Day: December 28, 2019

Building A Spinning Moiré Effect Lamp

December 28, 2019 by 7 Comments
A concise, comical explanation of Moiré patterns, via XKCD.

Moiré patterns are interference patterns created when grids of different size or alignment are placed over each other. You’ve probably seen these when photographing a TV screen or looking through a pair of windows screens at the same time. [ChrysN] put the effect to work with this spinning Moiré lamp build.

It’s a build that can be achieved with scrap-bin components. An LED-encrusted PC cooling fan is used as the base of the lamp, fitted with Sugru bumpers to hold a cheap glass vase. A line pattern is then printed on to paper, rolled into a cylinder, and slid on to the fan to spin with the blades, inside the vase. Another line pattern is then printed on to a transparency (a printable transparent sheet for those who don’t remember overhead projectors) and slid around the outside of the vase. When powered up, the LEDs glow, and the fan spins, creating a hypnotizing moving moiré pattern.

It’s a simple but visually captivating build, and one that should keep you up at night thanks to the blue LEDs. Moiré patterns can do so much more though – they’re even put to work guiding ships. Video after the break.

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Subterranean Uses For LIDAR: Cave Surveys

December 28, 2019 by 11 Comments

LIDAR has gained much popularity as a means for self-driving cars to survey the space around them. At their most basic, LIDAR is a surveying method that uses lasers to paints the space around the sensors and assembles the distances measured from reflected light into a digital three-dimensional representation. That’s something that has quite a number of other applications, from surveying ancient ruins and rainforests from a bird’s eye view to developing 3D models of indoor spaces.

One fascinating use of LIDAR technology is to map out the routes inside caves, subterranean spaces that are seldom accessed by humans apart from those with specialized equipment and knowledge of how to safely traverse the underground terrain. [caver.adam] has been working on his Open LIDAR project for a few years using an SF30-B High Speed Rangefinder and laser device for a dual-system atop a gimbal with stepper motors for cave scanning.

Originally an entry in the 2016 Hackaday Prize, [Adam] has continued to work on the project. The result shown in the video below is a cheaper 3D LIDAR setup that works by rotating the laser distance module on 2 axes with a sensor centered at the center of rotation. It works for volumetric calculations, detects change over time, and identifies various water patterns and rocks on a surface map. Compared to notebooks, tape measures, and compasses, it’s certainly a step up in cave surveying technology.

Check out some other past underground surveying projects, such as Iowa City’s beer caves scanning projects and National Geographic’s 2014 expedition of the Titan Chamber in southern Guizhou Province in China.

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LED Flame Illuminates The Beauty Of Noise

December 28, 2019 by 9 Comments

Have you ever wrapped up a nice blinky project only to be disappointed by the predictability of the light or the color patterns? When it came to lighting this LED candle, so was [fungus amungus]. But there’s a better way, and it involves noise.

Perlin noise was created in the early 80s by Ken Perlin while he was working on the movie Tron. Frustrated by the current state of computer graphics and too limited on space to use images, he devised an algorithm for generating natural-looking textures. Basically, you generate a bunch of numbers between 0 and 1, then assign values to those numbers, such as a range of greyscale values from black (0) to white (1), or the values from the color wheel. The result is much prettier than random numbers because the neighboring values for any given number aren’t radically different. You get nice randomness with hardly any overhead.

[fungus amungus] is using the FastLED’s noise function to generate the numbers, but there’s a whole lot more going on here. As he explains in the excellent video after the break, if you want to animate these values, you just add another dimension of them. Although [fungus amungus] is using a Trinket Pro and a NeoPixel ring, we think a simplified version could be done with a Circuit Playground Express using the built-in LEDs.

If you want to do it the hard way, start by making your own NeoPixel ring.

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A Pocket-Sized Terminal For Mobile Python Hacking

December 28, 2019 by 14 Comments

Inspired by the good old days when your computer would boot directly into BASIC, [Le Roux Bodenstein] has created a handheld device he calls “DumbDumb” that can drop you into a MicroPython environment at a moment’s notice. If that doesn’t interest you, think of it this way: it’s a (relatively) VT100 compatible serial terminal with a physical keyboard that can fit in your pocket.

Being essentially just a dumb terminal (hence the name), there’s actually not a lot of hardware on the board. Beyond the 320×240 NewHaven 2.4 inch LCD, there’s just an STM32G071R8 microcontroller and a handful of passives. Plus the 57 tactile buttons that make up the keyboard, of course.

The MicroPython part comes in thanks to the spot on the back of the board that accepts an Adafruit Feather Wing. In this case, it’s the HUZZAH32 with an ESP32 on board, but it could work with other variants as well. With the wide array of Feather boards available, this terminal could actually be used for an array of applications.

So even if fiddling around with MicroPython isn’t your idea of a good time, there’s almost certainly some interesting software you could come up with for a tiny network-attached terminal like this. For example, it might be just what you need to start working on that LoRa pager system.

Peek Inside These Same-But-Different Power Supplies

December 28, 2019 by 5 Comments

When [Kerry Wong] found an Amrel PPS 35-2 Programmable Power Supply from the late 90s on eBay, he recognized it as the single-channel version of another unit he owned, the dual-channel Amrel PPS-2322. Naturally, he purchased it and did a compare and contrast of the two models.

From the outside, they look fairly different but weigh about the same. But the similarities on the inside make it quite clear that they share a common design. There are a few things that grab your eye and the 35-2 doesn’t seem quite as well thought out, with some components being soldered into awkward-looking places. Capacitors bristle like barnacles where they are soldered directly to a connector, and a blob of hot glue anchors two resistors that rise up out of the board like a couple of weeds.

The link above shows some high resolution side-by-side photos between the two models, and [Kerry] thoughtfully provides a link to the manual for the PPS series as well as a dump of the firmware (.zip) for the 35-2. A teardown video is embedded below.

Benchtop power supplies are important tools, but we’ve also seen how modern breadboard power supplies are remarkably full-featured.

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Stronger 3D Prints — Glue Or Carbon Fiber?

December 28, 2019 by 31 Comments

[CNCKitchen], like many others, is looking to make strong 3D prints. Using a high tech PLA bio copolyester compound, he printed a bunch of hooks in two different orientations. He used several different types of glue including epoxy and superglue. You can see the video of his results, below.

In addition to the glue, he used epoxy and bulk carbon fiber, again, in two different orientations. After several days of curing, he was ready to test.

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A VFD Wall Thermometer

December 28, 2019 by 5 Comments

Want to build something using VFD tubes, but don’t need yet another clock project? In that case, this wall mounted temperature and humidity display created by [commanderkull] might be exactly what you’re looking for. With six IV-11 tubes, this display is a practical way to add some of that gorgeous blue-green glow to your home or office.

The USB powered display uses a XL6009 and an XL7015 to provide the 24 V and 1.8 V needed by the IV-11 tubes, respectively. Both of which can be disconnected with jumpers to shut down the tubes without powering off the entire device, a useful feature when programming and debugging the display’s ATmega328P microcontroller. Each tube is connected to the ATmega with an 74HC595 shift register and a UDN2981 driver. Temperature and humidity data is provided, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the exceptionally common DHT22 sensor.

If you are looking to build another clock with these style tubes, there’s certainly enough prior art out there to get you started. We’ve also seen faux VFDs that you could use for either project, just in case you aren’t looking to deal with the voltage requirements and relative rarity of the real thing.