Author: Richard Baguley

244 Articles

3D Printed GoPro Toy Car Mount

November 24, 2016 by 7 Comments

There’s been a spate of YouTube videos of people strapping GoPro cameras onto things recently. [Ruiz] at [Adafruit] is looking to contribute to this trend with this tutorial on 3D printing a GoPro Session toy car mount. The entire toy car mount is 3D printed, except for the axles, which are made of the unprinted filament with melted ends to hold the wheels in place.

The part of the mount that fits around the camera is printed in a flexible filament (think Ninjaflex), so it holds on tightly to the GoPro and can be used as a bumper as well. The car that fits into the base of the camera sleeve is designed to run on Hot Wheels track so that you can lay out your shots and keep the subject in frame. It’s a neat design that could be useful for creating an interesting point of view in a video.

If you have hotwheel, a GoPro (or other tiny camera), and 3D printer this is the project that will get you through the holiday without the kids driving you crazy. Good luck dear hackers.

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IP Over QR Codes

November 22, 2016 by 41 Comments

We’ve seen networks built over some interesting mediums, but QR codes has to be a new one. [Eric Seifert] decided to try to use QR codes to make an IP connection. He used these visual codes to create a bi-directional connection between two camera-equipped computers. He’s a persistent chap, because it works: in one of his videos, he shows an SSH connection between two devices.

He faced a number of challenges on the way. Although there is plenty of code to read QR codes, the data that can be encoded and read from them is limited. There is a binary mode that can be used with QR codes, but it is really inefficient. [Eric] decided to use base32 coding instead, packing the data into each frame as alphanumeric text. Each QR code image that is created and received is numbered, so the system can keep track and request any lost images. He also had some problems with keeping the data consistent between the encoded and decoded versions, so he had to add some packing to the data before it would work.  It uses Python-pytun to create a TUN/TAP device that carries the data.

The speed of the connection is rather slow: in his demo video, the two computers take over a minute to exchange keys for an SSH connection, and [Eric] measured the speed of the connection at about 100 bits per second. But even getting something like this working at all is a significant achievement. He has published his code on GitHub.

We’ve featured the work of [Eric] before: he created a data connection using an iPod FM transmitter.

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Make Your Eyes Louder With Bluetooth Speaker Goggles

November 20, 2016 by 16 Comments

Your eyes are cool, but they aren’t very loud. You can remedy that with this build from [Sam Freeman]: a pair of Bluetooth speaker goggles. Combine a pair of old welders goggles with a Bluetooth receiver, a small amp and a couple of cheap speaker drivers and you’re well on your way to securing your own jet set radio future.

[Sam] found a set of speaker drivers that were the same size as the lenses of the goggles, as if they were designed for each other. They don’t do much for your vision, but they definitely look cool. [Sam] found that he could run the speakers for an hour or so from a small Lithium Ion battery that’s hidden inside the goggles, along with a large lever switch for that throwback electronics feel. The total cost of this build is a reasonably-low at $40, or less if you use bits from your junk pile.

The real trick is watching them in action and deciding if there’s any motion happening. Don’t get us wrong, they look spectacular but don’t have the visual feedback component of, say, the bass cannon. Look for yourself in the clip below. We might add a pair of googly eyes on the speakers that dance as they move, but that would get away from the more serious Robopunk look that [Sam] is going for. What would you add to build up the aesthetic of these already iconic goggles?

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3D Printed Moon Phase Clock

November 19, 2016 by 20 Comments

Someone once observed that the moon is a harsh mistress. But that doesn’t mean you can’t keep track of her, specially with this awesome moon phase clock that [G4lile0] designed and built.

It uses a 3D printed moon model combined with a series of LEDs to create the phases. These LEDs are driven by an Arduino that calculates the phase to show, as well as driving a small OLED display that shows the date and time. There is even a party mode for all of those lunar raves that you host.

[G4lile0] has done an excellent job of documenting the code that drives the lamp, so it would be easy to add features, or adapt this design to show the phases of another moon or add other features. It’s an excellent overall design, and kudos to [G4lile0] for doing it all with open source tools like FreeCAD.

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Make Water Bridges With High Voltages

November 15, 2016 by 42 Comments

It’s generally a bad idea to mix high voltage electricity and water, but interesting things happen if you do. This video from [RWGResearch] shows one of them: water bridging. If you have two water sources (such as two beakers full of very highly distilled water) with a high voltage between them, the voltage can create a gravity defying bridge that flows between them.

The experiment starts with the pouring spouts from two beakers nearly touching each other. Water fills the beakers right up to the spout, but it’s the application of electricity that pulls the bridge between the positive and negative beakers. With care, this technique can create a bridge of up to 2cm (about 0.8 inches). [RWGResearch] shows that he is able to create a bridge of about a centimeter with a 5KV voltage, but which only carries a few milliamps.

What forces are at play here isn’t exactly clear, but one recent paper speculates that it’s down to a combination of the dielectric force caused by the differing charges of parts of water molecules and the surface tension of the water. Whatever it is, it is fascinating and makes for a neat trick.

Want to make your own contribution to the scientific body of knowledge? Prove or disprove the speculation mentioned in the Wikipeadia article: is this possible because of an H3O2 lattice formed by the high voltage? How would you formulate a test for this?

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Primes In A Box

November 7, 2016 by 6 Comments

Lots of useful things come in boxes. Shoes, soldering irons and… prime numbers? This simple project from [WhiskyTangoHotel] puts a list of prime numbers in a handy box. Press a button, get a prime.

Sure, it isn’t brain surgery: all that it is happening is that a Raspberry Pi is reading a number from a text file, then showing it on an LCD screen. But it’s well-documented project that shows how to tie together a number of things on the Pi, like writing to an I2C display and using a button to trigger a clean shutdown.

It might be a good starting project for the younger hacker or if you have a Pi pining for something to do. If you’re looking for more easy Raspberry Pi projects, check out our Enlightened Pi Contest.

Web Matrix Control Proves Power Of ESP8266

November 1, 2016 by 4 Comments

LED matrix projects are all over the place, but this one is interesting for its simplicity: it’s an LED matrix that is driven straight from an ESP8266 board. [Ray] put it together as a quick project for his students to teach the basics of LED programming.

It’s built using a WS2812 LED matrix board he designed himself and his own ESPToy ESP8266 dev board. But the gist of the hardware is simply an ESP8266 and some WS2812’s. Where this gets interesting is with the user interaction side of things. The ESP makes WiFi and web serving easy, and [Ray] has build a simple HTTP GET API into the firmware. This is a great combination for the web dashboard and JavaScript-based animation programs [Ray] is demonstrating in the video below.

Just get on the same network and load up the module’s WiFi address for a graphical representation of the 5×7 LED matrix. Pick a color, turn pixels on or off, or choose a predefined pattern and send it to the hardware. This is a powerful way to get use input and with this as a guide it’s fast to set up for pretty much an application you can think of. Just work your way through the documents he put together for the workshop (Zip file link), including all of the code and the slides he used to run the workshop.

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