H2gO Keeps Us From Drying Out

July 28, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 19 Comments

The scientific community cannot always agree on how much water a person needs in a day, and since we are not Fremen, we should give it more thought than we do. For many people, remembering to take a sip now and then is all we need and the H2gO is built to remind [Angeliki Beyko] when to reach for the water bottle. A kitchen timer would probably get the job done, but we can assure you, that is not how we do things around here.

A cast silicone droplet lights up to show how much water you have drunk and pressing the center of the device means you have taken a drink. Under the hood, you find a twelve-node NeoPixel ring, a twelve millimeter momentary switch, and an Arduino Pro Mini holding it all together. A GitHub repo is linked in the article where you can find Arduino code, the droplet model, and links to all the parts. I do not think we will need a device to remind us when to use the bathroom after all this water.

Another intrepid hacker seeks to measure a person’s intake while another measures output.

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The Apocalypse Bicycle

July 28, 2018 by Jenny List 66 Comments

It seems to be a perennial among humans, the tendency among some to expect the End Times. Whether it was mediaeval Europeans who prepared for a Biblical Armageddon at the first sight of an astronomical phenomenon, 19th-century religious sects busy expecting a Noah’s flood, cold-war survivalists with bunkers under the lawn, or modern-day preppers buying survival gear, we have a weakness for thinking that Time’s Up even when history shows us repeatedly that it isn’t. Popular culture has even told us that the post-apocalyptic world will be kinda cool, with Mad Max-style rusty-looking jacked-up muscle cars and Tina Turner belting out ballads, but the truth is likely to be a lot less attractive. Getting away from danger at faster than walking pace as a starving refugee would likely be a life-or-death struggle without the industrial supply chain that keeps our 21st-century luxury cars on the road, so something more practical would be called for.

[Don Scott] has written a paper describing an extremely straightforward solution to the problem of post-apocalyptic transport, which he calls the Apocalypse Bicycle. As you might expect it’s a two-wheeler, though it’s not the kind of machine on which you’d lead a break-away from the Tour de France peloton. Instead this is a bicycle pared down to its minimum,, without advanced materials and with everything chosen for durability and reliability. Bearings would have grease nipples, for instance, the chain would be completely enclosed for better retention of lubrication, and the wheels would be designed to have strips of salvaged tyre attached to them. Interestingly, the machine would also be designed not to attract attention, with muted matte colours, and no chrome. It occurs to us that many of the durability features of this machine are also those that appear on the rental bicycles owned by bike sharing companies that have been spread liberally on the streets of many cities.

You might wonder what use the idea might have, and why a prepper might consider one alongside their tins of survival rations. But it’s also worth considering that these machines have a real application in the here-and-now, rather than just an imagined one in an apocalyptic future. Many Hackaday readers are fortunate enough to live in countries unaffected by wars or natural disasters, but there are plenty of places today where an aid agency dropping in a load of these machines could save lives.

Apocalyptic cycling has featured little here. But we have brought you at least one bike made from wood.

Become The Rockstar Developer You’ve Always Dreamed Of Being

July 28, 2018 by Jenny List 6 Comments

If you have ever worked in software-related industries, the chances are that the word “Rockstar” will elicit a visceral reaction. It’s a word used by a Certain Type Of Manager for an elite software developer who’s so 1337 they don’t play by the rules of ordinary mortals. In reality it’s use is invariably an indication of trouble ahead, either from clueless startups or troublesome rockstar developers making a toxic atmosphere for the mere members of the backing band. Hackaday has a team that brings together a huge breadth of experience, and we’ve been there.

Would you like to be a rockstar developer, but without the heartache? No silly incentives, or even guitars required! [Dylan Beattie] can help, because he’s come up with a specification for the Rockstar programming language, a Turing-complete programming language whose syntax follows the conventions of 1980s rock power ballads. Of course, it’s a joke, and an excuse of some “Certified Rockstar Developer” laptop stickers, but it’s also an entertaining journey into lyrical language and compiler parsing, and the discovery that yes indeed, a singable set of classic rock lyrics can also be a compilable program.

Our particular favourite comes from the scheme used to represent numbers, as sentences in which a decimal is built from the lengths of the sentence words, and poetic licence can be employed to the fullest. The example is

 My dreams were ice. A life unfulfilled; wakin' everybody up, taking booze and pills

which line of code places the value 3.1415926535 into a variable called “my dreams”.

There does not appear to be a working Rockstar compiler at the time of writing, but we are sure that the amazing community of Rockstar developers will shortly create one. And we would be hugely disappointed were we not to hear some performative coding from spandex-clad guitar-wielding developers as a result. After all, how else will they get their work noticed!

Esoteric languages have featured before here, but they have usually been far more challenging ones.

The Undead Remote

July 28, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

In the very late 1990s, something amazing was invented. White LEDs. These magical pieces of semiconductors first became commercially available in 1996, and by the early 2000s, you could buy a single 5mm white LED for less than a dollar in quantity one. A year or two later, an astonishing product showed up on infomercials airing on basic cable at 2 a.m. It was a flashlight that never needed batteries. With a small white LED, a few coils wrapped around a tube, and a magnet, you could just shake this flashlight to charge it. It’s just what you needed for when the Y2K virus killed all electronics.

