Animal Crossing IRL With Nova Lights To Mark The Passage Of Time

August 8, 2020 by Jenny List 1 Comment

We feature a lot of clocks here at Hackaday, but it’s not often that one comes along and makes us stop in our tracks and reconsider the fundamental question: just what is a clock? [Charlyn] has managed it though, with her Nova Light clock, which doesn’t so much measure the passing of time, but mark it.

The clock itself is a set of origami pieces in the shape of the Nova lights and a star fragment from the popular Animal Crossing New Horizons game, and each has a multicolour LED underneath. The star fragment pulses, while the two Nova lights imperceptibly slowly change colour, one over the course of the day and the other over the course of the week. Except for Fridays, when in celebration of the end of the work week they pulsate with different colours. Under the hood is an Adafruit Feather with a real-time clock module, and since all the code is there for your enjoyment you can have a go at making your own. Below the break is a video showing the clock in action.

[Charlyn] is no stranger to these pages, in fact we’ve featured her exquisite use of origami before. It’s probably her rideable rocking horse that’s the most memorable among her projects though.

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Print With Plasma!

August 8, 2020 by Jenny List 29 Comments

Over the years there have been a variety of methods for a computer to commit its thoughts to paper. Be it a daisy wheel, a dot matrix, a laser, or an inkjet, we’ve all cursed at a recalcitrant printer. There’s another type of printer that maybe we don’t think of quite as often but is workhorse in a million cash registers and parking ticket machines: the thermal printer. These mechanisms can be readily found as surplus items and have made their way into more than one project here over the years. [HomoFaciens] has taken thermal printing a step further by building a plasma printer from scratch that makes use of the thermal paper.

A thermal printer does its job as its name suggests, by burning the image into the paper. It may not deliver the best quality print, but scores on not needing ink ribbons, cartridges, or toner. This DIY version uses an off-the-shelf battery-powered plasma lighter to do the job, mounted on a 3D printed XY printer mechanism driven by two stepper motors. Behind the scenes is an Arduino Uno, which receives its instructions via USB from a command-line program on a Linux box. It’s admitted that this is hardly the pinnacle of printing technology, but it does at least make for a fascinating project. You can see it in action in the video below the break.

This isn’t [HomoFaciens]’ first printer, we’re instantly reminded of this ink drop printer from a few years ago.

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Wood-Fired Hot Tub For The End Of The World

August 8, 2020 by Jenny List 13 Comments

It’s one of the idyls of our age, to imagine oneself lounging in a hot tub watching a golden sunset, glass of wine in hand and the love of your life at your side. Along the way though it’s one that’s become diverted from the original, instead of a Scandinavian style wood fired tub in the forest we’re more likely to be thinking of an electric whirlpool spa made from fibreglass, as much a status symbol as a leisure item. It’s refreshing then to see [sirClogg]’s home made hot tub, a simple wooden tub with associated wood stove to heat its water. We can’t wait to step in!

The tub is simplicity itself, being made from softwood planks held together under tension by some steel cables. He admits though that he made a mistake using green wood, as it has now contracted leaving the tub with some gaps. But it’s a simple enough build that he can contemplate dismantling and rebuilding it to correct for that oversight.

Heat meanwhile is provided by a pipe that circulates water from the bottom of the tub through a heat exchanger coil inside a brick-built wood stove adjacent to the tub. The fabrication of the heat exchanger is detailed in the video below, we enjoyed seeing the copper piping filled with salt to ensure it doesn’t collapse when being bent around a five-gallon bucket. It doesn’t get much simpler than this, and the reward of a hot tub must be a sweet one indeed.

For hot tub enthusiast hackers, it’s always worth remembering that the excellent Danish hacker camp BornHack has a hot tub as part of its wellness area.

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Vintage Gauges Turned Classy Weather Display

August 8, 2020 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

It’s always good to see old hardware saved from the junk pile, especially when the end result is as impressive as this analog gauge weather display put together by [Build Comics]. It ended up being a truly multidisciplinary project, combing not only restoration work and modern microcontroller trickery, but a dash of woodworking for good measure.

Naturally, the gauges themselves are the real stars of the show. They started out with rusted internals and broken glass, but parts from a sacrificial donor and some TLC from [Build Comics] got them back in working order. We especially like the effort that was put into making the scale markings look authentic, with scans of the originals modified in GIMP to indicate temperature and humidity while retaining the period appropriate details.

