Day: June 30, 2018

Wireless SMD microscope ring light

Wireless Ring Light For SMD Microscope

June 30, 2018 by 4 Comments

When [Felix Rusu], maker of the popular Moteino boards which started life as wireless Arduino compatibles, says he’s made a wireless ring light for his SMD microscope, we redirect our keystrokes to have a look. Of course, it’s a bit of wordplay on his part. What he’s done is made a new ring light which uses a battery instead of having annoying wires go to a wall wart. That’s important for someone who spends so much time hunched over the microscope. Oh, and he’s built the ring light on a rather nice looking SMD board.

The board offers a few power configurations. Normally he powers it from a 1650 mAh LiPo battery attached to the rear of his microscope. The battery can be charged using USB or through a DC jack for which there’s a place on the board, though he hasn’t soldered one on yet. In a pinch, he can instead power the light from the USB or the DC jack, but so far he’s getting over 6 hours on a single charge, good enough for an SMD session.

The video below shows his SMD board manufacturing process, from drawing up the board in Eagle, laser cutting holes for a stencil, pasting, populating the board, and doing the reflow, along with all sorts of tips along the way. Check it out, it makes for enjoyable viewing.

Here’s another microscope ring light with selectable lighting patterns for getting rid of those pesky shadows. What features would make your SMD sessions go a little easier?

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Reverse-Engineering Brains, One Neuron At A Time

June 30, 2018 by 10 Comments

Most posts here are electrical or mechanical, with a few scattered hacks from other fields. Those who also keep up with advances in biomedical research may have noticed certain areas are starting to parallel the electronics we know. [Dr. Rajib Shubert] is in one such field, and picked up on the commonality as well. He thought it’d be interesting to bridge the two worlds by explaining his research using analogies familiar to the Hackaday audience. (Video also embedded below.)

He laid the foundation with a little background, establishing that we’ve been able to see individual static neurons for a while via microscope slides and such, and we’ve been able to see activity of the whole living brain via functional MRI. These methods gradually improved our understanding of neurons, and advances within the past few years have reached an intersection of those two points: [Dr. Shubert] and colleagues now have tools to peer inside a functional brain, teasing out how it works one neuron at a time.

[Dr. Shubert]’s talk makes analogies to electronics hardware, but we can also make a software analogy treating the brain as a highly optimized (and/or obfuscated) piece of code. Virus stamping a single cell under this analogy is like isolating a single function, seeing who calls it, and who it calls. This pairs well with optogenetics techniques, which can be seen as like modifying a function to see how it affects results in real time. It certainly puts a different meaning on the phrase “working with live code”!

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DDL-4 Is A Visually Pleasing Modular CPU

June 30, 2018 by 16 Comments

Today’s CPUs are so advanced that they might as well be indistinguishable from magic, right? Wrong! Fundamentally, modern CPUs can be understood logically like any other technology, it’s just that they’re very fast, very small, and very complex, which makes it hard to get to grips with their inner workings. We’ve come a long way from the dawn of the home computer in the 80s, but what if there was something even simpler again, built in such a way as to be easily understandable? Enter the DDL-4-CPU, courtesy of [Dave’s Dev Lab].

The DDL-4 is a project to build a modular 4-bit CPU using bitslice methods. This is where computations are broken down into simple operations with two-bit inputs, which are executed with basic logic gates like NOR and XOR. This is great for building a CPU from individual parts, as logic chips are readily available and their operation is readily understood. That’s what’s used here – good old 74-series logic, which you can find just about anywhere!

The build consists of a series of modules, each on its own colourful PCB and labeled on the silkscreen. These modules can then be configured and plugged together with edge connectors to build the CPU. The work builds upon [Dave]’s earlier work on the Mega-One-8-One, a recreation of the 74181 Arithmetic Logic Unit for educational purposes.

If you’re learning about computing in a bare-metal sense, projects like these that create CPUs from the ground up are a great way to get to grips with the basic concepts of computation. Once you’ve tried this, you could always graduate to building a 6502 in Minecraft.

DEXTER Has The Precision To Get The Job Done

June 30, 2018 by 24 Comments

Robotic arms – they’re useful, a key part of our modern manufacturing economy, and can also be charming under the right circumstances. But above all, they are prized for being able to undertake complex tasks repeatedly and in a highly precise manner. Delivering on all counts is DEXTER, an open-source 5-axis robotic arm with incredible precision.

