Building A Bigger Cloud Chamber

Cloud chambers are an exciting and highly visual science experiment. They’re fascinating to watch as you can see the passage of subatomic particles from radioactive decay with your very own eyes. Many elect to build small chambers based on thermoelectric Peltier elements, but [Cloudylabs] decided to do something on a grander scale.

It’s a hefty chamber, and a very clean build.

[Cloudylabs] started building cloud chambers after first seeing one in a museum back in 2010. The first prototype was an air-cooled Peltier device, with a cooled area of just 4x4cm. Over the years, and after building many more Peltier-based chambers, it became apparent that the thermoelectric modules were somewhat less than robust, often failing after many thermal cycles. Wanting to take things up a notch, [Cloudylabs] elected to build a much larger unit based on phase-change technology, akin to the way a refrigerator works.

The final product is astounding, consisting of a 32x18cm actively cooled area mounted within a large glass viewing case. A magnet is mounted underneath which causes certain particles to curve in relation to the field, as well as an electrically charged grid up top. The chamber is capable of operating for up to 12 hours without requiring any user intervention.

Cloud chambers are always beautiful, and even moreso at this larger scale. When radioactive materials are introduced into the chamber the trails generated are long and easily visible. It’s a daunting build however, and the final product weighs over 30 kilograms. You might want to start with something a little smaller for your first build. Video after the break.

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Mind Poetry Mindflex Hack

Project Perceives Pondering, Prints Poetry

If poetry is your thing, this hack might convince you that your brain is more advanced than the rest of us poor sots. [Roni Brandini] designed a system that prints lines of poetry when you concentrate. The Mind Poetry project uses an EEG headset from Mattel’s Mindflex toy and pipes your brain’s signals to an Arduino Mega 2560. The system then looks for patterns of brain waves that indicate concentration. As you maintain your concentration, the system continues to print lines of poetry to a small display.

Tapping into the mindflex

[Roni] follows the standard Mindflex hack process by tapping into the data transmission pin on the Mindflex board. Optoisolation is provided by a PC817 to make sure wall power can’t accidentally bleed over into your own wetware. You could get away with just using batteries, but isolation is still a best practice.

The Arduino Brain Library is used to decipher the signal. The Mindflex picks up brain waves from roughly 1 Hz to 50 Hz, which is enough bandwidth to approximately determine mental state. For example, Theta waves are in the 4 Hz to 7 Hz range and can indicate a relaxed, meditative state. Low Beta waves range from 13 Hz to 17 Hz and indicate an alert, focused mental state. The Mindflex system is also generous in that it provides derived meditation and attention scores, ranging from 0 to 100.

It’s difficult to get a high level of precision with this sensor and sampling system, so the code uses [Roni]’s custom recipe of meditation score, attention score, and Low Beta value. He finds it most effective to trigger actions based on a relationship of these scores instead of focusing on the readings themselves. For example, an uptick in both Low Beta waves and the attention score indicate concentration.

Mindflex Brainwave Chart

If the wearer is concentrating, the system prints lines of poetry to the display and charts the three values. As an added gamification, it’ll tell you how many times you broke concentration before you completed the poem. One can imagine a game that tries to break concentration by printing other phrases or even activating an array of mechanical distractions.

If poetry isn’t your thing, you’re in luck. The “Mind Poetry” project also makes some headway (pun intended) with processing the EEG headset’s signals and triggering actions This means you don’t have to be into the poetry scene to reap the benefits. You now have the bones of a hack that lets you control things with your brain muscles and without your muscle muscles.

For inspiration, check out some other Mindflex hacks that let you order drinks with your mind (recommended), shock the heck out of people (not recommended), or even move around your skirt (uh… you do you?).

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Breathing LED Done With Raw Logic Synthesized From A Verilog Design

Breathing LEDs are an attractive adornment on many electronic devices. These days they’re typically controlled by software but of course there were fading effects back in the days of analog too. [Pepijn de Vos] mixes a little of the new and the old by building a hardware-based fader from a Verilog design and even too the time to explain the process in depth.

Rather than using a microcontroller and software, [Pepijn] wrote the logic required to make the LED “breathe” in the hardware description language, Verilog. You may be familiar with this for FPGAs, but using it to plan out a build with logic chips is just as apt a use. The Verilog was synthesized into a circuit using 74-series logic chips, with the help of work by [Dan Ravensloft] who has made a library for the Yosys Open Synthesis Suite. With the addition of a basic clock circuit, the LED is made to breathe and the rate can be controlled by changing the clock speed.

