Nexus 5X Phone Resurrected By The Oven

February 11, 2017 by Elliot Williams 67 Comments

Warranty shmarranty — toss the phone in the oven! There’s apparently a problem with the assembly of the Nexus 5X smartphones, and it looks like it is due to faulty BGA chip soldering. LG USA has had enough problems with the phone that they may not even have enough parts or new units to fix it, so they’re offering a refund. But we all know how it is to get attached to a device, right?

So [Alex] disassembled his beloved phone, pulled out the board in question, and gave it the XBox Red Ring Of Death treatment. He placed the board on some insulating aluminum foil, and baked it for six and a half minutes. Season with lemon and pepper, and serve! We’re honestly surprised that sticking the affected board into the oven at 195° C / 390° F for a few minutes would work at all. Isn’t that a low temperature for soldering, especially with a lead-free mix? Could it have been a problem with humidity after all? Continue reading “Nexus 5X Phone Resurrected By The Oven” →

Danger, Will Robinson: Sweet B9 Build

February 10, 2017 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

If you’ve ever seen “Lost in Space” in Portuguese, you’d definitely recognize the phrases that [Everaldo]’s B9 robot reads off of the SD card inside its belly. If not, you can check out the video below and learn such important phrases as “Warning! Alien approaching.” or “The planet’s breaking up” (we presume). Or head over to [Everaldo]’s website and check out the great model build log. And while you’re there, check out his model TRS80 too.)

There’s a lot of solid model-building going on here, but hidden inside the pretty exterior is some good old-fashioned hacking. Once the audio was stored on the SD card, [Everaldo] simply soldered it straight into the project. There’s also an IR daughterboard that drives the robot, while blinky lights and servo motors bring it to life. We want one for our desk!

If you haven’t made an IR-remote-based project, you really should. It’s still among the most hackable of methods to transmit data to or from a microcontroller, while making use of one of those superfluous IR remotes you have kicking around the house. If you’re short on inspiration, and not a model-builder, check out this Hacklet dedicated to IR, or our favorite smart-home(r) device of all time.

Are you thinking what we’re thinking? This would make an excellent entry in the Hackaday Sci-Fi contest which is accepting entries through March 6th.

Continue reading “Danger, Will Robinson: Sweet B9 Build” →

33C3: Edible Soft Robotics

February 7, 2017 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

Certainly one of the more entertaining talks of the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress was [Kari Love]’s talk on her experiments in mixing food with function. In [Kari]’s talk at the 2016 Hackaday Supercon, she talked extensively about working on soft robotic for NASA. At the 33C3, her focus was twofold: on a fun side project to make mobile robots out of stuff that you can eat, and to examine the process of creative engineering through the lens of a project like this.

If you look up edible robotics, you get a lot of medical literature about endoscopes that you can swallow, or devices that take samples while they’re inside you. That’s not what [Kari]’s after at all. She’s after a robot that’s made of candy, a yummy machine. And while this is still a work in progress, she demonstrated a video of an all-licorice cable-based actuator.

But more than that, she demonstrated all of the materials she’s looked at so far, and the research she’s done. To some extent, the process is the substance of this project, but there’s nothing wrong with some tasty revelations along the way.

This talk was a potpourri of helpful tips and novel facts. For instance, if you’re working in candy robotics, don’t eat your mistakes. That stomach ache that your mom always said you’d get? You will. Did you know that the gummi in gummibears is re-heatable and re-moldable? In addition, of the gels that she made, it was the most delicious. And finally, Pop Rocks don’t have enough CO2 in them to drive pneumatics. Who knew? [Kari] knows. And now you do too.

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AI Beats Poker Pros: Skynet Looms

February 7, 2017 by Elliot Williams 42 Comments

There have been a few “firsts” in AI-versus-human gaming lately, and the computers are now beating us at trivia, chess and Go. But in some sense, none of these are really interesting; they’re all games of fact. Poker is different. Aside from computing the odds of holding the winning hand, where a computer would obviously have an advantage, the key to winning in poker is bluffing, and figuring out when your opponent is bluffing. Until recently, this has helped man beat the machine. Those days are over.

Chess and Go are what a game theorist would call games of perfect information: everyone knows everything about the state of the game just from looking at the board, and this means that there is, in principle, a best strategy (series of moves) for every possible position. Granted, it’s hard to figure these out because it’s a big brute-force problem, but it’s still a brute-force problem where computers have an innate advantage. Chess and Go are games where the machines should be winning. Continue reading “AI Beats Poker Pros: Skynet Looms” →

Ham Radio Trips Circuit Breakers

February 6, 2017 by Elliot Williams 66 Comments

Arc-fault circuit breakers are a boon for household electrical safety. The garden-variety home electrical fire is usually started by the heat coming from a faulty wire arcing over. But as any radio enthusiast knows, sparks also give off broadband radio noise. Arc-fault circuit interrupters (AFCI) are special circuit breakers that listen for this noise in the power line and trip when they hear it. The problem is that they can be so sensitive that they cut out needlessly. Check out the amusing video below the break.

Our friend [Martin] moved into a new house, and discovered that he could flip the breakers by transmitting on the 20-meter band. “All the lights in the place went out and my rig switched over to battery. I thought it was strange as I was certainly drawing less than 20 A. I reset the breakers and keyed up again. I reset the breakers again and did a [expletive] Google search.” Continue reading “Ham Radio Trips Circuit Breakers” →

Amazing 3D-Scanner Teardown And Rebuild

February 6, 2017 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

Pour yourself a nice hot cup of tea, because [iliasam]’s latest work on a laser rangefinder (in Russian, translated here) is a long and interesting read. The shorter version is that he got his hands on a broken laser security scanner, nearly completely reverse-engineered it, got it working again, put it on a Roomba that was able to map out his apartment, and then re-designed it to become a tripod-mounted, full-room 3D scanner. Wow.

The scanner in question has a spinning mirror and a laser time-of-flight ranger, and is designed to shut down machinery when people enter a “no-go” region. As built, it returns ranges along a horizontal plane — it’s a 2D scanner. The conversion to a 3D scanner meant adding another axis, and to do this with sufficient precision required flipping the rig on its side, salvaging the fantastic bearings from a VHS machine, and driving it all with the surprisingly common A4988 stepper driver and an Arduino. A program on a PC reads in the data, and the stepper moves another 0.36 degrees. The results speak for themselves.

This isn’t [iliasam]’s first laser-rangefinder project, naturally. We’ve previously featured his homemade parallax-based ranger for use on a mobile robot, which is equally impressive. What amazes us most about these builds is the near-professional quality of the results pulled off on a shoestring budget.

Continue reading “Amazing 3D-Scanner Teardown And Rebuild” →