Hackaday Superconference: Tickets And Proposals

July 9, 2018 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Get your tickets now for the 2018 Hackaday Superconference. Join us November 2nd-4th in Pasadena, California!

This is the ultimate hardware conference. Hackers, designers, and engineers from all over the world converge — from the greenest beginners to those who have made history with their designs. This is the Hackaday community, these are your people, and you need to be here. Supercon is your chance to experience all things involved in hardware creation — the weekend is filled with unparalleled talks and workshops — but the experience of Supercon transcends the organized event. We call it a conference but it’s truly a hacker village with a who’s-who of hackerdom in attendance.

Call for Proposals

We want you to present a talk (or a workshop) at this year’s Supercon! Please submit your proposal using this form.

The number one question we get about CFP is “I’m excited about X, should I submit a proposal?” The answer is yes. Don’t self-eliminate — if you have an idea for a talk we want to hear from you. Supercon is a flat conference, your proposal will be judged on the idea and how you plan to present it, not on how many other amazing speaking slots you’ve secured.

To help get your mind moving about topics, we suggest that you consider this list of themes your talk might fit into: Engineering Heroics, Prototyping, Research, Product Development, Full-Stack Fabrication, and of course Wildcard.

Tickets! Get Your Tickets Here!

Are you a true believer? We’ve just opened up the Call for Proposal today, so we can’t tell you who’s speaking or what workshops will take place. However, we suspect there are many of you ready to take the plunge right now. Those first 96 true believers get an incredibly low ticket price of $128.

Standing room only during a 2017 Hackaday Supercon talk

Even at full price, the admission fee is an incredible value (see for yourself). Each ticket comes with admission for all three days, a custom hardware badge to hack on, admission to the Friday kick-off party and Saturday Hackaday Prize party, food and beverage throughout the conference, and much more.

This is the fourth year we’ve hosted the Hackaday Superconference. You can check out all of the talk videos from last year, there’s a slew of articles on the event, and of course an incredible hardware hacking scene throughout. In large part, the packed and jovial community atmosphere is why we’ve added Friday as a full day of workshops and badge hacking!

Get your ticket and book your travel. We look forward to hanging out with a huge chunk of the Hackaday community at Supercon!

Chinese Laser AK-47: Myth Or Reality?

July 9, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 164 Comments

Chinese company ZKZM Laser has produced the ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle which people are calling the Chinese AK-47 because of its similar size, weighing in at three kilos (6.6 lbs). Claims of its capabilities, however, are being disputed.

The South China Morning Post writes that the company claims the laser to:

be powered by a rechargeable lithium battery back,
have a range of 800 meters (0.5 miles),
have a beam that is invisible to the eye,
be able to fire 1000 “shots”, each no longer than two seconds,
be able to burn human flesh if held in place long enough,
be able to set fire to clothes and hair, and
be able to set fire to banners from a distance.

Burning things with lasers is nothing new but the disputes are mostly based around such a small laser being effective at an 800 meter range. To be fair, while the 800 meter range claim is everywhere, the Post writes that the company brochure says the range is 500 meters (0.3 miles), still quite a long distance.

[styropyro], a YouTuber with a lot of experience with lasers has done an analysis, starting by deducing a wavelength of around 2000 nanometers. He finds that at 800 meters the beam would have dispersed to a diameter of 26 cm (10 inches) and produce 53 W over that area. (EDIT: The 53 W is how much sunlight would produce for that area. In the video he carries the calculations further to work out the minimum power needed, ignoring losses, to light the cotton on fire, 645 W.) For 500 meters, using the same formula we calculate that the dispersion would be a diameter of 16 cm (6 inches) with 500 W spread over that area, which would get uncomfortable very fast, think of half a square meter of sunlight focused down to a circle of that diameter. (EDIT: Again, this it 500 W for sunlight, the laser produces more.) His video doesn’t include enough detail for us to replicate the remainder of the calculations so we’ll just have to go with the 800 meter claim. See the video below for his full analysis. If anyone else has any experience that’ll either support or dispute the claims then please share it with us in the comments.

After all the disputes against their claim, the Chinese company did produce a video firing the laser from a shorter distance. Check it out on this page by the post.

