Truly Versatile ESP8266 WiFi Webcam Platform

January 24, 2016 by Elliot Williams 33 Comments

[Johan Kanflo] built a sweet little ESP8266-based wireless camera. It’s a beautiful little setup, and that it’s all open and comes with working demo code is gravy on the cake! Or icing on the potatoes. Or something.

[Johan]’s setup pairs an ESP8266-12 module with an Arducam, which looks like essentially an SPI breakout board for the ubiquitous small CMOS image sensors. The board naturally has a power supply and headers for programming the ESP module as well as connectors galore. Flash in some camera code, and you’ve got a custom WiFi webcam. Pretty slick.

But since [Johan] designed the ESP-8266 board with standard female headers connecting to the ESP, it could also be used as a general-purpose ESP dev board. [Johan] built a few daughterboards to go along with it, including a bed-of-nails ESP8266 tester (since you can never tell when you’re going to get a dud ESP unit) and WiFi-to-RFM69 radio bridge. That’s two awesome applications for a tidy little system, and a reminder to design for extensibility when you’re laying out your own projects.

We’ve previously covered [Johan]’s Skygrazer project, which tracks planes as they fly overhead and displays them on a gutted old Mac. Is it any surprise, then, that he’s also created an ADS-B-controlled moodlight? This guy is on fire!

Man Shoots Lamp

January 24, 2016 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

What do you get when you mix together all of the stuff that you can get for cheap over eBay with a bit of creativity and some PVC pipe? [Austiwawa] gets a table lamp, remote-controlled by a toy gun, that turns off and falls over when you shoot it. You’ve got to watch the video below the break.

This isn’t a technical hack. Rather it’s a creative use of a bunch of easily available parts, with a little cutting here and snipping there to make it work. For instance, [Austiwawa] took a remote control sender and receiver pair straight off the rack and soldered some wires to extend the LED and fit it inside the toy gun. A relay module controls the lamp, and plugs straight into the Arduino that’s behind everything. Plug and play.

Which is not to say the lamp lacks finesse. We especially like the screw used as an end-of-travel stop for the servo motor, and the nicely fabricated servo bracket made from two Ls. And you can’t beat the fall-over-dead effect. Or can you? Seriously, though, great project [Austiwawa]!

Continue reading “Man Shoots Lamp” →

Five Bucks, Three Parts: WiFi Camera Remote

January 24, 2016 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

It’s just ridiculous how cheap and easy it is to do some things today that were both costly and difficult just two or three years ago. Case in point: Hackaday.io user [gamaral] built a WiFi remote control for his Canon E3 camera out of just three parts: an ESP8266 module, a voltage regulator, and a stereo plug that the camera uses as its remote trigger.

And the codebase is just about as minimal, although it’s not without its nice touches. Control is easy — just pull down a pin for focus or shutter. The ESP listens to a custom port, and when it gets the message, “presses” or “releases” the pins. It’s a good, simple example of how to work with the ESP IOT SDK.

The timing is all on the client side. [gamaral] knew that he was going to want to play around with how long to hold down the focus button, for instance, so he left that flexible. Using Netcat makes the client-side code completely trivial: echo -n "SHUTTER HOLD" | nc -w 1 -q 1 roosevelt 9021. Bam. And it worked first time. Check the well-done video just below for more details.

And keep your eye on [gamaral]’s Hackaday.io page, because he’s going to make another video when the PCBs arrive in the mail.

Continue reading “Five Bucks, Three Parts: WiFi Camera Remote” →

Pi Zero Recipe Kiosk

January 23, 2016 by Elliot Williams 16 Comments

Why do you want to have a tiny $5 Linux system on a chip? Because you can cram it into a discarded LCD monitor and you’ve got a useful device. [zarderxio] did just that, satisfying the age-old dream of the kitchen computer with junk that was lying around in the basement.

There’s not much to this hack. The Raspberry Pi Zero needs a 5V power supply and the screen has 12V, so a step-down converter takes care of that. [zarderxio] hard-wires the monitor out of the Zero straight up to the monitor’s input jack, and hot-glues a USB hub to the outside of the monitor for a keyboard and mouse. (Because if there’s one thing we know, it’s that the Raspberry Pi Zero needs more USB ports: see exhibit A and exhibit B just for example.)

