Year: 2017

So Long, And Thanks For All The Crystals

March 11, 2017 by 53 Comments

There was a time when anyone involved with radio transmitting — ham operators, CB’ers, scanner enthusiasts, or remote control model fans — had a collection of crystals. Before frequency synthesis, became popular, this was the best way to set an accurate frequency. At one time, these were commonly available, and there were many places to order custom cut crystals.

One of the best-known US manufacturers of quartz crystals still around is International Crystal Manufacturing (ICM). Well, that is, until now. ICM recently announced they were ceasing operations after 66 years. They expect to completely shut down by May.

In a letter on their website, Royden Freeland Jr. (the founder’s son), committed to fulfilling existing orders and possibly taking some new orders, raw materials permitting. The company started making products out of Freeland’s father’s garage in 1950.

Another big name that might still be around is Jan Crystals. We say might, because although their website is live, there’s not much there and the phone number is not quite disconnected but it is “parked.” There are also some posts on the Internet (where everything is true) indicating they are out of business.

Even if you didn’t do radio work, crystals are a staple in digital systems where an accurate clock is necessary and some types of filters, too. Of course, you can still get them, you just may not be able to get them made in the United States soon.

If you want to know more about the technology behind crystals [Jenny] has you covered. Crystals are one of those things that have not changed much in a long time, so you might enjoy the very 1960’s vintage U. S. Air Force training film below.

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Automatic Deploying Lightning Rod

March 11, 2017 by 36 Comments

As hackers, hams, and builders of all sorts of things that go in our yards or are attached to our houses we often encounter resistance from building associations and by-laws regarding what to us are harmless necessities but to others are risks to their sight-lines, property values, or are seen as safety hazards. A student at the Bergen County Academies Mechatronics Research Lab has identified this same issue with lightning rods for homes, monuments, and buildings of fine architecture; people don’t want to add unsightly lightning rods despite their proven protections. Her solution? Detect when a storm is approaching and automatically deploy the lightning rod for the duration of the storm.

To detect the approaching storm she’s monitoring the changing barometric pressure using an Adafruit BMP085 barometric pressure, temperature and altitude sensor (now replaced by the BME280) connected to an Arduino with a motor shield. If the pressure is low and the trend has been decreasing then she pivots the lightning rod up using a motor salvaged from a satellite dish. When the risk abates, she pivots the rod back down again. Admittedly the lightning rod has yet to be attached and care will have to be taken with how the discharge cable is deployed but it’s a start. You can see it in action in the video below.

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Tea For Two: A Tiny Tea Timer

March 11, 2017 by 11 Comments

The ATtiny85 microcontroller doesn’t have all that much of anything: 8 KB of flash, an 8-bit architecture, and only eight pins (three of which are taken up with power and reset duties). And that’s exactly what makes it a great fit for tiny little projects.

[Mimile]’s Tea Timer has a switch, a button, eight LEDs, and a buzzer. Flip the switch to “set” and button presses run through the desired steeping times. Flip it to “run” and you’re timing. The LEDs blink and the buzzer plays “Tea for Two” in squawky square waves. Wonderful!

But wait, how to control all of this I/O with just five pins? With one pin each for the two switches and one for the buzzer, that leaves only two pins for the eight LED display. [Mimile]’s fun solution is to use a binary counter (a 74HC393) and the remaining two lines to count and reset. That means toggling a pin very fast 255 times to light up all the LEDs. That’s a bizarre way to go, but we like it!

Hackaday has proven unable to resist the siren song of the ATtiny85. Whether teaching it to swear, to speak I2C, or to transmit analog TV signals, there’s just something about this cute little chip that invites you to test your mettle.

A Clock Created With Conway’s Life

March 11, 2017 by 22 Comments

Conway’s life has to be the most enduring zero-player computer game in history. Four simple cellular automaton rules have been used to create amazing simulations since the 1970’s. The latest is an entire digital clock implemented in life. StackExchange user [dim] created this simulation in response to a challenge from [Joe Z]. We have to admit that we didn’t believe it at first, but you can run it yourself by importing [dim’s] gist to the online Javascript Conway’s Life Simulator. To say this is impressive would be an understatement. We don’t know exactly how long it took [dim] to build this clock, but the challenge has been around since August of 2016.

