RGB LED Shutter Shades

August 5, 2020 by Orlando Hoilett 13 Comments

[splat238] is back at it again with another cool RGB LED display project. We were contemplating whether or not our readers have had enough of these over the last few weeks, but we’ve learned over the years that you can never have too many LED projects.

Instead of making a cool mask like we’ve covered before, [splat238] decided to trick-out some shutter shades. What’s really cool is he used the PCB itself as the frame, similar to another hack we’ve seen, which we’re sure also made his design process that much more convenient.

[splat238] got his boards pre-assembled since it would be really difficult to solder all those LEDs by hand. There are 76 of them in this design. It’s pretty helpful that he walks the reader through how to get the boards assembled, providing information on reliable fabrication and assembly houses that he’s had good experiences with. Pretty solid information if you don’t already have a go-to one-stop-house or have never designed for assembly before.

The glasses use an ESP8266-based microcontroller since it has plenty of space for storing LED patterns and has the potential benefit of including WiFi control in later revisions. However, we think you’ll be pretty happy with simply toggling through the patterns with a simple pushbutton.

The LEDs use a whopping 2.5 A at maximum and rely on an external power bank, so you’ll probably want to be really careful wearing this over an extended period of time. Maybe consider doing a bit of PWM to help reduce power consumption.

Another cool project [splat238]! Keep them coming. Continue reading “RGB LED Shutter Shades” →

Illegal Blast Fishing Detector Is All Ears

August 5, 2020 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

Blast fishing — the act of using explosives underwater to kill entire schools of fish with shock waves — has been a widespread problem in the Philippines for decades. Although a few fishermen get rich from the first blast at a fresh site, it isn’t good for anyone in the long term, especially the coral and other sea life. Many blast fisherman use homemade explosives, often at the risk of losing fingers and limbs.

The local authorities have tried many tactics to deter the activity. Where education about the diminishing returns of blast fishing has failed, appeals to religion with strategically placed statuary of the Virgin Mary have been somewhat successful. [Ifthekar ahammad] has another idea, and it involves detecting the explosion, triangulating the position of the blast, and reporting it to the authorities as soon as possible.

The CBobby system works by analyzing the audio spectrum. It looks for transient changes from the ambient background noise levels, and analyzes duration and the frequencies it heard to decide whether there was an explosion or not. Plans to field test this in the Philippines have been dashed by the pandemic, but [ifthekar] has been hard at work testing in Germany with underwater speakers blasting out explosion noises. Already, the system can differentiate the blasts from various environmental sounds like ships, the bellows of large sea creatures, earthquakes, rain, and thunder.

Although the test rig is encased in neon orange acrylic, the actual blast fishing tattler will be disguised as a venomous stonefish, making it as appealing to mess with as fire ants or wasps.

Destructive blast fishing is all-around terrible, even though it’s done for survival. But what do we think of using drones to fish for sport?

The Smell Of Space

August 5, 2020 by Jenny List 28 Comments

In space, so the Alien tagline goes, nobody can hear you scream. One of the most memorable pieces of movie promotion ever, it refers to the effect of the vacuum of space on the things human senses require an atmosphere to experience. It’s a lesson that Joss Whedon used to great effect with the Serenity‘s silent engine light-ups in Firefly, while Star Wars ignored it completely to give us improbable weapon noises in space battles.

Sound may not pass through the vacuum of space, but that’s not to say there are not things other than light for the senses. The Apollo astronauts reported that moon dust released a smell they described as akin to burnt gunpowder once it was exposed to the atmosphere inside their lander, and by now you may have heard that there is a Kickstarter that aims to recreate the smell as a fragrance. Will it replace the cloying wall of Axe or Lynx Africa body spray that pervades high-school boys’ changing rooms, or is it a mere novelty?

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Perfect Your Beer Pong Game With The PongMate CyberCannon Mark III

August 5, 2020 by Orlando Hoilett 3 Comments

[Grant] was inspired to help his party guests improve their beer pong game. What he created is a fairly impressive contraption, sure to make him unstoppable in his next bout.

The device uses a gyroscope and a time-of-flight sensor to calculate the optimum trajectory for the ping pong ball. The user is guided to the correct launching position using two bubble levels and a series of indicator LEDs that turn green when the optimal position is reached.

The launching mechanism uses a servo motor to push the ball into the circular wheel machine which then propels the ping pong ball to its target. The circular wheel machine is powered by two DC motors whose speeds are determined by the distance from the target. [Grant] calibrated the DC motor speed to the distance from the target and found a pretty reproducible relationship favoring a cube root function. You can see his calibration data on his Instructable page as well as a cool demo video showing how the device automatically adjusts motor speed to distance from the target.

