Jewelry Meets Carpentry With Bentwood Rings

October 12, 2015 by Adam Fabio 22 Comments

[Dorkyducks] is a bit of a jeweler, a bit of a carpenter, and a bit of a hacker. They’ve taken some time to document their technique for making bentwood rings. Bentwood is technique of wetting or steaming wood, then bending or forming it into new shapes. While the technique is centuries old, this version gets a bit of help from a modern heat source: The microwave oven. [Dorkyducks] starts with strips of veneer, either 1/36″ or 1/42″ thick. The veneer is cut into strips 1/2″ wide by about 12″ long, wrapped in a wet paper towel, and microwaved. The microwave heats the water in the towel, steaming it into the wood. This softens the wood fibers, making the entire strip flexible. The softened wood is then wrapped around a wooden preform dowel and allowed to dry for a day or two.

Once dry, the wood will hold the circular shape of the dowel. [Dorkyducks] then uses masking tape to tack the wood down to a new dowel which is the proper ring size for the wearer. Then it’s a superglue and wrapping game. The glue holds the laminated veneer together, and gives the ring it’s strength. From there it’s sanding, sanding, sanding. At this point, the ring can be shaped, and inlays added. [Dorkyducks] shows how to carve a ring and insert a gemstone in this gallery. The final finish is beeswax and walnut oil, though we’d probably go for something a bit longer lasting – like polyurethane.

Hacklet 79 – USB Projects

October 9, 2015 by Adam Fabio 7 Comments

Universal Serial Bus was created to simplify interconnecting computers and peripherals. First released in 1996, hackers and makers were slow to accept this strange new protocol. Parallel and serial ports were simpler, worked great, and had decades of hacking with thousands of projects behind them. As the new standard caught on in the mainstream, RS-232 and parallel ports started disappearing. “Legacy free” PC’s became the norm. Hackers, Makers, and Engineers had no choice but to jump on the bandwagon, which they did with great gusto. Today everything has a USB port. From 8 bit microcontrollers to cell phones to children’s toys. This week’s Hacklet is about some of the best USB projects on Hackaday.io!

We start with [Michael Mogenson] and Two Component USB Temperature Data Logger, which may be the simplest USB device ever made. [Michael] isn’t kidding. This data logger consists of just a Microchip PIC16F1455 microcontroller and a USB connector. Microchip’s datasheet calls for a capacitor to smooth out power, but [Michael] made it work without the extra part. He used M-Stack by Signal 11 to implement the USB stack. Once connected to a PC, the PIC enumerates as a serial port device. It then sends its die temperature of the PIC once per second. It could do more, but that would probably require adding a few more components!

Next up is [davedarko] with USB cable tester. Dave recently spent some time installing USB RFID readers. These devices were only a few meters away from the computer controlling them. Even so, the power and USB data cables had to run through pipes and in some cases under water. It wasn’t fun troubleshooting a device to find that it was a shorted USB cable causing the problem. [Dave’s] solution is a tiny coin cell powered board that tests each of the 4 wires in a standard USB 2.0 cable. The board runs on an ATtiny45 microcontroller. [Dave’s] current iteration has footprints for mini and micro USB connectors, along with the standard USB-A.

[MobileWill] has a USB Tester of his own. This USB tester checks current consumption and rail voltage. It does this by connecting in-line with the device under test. It’s perfect for troubleshooting why your PC’s USB port goes into over-current protection every time you plug in your device. The tester is modular – you can use the base board with your own multimeter, or grab [Will’s] tester backpack and see the results right on the built-in OLED display. USB Tester is [Will’s] entry in the 2015 Hackaday Prize.

Finally, we have [ajlitt] with Tiny Bit Dingus (TBD). TBD is a USB interface to 6 wires. Think of it as a tiny version of the bus pirate. This lilliputian board holds a Freescale KL27Z ARM processor, which has more than enough power to handle things like I2C, SPI, PWM, or just about any other way to send data or wiggle wires. [Ajlitt] started this project as an excuse to learn KiCAD and gain some experience with surface mount solder stencils. The result is an absolutely tiny board that is all but lost in a USB socket. Programming is handled with the mbed library, though you can always use Freescale’s native tools. Flashing code on the TBD is easy with kut, a chrome browser plugin.

If you want to see more USB projects, check out our new USB projects list. Did I miss your project? Don’t be shy, just drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet, As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

Arcades: Don’t Call It A Comeback

October 6, 2015 by Adam Fabio 14 Comments

Video arcades may be a thing of the past, but they’re still alive, well and were ready to play at this year’s World Maker Faire. The offerings weren’t old favorites, all were brand new games many being shown for the first time like the long-awaited VEC9. The Hall of Science building was filled with cabinets and no quarters were necessary, all were free-play.

Death By Audio Arcade was there in force with games like Particle Mace and Powerboat Italia ’88. Our personal favorite was Nothing Good Can Come of This. [Michael P. Consoli] devised a simple game: Two players in an empty room. A bullet drops from a hole in the ceiling, followed by a gun shortly thereafter. What happens next is up to the players. The simple graphics and gameplay give this title its charm. [Michael] was showing off a new stand-up cabinet for the game this year. He built the entire thing himself, working until the wee hours before load-in at Maker Faire.

