Love Open Source But Hate People? Get OpenKobold

March 5, 2018 by Tom Nardi 47 Comments

[Tadas Ustinavičius] writes in to tell us of his latest project, which combines his two great loves of open source and annoying people: OpenKobold. Named after the German mythical spirit that haunts people’s homes, this tiny device is fully open source (hardware and software) and ready to torment your friends and family for up to a year on a CR1220 battery.

The design of the OpenKobold is quite simple, and the open source nature of the project makes this an excellent case study for turning an idea into a fully functional physical object.

Beyond the battery and the buzzer module, the OpenKobold utilizes a PIC12F675, a transistor, and a few passive components. This spartan design allows for a PCB that measures only 25 x 20 mm, making it very easy to hide but fiendishly difficult to try to track down later on.

But the real magic is in the software. The firmware that [Tadas] has written for the PIC not only randomizes how often the buzzer goes off, but how long it will sound for. This makes predicting the OpenKobold with any sort of accuracy very difficult, confounding the poor soul who’s searching their home or office for this maddening little device.

Hackers have a long and storied history of creating elaborate pranks, putting the OpenKobold in very good company. From randomly replaying signals from a remote control to building robotic cardboard burglars, we’ve seen our fair share of elaborate pranks from the community.

Building A Bioactive Vivarium From An IKEA Shelf

March 5, 2018 by James Hobson 16 Comments

Pets are often worth a labour of love. [leftthegan] — in want of a corn snake — found that Sweden’s laws governing terrarium sizes made all the commercial options to too small for a fully-grown snake. So they took matters into their own hands, building a bioactive vivarium for their pet!

[leftthegan] found an IKEA Kallax 4×4 shelving unit for a fair price, and after a few design iterations — some due to the aforementioned regulations — it was modified by adding a shelf extension onto the front and cutting interior channels for cabling. For the vivarium’s window, they settled on plexiglass but strongly recommend glass for anyone else building their own as the former scratches and bends easily — not great if their snake turns out to be an escape artist! In the interim, a 3D printed handle works to keep the window closed and locked.

Continue reading “Building A Bioactive Vivarium From An IKEA Shelf” →

Portable Guitar Amp – Is That A Linux In Your Pocket?

March 5, 2018 by Sven Gregori 18 Comments

When it comes to music production and audio engineering, Linux isn’t the most common choice. This isn’t for lack of decent tools or other typical open source usability issues: Ardour as a highly capable, feature-rich digital audio workstation, the JACK Audio Connection Kit for powerful audio routing, and distributions like Ubuntu Studio packing all the essentials nicely together, offer a great starting point as home recording setup. To add variation to your guitar or bass arrangement on top of that, guitarix is a virtual amp that has a wide selection of standard guitar effects. So when [Arnout] felt that his actual guitar amp’s features were too limiting, he decided to build himself a portable, Linux-based amp.

[Arnout] built the amp around an Orange Pi Zero with an expansion board providing USB ports and an audio-out connector, and powers it with a regular USB power bank to ensure easy portability. A cheap USB audio interface compensates the lacking audio-in option, and his wireless headphones avoid too much cable chaos while playing. The amp could theoretically be controlled via a MIDI pedalboard, but [Arnout] chose to use guitarix’s JSON API via its built-in Python web interface instead. With the Orange Pi set up as WiFi hotspot, he can then use his mobile phone to change the effect settings.

One major shortcoming of software-based audio processing is signal latency, and depending on your ear, even a few milliseconds can be disturbingly noticeable. To keep the latency at a minimum, [Arnout] chose to set up his Orange Pi to use the Linux real-time kernel. Others have chosen a more low-level approach in the past, and it is safe to assume that this won’t be the last time someone connects a single-board computer to an instrument. We surely hope so at least.

One Man’s Quest For A Desktop Spherical Display

March 5, 2018 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

[Nirav Patel] is a man on a mission. Since 2011 he has been obsessed with owning a spherical display, the kind of thing you see in museums and science centers, but on a desktop scale. Unfortunately for him, there hasn’t been much commercial interest in this sort of thing as of yet. Up to this point, he’s been forced to hack up his own versions of his dream display.

That is until he heard about the Gakken Worldeye from Japan. This device promised to be exactly what he’s been looking for all these years, and he quickly snapped up two of them: one to use, and one to tear apart. We like this guy’s style. But as is often the case with cheap overseas imports, the device didn’t quite live up to his expectations. Undaunted by the out of the box performance of the Worldeye, [Nirav] has started documenting his attempts to improve on the product.

These displays work by projecting an image on the inside of a frosted glass or plastic sphere, and [Nirav] notes that the projection sphere on the Worldeye is actually pretty decent. The problem is the electronics, namely the anemic VGA resolution projector that’s further cropped down to a 480 pixel circle by the optics. Combined with the low-quality downsampling that squashes down the HDMI input, the final image on the Worldeye is underwhelming to say the least.

