Day: December 16, 2024

Robot Air Hockey Player Predicts Your Next Move

December 16, 2024 by 21 Comments

Air hockey is a fun game, but it’s one you can’t play by yourself. That is, unless you have a smart robot hockey player to act as your rival. [Zeroshot] built exactly that.

The build is based around a small 27-inch air hockey table—not exactly arcade-spec, but big enough to demonstrate the concepts at play. The robot player moves its mallet in the X and Y axes using a pair of NEMA17 stepper motors and an H-belt configuration. To analyze the game state, there’s a Raspberry Pi 3B fitted with a camera, and it has a top-down view of the board. The Pi gives the stepper motors commands on how to move the mallet via an Arduino that communicates with the stepper drivers.  The Pi doesn’t just aim for the puck itself, either. With Python and OpenCV, it tries to predict your own moves by tracking your mallet, and the puck, too. It predicts the very-predictable path of the puck, and moves itself to the right position for effective defence.

Believe it or not, we’ve featured quite a few projects in this vein before. They’ve all got their similarities, and their own unique quirks. Video after the break.
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Fairey Rotodyne in flight

Versatile, Yet Grounded: The Rotodyne Revisited

December 16, 2024 by 26 Comments

When it comes to aviation curiosities, few machines captivate the imagination like the Fairey Rotodyne. This British hybrid aircraft was a daring attempt to combine helicopter and fixed-wing efficiency into a single vehicle. A bold experiment in aeronautical design, the Rotodyne promised vertical takeoffs and landings in cramped urban spaces while offering the speed and range of a regional airliner. First flown in 1957, it captured the world’s attention but ultimately failed to realize its potential. Despite featured before, new footage keeps fascinating us. If you have never heard about this jet, keep reading.

The Rotodyne’s innovative design centered around a massive, powered rotor that utilized a unique tip-jet system. Compressed air, mixed with fuel and ignited at the rotor tips, created lift without the need for a tail rotor. The result: a smoother transition between vertical and forward flight modes. Inside, it offered spacious seating for 50 passengers and even had clamshell doors for cargo. Yet its futuristic approach wasn’t without drawbacks—most notably, the thunderous noise produced by its rotor jets, earning complaints from both city planners and residents.

Despite these hurdles, the helicopter-plane crossover demonstrated its versatility, setting a world speed record and performing groundbreaking intercity flights. Airlines and militaries expressed interest, but escalating development costs and noise concerns grounded this ambitious project.

To this day, the Rotodyne remains a symbol of what could have been—a marvel of engineering ahead of its time. Interested in more retro-futuristic aircraft tales? Read our previous story on it, or watch the original footage below and share your thoughts.

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Emulating The Battery Controller In An Ancient Acer PDA

December 16, 2024 by 11 Comments

[Mark B] had a problem. He’d come into possession of an Acer N30 PDA, sans batteries. He couldn’t just throw any old cells in, since the unit expected to communicate with an onboard controller chip in the original pack. What ensued was his effort to emulate the original battery controller hardware. This is classic Hackaday right here, folks.

Just wiring in typical Li-Ion voltages to the PDAs battery pins wasn’t enough to make this Windows CE device happy. The device kept fleeing to sleep mode, thinking the battery was faulty or very low. Eventually, inspecting the motherboard revealed the PDA hosted a BQ24025 charger IC from Texas Instruments. [Mark] surmised it was trying to communciate with a BQ26500 “gas gauge” IC from the original battery pack. Armed with that knowledge, he then set about programming an STM32 chip to emulate its behavior. He then successfully ported the functionality over to a CH32V003 microcontroller as well. Paired with a Nokia BL-5CT battery, he had a working portable power solution for his PDA.

It’s great to see ancient hardware brought back to functionality with some good old fashioned hacking. I’d hoped to do the same with my Apple Newton before someone nicked it from my lounge room, more’s the pity. If you’re rescuing your own beleaguered battery-powered portables, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Using A Smartphone As A Touchscreen For Arduino

December 16, 2024 by 22 Comments

If you want a good display and interface device for an embedded project, it’s hard to look past an old smartphone. After all, you’ve got an excellent quality screen and capacitive touch interface all in the same package! [Doctor Volt] explains how to easily set up your old smartphone to work as a touchscreen for your Arduino.