[Batsly Adams], [Todd Bailey], and [Mike Dooley] teamed up to create what may be the first new vector arcade in decades. VEC9 has been teased for over 2 years. They’ve finally wrapped this game up and showed it off at the faire. VEC9 started with an old
Asteroids vector monitor found by [Batsly].

Continue reading “Arcades: Don’t Call It A Comeback” →

The Square Inch Project Challenges Your Layout Skills

October 2, 2015 by Adam Fabio 107 Comments

[alpha_ninja] proves that Hackaday.io is not just about great projects, but about an awesome community. Over this past week [alpha_ninja] has created The Square Inch Project, which is a grass-roots contest. The contest rules are pretty simple: The project PCB must fit in a 1″ x 1″ square. That’s 2.54 cm for those that don’t use freedom units. Smaller than a square inch is fine. If the project has multiple PCBs like a cordwood module, ALL the PCBs must still fit within the 1″ x 1″ square. Hackaday.io users coming up with cool contest ideas and inviting everyone to take a shot at winning? Awesome!

Of course a contest has to have prizes. [Alpha_ninja] has already lined up $100 in gift certificates to OSHPark. Many thanks to [Laen] and the rest of the OSHPark crew for sponsoring this contest. Hackaday loves the idea so we’re also kicking in eight $50 gift certificates to the Hackaday store, as well as four more $25 gift certificates to OSHPark.

Though the contest has been up for less than a week, the square inch project already has some great entries.

[Drix] has entered Twiz, a 9 degree of freedom Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity. Twiz senses its environment with a MPU9150 IMU chip. A nRF51822 provides the Bluetooth connection and ARM Cortex-M0 processor. Put all this together, and you’ve got a great way to determine where an object is in space. [Drix] has used Twiz to control everything from holographic projectors to room lights. Contests aren’t new to [Drix], he’s already entered Twiz in the 2015 Hackaday Prize.

[WeisTekEng] has entered Micro DIY Lipo retro NumiTron clock. [WeisTekEng] loves the classic IV-9 Russian numitron tubes. His plan here is to build a numitron clock driven by an ATmega328 microcontroller. The timebase for this clock is also a classic — The Dallas Semiconductor (now Maxim) DS1307 I2C real-time clock chip. Everything is going to run on a single LiPo cell. Fitting within the project constraints, the board will be only 1″ square. This is [WeisTekEng’s] first big project on Hackaday.io, so we’re happy to see him join the community. He’s also just getting started, so the PCB’s only exist in the virtual word of his EDA software for now. We’re looking forward to reading the numitron clock!

[Al1] has entered tiny7, a 7 segment display which is compatible with Atmel ISP headers. Ever notice those 6 pin headers on the Arduino? That’s the ISP connector, used to program the ATmega328 micro. In many designs these valuable IO pins spend most of their time unused. [Al1] decided to give them a purpose – displaying data! He’s connected a 75HC595 shift register to the SPI pins of the ISP header. Data clocked into the ‘595 is displayed on a 7 segment display. [Al1] designed the boards with castellated connections on the sides. Some careful soldering allows the boards to be daisy chained. Several 7 segment displays to be driven from a single ISP header.

[Radomir Dopieralski] is using The Square Inch Project as a learning platform as well. He’s entering Nyan Board, a tiny PCB shaped like everyone’s favorite rainbow pooping cat. [Radomir] is using nyan board to learn how to work with ATtiny microcontrollers. Due to memory constraints, these little controllers can be a bit harder to program than their bigger brothers. [Radomir’s] early goals for Nyan are humble ones – he will be happy to have the cat’s eyes flash while it plays the Nyan Cat tune. Once that task is complete, the RAM and Flash of the ATtiny microcontroller will be his only constraints.

The contest deadline isn’t until November 28, 2015, so there is still plenty of time to enter. If you want to see more of the entrants, check out The Square Inch Project page, or the entrant list. Want to know more? Ask a question on the project page, or drop [Alpha_Ninja] a message!

That’s it for this week’s Hacklet, As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

World Maker Faire 2015: Prometheus And The New Air Quality Egg

September 30, 2015 by Adam Fabio 5 Comments

There were plenty of projects and products to be seen at the 2015 World Maker Faire. In the maker pavilion, we found [Rocco Tuccio] showing off Prometheus, his PCB CNC router. Machines like this make prototyping circuits easy. Just place a blank piece of copper clad in the machine, load up your design, and a few minutes later you’ll have a board ready to stuff. Prometheus sports some impressive specs: 7 mil (0.18 mm) trace and space, and a Total Indicated Runout (TIR) of .0001 inches (2.5 micron). Not bad for a spindle turning 40,000 RPM. [Rocco] has spent the last two years designing this machine, and has sourced most of the parts from local US vendors. The unique part of Prometheus is the spindle design. Like many other small PCB routers, Prometheus uses a brushless quadcopter motor for power. Rather than go with a belt system, [Rocco] simplified things to a simple friction drive. The only precision parts he has to worry about are the bearings which hold the cutting bits in place. Prometheus isn’t for sale yet. [Rocco] plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign in the coming months.

