White pieces on a teal and white chess board. The line of pawns shows three segmented queens in the foreground, one piece being pressed by a man's hand from above in a state between queen and pawn, and the remainder of the pawns in the background in the pawn state.

Transforming Pawn Changes The Game

November 2, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 15 Comments

3D printing has allowed the hobbyist to turn out all sorts of interesting chess sets with either intricate details or things that are too specialized to warrant a full scale injection molded production run. Now, the magic of 3D printing has allowed [Works By Design] to change the game by making pawns that can automatically transform themselves into queens.

Inspired by a CGI transforming chess piece designed by [Polyfjord], [Works By Design] wanted to make a pawn that could transform itself exist in the real world. What started as a chonky setup with multiple springs and a manually-actuated mechanism eventually was whittled down to a single spring, some pins, and four magnets as vitamins for the 3D printed piece.

We always love getting a peek into the trial-and-error process of a project, especially for something with such a slick-looking final product. Paired with a special chess board with steel in the ends, the magnets in the base activate the transformation sequence when they reach the opposite end.

After you print your own, how about playing chess against the printer? We’d love to see a version machined from metal too.

Thanks to [DjBiohazard] on Discord for the tip!

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Measuring Temperature Without A Thermometer

November 2, 2024 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

If you need to measure the temperature of something, chances are good that you could think up half a dozen ways to do it, pretty much all of which would involve some kind of thermometer, thermistor, thermocouple, or other thermo-adjacent device. But what if you need to measure something really hot, hot enough to destroy your instrument? How would you get the job done then?

Should you find yourself in this improbable situation, relax — [Anthony Francis-Jones] has you covered with this calorimetric method for measuring high temperatures. The principle is simple; rather than directly measuring the temperature of the flame, use it to heat up something of known mass and composition and then dunk that object in some water. If you know the amount of water and its temperature before and after, you can figure out how much energy was in the object. From that, you can work backward and calculate the temperature the object must have been at to have that amount of energy.

For the demonstration in the video below, [F-J] dangled a steel ball from a chain into a Bunsen burner flame and dunked it into 150 ml of room-temperature water. After a nice long toasting, the ball went into the drink, raising the temperature by 27 degrees. Knowing the specific heat capacity of water and steel and the mass of each, he worked the numbers and came up with an estimate of about 600°C for the flame. That’s off by a wide margin; typical estimates for a natural gas-powered burner are in the 1,500°C range.

We suspect the main source of error here is not letting the ball and flame come into equilibrium, but no matter — this is mainly intended as a demonstration of calorimetry. It might remind you of bomb calorimetry experiments in high school physics lab, which can also be used to explore human digestive efficiency, if you’re into that sort of thing.

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The Phantom PSP: Crafting The Handheld Sony Never Sold

November 2, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 7 Comments

In the world of retro gaming, some legends never die – especially the ‘phantom’ PSP, Sony’s mythical handheld that never saw the light of day. While that elusive device remains a dream, hacker and gaming wizard [Kyle Brinkerhoff] built his own – and Macho Nacho made a video about it. His creation, which also goes by the name ‘Playstation Zero’, isn’t just another handheld emulator; it’s a powerful, custom-built system that revives the classics and plays them on a portable device that feels like the future.

Driven by a hunger for the ultimate gaming experience, [Kyle] set out to blend modern tech with retro gaming magic. He started with the Raspberry Pi, loading it up with emulation software for all the iconic systems—from NES and SNES to the Sega Genesis and Game Boy. But [Kyle] didn’t just slap on an off-the-shelf emulator; he dived into the code himself, optimizing and tweaking for lightning-fast responsiveness, so each game plays like it’s running on the original hardware. That’s hacking in true form: pushing the limits of software and hardware until they work exactly the way you want them to. Best of all: he published it all open source for others to use.

In the spirit of the Geneboy—a handheld Sega Genesis built by [Downing] and featured on Hackaday back in 2012—[Kyle]’s device pairs handheld emulation with the consoles all nineties kids wanted for Christmas. To capture the tactile thrill of vintage gaming, [Kyle] went a step further by designing and 3D-printing a custom controller layout that mimics the feel of the original systems. If watching someone neatly soldering a pcb sounds relaxing to you, don’t skip the middle part of his video. Although this little beast is packed with all bells and whistles you’d expect to see on a Raspberry Pi, it does lack one serious thing: battery life. But, [Kyle] is open about that, and hopes to improve on that in a future version.

If you want to see the full build, check out the video below. Or, immediately dive into [Kyle]’s Github, order the cute Takara shell, and get started!