To drive the 1940s era indicators, [Build Comics] is using an Arduino Nano and a DHT22 sensor that can detect temperature and humidity. A couple of trimmer pots are included for fine tuning the gauges, and everything is mounted to a small scrap of perfboard hidden inside of the custom-made pine enclosure.

This is hardly the first time we’ve seen analog gauges hooked up to modern electronics, but most of the projects are just that: modern. While the end look might be somewhat polarizing, we think maintaining the hardware’s classic style was the right call.

A Shell? A Programming Language? Relax! It’s Both!

August 8, 2020 by Al Williams 53 Comments

Every time we publish a Linux hack that uses a shell script, someone will chime in about how awful it is to program shell scripts. While we like the ubiquity and efficiency, we can’t disagree that the shell is a bit of a hack itself. [Axel Lijencrantz] wants to change your shell to be a full-blow programming language called Crush.

On the face of it, it looks like a shell. Want to see the contents of the current directory? Simple: ls.

The difference is underneath. In Crush, ls is a built-in and it returns data in rows like a database. You can manipulate that database with SQL-like commands: ls | where {type=="directory"}.

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DIY HID, OMG!

August 8, 2020 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

William English, one of the creators of the mouse back in the 60s, passed away last week. And that got me thinking of how amazing it would have been to be in the place that was inventing what would become modern computing interfaces. What a special time! Of course, they probably had no idea.

From here, it looks like the mouse changed everything, but you have to realize that they were working in a world with light-pens, where you could actually draw on the screen. In contrast, the mouse seems positively non-futuristic. They must have known they’d come up with an improvement over the status quo, but did they know they’d created a revolution?

So where has the revolutionary spirit in DIY human interface devices gone? I’d claim it’s still alive and kicking. Indeed our own Kristina Panos has a series called “Inputs of Interest” and we’ve seen a ton of DIY keyboards of late. Then there are many varieties of dial inputs. I used to have a dedicated scroll wheel made out of a hard-drive platter, and when I was reading lots of PDFs on-screen, I have to say it earned its desk-space. Heck, we’ve even seen people make their own mouse.

But what I love about the story of the development of the mouse is that they asked the question “what is the best way to locate a point on a screen” and tried to answer it. Half of their success is probably in simply asking the right question, and the other half in prototyping something half-workable. My gut says that we don’t have inputs figured out 100% on mobile yet. This sounds like a job for Hackaday. What’s the next big human-interface design need? And have you got any crazy ideas to solve it?

Hackaday Remoticon

And this week, we announced the Hackaday Remoticon, our shelter-in-place version of the Supercon. It’s going to take place in November as usual, but online instead of IRL.

The good news? It’s going to be chock full of workshops, all streamed online and recorded for posterity. And for that we need your proposals. If you’d like to teach a group of distributed hackers learning your favorite techniques and tricks, this is your chance!

The bad news is of course that we won’t get to see you all in person. That’s going to make the 2021 Hackaday Supercon seem even more super.

Why Buy The Newer Model, When You Can Just Replicate Its User Interface?

August 8, 2020 by Jenny List 9 Comments

Every now and then, along comes an awesome hack from years past that we missed at the time. We kick ourselves for somehow missing such amazing work, and since it’s that good, we share it with you with apologies. Such is the case with [Andrei Anatska]’s faithful replication of the Pioneer CDJ-2000 user interface as an upgrade to the earlier CDJ-1000 DJ controller, a piece of work of such quality that you could almost mistake it for being a commercial product.

At its heart is the STM32F746G Discovery board, which for some reason it pleases us greatly in this context that he refers to as the Disco board. If you’re hazy on the details of the various STM dev boards, this is the all-singing all-dancing one with the fancy colour LCD display. Out comes the VFD on the CDJ-1000 and a set of wires are soldered to its main board, then the Disco board is hooked up with the project firmware installed. The piece de résistance is the case, for which he eschews 3D-printing and instead cuts out from black plastic. Full instructions can be found in this PDF, so should you happen to have a CDJ-1000 that’s seen better days, you can join in the fun. See it in action in the video below.

DJ controllers may be run-of-the-mill today, but to those of us whose DJing days were in the era of a pair of Technics SL1200s and a stack of vinyl to the sound of early ’90s house music they are still nothing short of miraculous. We’ve featured plenty of hacks involving them here but they don’t always involve professional kit. Even a game controller can be pressed into service.

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