Blend Your Last Frogs. Google Turns A Blind Eye To Flash.

November 6, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 66 Comments

Google has announced that it will no longer index Flash files.

Journey with me to a time in a faraway internet; a time before we had monetized social media. A time when the page you shared with your friends was your page and not a page on someone’s network. Way back when Visual Basic was what Python is now and JavaScript was a hack mostly used for cool effects. A hero arose. Macromedia Flash opened the gates to the interactive web, and for a chunk of time it consumed more than a decent portion of humanity’s attention and artistic output.

Computer art was growing, but was it public? How many grandmothers would see a demo?

New grounds were paved and anyone who wanted to become an animator or a web designer could manage it in a few tutorials. Only a few years before Flash took off, people had started talking about computers as a source for art in mostly theoretical terms. There were demoscenes, university studies, and professional communities, of course, but were they truly public? Suddenly Flash made computer art an everyday thing. How could computers not be used for art? In schools and offices all over the world people of varying technical skill would get links to games, animation, and clever sites sent by their friends and colleagues.

For 23 years Flash has had this incredible creative legacy. Yet it’s not perfect by any means. It’s a constant headache for our friendly neighborhood super-conglomerates. Apple hates how it drains the battery on their mobile devices, and that it’s a little village outside of their walled garden. Microsoft sees it as another endless security violation. They all saw it as a competitor product eating their proprietary code bases. Continue reading “Blend Your Last Frogs. Google Turns A Blind Eye To Flash.” →

Servo Socks Is A Brilliantly Simple Solution For Quick Hacking

November 5, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 8 Comments

[Dan Kitchen] has a great solution for making servos easy to hack.

Every hacker has a drawer full of servo’s somewhere. Just about every project that uses them starts off by measuring the spacing and designing some obscure bracket to meet that unique motor’s size. However, what if you could use common wood screws and hand tools to use them right away?

[Dan]’s solution is to make a case from recycled HDPE lumber, the same sort of material you might buy for a deck. This material is sandable, carvable, and can be drilled into. The case encapsulates the servo motor completely. One side has a freewheeling wooden disk and the other side’s disk is attached to the motor. Now when you need motion you can work with the servo as if it were just a block of wood. Very cool.

[Dan] appears to be moving to make this a commercial product and we can see why. Though we see no reason why an enterprising hacker or hackerspace couldn’t come up with their own variations on this great idea.

Axiom, A 100+kW Motor Controller For Making Big Motors Move

November 4, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 47 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of motor driver boards for robots and the odd electric skateboard. What we haven’t see a lot of is one big enough to drop into an electric vehicle.

The Axiom motor controller was a winner of the bootstrap contest and is a Finalist in the 2019 Hackaday Prize. The driver aims to deliver 300A continuous at 400V all day long. Which is a very impressive amount of power from a board that appears to be quite compact.

The brains of the device is an ice40 FPGA from Lattice running software based on the VESC Project. Its open source roots will certainly allow for some interesting hacks and an increasingly stable platform over time. Not to mention the existing software tools will aid in the sometimes cumbersome motor-driver tuning process.

The board designs are available, but we agree with the team that the complexity of assembly is likely going to be high (along with the price). The amount of research and skill going into this complicated kit is a bit mind-boggling, but we hope it will really enable some cool hacks, from cars, to ATVs, and maybe even an electric flyer.

SmallKat: An Adorable And Dynamic Robot

November 3, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 11 Comments

SmallKat is a cute little robot with a lot of capability designed around teaching and experimenting with dynamic robot control. It’s a shame we haven’t covered SmallKat yet, as it’s both a finalist in the 2019 Hackaday Prize and was one of the Bootstrap Winners this year.

Many hobby robots move by repeating a pre-programmed sequence of movements. Most hexapods for example follow this line of thought. However, robots like Spot and the MiniCheetah show a different world where robots determine the locations of their limbs by their current state, the measured state of their environment, and some imagined future. These robots are capable of so much more than their predecessors.

However, even a cost-effective version of these robots climb into the tens of thousands of dollars at a steep curve. SmallKat will help there: based around hobby servos and an ESP32 the hardware stays affordable. Data can be streamed to a much larger computer for experimentation which saves on some of the weight that supporting a larger device like a Pi would add.

This device will let students experiment with all kinds of dynamic models and even machine learning-based movements without breaking the bank. There’s even a nice software studio for experimentation to aid in the learning process. Video of it shuffling around after the break.

Continue reading “SmallKat: An Adorable And Dynamic Robot” →

Forget Printing Labels For Your Bathtub Hooch, Why Not Engrave The Bottle?

November 2, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 20 Comments

[BlueFlower] sends in this cool wine bottle engraver. It’s a simple machine that reminds us of the infamous EggBot. One axis can move in x and z while the other axis rotates the work piece. The EggBot works in spherical coordinates while this one lives in a cylindrical world.

The base of the device appears to be an older project of [BlueFlower]’s an XY-Plotter/Cutter. The plotter itself is a very standard twin-motor gantry design. In fact, it looks like when the machine is converted to bottle engraving, the drivers which previously moved the Y-axis are re-purposed to move two rollers. The rollers themselves are suspiciously similar to those found inside 2D printers. We all have them kicking around our junk drawers, but it’s rare to see them actually being used. The spindled is just a DC motor with a ball grinder coupled to the end.

As for the final result, we have to admit that the engraved bottles are quite fetching. Catch a video of the engraving process after the break.

Continue reading “Forget Printing Labels For Your Bathtub Hooch, Why Not Engrave The Bottle?” →

FBus: An Extensible And Easily Configurable FPGA Based DAQ

November 1, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 4 Comments

[flow] is a little disillusioned with commercial Data Acquisition Systems (DAQs) and channeled his frustration into his own, very cool, FPGA based solution.

The project takes form as a back plane into which various cards can be slotted. The the interface is just a PCI-e connector. If you need analog input, simply insert the card for it. Ethernet output? Same process. Modularity and expandability are the themes here.

[flow] already has projects in mind for his new DAQ. He’s using it to build an inverted pendulum. However, his planned cards really show the possibilities, anything from a logic analyzer card to an HDMI Output card allow for a wide array of configurations. There is also a small suite of tools which makes this process relatively easy to manage.

We can definitely see this evolving into a useful tool on our bench for prototyping.

Symbiflow Open Source FPGA Toolchain

November 1, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 12 Comments

Anyone who’s ever had the pleasure of programming FPGAs knows that it’s a land of proprietary tools that almost require marriage level commitment to a specific platform to be effective. Symbiflow hopes to solve this by becoming the GCC of FPGAs.

Rather than a tool built around a specific chip or architecture, Symbiflow will provide a more universal interface. Users can program in Verilog; architecture definitions define how the code will be compiled for the right chip. They are currently targeting the popular Xilinx 7-series, the very affordable iCE40 series from lattice, and the ECP5 FPGAs also from Lattice.

If you’re headed to Hackaday Supercon this year, [Timothy Ansell] will be giving a talk on how Symbiflow is making this process much more approachable and much less proprietary. Overall we’re very excited about a common interface, especially as the price of FPGAs keep dropping into micro controller territory while also increasing in capability.

(Speaking of Supercon, and maybe this is a spoiler, the badge would not have been possible without Symbiflow, Project Trellis, Yosys, and NextPNR.)