It’s a fun way to experiment with both Verilog and old-school logic, albeit one that may not scale well. An interesting side note from the Twitter thread, [Dan] estimates that with current settings the PicoRV32 CPU would require over 2000 chips to build. Regardless, it’s an interesting tool and one that likely has further scope for experimentation.

First patented by Apple way back in 2002, the breathing LED has been a popular project for those learning electronics. We’ve even seen it on motorbikes. Video after the break.

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A Multi-Layered Spin On Persistence Of Vision

By taking advantage of persistence in human vision, we can use modest bits of hardware to create an illusion of a far larger display. We’ve featured many POV projects here, but they are almost always an exploration in two dimensions. [Jamal-Ra-Davis] extends that into the third dimension with his Volumetric POV Display.

Having already built a 6x6x6 LED cube, [Jamal] wanted to make it bigger, but was not a fan of the amount of work it would take to grow the size of a three-dimensional array. To sidestep the exponential increase in effort required, he switched to using persistence of vision by spinning the light source and thereby multiplying its effect.

The current version has six arms stacked vertically, each of which presents eight individually addressable APA102 LEDs. When spinning, those 48 LEDs create a 3D display with an effective resolution of 60x8x6.

We saw an earlier iteration of this project a little over a year ago at Bay Area Maker Faire 2018. (A demo video from that evening can be found below.) It was set aside for a while but has now returned to active development as an entry to Hackaday Prize 2019. [Jamal-Ra-Davis] would like to evolve his prototype into something that can be sold as a kit, and all information has been made public so others can build upon this work.

We’ve seen two-dimensional spinning POV LED display in a toy top, and we’ve also seen some POV projects taking steps into the third dimension. We like where this trend is going.

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Create A Low-Cost, High-Accuracy LCR Meter With An STM32 MCU

Having a good LCR meter was something which [Adil] had wanted for his personal lab, so as any good university student (and former Hackaday contributor) does, he ended up building his own. Using a Nucleo-F446RE board for the MCU side and a custom PCB for the side that does the actual measuring, he created a meter that reportedly comes pretty close to commercial meters, and for the low price of £55.

Running through some of the theory behind the design as well some design choices, the resulting product is then presented. The choice to not using a standard current shunt, but instead a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) is explained as well. Unfortunately there are no schematics or source code, and the text is somewhat unclear on some points, failing to explain some acronyms that’d make it hard for someone who is not active in this field to understand the full design.

We hope that [Adil] can address those points and provide design files and source code, as it does look like a very interesting project!

Designing Compact Gasoline Generator Prototype For Drone Use

Lithium batteries and brushless motors helped make multirotor drones possible, but batteries only last so long. Liquid fuels have far greater energy densities, but have not  been widely applied in these roles. [Tech Ingredients] has been experimenting with a compact gasoline-fueled generator, with the aim to extend drone flight times well beyond what is currently possible with batteries (Youtube link, embedded below).

The build began with a single-cylinder, four stroke engine. However, torque spikes and vibration made things difficult. After some iteration, the design settled on employing two single-cylinder two stroke engines, fitted with a timing belt to keep them 180 degrees out of phase. In combination with a pair of balanced flywheels, this keeps vibration to a minimum. Brushless motors are used as generators, combined with rectifier diodes and capacitors to smooth the voltage output. The generator is intended to be used in parallel with a lithium battery pack in order to ensure the drone always has power available, even in the event of a temporary malfunction.

This is a build with plenty of promise, and we can’t wait to see what kind of flight time can be achieved once the system is finished and flight ready. We’ve seen others experimenting with hybrid drones, too.

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The Case Of The Vintage Computer, The Blown Fuse, And The Diode

If you are the operator of a vintage computer, probably the only one of its type remaining in service, probably the worst thing you can hear is a loud pop followed by your machine abruptly powering down. That’s what happened to the Elliott 803B in the UK’s National Museum Of Computing, and its maintainer [Peter Onion] has written an account of his getting it back online.

The Elliott is a large machine from the early 1960s, and because mains supplies in those days could be unreliable it has a rudimentary UPS to keep it going during a brownout. A hefty Ni-Cd battery is permanently hooked up to a charger that also serves as the power supply for the machine, ensuring that it can continue to operate for a short while as the voltage drops. A spate of fuses had blown in this power supply, so we’re taken through the process of fault-finding. Eventually the failure is found in a rectifier diode, the closest modern equivalent is substituted, and after testing the machine comes back to life.

We’re used to reading these stories from the other side of the Atlantic, so we welcome TNMOC saying that this is the first of a series of technical posts on their work. We visited the museum back in 2016, and also featured its famous recreated Colossus.