[Doctor Volt] demonstrates the idea with a 2018 Samsung Galaxy A8, though a wide variety of Android phones can be put to use in this way. The phone is connected to the Arduino via a USB-to-serial converter and an OTG cable. Using a USB-C phone with Power Delivery is ideal here, as it allows the phone to be powered while also communicating with the Arduino over USB.

The RemoteXY app is built specifically for this purpose. It can be installed on an Android phone to allow it to communicate effectively with Arduino devices, which run the RemoteXY library in turn. Configuring the app is relatively straightforward, with a point-and-click wizard helping you designate what hardware you’re using and how you’ve got it hooked up. [Doctor Volt] does a great job of explaining how to hook everything up, and how to build some simple graphical interfaces.

There are a ton of display and interface options in the embedded space these days, many of which can be had cheaply off the shelf. Still, few compete with the resolution and quality of even older smartphones. It’s a neat project that could come in very handy for your next embedded build! Video after the break.

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3D-Printed Boat Feeds The Fishes

December 16, 2024 by No comments

In most natural environments, fish are able to feed themselves. However, if you wanted to help them out with some extra food, you could always build a 3D-printed boat to do the job for you, as [gokux] did.

The concept is simple enough—it’s a small radio-controlled boat that gets around the water with the aid of two paddle wheels. Driven together, the paddle wheels provide thrust, and driven in opposite directions, they provide steering. A SeeedStudio XIAO ESP32 is the brains of the operation. It listens into commands from the controller and runs the paddle drive motors with the aid of a DRV8833 motor driver module. The custom radio controller is it itself running on another ESP32, and [gokux] built it with a nice industrial style joystick which looks very satisfying to use. The two ESP32s use their onboard wireless hardware to communicate, which keeps things nicely integrated. The boat is able to putter around on the water’s surface, while using a servo-driven to deliver small doses of food when desired.

It’s a neat build, and shows just what you can whip up when you put your 3D printer to good use. If you’d like to build a bigger plastic watercraft, though, you can do that too. Video after the break.

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Sony Vaio Revived: How Does One Start?

December 16, 2024 by 23 Comments

A long-term project of mine is the the Sony Vaio new mainboard project. A year ago, I used it as an example to show you the cool new feature in KiCad 8, known as “background bitmaps”.

There are a heap of cool aspects to this specific Sony Vaio. It’s outrageously cute and purse-sized, the keyboard is nice enough for typing, motherboard schematics are available (very important!), and it’s not too terribly expensive. Of course, the most motivating aspect is that I happen to own one, its mainboard is not in the best state, and I’ve been itching to make it work.

It turned out to be a pretty complicated project, and, there was plenty to learn – way more than I expected in the beginning, too. I’m happy to announce that my v1 PCB design has been working wonders so far, and there are only a few small parts of it left untested.

I know that some of you might be looking to rebuild a lovely little computer of your choice. Hell, this particular laptop has had someone else rebuild it into a Pi-powered handheld years ago, as evidenced by this majestic “mess of wires” imgur build log! In honor of every hacker who has gotten their own almost-finished piece of hardware waiting for them half-assembled on the shelf, inside a KiCad file, or just inside your mind for now, let’s go through the tricks and decisions that helped make my board real.

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A Red Ring Light Show For Your Xbox 360

December 16, 2024 by 6 Comments

The Red Ring of Death (RROD) was the bane of many an Xbox 360 owner. The problem was eventually solved, mostly, but memories of that hellish era lurk in the back of many a gamer’s mind. For a more cheery use of those same status lights, you might appreciate “Lightshow” from [Derf].

The concept is simple enough. It’s a small application that runs on an Xbox 360, and allows you to test the individual LEDs that make up the Ring of Light indicator, along with the main power LED. If you want to test the lights and see each segment correctly lights up as green, yellow and red, you can.

Alternatively, you can have some fun with it. [Derf] also programmed it to flash along to simple four-channel MIDI songs. Naturally, Sandstorm was the perfect song to test it with. It may have been the result of a simple throwaway joke, but [Derf] delivered in amusing fashion nonetheless.

Lightshow is an entry for Xbox Scene Modfest 2024; it’s nice to see the community is still popping off even in this era of heavily-locked-down consoles. We’ve featured some other useful 360 hacks in recent months, too. Video after the break.

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