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3D Printed Hardware Sorter Keeps It Simple

November 2, 2024 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

If you’re like us, you’ve got at least one bin dedicated to keeping the random hardware you just can’t bear to part with. In our case it’s mostly populated with the nuts and bolts left over after finishing up a car repair, but however it gets filled, it’s a mess. The degree to which you can tolerate this mess will vary, but for [EmGi], even a moderately untidy pile of bolts was enough to spur this entirely 3D-printed mechanical bolt sorter.

The elements of this machine bear a strong resemblance to a lot of the sorting mechanisms we’ve seen used on automated manufacturing and assembly lines. The process starts with a hopper full of M3 cap head bolts of varying lengths, which are collated by a pair of elevating platforms. These line up the bolts and lift them onto a slotted feed ramp, which lets them dangle by their heads and pushes them into a fixture that moves them through a 90° arc and presents them to a long sorting ramp. The ramp has a series of increasingly longer slots; bolts roll right over the slots until they find the right slot, where they fall into a bin below. Nuts can also feed through the process and get sorted into their own bin.

What we like about [EmGi]’s design is its simplicity. There are no motors, bearings, springs, or other hardware — except for the hardware you’re sorting, of course. The entire machine is manually powered, so you can just grab a handful of hardware and start sorting. True, it can only sort M3 cap head bolts, but we suspect the design could be modified easily for other sizes and styles of fasteners. Check it out in action in the video below.

Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean we don’t like more complicated hardware sorters, like the ones [Christopher Helmke] builds.

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Supercon 2024: Streaming Live

November 2, 2024 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

The 2024 Hackaday Supercon is on in Pasadena, but if you couldn’t make it to sunny California this year, don’t worry. We’ve got a live streams of the main stage talks, and all of the second track talks are being recorded and will be put up on the YouTube channel after the con.

If you’re watching from home and want to join the conversation, today might be a good time to join the official Hackaday Discord server.

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Don’t Forget Your Curve Tracer

November 2, 2024 by Jenny List 4 Comments

As cheap microcontrollers have given us an impressive range of test equipment trinkets to play with, it’s easy to forget some of the old standabys. A curve tracer for example, the relatively simple circuit allowing the plotting of electronic component response curves on an oscilloscope. Lest we forget this useful device, here’s [Gary LaRocco] with a video describing one that’s so easy to build, anyone could do it.

It’s a simple enough premise, a low AC voltage comes from a mains transformer and is dropped down to the device under test through a resistor. The X and Y inputs of the ‘scope are configured to show the current and the voltage respectively, and the result is a perfect plot of the device’s IV curve. The best part is that it’s designed for in-circuit measurement, allowing it to be used for fault-finding. There’s a demonstration at the end with a variety of different parts, lest we needed any reminder as to how useful these devices can be.

The cost of one of these circuits is minimal, given that the transformer is likely to come from an old piece of consumer electronics. It’s not the first simple curve tracer we’ve seen, but we hope it will give you ideas. The video is below the break.

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The Tsushin Booster – A PC Engine Modem Add-on With A Twist

November 2, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 5 Comments

Sometimes, hardware projects get cancelled before they have a chance to make an impact, often due to politics or poor economic judgment. The Tsushin Booster for the PC Engine is one such project, possibly the victim of vicious commercial games between the leading Japanese console manufacturers at the tail end of the 1980s. It seems like a rather unlikely product: a modem attachment for a games console with an added 32 KB of battery-backed SRAM. In addition to the bolt-on unit, a dedicated software suite was provided on an EPROM-based removable cartridge, complete with a BASIC interpreter and a collection of graphical editor tools for game creation.

Internally, the Tsushin booster holds no surprises, with the expected POTS interfacing components tied to an OKI M6826L modem chip, the SRAM device, and what looks like a custom ASIC for the bus interfacing.

It was, however, very slow, topping out at only 1200 Baud, which, even for the period, coupled with pay-by-minute telephone charges, would be a hard sell. The provided software was clearly intended to inspire would-be games programmers, with a complete-looking BASIC dialect, a comms program, a basic sprite editor with support for animation and even a map editor. We think inputting BASIC code via a gamepad would get old fast, but it would work a little better for graphical editing.

PC Engine hacks are thin pickings around these parts, but to understand a little more about the ‘console wars’ of the early 1990s, look no further than this in-depth architectural study. If you’d like to get into the modem scene but lack original hardware, your needs could be satisfied with openmodem. Of course, once you’ve got the hardware sorted, you need some to connect to. How about creating your very own dial-up ISP?