialer can take all of this complication out of making phone calls. [SunFounder] is able to make a simple dialer from scratch, using an Arduino, its “tone” library, and a speaker that is simply held up to the phone that the call will be placed on.

[SunFounder] points out that he built this more because he’s interested in the inner workings of phones, and not because he needed a purpose-built dialer. It’s a good demonstration of how phones continue to use DTMF though, and how easy it is to interface with such a system. It might also suit a beginner as an introduction to the world of phreaking.