Friday Hack Chat: Environmental Sensors

September 5, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

When it comes to IoT and robotics, the name of the game is sensors. These aren’t just IMUs and the stuff that makes robots move — we’re talking about environmental sensors here. Everything from sensors that measure temperature, air quality, humidity, chemical sensors, and radiation sensors are on the table here. For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking all about environmental sensors with a hardware designer who has put them to the test.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat is Radu Motisan. He was a finalist in the 2014 Hackaday Prize with the uRad Monitor, a self-contained radiation monitoring network that sends radiation measurements out to a central server, that can be viewed by the entire world. The goal of this project is to create a worldwide network of radiation monitoring devices, and we’re going to say Radu has succeeded. There are hundreds of these uRad Monitors in over forty countries, and all of them are churning out data about the radiation environment in their neck of the woods.

By training, Radu is a software engineer with a masters in science. In his spare time, Radu plays around with chemistry, physics, and electronics. It’s this background that led Radu to create one of the most amazing Hackaday Prize projects ever.

We’ll kick off with a discussion of Radu’s uRad Monitor, and that means we’ll be covering:

Radiation Detection, why is it important, and what does it mean?
How do you detect radiation?
The differences between Geiger-Mueller tubes and scintillators

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Environmental Sensor Hack Chat Event Page and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week is just like any other, and we’ll be gathering ’round our video terminals at noon, Pacific, on Friday, September 7th. Need a countdown timer? We should look into hosting these countdown timers on hackaday.io, actually.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

This Is Your Solution For Open Source Motion Tracking

September 4, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

The HTC Vive Tracker adds real-world objects to your virtual world. While these real-world objects in virtual environments are now mostly limited to a Nintendo Zapper for a Duck Hunt clone and a tennis racket, the future is clear: we’re going to be playing Duck Hunt and Wii Sports while wearing headsets. The future is so bright, it burns.

Of course, with any piece of neat computing hardware, there’s an opportunity for building an Open Source clone. That’s what [Drix] is doing with his Hackaday Prize entry. He’s created an Open Source Vive Tracker. It’s called the HiveTracker, and it is right now the best solution for tracking objects in a 3D space.

After a few missteps with ultrasonic and magnetic approaches, the team decided to piggyback on the HTC Vive lighthouses. These two base stations scan a laser beam across the room, first vertically, then horizontally. It’s an incredible piece of technology that [Alan Yates] talked about at the 2016 Hackaday Superconference.

While most microcontrollers don’t operate fast enough to see these laser sweeps, the team behind the HiveTracker found one microcontroller, with Bluetooth, and a feature called ‘PPI’. This programmable peripheral interconnect is kinda, sorta like a cross-bar, but designed for more real-time control of applications. With the right software, the team behind the HiveTracker was able to detect the lighthouses and send position and orientation data back to a computer.

This is a stupendous amount of work, and the results are remarkable. You can check out the video below and see that, yes, this is a real, Open Source Vive Tracker.

Continue reading “This Is Your Solution For Open Source Motion Tracking” →

There Is A Cost To Extended Lifetime Products. It’s 7.5%.

September 3, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 43 Comments

Silicon and integrated circuits come and go, but when it comes to extended lifetime support from a company, it’s very, very hard to find fault with Microchip. They’re still selling the chip — new — that was the foundation of the Basic Stamp. That’s a part that’s being sold for twenty-five years. You can hardly find that sort of product support with a company that doesn’t deal in high-tech manufacturing.

While the good times of nearly unlimited support for products that are decades old isn’t coming to an end, it now has a cost. According to a press release from Microchip, the price of these old chips will increase. Design something with an old chip, and that part is suddenly going to cost you 7.5% more.

The complete announcement (3MB PDF), states, in part:

…in the case of extended lifecycle product offerings, manufacturing, assembly and carrying costs are increasing over time for
these mature technology products and packages. Rather than discontinue our mature product, Microchip will continue to support our
customer needs for product availability, albeit increasing the prices in line with increased cost associated with supporting mature
product lines….

For all orders received after 31 August, pricing for the products listed will be subject to an increase of 7.5%

The PDF comes with a list of all the products affected, and covers the low-end ATtinys, ATMegas, and PICs that are used in thousands of tutorials available online. The ATtiny85 is not affected, but the ATMega128 is. There are a number of PICs listed, but a short survey reveals these are low-memory parts, and you really shouldn’t be making new designs with these anyway.

The Quest For High Powered Blinky And Buzzing

September 3, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

Sometimes, we need devices to notify us of something. The oven timer is going off. Your phone has a push notification. The smoke detector battery is getting low. All of these problems can be solved with a buzzer or an LED. It’s a simple and cheap problem to solve.

But what if you need to know if something’s wrong with a diesel engine that throwing out 90 dB of noise? What if you’re not guaranteed to be around that engine? What if you need to tell everyone within a half mile that something is wrong. Again, LEDs and beepers, but the standard, off-the-shelf implementation isn’t going to cut it. You need massive amounts of buzzers and LEDs, and you’re going to need to drive them all with some reasonably high current. How do you solve that problem?

This is the problem [Tegwyn] had to solve for another one of his Hackaday Prize entries. The solution is what you would expect — buzzers and LEDs — but he’s putting some serious current behind these devices. There are, in fact, thermal considerations taken into account when you’re beeping this many buzzers.

