Old Portable TV Becomes Unique CRT Cyberdeck

February 28, 2022 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

Remember the “suitcase” form-factor for PCs? In the time before latops, these luggable machines were just the thing for the on-the-go executive. OK, maybe not really — but the ability to have PC, monitor, and peripherals in a single package had real appeal, and a lot of that rationale is behind the cyberdeck phenomenon. So when we saw this retro portable TV turned into a cyberdeck, it really caught our eye.

Ironically, the portable black-and-white TV that [Lucas Dul] chose as the basis for his cyberdeck hails from about the same period in time that luggable PCs were having their brief time in the sun. Scored from eBay, the Magnavox TV/radio combo had seen better days, and required a bit of surgery to repair what might have been drop damage. With the CRT restored and the video and audio paths located, the TV got a Raspberry Pi, a small touchpad, and a couple of concealed USB connectors. The Pi’s composite output drives the CRT, with about the results you’d expect. The keyboard appears to be just about the right size to serve as a cover, but [Lucas] said that’s a future project.

Still, with the TV’s original handle acting as a stand, this cyberdeck gives off a real Compaq or IBM portable PC vibe. We’ve seen a few luggable-lookalike cyberdecks before, but none that dared use a CRT monitor. It may be a far cry from HDMI, but we really appreciate that [Lucas] chose this way rather than slapping in an LCD.

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Swap The Laser For A Vortex Cannon And You Have… Lift?

February 28, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 6 Comments

When people are thinking of the future of space travel, an idea that floats around is a spaceship with a giant solar sail pushed along by a massive laser. Inspired by the concept but lacking a giant laser, [Tom Stanton] build a small craft powered by a vortex cannon.

Creating a vortex is hard enough, but creating a vortex with enough oomph to travel a longer distance and push something takes some doing. [Tom] started with some cheap solenoids, but had a few issues. Their interior nozzles were quite small, which restricted airflow. He used four valves all plumbed together to provide the volume of air needed. Additionally, he found that their response time was lacking. They couldn’t quite switch off quickly enough so instead of a puff of air, it pushed out something closer to a stream. To compensate, [Tom] 3d printed and tried a few different sizes of cone nozzles to see if that helped. Unfortunately, it did not. So he combined the nozzle with an expansion chamber that allowed the pressure wave to shorten, then it narrows to speed it up again. This provided a decent vortex.

Next [Tom] turned to his craft. After designing a 3d model, he had a template to cut out some shapes from paper and taped them together to form a light vehicle that can capture the vortex. The initial tests weren’t too promising as the craft twisted and the string that it traveled on had too much friction. Switching to a vertical test showed more promise but trying to generate multiple vortexes rapidly was unsuccessful as the turbulence from the previous rings broke up the newer rings.

So what’s to be learned from this? It seems like he doesn’t have much to show. [Tom] tweaked and iterated his way to a working vortex cannon and has continued to refine his craft. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll see a fully-functional version of this. The lesson is to keep enumerating the possibilities. Like this webcam based posture sensor iterating its way to success. Video after the break.

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3D Printering: Giants

February 28, 2022 by Al Williams 17 Comments

Newton famously said, “If I see further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” For 3D printing, though, it might be the reverse. If a printer prints larger than others, it is probably using work developed for smaller printers. There are a variety of very large 3D printers out there now and you frequently see claims in the press of “world’s largest 3D printer.” Roboze, for example, makes that claim with a build volume of 1 meter on each axis.

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Logic Simulation Hack Chat With Al Williams

February 28, 2022 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, March 2 at noon Pacific for the Logic Simulation Hack Chat with Al Williams!

Many of us probably remember — some fondly, some less so — our first encounter with a truth table. The little grid of ones and zeros seemed simple enough, but it held real power in its tabular representation of the output of a logic circuit for a given set of inputs. It’s what makes more complex logic circuits possible, but only up to a point — add enough gates, flip flops, and counters, and keeping track of what’s high and what’s low becomes problematic with just pencil and paper.

If you’ve reached the point where keeping your digital design in your head doesn’t work anymore, or if you never could keep your NANDs and NORs straight, then you’re ready for a digital logic simulator. Applications like Falstad and LogiSim let you build a design using everything from discrete logic gates to complete assemblies like adders, counters, and even arithmetic logic units. Add in some passives like capacitors and inductors, and a logic simulator may be the only tool you need to bring a design to life in the virtual world before ever touching a breadboard.

To help us figure out where logic simulators fit in our design processes, Hackaday Staff Writer Al Williams will hop onto the Hack Chat with us. Al ran a very successful FPGA Bootcamp series back in 2018, which included a review of digital logic using Falstad. He’ll expand on that in this Hack Chat, so come along with your questions and comments. You won’t want to miss this one!

