Year: 2024

A black OLED screen with a happy face displayed upon it is situated at the top of a squarish calculator with a 5x6 grid of white calculator keys. It floats above a graphing calculator, Nintendo Switch, aigo numpad, and an Arduino Mega on a white table. A handful of differently-colored kalih choc switches are in various places around the table.

Mechanical Switch Sci-Calc Is Also A Macropad

October 4, 2024 by 6 Comments

Smartphones have replaced a desktop calculator for most folks these days, but sometimes that tactility is just what you need to get the mathematical juices flowing. Why not spruce up the scientific calculator of yore with the wonders of modern microcontrollers?

While you won’t be able to use Sci-Calc on a standardized test, this classy calculator will let you do some pretty cool things while clacking on its mechanical choc switches. Is it a calculator? Obviously. Is it an Arduboy-compatible device that can play simple games like your TI-84? Yes. Is it also a macropad and ESP32 dev board? Why not? If that isn’t enough, it’s also takes both standard and RPN inputs.

[Shao Duan] has really made this device clean and the menu system that rewrites main.bin based on the program selection is very clever. Escape writes main.bin back into the ROM from the SD card so you can select another application. A few classic games have already been ported, and the process looks fairly straightforward for any of your own favorites.

If you’re hankering for more mathy inputs, checkout the Mathboard or the MCM/70 from 1974.

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This Bluetooth GATT Course Is A Must Watch

October 4, 2024 by 6 Comments

Bluetooth is a backbone technology for innumerable off-the-shelf and hacker devices. You should know how to work with it – in particular, nowadays you will certainly be working at the Bluetooth GATT (Generic Attribute) layer. This two-part project by [V. Hunter Adams] of Cornell fame spares no detail in making sure you learn Bluetooth GATT for all your hacking needs – not only will you find everything you could want to know, you also get example GATT server and client application codebases to use in your projects, designed to work with the commonly available Pi Pico W!

What’s better than a visual demonstration? The video below shows the GATT server running on a Pico W – handling six different parameters at once. [Hunter] pokes at the server’s characteristics with a smartphone app – sending string data back and forth, switching an LED, and even changing parameters of audio or video color output by the Pico. Flash the server code into your Pico W, play with it, read through it, and follow the tutorial to learn what makes it tick.
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Overhead photo of a Tandon TM100-1 Floppy Drive and a 5,25" Floppy

How To Revive A Tandon Floppy Drive

October 4, 2024 by 9 Comments

In this episode of [Adrian’s Digital Basement], we dive into the world of retro computing with a focus on diagnosing and repairing an old full-height 5.25-inch floppy drive from an IBM 5150 system. Although mechanically sound, the drive had trouble reading disks, and Adrian quickly set out to fix the issue. Using a Greaseweazle—a versatile open-source tool for floppy disk diagnostics—he tests the drive’s components and explores whether the fault lies with the read/write head or electronic systems.

The repair process provides fascinating insights into the Tandon TM100-1 floppy drive, a key player in vintage computing. Adrian explains how the drive was designed as a single-sided unit, yet hints at potential double-sided capability due to its circuit board, raising possibilities for future tweaks. Throughout the video, Adrian shares handy tips on ensuring proper mechanical maintenance, such as keeping lubrication in check and ensuring correct spring tension. His attention to detail, especially on termination resistors, provided vital knowledge for anyone looking to understand or restore these old drives.

For fans of retro tech, this episode is a must-watch! Adrian makes complex repairs accessible, sharing both technical know-how and nostalgic appreciation. For those interested in similar hacks, past projects like the Greaseweazle tool itself or other Amiga system repairs are worth exploring. To see Adrian in action and catch all the repair details, check out the full video.

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Single Rotor Drone Spins For 360 Lidar Scanning

October 4, 2024 by 9 Comments

Multiple motors or servos are the norm for drones to achieve controllable flight, but a team from MARS LAB HKU was able to a 360° lidar scanning drone with full control on just a single motor and no additional actuators. Video after the break.

The key to controllable flight is the swashplateless propeller design that we’ve seen a few times, but it always required a second propeller to counteract self-rotation. In this case, the team was able to make that self-rotation work so that they could achieve 360° scanning with a single fixed LIDAR sensor. Self-rotation still needs to be slowed, so this was done with four stationary vanes. The single rotor also means better efficiency compared to a multi-rotor with similar propeller disk area.

