Hacking The IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD LED Wall Lamp

May 25, 2023 by Donald Papp 18 Comments

The IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD is a pixel-style LED wall lamp that comes with a few baked-in animations, and [ph1p] improved it immensely with an ESP32 board and new firmware. The new controller provides all kinds of great new abilities, including new modes and animations, WiFi control, and the ability to send your own images or drawings to the panel. All it takes is desoldering the original controller and swapping in a programmed ESP32.

Hacking in a new controller provides a whole new range of capabilities.

Sadly, opening the unit up is a bit of a pain. It seems the back panel is attached with rivets rather than screws, but it will yield to a little bit of prying force.

The good news is that once the back panel is off, the inside of the OBEGRÄNSAD is very hackable. All the parts and connectors are easily accessible from where they are, and a nicely-labeled pin header makes a convenient attachment point for the new ESP32 board. There’s no need to disassemble any further once the back is off, and that’s always nice.

Going a bit smaller, we’ve also seen an IKEA LED nightlight greatly improved by a little hacking, and there are plenty more IKEA hacks where that came from.

Hackaday Prize 2023: Hearing Sirens When Drivers Can’t

May 25, 2023 by Donald Papp 25 Comments

[Jan Říha]’s PionEar device is a wonderful entry to the Assistive Tech portion of the 2023 Hackaday Prize. It’s a small unit intended to perch within view of the driver in a vehicle, and it has one job: flash a light whenever a siren is detected. It is intended to provide drivers with a better awareness of emergency vehicles, because they are so often heard well before they are seen, and their presence disrupts the usual flow of the road. [Jan] learned that there was a positive response in the Deaf and hard of hearing communities to a device like this; roads get safer when one has early warning.

Deaf and hard of hearing folks are perfectly capable of driving. After all, not being able to hear is not a barrier to obeying the rules of the road. Even so, for some drivers it can improve awareness of their surroundings, which translates to greater safety. For the hearing impaired, higher frequencies tend to experience the most attenuation, and this can include high-pitched sirens.

The PionEar leverages embedded machine learning to identify sirens, which is a fantastic application of the technology. Machine learning, after all, is a way to solve the kinds of problems that humans are not good at figuring out how to write a program to solve. Singling out the presence of a siren in live environmental audio definitely qualifies.

We also like the clever way that [Jan] embedded an LED light guide into the 3D-printed enclosure: by making a channel and pouring in a small amount of white resin intended for 3D printers. Cure the resin with a UV light, and one is left with an awfully good light guide that doubles as a diffuser. You can see it all in action in a short video, just under the page break.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2023: Hearing Sirens When Drivers Can’t” →

Watch A Web Page Fetch Itself Over TLS, Complete With Commentary

May 21, 2023 by Donald Papp 12 Comments

TLS, byte by byte performs an unusual and interesting function: it fetches itself over HTTPS, and provides a complete annotation of what’s going on in the process, one byte at a time. Visit the site and give the button a click to watch it happen, it’s neat!

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is what’s responsible for encrypting traffic over the internet, and it’s normally implemented on top of TCP to encrypt an application-layer protocol like HTTP (resulting in HTTPS and the little padlock icon in browsers indicating a connection with a web site is encrypted.) Back in the day, traffic over the internet was commonly unencrypted, but nowadays no communication or hardware is too humble for encryption and methods are easily accessible.

So for what purpose would someone actually need or use such an implementation of TLS? Well, probably no one actually needs it. But it is a userspace TLS implementation in javascript that may fit a niche for someone, and it certainly provides beautifully-indented and annotated binary data in the process. Sound up your alley? The GitHub repository for the project has all the details, so give it a look.

Robotic Coffee Comes To Brooklyn, But Will It Stay?

May 21, 2023 by Donald Papp 25 Comments

Robots are cool. Everyone knows it, and [Eater NY] highlights a coffee shop with a robotic server opening in Brooklyn. While robots able to prepare and serve drinks or food is not new, it isn’t every day a brick-and-mortar café with a robot behind the counter opens up. But expensive automation isn’t the only puzzle piece needed to make a location work.

A robotic coffee shop (like a robotic burger joint) certainly offers novelty, but can it sustain itself beyond that?

As one example, the linked article above points out that the city of New York prohibits entirely cashless businesses. Establishments must accept cash payments, and it’s unclear how the touchscreen-driven system would comply with that requirement.

There are also many tasks involved in running even a modest establishment — loading, cleaning, and maintaining for example — that can’t be realistically taken care of by an immobile robot barista. It’s unclear to what extent the robotic coffee shop will employ human staff, but it’s clear that human involvement is something that isn’t going be eliminated any time soon.