Of course, no one uses these flashlights now because they suck. The early white LEDs never put out enough light, and charging a flashlight by shaking it every twenty seconds is annoying. There is another technology that desperately needs a battery-less solution, though: remote controls. They hardly use any power at all. That’s exactly what [oneohm] did for his Hackaday Prize entry. He created the Undead Remote.

The dream of a battery-less remote control has been dead since your parents got rid of that old Zenith Space Command, but here it is. This is really just a shake flashlight, a diode rectifier, a large capacitor, and some glue. Shake the remote, and you can change the channel. Is it useful? Certainly. Does it look weird and is it slightly inconvenient? Also yes. But there you go. If you want an easy way to deal with batteries in your remote control, this is a solution.

Save Some Steps With This Arduino Rapid Design Board

July 28, 2018 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

We’re all familiar with the wide variety of Arduino development boards available these days, and we see project after project wired up on a Nano or an Uno. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but there comes a point where some hobbyists want to move beyond plugging wires into header sockets and build the microcontroller right into their project. That’s when one generally learns that development boards do a lot more than break the microcontroller lines out to headers, and that rolling your own design means including all that supporting circuitry.

To make that transition easier, [Sean Hodgins] has come up with a simple Arduino-compatible module that can be soldered right to a PCB. Dubbed the “HCC Mod” for the plated half-circle castellations that allows for easy soldering, the module is based on the Atmel SAMD21 microcontroller. With 16 GPIO lines, six ADCs, an onboard 3.3 V regulator, and a reset button, the module has everything needed to get started — just design a PCB with the right pad layout, solder it on, and surround it with your circuitry. Programming is done in the familiar Arduino IDE so you can get up and running quickly. [Sean] has a Kickstarter going for the modules, but he’s also releasing it as open source so you’re free to solder up your own like he does in the video below.

It’s certainly not the first dev module that can be directly soldered to a PCB, but we like the design and can see how it would simplify designs. [Sean] as shown us a lot of builds before, like this army of neural net robots, so he’ll no doubt put these modules to good use.

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A Mobile Computer To Make William Gibson Jealous

July 28, 2018 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

The personal computers in science fiction books, movies, and games are way cooler than the dinky pieces of hardware we’re stuck with in the real world. Granted the modern laptop has a bit more style than the beige boxes of yesteryear, but they still aren’t half as l33t as the custom PowerBooks in Hackers. Luckily for those who dream of jacking into the Matrix, the average hacker now has access to the technology required to make a custom computer to whatever fanciful specifications they wish.

A perfect example is this “cyberdeck” created by [Tinfoil_Haberdashery]. Inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, this wild-looking machine is more than just a cosplay prop or conversation piece. It packs in enough power to be a daily-driver computer, as well as some special features which make it well suited for field work.

The body of the cyberdeck is 3D printed, but as [Tinfoil_Haberdashery] doesn’t have a 3D printer big enough to do the whole thing in one piece he had to break it up into subsections. He added a dovetail pattern to the edges of each piece, which makes for much stronger joint than simply gluing it together. A worthwhile tip if you ever find yourself in need of printing something really big.

Raspberry Pi aficionados might be disappointed to see the Intel NUC motherboard inside; which features a 3.4 Ghz dual-core CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a roomy 500 GB SSD in an incredibly small package. To keep everything running the machine can take up to twelve 18650 cells, giving it a maximum run-time of sixteen hours or so. There’s even a 12 V power jack so he can power a soldering iron and other low voltage gadgets off of the deck’s batteries in a pinch. The integrated charger can take anywhere from 6 to 30 V, which gives [Tinfoil_Haberdashery] the ability to charge up from a wide array of sources.

But perhaps the best feature of the cyberdeck is the display. It uses a Fat Shark Transformer, a five inch 720p display designed for FPV drone use, which can not only fold flat against the deck for storage, but can be removed and slipped into a pair of goggles. This gives the cyberdeck a head mounted display that looks like something straight out of the movies. It even supports 3D, if you’re willing to cut the resolution in half.

Things have come a long way in the world of DIY head mounted computer displays. Really makes you wonder what the dedicated hacker is going to be able to pull off in another 10 years or so.

[via /r/cyberpunk]

The $4 Z80 Single-Board Computer, Evolved.

July 28, 2018 by Jenny List 33 Comments

We feature hundreds of projects here at Hackaday, and once they have passed by our front page and disappeared into our archives we often have no opportunity to return to them and see how they developed. Sometimes of course they are one-off builds, other times they wither as their creator loses interest, but just occasionally they develop and evolve into something rather interesting.

One that is taking that final trajectory is [Just4Fun]’s Z80-MBC, a single board computer with only 4 ICs, using an Atmel microcontroller to simulate the Z80 support chips. It has appeared as a revised version, on a smart new PCB rather than its original breadboard, and with built-in SD card and RTC support through readily available breakout boards, and banked RAM for CP/M support. You may remember the original from last year, when it was also a Hackaday Prize entry and stage finalist. From a Hackaday perspective this is particularly interesting, because it shows how the Prize can help a project evolve.

The Atmega32A uses the Arduino bootloader with programming through the ICSP port, and full instructions are given in the hackaday.io project page alongside all the files required to build your own board. There is no mention of whether boards can be bought, but we’d say this could be a commercial-quality product if they chose to take it in that direction.