Now you’re all thinking, “USB keyboard and mouse?!?! I want a touchscreen!” Do you really? In the kitchen, with sticky fingers? Well, the screen in [zarderxio]’s junk box didn’t have a touchscreen, and this makes it more flexible, so we’re on the side of the quick hack done. Who knows, maybe he’ll hack yet another Raspberry Pi Zero into a smudge-proof recipe controller?

[via reddit.]

Amazing IMU-based Motion Capture Suit Turns You Into A Cartoon

January 23, 2016 by Elliot Williams 40 Comments

[Alvaro Ferrán Cifuentes] has built the coolest motion capture suit that we’ve seen outside of Hollywood. It’s based on tying a bunch of inertial measurement units (IMUs) to his body, sending the data to a computer, and doing some reasonably serious math. It’s nothing short of amazing, and entirely doable on a DIY budget. Check out the video below the break, and be amazed.

Cellphones all use IMUs to provide such useful functions as tap detection and screen rotation information. This means that they’ve become cheap. The ability to measure nine degrees of freedom on a tiny chip, for chicken scratch, pretty much made this development inevitable, as we suggested back in 2013 after seeing a one-armed proof-of-concept.

But [Alvaro] has gone above and beyond. Everything is open source and documented on his GitHun. An Arduino reads the sensor boards (over multiplexed I2C lines) that are strapped to his limbs, and send the data over Bluetooth to his computer. There, a Python script takes over and passes the data off to Blender which renders a 3D model to match, in real time.

All of this means that you could replicate this incredible project at home right now, on the cheap. We have no idea where this is heading, but it’s going to be cool.

Continue reading “Amazing IMU-based Motion Capture Suit Turns You Into A Cartoon” →

Link Trucker Is A Tiny Networking Giant

January 22, 2016 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

If you’re a networking professional, there are professional tools for verifying that everything’s as it should be on the business end of an Ethernet cable. These professional tools often come along with a professional pricetag. If you’re just trying to wire up a single office, the pro gear can be overkill. Unless you make it yourself on the cheap! And now you can.

[Kristopher Marciniak] designed and built an inexpensive device that verifies the basics:

Is the link up? Is this cable connected?
Can it get a DHCP address?
Can it perform a DNS lookup?
Can it open a webpage?

What’s going on under the hood? A Raspberry Pi, you’d think. A BeagleBoard? Our hearts were warmed to see a throwback to a more civilized age: an ENC28J60 breakout board and an Arduino Uno. That’s right, [Kristopher] replicated a couple-hundred dollar network tester for the price of a few lattes. And by using a pre-made housing, [Kristopher]’s version looks great too. Watch it work in the video just below the break.

Building an embedded network device used to be a lot more work, but it could be done. One of our favorites is still [Ian Lesnet’s] webserver on a business card from way back in 2008 which also used the ENC28J60 Ethernet chip.
Continue reading “Link Trucker Is A Tiny Networking Giant” →

Pack Your Plywood Cuts With Genetic Algortihms

January 22, 2016 by Elliot Williams 42 Comments

Reading (or writing!) Hackaday, we find that people are often solving problems for us that we didn’t even know that we had. Take [Jack Qiao]’s SVGnest for instance. If you’ve ever used a laser cutter, for instance, you’ve probably thought for a second or two about how to best pack the objects into a sheet, given it your best shot, and then moved on. But if you had a lot of parts, and their shapes were irregular, and you wanted to minimize materials cost, you’d think up something better.

SVGnest, which runs in a browser, takes a bunch of SVG shapes and a bounding box as an input, and then tries to pack them all as well as possible. Actually optimizing the placement is a computationally expensive proposition, and that’s considering the placement order to be fixed and allowing only 90 degree rotations of each piece.

Once you consider all the possible orders in which you place the pieces, it becomes ridiculously computationally expensive, so SVGnest cheats and uses a genetic algorithm, which essentially swaps a few pieces and tests for an improvement many, many times over. Doing this randomly would be silly, so the routine packs the biggest pieces first, and then back-fills the small ones wherever they fit, possibly moving the big ones around to accommodate.

That’s a lot of computational work, but the end result is amazing. SVGnest packs shapes better than we could ever hope to, and as well as some commercial nesting software. Kudos. And now that the software is written, as soon as you stumble upon this problem yourself, you have a means to get to the solution. Thanks [Jack]!