While waiting to see how much truth there is to the Chinese company’s claims we can sit back and enjoy [styropyro’s] home-brew high power ruby laser, both his build and him doing some serious damage with it.

Oh, and don’t try this at home. It’s probably in violation of the Geneva Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in addition to common sense.

Continue reading “Chinese Laser AK-47: Myth Or Reality?” →

3D Printed Upgrade For Cheap Foam Glider

July 9, 2018 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

We know you’ve seen them: the big foam gliders that are a summertime staple of seemingly every big box retailer and dollar store in the world. They may be made by different companies or have slight cosmetic differences, but they all adhere to the basic formula: a long plastic bag containing the single-piece fuselage and two removable wings and a tail. Rip open the bag, jam the wings into the fuselage, and go see if you can’t get that thing stuck on a roof someplace.

But after you toss it around a few times, things start to get a little stale. Those of us in the Hackaday Collective who still retain memories of our childhood may even recall attempting to augment the glider with some strategically attached bottle rockets. But [Timothy Wright] has done considerably better than that. With the addition of a 3D printed “backpack”, he managed to add not only a motor to one of these foam fliers but an RC receiver and servos to move the control surfaces. The end result is a cheap and surprisingly capable RC plane with relatively little work required.

[Timothy] certainly isn’t claiming to be the first person to slap a motor on a foam glider to wring a bit more fun out of it, but his approach is very slick and of course has the added bonus of being available for other grownup kids to try thanks to the Creative Commons license he released the designs under. He mentions that variations in the different gliders might cause some compatibility issues, but with the generous application of some zip ties and tape, it should be good to go.

This particular hunk of foam might not set any altitude or distance records, and it certainly won’t be carrying you aloft, but it’s a pretty approachable summer project if you’ve got some RC gear laying around.

Continue reading “3D Printed Upgrade For Cheap Foam Glider” →

Disney’s Humanoid Stunt Robots Throw Multiple Backflips No Sweat

July 8, 2018 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

What’s the biggest problem right now with humanoid robots? They fall down. Disney seems to have solved that problem here by making robots that are meant to fall down and be caught by a net. Disney’s research arm (you may know them as Imagineers) is showing off a robot called Stuntronic which can perform controlled somersaults as it flies through the air. Check the video below, you really have to watch a few times to make sure this is a robot and not a person.

It’s really interesting to follow the evolution of this robot. It began with BRICK, a limbless rectangular bot that could shift its center of gravity to control orientation while moving through the air. From there, Stickman adapted those concepts into a stick-shaped robot that had two hinged portions which allowed for controlled somersaults as it flew through the air. Stuntronic feels like a big leap from that design.

As with Stickman, it can bend to control somersaults mid-air, but with the addition of articulated arms, Stuntronic can also add twists to the acrobatic bag of tricks. To our eye, this is very lifelike and manages to completely escape the uncanny valley. This is a ringing endorsement since one of the proposed purposes of this research is for live performances at Disney’s theme parks.

The Hall of Presidents was a marvel of its time, as robots presented famous speeches while decorated in the likeness of the leaders who originally delivered them. But to stand and deliver is a trick of decades past. We hope this is a trick of next year and not something we’ll have to wake decades into the future to see in person.

Oh, and for those wondering if Stuntronic stuck the landing? The controlled delivery into the net’s warm embrace is equally impressive. Hopefully, successful landings are commonplace because they’re launching these bots with some really wicked force! In addition to the gyroscopes and accelerometers you’d expect to find in a motion-aware machine, the design uses a trio of laser rangefinders that triangulate ground position to spot the optimal landing. We haven’t seen a publication for this bot yet but check the Stickman info for more on these sensors.

Continue reading “Disney’s Humanoid Stunt Robots Throw Multiple Backflips No Sweat” →

This 3D Printed Syringe Static Mixer Does It All

July 8, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 20 Comments

One trick for getting the bubbles out of freshly mixed 2-part epoxy, aka degassing, is to go over it gently with the flame from a propane torch. But both the mixing and degassing take time. [Gianteye] came up with a 3D printed dual-syringe static mixing system which speeds up the process. He used it with silicone to get the difficult steps out of the way quickly for his hands-on soft robotics class, allowing the students to focus more on the matter at hand. But we figure most readers might use it for epoxy.