We should combine the PongMate with the Auto-Bartender we wrote about a few weeks ago. What are your favorite beverage hacks? Please share in the comments below.

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Teardown: Orthofix SpinalStim

August 5, 2020 by Tom Nardi 55 Comments

If you’ve ever had a particularly nasty fracture, your doctor may have prescribed the use of an electronic bone growth stimulator. These wearable devices produce a pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) around the bone, which has been shown to speed up the natural healing process in a statistically significant number of patients. That’s not to say there isn’t a debate about how effective they actually are, but studies haven’t shown any downsides to the therapy, so it’s worth trying at least.

When you receive one of these devices, it will be programmed to only operate for a certain amount of time or number of sessions. Once you’ve “used up” the bone stimulator, it’s functionally worthless. As you might imagine, there’s no technical reason this has to be the case. The cynic would say the only reason these devices have an expiration date on them is because the manufacturer wants to keep them from hitting the second hand market, but such a debate is perhaps outside the scope of these pages.

The Orthofix SpinalStim you’re seeing here was given to me by a friend after their doctor said the therapy could be cut short. This provided a somewhat rare opportunity to observe the device before it deactivated itself, which I’d hoped would let me take a closer look at how it actually operated.

As you’ll soon see, things unfortunately didn’t work out that way. But that doesn’t mean the effort was fruitless, and there may yet be hope for hacking these devices should anyone feel like taking up the challenge.

Continue reading “Teardown: Orthofix SpinalStim” →

Pour Yourself A Glass Of 100,000 Volts

August 5, 2020 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

You’d be hard pressed to find a hacker or maker who doesn’t have a soft spot for the tantalizing buzz and snap of a high voltage spark gap, but it remains the sort of project that most of us don’t take on personally. There’s a perceived complexity in building a device capable of shooting a proper spark through several inches of open air, with connotations of exotic components and massive hand-wound coils. Plus, nobody wants to inadvertently singe off their eyebrows.

While the latest video from [Jay Bowles] might not assuage anyone’s fear of performing impromptu electrolysis, it does at least prove that you don’t need to have a laboratory full of gear to produce six figure voltages. In fact, you don’t even need much in the way of electronics: the key components of this DIY Marx generator are made with little more than water and some household items.

This is made possible by the fact that the conductivity of water can be changed depending on what’s been dissolved into it. Straight tap water is a poor enough conductor that tubes of it can be used in place of high voltage resistors, while the addition of some salt and a plastic insulating layer makes for a rudimentary capacitor. You’ll still need wires to connect everything together and some bits of metal to serve as spark gaps, but nothing you won’t find lurking in the parts bin.

Of course, water and a smattering of nails won’t spontaneously generate electricity. You need to give it a bit of a kick start, and for that [Jay] is using a 15,000 volt DC flyback power supply that looks like it may have been built with components salvaged from an old CRT television. While the flyback transformer alone could certainly generate some impressive sparks, this largely liquid Marx generator multiplies the input voltage to produce a serious light show.

We’re always glad to see a new video from the perennially jovial [Jay] come our way. While his projects might not always be practical in the strictest sense, they never fail to inspire a lively discussion about the fascinating applications of high voltage.

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The Game Boy As A Midi Synthesiser

August 5, 2020 by Jenny List 6 Comments

In the world of chiptune music there are many platforms to choose from, each with their own special flavour tot heir sound. The Game Boy has a particular following, but it differs from some of its contemporary platforms in having a custom sound chip built into the same silicon as its processor. You can’t crank open a Game Boy and lift out the sound chip for your own synth project, instead you must talk to it through the Game Boy’s Z80 processor. This is something [Adil Soubki] knows well, as he’s completed a project that turns the handheld console into a MIDI synthesiser.

A Game Boy was designed to play games and not as a developer’s toy, so it doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for the hacker. He’s got under the console’s skin by mapping a section of its memory address map to the pins on a Teensy microcontroller board, and running some Game Boy code that reads the vaues there and uses them to configure the sound hardware. The Teensy handles the translation between MIDI and these byte values, turning the whole into a MIDI synthesiser. It’s a succesful technique, as can be seen in the video below the break. Best of all, the code is available, so you can have a go for yourself.

We’ve featured Game Boy synths before here at Hackaday, but usually they have been of the more conventional variety.

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