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 2 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

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A Ryobi belt sander with remote control car parts

Boring Belt Sander Is RC Racer In Disguise

February 28, 2022 by Chris Wilkinson 12 Comments

As a child, [David Windestal] already knew that a belt sander was the perfect motor for a banging radio-controlled car. Many years later, the realization of that dream is everything he could have hoped for.

The core of this project is a battery-powered belt sander by a well known manufacturer of gnarly yellow power tools. With an eye for using bespoke 3D printed parts, the conversion appeared straightforward – slap on (or snap on) a pre-loved steering mechanism, add a servo for controlling the sander’s trigger, and that’s pretty much job done. Naturally the intention was to use sandpaper as tread, which is acceptable for outdoor use but not exactly ideal for indoors. A thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) tread was designed and printed for playtime on the living room floor, where sandpaper may be frowned upon.

The finished product is a mean looking toy with plenty of power. What we really like most about this hack is the commitment to the aesthetics. It’s seriously impressive to see a belt sander so convincingly transformed into a three-wheeler radio-controlled car. The final iteration is also completely reversible, meaning that your belt sander can keep on sanding two by fours on the job site. All the printed parts snap snug into place and are mostly indistinguishable from the stock sander.

Speaking of reversible, there were just a couple of issues with the initial design, if you catch our drift. We won’t spoil what happens, but make sure to watch the video after the break for the full story.

If this hack has whet your appetite for more quirky tool hacks, make sure to check out our coverage of the angle grinder turned slimline belt sander. Or if you can’t get enough of RC, then check out this remote controlled car with active suspension.

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It’s Official! The Raspberry Pi Is Now 10!

February 28, 2022 by Jenny List 100 Comments

In any given field there are epoch-defining moments, those events after which nothing was quite the same as it had been before. It’s been a decade since the launch of the first Raspberry Pi single board computer. This was by no means the first inexpensive computer board, nor was it the first to support the GNU/Linux operating system, but it was among the first to promise a combination of those two. Coupled with support from a crop of British 8-bit alumni meant that from when it first gained publicity in early 2011 it garnered a huge buildup of interest.

We were first teased with a USB stick style prototype, which morphed into a much larger Raspberry Pi alpha board and finally into pre-production boards much closer to the model launched at the end of February ten years ago.

How To Disappoint Every Single British Geek At 6 AM

An array of Pi prototype boards pictured on display at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory.

Pedants will claim that the 10th birthday of the Pi is technically not yet upon us because those first Model B boards went on sale on the 29th of February 2012, a leap day. The two distributors, RS and Farnell, were both putting them on sale with the expectation of selling around 10,000 units — a prediction that proved woefully inadequate, with both websites collapsing under the weight of would-be Pi-purchasers within seconds of opening up at 6 AM.

I was ready to order at 6 AM, and was only able to order mine halfway through the day. That short wait would be just the beginning — because they received so many more orders than anticipated, the bulk of the orders weren’t fulfilled until May. Nobody had imagined how wildly successful the Pi boards would become. Continue reading “It’s Official! The Raspberry Pi Is Now 10!” →

Autonomous Mower Hits Snag

February 28, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

Interfacing technology and electronics with the real world is often fairly tricky. Complexity and edge cases work their way in to every corner of a project like this; just ask anyone who has ever tried to operate a rover on Mars, make a hydroponics garden, or build almost any robotics project. Even those of us who simply own a consumer-grade printer are flummoxed by the ways in which they can fail when manipulating single sheets of paper. This robotic lawnmower is no exception, driving its creator [TK] to extremes to get it to mow his lawn.

[TK] actually had a platform for his autonomous mower ready to go thanks to a previous build using this solar-powered robot to explore the Australian outback. Adding another motor to handle the grass trimming seemed simple at first and he set about wiring it all up and interfacing it to the robot. After the first iteration he found the robot was moving too fast to effectively cut the grass, so he added a more powerful cutting motor and a gearbox to help the mower crawl more slowly over the lawn. Disaster struck when his 3D printed mount for the steel cutting blades shattered, but with [TK] uninjured he pushed on with more improvements.

As it stands right now, the mower can effectively cut the grass moving forward even with the plastic-only cutting blades that [TK] is using now for safety reasons. The mower stripped its reverse gear so there still are some improvements to make before this robot is autonomously cutting the lawn without supervision. Normally we see lawnmowers retrofitted with robotics rather than robotics retrofitted with a lawnmower, but we’re excited to see any approach that lets us worry about one less household chore.

Thanks to [Rob] for the tip!

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