If you’ve bought those 2-part epoxy syringes available in stores before then you’ll know that they usually come with two syringes, each filled with one of the two parts to be mixed. Depressing the syringes causes each part to come out of its own tube. It’s then your job to mix them together and degas the result.

[Gianteye’s] system consists of 3D printed parts and two syringes. Models for the 3D printing are available on his Thingiverse page and the syringes can be found online. Some of the 3D printed parts help you first fill and degas the syringes. You then attach a 3D printed mixing tube to the ends of the syringes. This tube serves two purposes. When the syringe’s plungers are depressed, both parts of the material are forced through the tube and extruded out. But on their way through, both parts pass through eight helices which form 180° turns and mix the parts together. Out comes the portioned, mixed and degassed material which can go straight into a mold or to wherever you need it.

The mixing tube was designed for one-time use but [Gianteye] discovered during an evaluation that it can be reused if you pull out any cured material and purge it. The evaluation involved silicone though. With hardened epoxy, you’ll probably have to use a new tube each time.

Check out the full details of his system in the video below, including both assembly and usage.

If you’re looking for a metallic look for something without wanting to cast metal than have a look at our own [Gerrit Coetzee’s] article about cold casting wherein he makes some very nice looking parts.

Continue reading “This 3D Printed Syringe Static Mixer Does It All” →

Hackaday Links: July 8, 2018

July 8, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Software-defined radio has been around for years, but it’s only recently that it’s been accessible to those of us who don’t have tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment in their lab. Here’s a new book from Analog Devices that gives you the lowdown on software-defined radio. It’s heavy on MATLAB and components from Analog, but it’s still a solid foundation for SDR.

Do you like cyberpunk? Do you like stories about rebellious people overthrowing the system? How about androids? Do you like androids? Here’s a Kickstarter that’s tying all of that together. Neptune Frost is (will be?) a movie about an e-waste village in Burundi that’s home to the ‘world’s most subversive hacking collective’, a coltan miner and an inter-sex runaway. It’s literally got everything.

Hey, this is cool, Hackaday has been cited in a journal article. The title of the article is An open-source approach to automation in organic synthesis: The flow chemical formation of benzamides using an inline liquid-liquid extraction system and a homemade 3-axis autosampling/product-collection device, and can be found in Tetrahedron Volume 74, Issue 25, 21 June 2018, Pages 3152-3157.

Asteroid day was a few days ago, and there’s a Kickstarter to go with it. The Planetary Society, headed up by Bill Nye (a science guy) is raising awareness about the threat of asteroid impacts. There’s hilarious swag that says ‘Kick Asteroid’, even though actually kicking an asteroid might be a bad idea; a gravity tractor would be the best method of nudging the orbit of an asteroid given enough time.

Last year, a company in the US trademarked the word ‘RetroPie’ and used that trademark to sell Raspberry Pis loaded up with (you guessed it) RetroPie software. This company also used the trademark to force anyone else doing the same to stop. Obviously, this didn’t sit well with the developers of RetroPie. After some generous legal help, the RetroPie trademark issue has been resolved. That’s a tip of the hat to Eckland & Blando who offered some pro bono legal work.

Ultra-Low Power, Energy Harvesting Battery Charger

July 8, 2018 by Donald Papp 10 Comments

This half-inch square ultra-low power energy harvesting LiPo cell charger by [Kris Winer] uses a low voltage solar panel to top up a small lithium-polymer cell, which together can be used as the sole power source for projects. It’s handy enough that [Kris] uses them for his own projects and offers them for sale to fellow hackers. It’s also his entry into the Power Harvesting Challenge of the Hackaday Prize.

The board is essentially a breakout board for the Texas Instrument BQ25504, configured to charge and maintain a single lithium-polymer cell. The BQ25504 is an integrated part that takes care of most of the heavy lifting and has nifty features like battery health monitoring and undervoltage protection. [Kris] has been using the board along with a small 2.2 Volt solar panel and a 150 mAh LiPo cell to power another project of his: the SensorTile environmental data logger.

It’s a practical and useful way to test things; he says that an average of 6 hours of direct sunlight daily is just enough to keep the 1.8 mA SensorTile running indefinitely. These are small amounts of power, to be sure, but it’s free and self-sustaining which is just what a remote sensing unit needs.