[Nirav] decided to rip the original projector out of the Worldeye and replace it with a Sony MP-CL1 model capable of a much more respectable 1280×720. He came up with a 3D printed bracket to hold the MP-CL1 in place, and has put the files up on Thingiverse for anyone who might want to play along at home. The results are better, but unfortunately still not great. [Nirav] thinks the sphere is physically too small to support the higher resolution of the MP-CL1, plus the optics aren’t exactly of the highest quality to begin with. But he’s just glad he didn’t have to build this one from scratch.

Going back to our first coverage of his DIY spherical display in 2012, we have to say his earliest attempts are still very impressive. It looks like this is a case of the commercial market struggling to keep up with the work of independent hackers.

Customising A $30 IP Camera For Fun

March 5, 2018 by Inderpreet Singh 32 Comments

WiFi cameras like many other devices these days come equipped with some sort of Linux subsystem. This makes the life of a tinkerer easier and you know what that means. [Tomas C] saw an opportunity to mod his Xiaomi Dafang IP camera which comes configured to work only with proprietary apps and cloud.

The hack involves voiding the warranty by taking the unit apart and installing custom firmware onto it. Photos posted by [Tomas C] show the mainboard powered by an Ingenic T20 which is a popular IP Camera processor featuring some image and video processing sub-cores. Upon successful flashing of the firmware, the IP camera is now capable of a multitude of things such as remote recording and playback which can be configured using the web UI as documented by [Tomas C]

We did a little more digging on the custom firmware and discovered that the original author of the custom firmware, [EliasKotlyar] has done a lot of work on this project. There are loads of images of the teardown of a camera and an excellent set of documentation of how he made the hack. Everything from adding serial headers, getting root access, dumping the firmware and even toolchain links are given on the page. This is extremely handy for a newbie looking to get into the game.

And IP Cameras are not of the only hackable hardware out in the wild. There are other devices that are running Linux based firmware such as the Wifi SD Cards that run OpenWRT. Check out the essential guide to compiling OpenWRT from source if you are looking to get started with your next IP Camera hack.

Thanks for the tip [Orlin82]

Controlling OctoPrint On The Go

March 5, 2018 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

Not too long ago I took the plunge into the world of OctoPrint by shoehorning a Raspberry Pi Zero into a PrintrBot Play, and I have to say, the results were quite impressive. OctoPrint allows you to run your 3D printer untethered from your computer, but without all the downsides of printing off of an SD card. Generally running off of a Raspberry Pi, OctoPrint serves up a very capable web interface that gives you full control over slicing and printing from essentially any device with a modern browser.

That’s all well and good if you’ve got your laptop with you, or you’re sitting at your desktop. But what if you’re out of the house? Or maybe out in the garage where you don’t have a computer setup? OctoPrint is still happily serving up status information and a control interface, you just don’t have a computer to access it. Luckily, there are options for just that scenario.

In this post we’re going to take a look at a couple of options for controlling and monitoring OctoPrint from your mobile device, which can help truly realize its potential. Personally I have an incredible amount of anxiety when leaving a 3D printer running a long job, and in the past I’ve found myself checking every 10 minutes or so to see if it was done. Now that I can just glance at my phone and see an ETA along with status information about the machine, it’s given me the confidence to run increasingly longer and complex prints. Continue reading “Controlling OctoPrint On The Go” →

3D Printing With Mussels And Beets

March 5, 2018 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

What do you get when you combine oven-baked mussels and sugar beets in a kitchen blender? No, it isn’t some new smoothie cleanse or fad diet. It’s an experimental new recyclable 3D printing material developed by [Joost Vette], an Industrial Design Engineering student at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. While some of the limitations of the material mean it’s fairly unlikely you’ll be passing over PLA for ground-up shellfish anytime soon, it does have a few compelling features worth looking into.

For one thing, it’s completely biodegradable. PLA is technically biodegradable as it’s usually made primarily of cornstarch, but in reality, it can be rather difficult to break down. Depending on the conditions, PLA could last years exposed to the elements and not degrade to any significant degree. But [Joost] says his creation degrades readily when exposed to moisture; so much so that he theorizes it could have applications as a water-soluble support material when printing with a multiple extruder machine.

What’s more, after the material has been dissolved into the water, it can be reconstituted and put back into the printer. Failed prints could be recycled directly back into fresh printing material without any special hardware. According to [Joost], this process can be repeated indefinitely with no degradation to the material itself, “A lot of materials become weaker when recycled, this one does not.”

So how can you play along at home? The first challenge is finding the proper ratio between water, sugar, and the powder created by grinding up mussel shells necessary to create a smooth paste. It needs to be liquid enough to be extruded by the printer, but firm enough to remain structurally sound until it dries out and takes its final ceramic-like form. As for the 3D printer, it looks like [Joost] is using a paste extruder add-on for the Ultimaker 2, though the printer and extruder combo itself isn’t going to be critical as long as it can push out a material of the same viscosity.

We’ve seen a number of DIY paste extruder mods for 3D printers, which is a good starting point if you’re getting sick of boring old plastic. Before long you might find yourself printing with living tissue.

[Thanks to Mynasru for the tip]