A few minutes later we ran into [Victor Aprea] from Wicked Device, showing off the Air Quality Egg V2. [Victor] and his partner [Dirk] ran the design and manufacturing side of the Air Quality Egg, which had a successful Kickstarter campaign back in 2012. The eggs from that campaign can be found online at the project’s website. [Victor and Dirk] have greatly improved on the Egg since then. The biggest update are the sensors. Sensors for ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide are now much more sensitive units from SpecSensors. These sensors don’t come cheap though. To keep costs down, [Victor and Dirk] have released three separate versions of the product with different sensor suites. On the connectivity side, the egg is now based upon Wicked Device’s Wildfire, allowing it to connect to WiFi networks. These Eggs mean business too – [Victor and Dirk] obtained permission to co-locate a trio of eggs alongside an official New York State/EPA air quality sensing unit. The Eggs all read within 2 parts per million for carbon monoxide, and 10 parts per billion for sulfur dioxide. As with the original Egg, these devices are open source hardware. Source code is available on Wicked Device’s Github.

World Maker Faire 2015: Automatic Photo Collage

September 26, 2015 by Adam Fabio 4 Comments

We’re on the ground here at the 6th Annual World Maker Faire in Queens, New York. This year the Faire is even bigger, extending out from the New York Hall of Science towards Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

Just inside the gates, we ran into [Tommy Mintz] who was showing off his improved portable automated digital photo collage (IP-ADC). Tommy has connected a Raspberry Pi and its camera on a long extension cable. The camera resides high up on a monopod, giving it a bird’s eye view of the area. The Pi first captures a background image, then grabs shots of things that change within the scene. The resulting collages range from hilarious to the surreal. The entire system is mounted on a cart and powered by batteries.

[Tommy] hooked us up with the WiFi password, so we were able to download photos directly from the IP-ADC. Less technologically inclined folks would be able to grab physical prints from the on-board Epson photo printer.

We’ll be reporting what we see here at the faire, so drop us a tweet @hackaday if you want us to stop by!

Hacklet 77 – Projects That Tweet

September 25, 2015 by Adam Fabio 4 Comments

Since it’s launch way back in 2006, Twitter has become a magnet for techies. Maybe it’s the simple interface, maybe it’s the 140 character limit. Whatever the reason, you can find plenty of hackers, makers, and engineers tweeting about their daily activities. It didn’t take long for folks to start incorporating Twitter into their projects. Ladyada’s Tweet-a-watt is a great early example of this. This week’s Hacklet is all about some of the best tweeting projects on Hackaday.io!

We start with [Henry Conklin] and A Twitter account for my dog. [Henry’s] dog [Oliver] loves to bark and finding a solution became his entry to The Hackaday Prize. Rather than bring Cesar Millan in, [Henry] decided to embrace [Oliver’s] vocalizations by sending them up to the cloud. A Raspberry Pi with a USB microphone uses some custom Python code to detect barks and ruffs. The Pi then sends this data to Twitter using the python-twitter library. The Pi is connected to the internet via a USB WiFi dongle. You can see the results of [Henry’s] work on [Oliver’s] own Twitter page!

Next up is [troy.forster] and tweetie-pi. Rather than constantly check his phone or computer, [Troy] wanted a device to read his tweets. A bit of NodeJS code later, and tweetie-pi was born. A Raspberry Pi connected to the internet pulls data through the Twitter stream API. When tweets directed at a pre-configured username are found, the data is sent to a an Emic 2 text to speech module. The Emic reads in that classic DECtalker style voice we all know and love from the movies. [Troy] even added code to properly handle usernames and retweets.

[SirClover] joined the internet of things by creating Home automation system with Twitter, his entry in the 2014 Hackaday Prize. This home automation system is based around an Arduino Leonardo and an Ethernet shield. [SirClover] rolled his own custom PCB to handle relays, a Cds cell, and a 2×16 character LCD. The system can be accessed through a simple web interface. This allows the user to open or close blinds, turn on lights, all that great smart home stuff. Every time it executes a command, the home automation system reports status to Twitter.

Finally we have [Jakob Andrén] with A danceable notification cube, which is [Jakob’s] entry in the 2015 Hackaday Prize. The cube itself is a translucent box that contains a metric crapton of LEDs. 148 Neopixels and 12 3W power LEDs to be exact. All these LEDs are driven by a Teensy 3.1, which serves as the main processor for the entire system. The Teensy reads position data from an MPU6040 IMU. This allows it to change brightness and color as the box is moved around – or “danced”. An ESP8266 provides the cube with data from the interwebs, specifically Facebook and Twitter. The cube lights up and flashes whenever it receives a message.

If you want to see more tweeting projects, check out our new projects that tweet list. Did I miss your project? Don’t be shy, just drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet, As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!