Lasers, Mirrors, And Sensors Combine In An Optical Bench Game

March 24, 2018 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

Who would have thought you could make a game out of an optical bench? [Chris Mitchell] did, and while we were skeptical at first, his laser Light Bender game has some potential. Just watch your eyes.

The premise is simple: direct the beam of a colored laser to the correct target before time runs out. [Chris] used laser-cut acrylic for his playfield, which has nine square cutouts arranged in a grid. Red, green, and blue laser pointers line the bottom of the grid, with photosensors and RGB LEDs lining the grid on the other three sides. Play starts with a random LED lighting up in one of the three colors, acting as a target. The corresponding color laser comes on, and the player has to insert mirrors or pass-through blocks in the grid to create a path to the target. The faster you hit the CdS cell, the higher your score. It’s simple, but it looks really engaging. We can imagine all sorts of upgrades, like lighting up two different targets at once, or adding a beamsplitter block to hit two targets with the same color. Filters and polarizers could add to the optical fun too.

We like builds that are just for fun, especially when they’re well-crafted and have a slight air of danger. The balloon-busting killbots project we featured recently comes to mind.

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Cordless Tool Battery Pack Turned Into Portable Bench Supply

March 24, 2018 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

Say what you want about the current crop of mass-marketed consumer-grade cordless tools, but they’ve got one thing going for them — they’re cheap. Cheap enough, in fact, that they offer a lot of hacking opportunities, like this portable bench power supply that rides atop a Ryobi battery.

Like many of the more common bench supply builds we’ve seen, [Pat K]’s more portable project relies on the ubiquitous DPS5005 power supply module, obtained from the usual sources. [Pat K] doesn’t get into specifics on performance, but supplied with 18 volts from a Ryobi One+ battery, the DC-DC programmable module should be able to do up to about 16 volts. Mating the battery to the supply is easy with the 3D-printed case, which has a socket for the battery that mimics the sockets on tools from the Ryobi line. It’s simple and effective, as well as neatly executed. The files for the case are on Thingiverse; sadly, only an STL file is included, so if you want to support another brand’s batteries, you’ll have to roll your own.

Check out some of the other power supplies we’ve featured that use the DPS5005 and its cousins, like this nice bench unit. We’ve also covered some of the more hackable aspects of this module, such as an open-source firmware replacement.

Business On The Outside, Electronics Workstation On The Inside

March 23, 2018 by James Hobson 15 Comments

As an electrical engineering student, [Brandon Rice] had the full suite of electronics tools you’d expect. Cramming them all into a dorm room was doable — but cramped — a labour to square everything away from his desk’s top when he had to work on something else. To make it easier on himself, he built himself a portable electronics workstation inside the dimensions of a briefcase.

Built from scratch, the workstation includes a list of features that should have you salivating by the end. Instead of messing with a bunch of cables, on-board power is supplied by a dismantled 24V, 6A power brick, using a buck converter and ATmega to regulate and display the voltage, with power running directly to 12V and 5V lines of a breadboard in the middle of the workstation. A wealth of components are stored in two dozen 3d printed 1″ capsules setting them in loops pinned to the lid.

If all this was not already enough, there’s more!

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Ground-Effect Lighting For Your Bed.

March 23, 2018 by James Hobson 24 Comments

If you’ve ever disturbed your partner by getting up during the night and flicking on the bathroom light — or tripping over something and startling them awake completely in the ensuing catastrophe — [Kristjan Berce]’s idea to install motion-activated ground-effect lighting on his girlfriend’s bed might hold your attention.

[Berce] is using an Arduino Nano for the project’s brain, a PIR sensor from Adafruit, and an L7805 voltage regulator to handle load spikes. He doesn’t specify the type of LED strip he’s using, but Neopixels might be a safe bet here. Soldering issues over with, he mounted his protoboard in a 3D printed project box. Instead of reinventing the LED, [Berce] copied the code from Adafruit’s PIR tutorial before sticking the project to the side of the bed with adhesive strips so the on/off switch within handy reach to flick before meeting Mr. Sandman. Check out the build video after the break!

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DIY Perpetual Flip Calendar

March 23, 2018 by Rich Hawkes 12 Comments

Flip calendars are a neat little piece of history. Sold as tourist trinkets, they sit on your desk and show the current day of the month and, depending on the particular calendar, month and year. Each day, you rotate it and it shows you the current date. At the end of February, you rotate it a bunch of times to get from February 28th (or 29th) to March 1st. [measuredworkshop] always had fun flipping the dates on his parents’ flip calendar, so decided to build his own wooden one.