The LIDAR comprises a full 50% of the drone’s weight and provides a conical FOV out to a range of 450m. All processing happens onboard the drone, with point cloud data being processed by a LIDAR-inertial odometry framework. This allows the drone to track and plan its flight path while also building a 3D map of an unknown environment. This means it would be extremely useful for indoor or underground environments where GPS or other positioning systems are not available.

All the design files and code for the drone are up on GitHub, and most of the electronic components are off-the-shelf. This means you can build your own, and the expensive lidar sensor is not required to get it flying. This seems like a great platform for further experimentation, and getting usable video from a normal camera would be an interesting challenge. Continue reading “Single Rotor Drone Spins For 360 Lidar Scanning” →

Interactive Project Teaches Lessons About Electromagnets And Waves

October 4, 2024 by 3 Comments

Whether you’re a kid or a nerdy adult, you’ll probably agree that the interactive exhibitions at the museum are the best. If you happened to get down to the Oregon Science Festival in the last couple of years, you might have enjoyed “Catch The Wave!”—a public education project to teach people about electromagnets and waves. Even better, [Justin Miller] has written up how he built this exciting project.

Catch The Wave! consists of four small tabletop cabinets. Each has physical controls and a screen, and each plays its role in teaching a lesson about electromagnets and sound waves, with a context of audio recording and playback.

The first station allows the user to power up an electromagnet and interact with it using paper clips. They can also see the effect it has on a nearby compass. The second illustrates how reversing current through an electromagnet can reverse its polarity, and demonstrates this by using it to swing a pendulum. The third station then ties this to the action of a speaker, which is effectively a fancy electromagnet—and demonstrates how it creates sound waves in this way. Finally, the fourth station demonstrates the use of a microphone to record a voice, and throws in some wacky effects for good fun.

If you’ve ever tried to explain how sound is recorded and reproduced, you’d probably have loved to had tools like these to do so. We love a good educational project around these parts, too.

HackFest Enschede: The Type Of Indoor Event We Wanted All Along

October 4, 2024 by 6 Comments

I’m sitting at a table writing this in the centre of a long and cavernous industrial building, the former print works of a local newspaper, I’m surrounded by hardware and software hackers working at their laptops, around me is a bustling crowd admiring a series of large projects on tables along the walls, and the ambient sound is one of the demoscene, chiptunes, 3D-printed guitars, and improbably hurdy-gurdy music. Laser light is playing on the walls, and even though it’s quite a journey from England to get here, I’m home. This is Hackfest Enschede, a two-day event in the Eastern Dutch city which by my estimation has managed the near-impossible feat of combining the flavour of both a hacker event and a maker faire all in one, causing the two distinct crowds to come together.

The Best Of Both Worlds, In One Place

To give an idea of what’s here it’s time for a virtual trip round the hall. I’ll start with the music, aside from the demosceners there’s Printstruments with a range of 3D-printedmusical instruments, and Nerdy Gurdy, as you may have guessed, that hacker hurdy-gurdy I mentioned. This is perhaps one of few places I could have seen a spontaneous jam session featuring a 3D-printed bass and a laser-cut hurdy-gurdy. Alongside them were the Eurorack synthesisers of Sound Force, providing analogue electronic sounds aplenty. Continue reading “HackFest Enschede: The Type Of Indoor Event We Wanted All Along” →

Hackaday Podcast Episode 291: Walking In Space, Lead In The Earth, And Atoms Under The DIY Microscope

October 4, 2024 by 2 Comments

What have you missed on Hackaday this week? Elliot Williams and Al Williams compare notes on their favorites from the week, and you are invited. The guys may have said too much about the Supercon badge this year — listen in for a few hints about what it will be about.

For hacks, you’ll hear about scanning tunneling microscopes, power management for small Linux systems, and lots of inertial measurement units. The guys talked about a few impossible hacks for consumer electronics, from hacking a laptop, to custom cell phones.

Of course, there are plenty more long-form articles of the week, including a brief history of what can go wrong on a spacewalk and how to get the lead out (of the ground). Don’t forget to take a stab at the What’s That Sound competition and maybe score a sweet Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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