DEXTER is built out of 3D printed parts, combined with off-the-shelf carbon fiber sections to add strength. Control is through five NEMA 17 stepper motors which are connected to harmonic drives to step the output down at a ratio of 52:1. Each motor is fitted with an optical encoder which provides feedback to control the end effector position.

Unlike many simpler projects, DEXTER doesn’t play in the paddling pool with 8-bit micros or even an ARM chip – an FPGA lends the brainpower to DEXTER’s operations. This gives DEXTER broad capabilities for configuration and expansion. Additionally, it allows plenty of horsepower for the development of features like training modes, where the robot is stepped manually through movements and they are recorded for performance later.

It’s a project that is both high performing and open-source, which is always nice to see. We look forward to seeing how this one develops further!

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Sonar In Your Hand

June 30, 2018 by 8 Comments

Sonar measures distance by emitting a sound and clocking how long it takes the sound to travel. This works in any medium capable of transmitting sound such as water, air, or in the case of FingerPing, flesh and bone. FingerPing is a project at Georgia Tech headed by [Cheng Zhang] which measures hand position by sending soundwaves through the thumb and measuring the time on four different receivers. These readings tell which bones the sound travels through and allow the device to figure out where the thumb is touching. Hand positions like this include American Sign Language one through ten.

From the perspective of discreetly one through ten on a mobile device, this opens up a lot of possibilities for computer input while remaining pretty unobtrusive. We see prototypes which are more capable of reading gestures but also draw attention if you wear them on a bus. It is a classic trade-off between convenience and function but this type of reading is unique and could combine with other bio signals for finer results.

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Gyrotourbillion Blesses The Eyes, Hard To Say

June 30, 2018 by 14 Comments

Clock movements are beautifully complex things. Made up of gears and springs, they’re designed to tick away and keep accurate time. Unfortunately, due to the vagaries of the universe, various sources of error tend to creep in – things like temperature changes, mechanical shocks, and so on. In the quest for ever better timekeeping, watchmakers decided to try and rotate the entire escapement and balance wheel to counteract the changing effect of gravity as the watch changed position in regular use.

They’re mechanical works of art, to be sure, and until recently, reserved for only the finest and most luxurious timepieces. As always, times change, and tourbillions are coming down in price thanks to efforts by Chinese manufacturers entering the market with lower-cost devices. But hey – you can always just make one at home.

That’s right – it’s a 3D printed gyrotourbillion! Complete with a 3D printed watch spring, it’s an amazing piece of engineering that would look truly impressive astride any desk. All that’s required to produce it is a capable 3D printer and some off-the-shelf bearings and you’ve got a horological work of art.

It’s not the first 3D-printed tourbillion we’ve seen, but we always find such intricate builds to be highly impressive. We can’t wait to see what comes next – if you’re building one on Stone Henge scale for Burning Man, be sure to let us know. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Keith for the tip!]

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The BBC Computer Literacy Project From The 1980s Is Yours To Browse

June 30, 2018 by 12 Comments

In the early 1980s there was growing public awareness that the microcomputer revolution would have a significant effect on everybody’s lives, and there was a brief period in which anything remotely connected with a computer attracted an air of glamour and sophistication. Broadcasters wanted to get in on the act, and produced glowing documentaries on the new technology, enthusiastically crystal-ball-gazing as they did so.

In the UK, the public service BBC broadcaster produced a brace of series’ over the decade probing all corners of the subject as part of the same Computer Literacy Project that gave us Acorn’s BBC Micro, and we are lucky enough that they’ve put them all online so that we can watch them (again, in some cases, if a Hackaday scribe can get away with revealing her age).

You can see famous shows such as the moment when the presenters experienced a live on-air hack while demonstrating an early online service, but most of it is a fascinating contemporary look at the computers we now enthuse over as retro devices. Will the MSX sweep all before it, for example? (It didn’t).

They seem very dated now with their 8-bit micros (if not just for the word “micro”), synth music, and cheesy graphics. But what does come across is the air of optimism, this was the future, and it was packaged not as a threat, but as a good place to be. Take a look, but make sure you have plenty of time. You may spend a while in front of the screen.

We’ve mentioned int he past another spin-off from the Computer Literacy Project, the Domesday Project.

Thanks [Darren Grant] for the tip.