[Dim] does a pretty good job of describing exactly how the clock works. The timebase is at the top. Below it is clock distribution and counters. After that come counters, latches, and lookup tables. Data moves around the clock in the form of gliders. P30 (aka Queen Bee) gliders to be exact. It might make things simpler to think of the glider paths as circuit traces, and the gliders themselves as clock pulses.

We couldn’t get over all the little details in this design. If you zoom way in, you can see all the lookup table patterns have been annotated, much in the way a schematic would be. For [Dim’s] next feat, we hope he takes on [Joe Z’s] Tetris challenge!

Conway’s life is like honey for hackers. We’ve seen it running on our own Hackaday Badge. We’ve even seen clocks that run the game on their display. Someone needs to implement a clock that runs the game that runs this clock. Clockception, anyone?

Burn Music On To Anything!

March 11, 2017 by 17 Comments

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again. This is especially true when your efforts involve a salvaged record player, a laser cutter, and He-Man. Taking that advice to heart, maniac maker extraordinaire [William Osman] managed to literally burn music onto a CD.

Considering the viability of laser-cut records is dubious — especially when jerry-built — it took a couple frustrating tests to finally see results, all the while risking his laser’s lens. Eventually, [Osman]’s perseverance paid off. The lens is loosely held by a piece of delrin, which is itself touching a speaker blaring music. The vibrations of the speaker cause the lens to oscillate the focal point of the laser into a wavelength that is able to be played on a record player. You don’t get much of the high-end on the audio and the static almost drowns out the music, but it is most definitely a really shoddy record of a song!

Vinyl aficionados are certainly pulling their hair out at this point. For the rest of us, if you read [Jenny’s] primer on record players you’ll recognize that a preamplifier (the ‘phono’ input on your amp) is what’s missing from this setup and would surely yield more audible results.

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[Homo Faciens] Builds A Winchbot

March 11, 2017 by 16 Comments

The trademark hacker style of Hessian YouTuber [Homo Faciens] is doing a lot with a little. Given a package of parts from a sponsor, he could have made something “normal” like a fancy robot arm. Instead, he decided to make a winchbot. (Video embedded below.)

What’s a winchbot? It’s a big frame that supports three relatively heavy motors that pull steerable gripping arms around. It’s a little bit like the hanging Hektor / wallbot / plotterbot and a little bit like a delta-style 3D printer. Although [Homo Faciens]’s build doesn’t showcase it, a winchbot is also a great way to lift heavy things because the parts that need to be beefy — the frame and the lifting motors — don’t have to move. We love the gimballed square rod that works in concert with the winches!

With five extra servos on hand, and the computing power of a Raspberry Pi, [Homo Faciens] couldn’t just stop with lifting a claw. Instead, the gripping-arms part of the bot is mounted with four degrees of freedom and is powered with software that makes it stay parallel with the table and rotate around the gripper to make programming easier. Watch it in action in the video to see what we mean.

The biggest unsolved problem that we can see is the jerkiness that it displays in moving things around. That doesn’t stop it from building up a tower and a domino knock-down. We suspect that there’s some combination of firmware and hardware tweaking that can solve this problem, or it could just be run slowly so that the wobbles damp themselves out. We’re also quite confident that [Homo Faciens] will come up with an elegant and cheap solution. Have you seen his CNC machine?

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Putting Pi In Infrared Doohickies

March 10, 2017 by 8 Comments

The Raspberry Pi Zero W is a tiny, cheap Linux computer with WiFi. It’s perfect for Internet of Things things such as controlling ceiling fans, window blinds, LED strips, and judgmental toasters. This leads to an obvious question: how do you attach your ceiling fan and LED strips to a Pi Zero? A lot of these things already have infrared remotes, so why not build an infrared hat for the Pi? That’s what [Leon] did, and it’s Open Hardware with documentation.

[Leon]’s Anavi Infrared Pi Hat does exactly what you think it should do. There’s an IR receiver, two IR LEDs, and UART pins for debugging. That’s all you need to control infrared doohickies over the Internet, and [Leon] wrapped it up in a nice neat package that’s the same size as a Raspberry Pi Zero. Add on some documentation and you have something we rarely see: a project meant to be used by other people.

This focus on allowing people to actually use what [Leon] created can lead to only one cynical conclusion: he’s probably selling these things somewhere. The cynic is never surprised. [Leon] has a crowdfunding campaign going, that’s over 400% funded with a month to go. That’s okay, though: all the design files are available so if you want to build your own without supporting people who build useful devices, have at it.