The calendars consist of a series of tiles with the dates on them inside an enclosure. Rotating the enclosure allows a new tile to slide down in front of the old one. Once you know how many tiles you are going to use, you put a different date on the back side of each tile. In [measuredworkshop]’s case, there were 15 tiles to hold 30 dates (he created one with 30/31 on it for the end of the month) so the 1 has a 16 on the back, the 2 a 17, and so on. Tiles of different colored wood were cut and sanded and then the numbers drawn on by hand.

The enclosure was cut using a Morso Guillotine, a machine which uses sharp blades to do precise mitre cuts in wood. One side of the enclosure was covered by wood, the other by clear acrylic, so that you can see how the mechanism works as it is rotated. Finally, a stand was cut from wood as well and the final product assembled.

As you can see in the video below this is a great showpiece, and because of the design gives a view into how flip-calendars work. At the end of his write-up, [measuredworkshop] shares a link he found to a 3d printed flip-calendar on Thingiverse. Check out some of the more techie calendars posted at Hackaday, like this e-ink calendar, or this Raspberry Pi wall calendar.

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Building A Plate Reverb On The Cheap

March 23, 2018 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

For those who don’t spend their free time creating music with experimental audio effects, a plate reverb is essentially a speaker. It just happens to be, by design, a rather poor one. Rather than using a paper cone for a diaphragm like a traditional speaker, the plate reverb uses as you might guess, a metal plate. As the plate vibrates along with the source audio, a set of piezoelectric pickups convert that to an output. The end result is that audio fed into the plate reverb comes out with a nice echo effect.

But despite their relative simplicity, a plate reverb costs thousands of dollars. They’re so expensive that the majority of people just emulate the effect in software. But it doesn’t have to be that way. [Sammartino] and an audio engineer friend recently came up with a detailed guide for building a plate reverb that cost about 10% of commercially available models.

The construction is fairly simple. A wooden frame is built, and eight hooks are installed around the edges. The plate is suspended between these hooks using guitar strings, which holds it tight but with enough give to vibrate along with the tunes. Another board is attached across the center of the frame to support the electronics: a transducer to vibrate the plate, and two piezo pickups to convert that to an audio signal, and a couple jacks and some wiring to tie it all together.

For a different take on the DIY plate reverb, check out this one we covered all the way back in 2013. If you’re in the market for something a bit larger, we’ve got you covered there as well.

We’re Making It Rain Achievements This Year

March 23, 2018 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

We just dished out the first round of achievements to a bunch of hardware projects and there’s a lot more to come.

You may have missed it in all the fanfare last week, so today we take a closer look. Achievements are the newest edition to the Hackaday Prize and we’re really excited about them! With so much creativity in the projects we see entered, these achievements recognize a range of different aspects from serious to lighthearted, and even the downright absurd. There can be only 20 finalists in each challenge of the Prize, but there can be dozens of projects that unlock each achievement.

Today we’re taking a look at three of the achievements: Voltron, Pickle Rick, and the League of Extraordinary Cyborgs. You can also pursue the current list of achievements for an idea of what they’re all about.

Voltron Achievement

Modular PCBs

Swarm Robotics

The five projects that have unlocked the Voltron Achievement aren’t about defending the universe (but if that’s what you’re doing, cool!). What we’re looking for is many things coming together to be greater than the whole. Two great examples are the Hexabitz project which is an edge-soldered modular PCB system, and a project that envisions swarm robotics for construction, inspection, and maintenance.

Pickle Rick Achievement

Neon 7-Segment Displays

Car Robot or Snake Robot?

Does this need explaining? If your brain skips a cycle and your lips utter a halting “What?!” then you’ve unlocked the Pickle Rick Achievement. These are the out-of-the-ordinary hacks borne of the because-I-can mentality and we love them. The first two projects in this group are a neon 7-segment display (complete with bulky toggle switches and mechanical relays) and a robot snake that transforms into a robot car. What?!

League of Extraordinary Cyborgs Achievement

It’s dangerous to go alone. OK, maybe it’s not, but you can get a lot more done as a close-knit team! We’re looking for team entries, which is how you unlock the League of Extraordinary Cyborgs Achievement.

Unlocks and the Achievements We Forgot

These achievements are easy to unlock. Your project needs to be a Hackaday Prize entry, and meet the achievement criteria. They don’t come with a cash prize (and don’t affect your chances of winning one). Achievements are a tip of the hat to the hackers who are passionate about the hardware they’re building.

We’ll be digging through entries, awarding these as we go, but of course we would love your help. When you see projects perfect for an achievement, leave a comment on that page with your support. You can also send a Hackaday.io message to Stephen Tranovich, Technical Community Leader at Hackaday.io and the person most on the lookout for awarding achievements, requesting an achievement unlock.

The currently displayed list doesn’t include all of the achievements. Some of them are secret (we’ll tell you when we start awarding those). We will be adding more along the way. If an idea for an interesting achievement pops into your mind, let us know in the comments below and we might add it!