Turn Your Motorola Android Phone Into A Raspberry Pi

August 15, 2016 by Elliot Williams 50 Comments

In the surest sign that hardware hacking is the new hotness, Motorola and Farnell/Element 14 have developed an add-on board and SDK that will let you connect virtually anything to your mobile phone. Motorola is calling it the “Moto Mods” system, and it looks like its going to be a dedicated microcontroller that interfaces with the computer inside the phone and provides everything from GPIOs to DSI (video). Naturally, I2C, I2S, SPI, UART, even two flavors of USB are in the mix.

The official SDK, ahem Mods Development Kit (MDK), is based on the open Greybus protocol stack (part of Google’s Project Ara open phone project) and it’s running on an ARM Cortex-M4F chip. It’s likely to be itself fairly hackable, and even if the suggested US $125 price is probably worth it for the convenience, we suspect that it’ll be replicable with just a few dollars in parts and the right firmware. (Yes, that’s a challenge.)

The initial four adapter boards range from a simple breadboard to a Raspberry-Pi-hat adapter (hence the title). It’s no secret that cell phones now rival the supercomputers of a bygone era, but they’ve always lacked peripheral interfaces. We wish that all of the old smartphones in our junk box had similar capabilities. What do you say? What would you build with a cellphone if you could break out all sorts of useful comms?

Via HackerBoards, and thanks to [Tom] for the tip!

3.3V Is Not Enough For This Raspberry Pi Zero

August 14, 2016 by Elliot Williams 27 Comments

A Raspberry Pi Zero is down to a price and size where it’s just begging to be integrated into your projects. Unless, that is, if your project involves a lot of 5 V equipment. Then it’s just begging to be fried.

[David Brown] solved this problem by breaking out pins with level converters. He used flat-flex cable and some pin-headers. While he was at it, he added a full-sized USB port and power headers. (Extra hack points are awarded for connecting the USB to the board through pogo pins.)

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We’re Fans Of Dave’s Fans

August 13, 2016 by Elliot Williams 73 Comments

Hackaday.io contributor extraordinaire [davedarko] gets hot in the summer. We all do. But what separates him from the casual hacker is that he beat the heat by ordering four 120 mm case fans. He then 3D printed a minimalistic tower frame for the fans, and tied them all together with a ULN2004 and an ESP8266. The whole thing is controlled over the network via MQTT. That’s dedication to staying cool.

We really like the aesthetics of this design. A fan made up of fans! But from personal experience, we also know that these large case fans can push a lot of air fairly quietly. That’s important if you’re going to stand something like this up on your desk. While we’re not sure that a desk fan really needs networked individual PWM speed control, we can see the temptation.

Now that they’re individually controlled, nothing stops [davedarko] from turning this into a musical instrument, or even using the fans to transmit data. The only thing we wouldn’t do, despite the temptation to stick our fingers in the blades, is to complicate the design visually. Maybe that would finally teach the cat not to walk around on our desk.

Hacker Builds New Single Board Computer Out Of Old Single Board Computer

August 13, 2016 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

[Ncrmnt] had a busted tablet PC with an Allwinner A23 SoC inside. He combined two of our favorite past-times, Linux hacking and 3D printing, to make a rather sweet little single-board-computer out of it, giving the tablet a second life.

Step one was to make sure that the thing works. Normally, you’d hook up a wired serial terminal and start hacking. [Ncrmnt] took it one step further and wired in a HC-05 Bluetooth serial module, so he can pull up the debug terminal wirelessly. The rest of the hackery was just crafting a bootable SD card and poking around in the Android system that was still resident in the flash memory of the system.

Once the board was proven workable, [Ncrmnt] designed and printed a sweet custom case using Solvespace, a constraint-based 3D CAD modeler that was new to us until recently. The case (after three prints) was a perfect fit for the irregularly shaped system board, a 3.7 V LiIon battery, and a speaker. He then added some nice mounting tabs. All in all, this is a nice-looking and functional mini-computer made out of stuff that was destined for the trash. It’s fast, it’s open-source, and it’s powerful. Best of all, it’s not in the dumpster.

There are pictures and more details on his blog, as well as [Ncrmnt]’s TV-stick to computer conversion that we’ve covered before.

Fun Audio Waveform Generator Is More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

August 10, 2016 by Elliot Williams 22 Comments

[Joekutz] wanted to re-build an audio-rate function generator project that he found over on Instructables. By itself, the project is very simple: it’s an 8-bit resistor-ladder DAC, a nice enclosure, and the rest is firmware.

[Joekutz] decided this wasn’t enough. He needed an LCD display, a speaker, and one-hertz precision. The LCD display alone is an insane hack. He reverse-engineers a calculator simply to use the display. But instead of mapping each key on the calculator and typing each number in directly, he only taps the four 1, +, =, and clear keys. He can then enter arbitrary numbers by typing in the right number of ones and adding them up. 345 = 111 + 111 + 111 + 11 + 1. In his video, embedded below, he describes this as a “rather stupid” idea. We think it’s hilarious.

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Bluetooth HID Gamepad And HC-05 Serial Hack

August 10, 2016 by Elliot Williams 20 Comments

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Don’t bother us with stupid questions, they both co-evolved into the forms that we now serve up in tasty sandwiches or omelets, respectively. “Which came first, the HC-05 serial-flash-hack, or the wireless Bluetooth Gamepad?” Our guess is that [mitxela] wanted to play around with the dirt-cheap Bluetooth modules, and that building the wireless controller was an afterthought. But for that, it’s a well-done afterthought! (Video below the break.)

It all starts with the HC-05 Bluetooth module, which is meant to transfer serial data, but which can be converted into a general-purpose device costing ten times as much with a simple Flash ROM replacement. The usual way around this requires bit-banging over a parallel port, but hackers have worked out a way to do the same thing in bit-bang mode using a normal USB/Serial adapter. The first part of [mitxela]’s post describes this odyssey.

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Yak Shaving: Hacker Mode Vs Maker Mode

August 9, 2016 by Elliot Williams 51 Comments

When I start up a new project, one that’s going to be worth writing up later on, I find it’s useful to get myself into the right mindset. I’m not a big planner like some people are — sometimes I like to let the project find its own way. But there’s also the real risk of getting lost in the details unless I rein myself in a little bit. I’m not alone in this tendency, of course. In the geek world, this is known as “yak shaving“.

The phrase comes obliquely from a Ren and Stimpy episode, and refers to common phenomenon where to get one thing done you have to first solve another problem. The second problem, of course, involves solving a third, and so on. So through this (potentially long) chain of dependencies, what looks like shaving a yak is obliquely working on cracking some actually relevant problem.
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