The LEDs for this project are a handful of blindingly bright 1209 and 1206 SMD parts, and the buzzer is an obnoxiously loud SMD 97 dB buzzer. There are eight buzzers on this board. So, how do you drive these power-hungry devices? [Tegwyn] is using an L293E half-bridge motor driver, in a ‘Power-DIP’ package for relatively effective heat dissipation. Does it work? Oh, yes, and it’s very annoying. Take a look at the video below and judge for yourself. You can, indeed, make something louder and more annoying by adding more power.

Continue reading “The Quest For High Powered Blinky And Buzzing” →

Hackaday Links: September 2, 2018

September 2, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

It’s (was, is?) the end of August, and that means the entire dreadlocked population of San Francisco is out in the middle of the Nevada Desert for a week. Yes, it’s Burning Man, and as always we have a host of builds that make you ask, ‘how did they do that, and how did they get that here’.

For the last few years, the greatest logistical feat of art cars is the 747. Yes, it’s the fuselage of a 747, turned into an art car. The top deck is a convertible. The biggest question surrounding this 747 is how do you transport this thing? You can’t fly it in (well, you could, once), it’s not going to fit on a train, and it’s extraordinarily long. Now we have an answer: they did it on a truck. The 747 was stationed in the Mojave, and from there it’s a relatively quick shot up Nevada to Black Rock City. Several power lines had to be raised, and you’re still looking at an enormous logistical endeavour.

I’m saying it now. Sphere, the 1998 movie with Dustin Hoffman. There’s a 25 meter diameter mirror ball that looks like the sphere in Sphere. It’s inflatable, so that takes care of the obvious questions, but we’re still asking how this thing looks in person, how massive wind storms are going to affect what is basically a gigantic ~~sale~~ sail, and what the reflections of the sun will actually do. I suppose being convex, you’re not going to get the accidental architectural parabolic mirror effect that melts cars, but one can always hope.

Want a neat story on the features of Burning Man that doesn’t get a lot of press? IEEE Spectrum did a feature on Black Rock City airport. For one week a year, it is the third busiest airport in Nevada, behind McCarren and Reno. It’s also a towered, yet uncontrolled airport. This makes no logical sense, but it’s something that can happen with FAA regs.

[alicestewwwart] has left us with a quandary. She’s creating highly artistic circuits out of ICs, discrete parts, and wire. These circuits are functional, but we don’t know what to call them. They’re not quite deadbug, because SMD parts don’t have legs, and ‘deadbug’ gets its name from upside down DIPs that looks like dead centipedes. It’s not Manhattan style, although this might be closer to Manhattan than deadbug. So what is it? Leave your answer in the comments.

You Have To Have A Very High IQ To Understand This Rick And Morty Portal Gun Replica

September 2, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 45 Comments

It’s barely September, but that still means you’ve got to start working on your Halloween costume. If last year is any indication, the most popular costume this year will be, by far, Rick from Rick and Morty. There’s a lot to be said about this, but let me simplify it: if you dress up as Rick from Rick and Morty, you are not a Rick. You’re a Morty.

Nevertheless, Halloween is an awesome opportunity for some cosplay and prop-making action, and [Daren] has this year all wrapped up. He’s building the portal gun from Rick and Morty, with a projector. Yes, it will display portals where ever you point it. It’s actually building something instead of buying a blue wig and a lab coat. Rick would be proud.

The key to this portal build replica is the same tech as found in those Christmas projectors that illuminate the sides of houses with tidings of good cheer. These are just tiny little gobos in a rotating frame, illuminated with high-brightness LEDs. That’s easy enough to fit inside a 3D printed portal gun case, and when you add some 18650 LiPOs, a speaker for sound, and a PC fan for cooling, you have the makings of a real, projecting portal gun.

While it’s just a work in progress now, it is a fantastic achievement so far. Halloween is coming up, and this is a great build for all those Mortys out there.

You’ll Be Shocked At This Way To Improve Your Video Game High Score

September 1, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

What if you could play video games perfectly? Would you be one of the greats, raking in millions of dollars simply by playing competitive Fortnite? That’s what Twitch does. Twitch plays video games for you. The irony of this name should not be lost on you.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Peter] built a device that shocks you into playing a computer game perfectly. These experiments began with a transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator (TENS), or basically a device that makes you… twitch. This device, however, is connected to four buttons, representing up, down, left, and right. This is a video game controller, that will make your muscles contract automatically. See where this is going?

To play a video game perfectly, you need a video game. For that, [Peter] chose the classic Snake game. The computer runs the game, and figures out if the next move will be up, down, left, or right. This bit of information is then sent to the TENS device, forcing the player to move the snake up, down, left, or right. The computer can’t directly control the snake, it merely has the human in the loop. The human becomes part of the program.

We’re getting into weird cyberpunk territory here, and it’s awesome. Is the human directly responsible for winning the game? What are the philosophical ramifications? What episode of Star Trek was this from? It’s a great entry for the Hackaday Prize – cyberpunk and a neat video (available below) all wrapped up into one package.

Continue reading “You’ll Be Shocked At This Way To Improve Your Video Game High Score” →