Month: February 2020

A Laser Drawing Machine For Flashes Of Creativity

February 7, 2020 by 6 Comments

Ahh, midterms. Some students blow off steam between study sessions by playing video games or just zoning out. While those kids were all distracted, [Justinwong777] and his buddy [Brett] found a bunch of scrap wood and built this laser drawing machine in their school’s makerspace. You operate it as you might an Etch-a-Sketch, except your drawings are as fleeting as sparkler art on the 4th of July, if they made Tron-colored sparklers.

Though you work it like an Etch-a-Sketch, the business end operates like a laser cutter. Inside that plywood enclosure is an Arduino Uno and a pair of motors. These motors turn a series of custom gears, which move a small mirror angled at 45° in the xy-plane.  There’s a 30mW laser mounted parallel with the base, pointed at the mirror, and it reflects the beam toward a canvas panel coated with phosphorescent paint. We dig the printed ergonomic case for the joystick, which gives control of both x and y. Put on some eye protection and check it out after the break.

If you want to draw with lasers, but aren’t much of an artist, do something unexpected: build a laser turret not to kill, but to draw the weather on the wall.

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Mitch Altman Asks How You’re Using Your Life

February 7, 2020 by 57 Comments

This talk will probably make you a bit angry. You might be upset with some of Mitch Altman’s views or his hyperbole in describing them. Or you might be upset because you totally agree with his views and feel the same disappointment he does with many (ab)uses of technology. Either way, the point of his talk, which was given at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference, is that we all should think deeply about what we choose to do with our time and our talents. Consider yourself challenged.

The video below is packed full of colorful ideas, along with some colorful language. Let’s take a look.

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Turning A Problem Around: The Whitney Cotton Gin

February 7, 2020 by 38 Comments

If you went to elementary school in the United States, you no doubt learned about Eli Whitney’s cotton gin as an example of how the industrial revolution took previously manual processes and replaced the low-efficiency of human labor with machines. The development of the cotton gin — patented in 1794 — involves an interesting lesson about solving engineering problems.

Farmers in the southern United States had a big problem. Tobacco was a cash crop, but it eventually left your fields barren and how to solve that problem wasn’t understood yet. Indigo was valuable for dye, but the British were eating away that market with indigo created in its colonies. Rice requires a lot of water and swamp, so it was only suitable for certain areas.

There was one thing that grew very readily in much of the land: cotton. Unfortunately, the cotton had little seeds you had to remove. A single person could clean — maybe — a pound of cotton a day. In the late 1700s, plantation owner Catharine Littlefield Greene introduced Whitney to a group of farmers were trying to decide if there was a way to make cotton a more profitable crop.

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Hackaday Podcast 053: 1-Bit Computer Is A Family Affair, This Displays Is Actually Fabulous, And This Hoverboard Is A Drill Press

February 7, 2020 by 3 Comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams navigate the crowded streets of the hackersphere for the most interesting hardware projects seen in the past week. Forget flip-dot displays, you need to build yourself a sequin display that uses a robot finger and sequin-covered fabric to send a message. You can do a lot (and learn a lot) with a 1-bit computer called the WDR-1. It’s never been easier to turn a USB port into an embedded systems dev kit by using these FTDI and Bluepill tricks. And there’s a Soyuz hardware teardown you don’t want to miss.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

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Automatic Component Tape Cutter For When Your Electronics Kit Hits The Big Time

February 7, 2020 by 4 Comments

Even for the simplest of products, production at scale can be big challenge. For example, you might find yourself spending many hours manually counting and cutting strips of component tape to go with the DIY electronics kit your selling on Tindie. [Tom Keddie] found himself in similar position some time ago, and built himself an automated component counter and tape cutter.

[Tom] posted the video of his old machine (see it after the break) after a call for help from another Twitter user who found himself with a lot of component strips to cut. The frame of the machine is made from 20×20 aluminium extrusions and laser cut plexiglass. The tape is pulled off the reel by a stepper motor using a 3D printed sprocket, with the tape held on by Lego wheel and tension spring. A second idler sprocket with tensioner is used to guide the tape through two photo-interrupters that can count holes in opaque tape or the components in clear tape. The cutter itself it an Exacto blade mounted on a wooden block in a guillotine-like arrangement, driven by another stepper motor and a threaded rod as lead screw. Everything is of course controlled by an Arduino. Although not used any more, [Tom] says it worked very well in its day.

The availability of cheap laser cutting, 3D printing and components like aluminium extrusions and stepper motors have really made it possible for anyone to add some automation to production in the home workshop. You won’t be surprised that we’ve seen something like this before, but we’ve also seen similar machines for wiring prep and through-hole resistors. Let us hear your production hacks in the comments, or drop us a tip if you’ve documented it!

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This Week In Security: Google Photos, Whatsapp, And Doom On Deskphones

February 7, 2020 by 12 Comments

Google Photos is handy. You take pictures and videos on your cell phone, and they automatically upload to the cloud. If you’re anything like me, however, every snap comes with a self-reminder that “the cloud” is a fancy name for someone else’s server. What could possibly go wrong? How about some of your videos randomly included in another user’s downloads?

Confirmed by Google themselves, this bug hit those using Google Takeout, the service that allows you to download all your data from a Google application, as a single archive. Google Photos archives downloaded between November 21 and November 25 may contain videos from other users, according to a notice sent to the users who downloaded said archives. It’s notable that those notices haven’t been sent to users who’s videos were exposed.
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Music Player Erected From Floppy Disks

February 7, 2020 by 26 Comments

Holding on to a cache of old floppies because nostalgia? Us too, and this might be the coolest possible use for ’em. While it’s fun to imagine that he wrote a compression algorithm to fit a lossless copy of Coltrane’s Blue Train on a 1.44Mb coaster, or somehow rolled his own mini-disc, [Dino Fizzotti]’s Diskplayer uses floppies to serve up Spotify albums.

What’s actually on the floppy, then? The corresponding Spotify album URL. He just pops a disk in the drive, and the Pi does the rest — it detects the floppy event and executes a script that starts an open-source Spotify client. There’s no track skipping and no shuffle, just the entire album as intended, take it or eject it. If you think about it, he’s actually managed to improve on the vinyl experience, since all the songs are on one side. Demo is queued up after the break, and it includes [Dino]’s simple web interface for writing the Spoti-floppies.

When this project started seven months ago, [Dino] intended to bring his vinyl collection into the 21st century with RFID tags, but we’re glad that he decided to involve a fairly obsolete medium. Don’t have a drive or a heap of floppies gathering dust in a closet? Neither did [Dino]. But he found plenty of people selling pretty-colored floppies on ebay, and Amazon has tons of cheap external drives. We think the album art stickers are a nice touch, as is matching album cover color to floppy. He’s right to lock those bad boys up.

Got a bunch of floppy drives? Build a Floppotron and make your own music!

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