Some of you may remember the robotic burger joint that our own Brian Benchoff managed to check out, and many of his same observations come to mind. The robot burger was perhaps ahead of its time (its single location is listed as closed on Google maps with no recent activity) but maybe the robot coffee place can make it work. Still, expensive automation is only one piece of a system, and the ability to crank out a drink per minute 24/7 might not actually be the missing link.

Here’s How To Build A Tiny Compiler From Scratch

May 21, 2023 by Donald Papp 27 Comments

Believe it or not, building a tiny compiler from scratch can be as fun as it is accessible. [James Smith] demonstrates by making a tiny compiler for an extremely simple programming language, and showing off a hello world.

Here’s what happens with a compiler: human-written code gets compiled into low-level machine code, creating a natively-executable result for a particular processor. [James]’ compiler — created from scratch — makes native x64 Linux ELF binary executables with no dependencies, an experience [James] found both educational and enjoyable. The GitHub repository linked below has everything one needs, but [James] also wrote a book, From Source Code to Machine Code, which he offers for sale to anyone who wants to step through the nitty-gritty.

The (very tiny) compiler is on GitHub as The Pretty Laughable Programming Language. It’s tiny, the only data types are integers and pointers, and all it can do is make Linux syscalls — but it’s sufficient to make a program with. Here’s what the code for “Hello world!” looks like before being fed into the compiler:

; the write() syscall: ; ssize_t write(int fd, const void *buf, size_t count); (syscall 1 1 "Hello world!\n" 13) 0

Working at such a low level can be rewarding, but back in the day the first computers actually relied on humans to be compilers. Operators would work with pencil and paper to convert programs into machine code, and you can get a taste of that with a project that re-creates what it was like to program a computer using just a few buttons as inputs.

Learn How Impossibly Close-fitting Parts Are Actually Made

May 17, 2023 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

Most of us have seen those demonstrations of metal parts that mate together so finely that, once together, they have no visible seam at all. But how, exactly, is this done? [Steve Mould] has a video that shows and explains all, and we’ve never seen the process explained quite like he does.

The secret ingredient is wire EDM, or Electrical Discharge Machining, but that’s only one part of the whole. Wire EDM works a bit like a hot-wire cutter slicing through foam, but all by itself that’s not enough to produce those impossibly close-fitting parts we love to see.

EDM is capable of astounding precision in part because — unlike a cutting tool — nothing physically contacts the material. Also, there isn’t a lot of friction and heat causing small distortions of the material during the machining process. EDM is as a result capable of fantastically-precise cuts, but not invisible ones.

It’s pretty neat to see a water jet used to thread the fine wire through the workpiece.

In all good manufacturing, the capabilities (and limitations) of the tool are taken into account, and this is also true for making those close-fitting pieces. The hole and plug are actually made in two separate stages.

The hole is cut separately from the plug, and because EDM is capable of such finesse, the cuts can be made in such a way that they complement one another with near-perfection. After that, grinding and polishing takes care of the surface finish. The result is the fantastically-smooth and apparently seamless fitment we like so much.

The video is embedded below, and there are some great details about EDM and how it actually works in there. For example, we see how a wire EDM machine can use a jet of water to help thread the wire through a hole in the part to start a job, and we learn that the wire is constantly moving during the process.

As cool as wire EDM is, it is not magic and we’ve seen some pretty remarkable efforts at bringing the technology into the home workshop.
Continue reading “Learn How Impossibly Close-fitting Parts Are Actually Made” →

MIDI Interface For NeXTcube Plugs Into The Past

May 16, 2023 by Donald Papp 21 Comments

[Joren] recently did some work as part of an electronic music heritage project, and restored an 80s-era NeXTcube workstation complete with vintage sound card, setting it up with a copy of MAX, a graphical music programming environment. But there was one piece missing: MIDI. [Joren] didn’t let that stop him, and successfully created hardware to allow MIDI input and output.

The new panel provides all the connectors necessary to interface with either classic MIDI devices, or MIDI over USB (where it appears as a USB MIDI device to any modern OS.)

Interestingly, the soundcard for the NeXTcube has an RS-422 serial port and some 8-pin mini DIN connectors. They are not compatible with standard MIDI signals, but they’re not far off, either.

To solve this, [Joren] used a Teensy developer board to act as an interface between classic MIDI devices like keyboards or synthesizers (or even not-so-common ones like this strange instrument) while also being able to accommodate modern MIDI over USB connections thanks to the Teensy’s USB MIDI functionality.

A metal enclosure with a 3D-printed panel rounds out the device, restoring a critical piece of functionality to the electronic music-oriented workstation.

MIDI as a protocol isn’t technically limited to musical applications, though that’s one place it shines. And just in case it comes in handy someday, you can send MIDI over I2C if you really need to.