Author: Elliot Williams

1502 Articles

Darth Vader Magic 8 Ball

November 27, 2014 by 4 Comments

Imagine that your wife likes Darth Vader and wants help making important life choices. (Who doesn’t?) [bithead942] solves both problems in one project by gutting a Lego clock and making a talking animatronic Darth Vader 8-Ball-style oracle. Now his wife can simply press Darth’s head and her decision-making is handled by the Dark Side of the Force.

You can see the result in the video below the break.

The internals consist mainly of an Arduino Nano, a WTV020SD WAV playback chip, and some swanky servos. [bithead942] took a Dremel to the existing clock interior and found a way to make it all fit. The cloak helped, and the speaker was a good fit for the previous clock’s display.

Then he used IMDB and combed through the Star Wars movies to find Darth Vader quotes that kinda sound like the 8-Ball’s answers. As [bithead942] mentions Darth Vader doesn’t really dwell much on the positive, so finding instances where he says “yes” was hard work. This is in contrast to the original 8 Ball which has a brighter outlook than a cheerleader on Prozac, but there’s a reason they call it the Dark Side.

We really like the way the waist and arm servos work together to bring Darth to life. The added oak base with pull-out instruction card not only makes Darth look fancy, but prevents him from falling over when he leans forward to talk. All in all, a really nice build and well written-up with difficulties and their solutions.

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Chicken-powered Pendulum

November 24, 2014 by 17 Comments

Every once in a while we get sent a link that’s so cute that we just have to post it. For instance: this video from [Ludic Science]. It’s a wind-up chicken toy that kicks a pendulum back and forth. No more, no less.

But before you start screaming “NOT A HACK!” in the comments below, think for a second about what’s going on here. The bird has a spring inside, and a toothed wheel that is jammed and released by the movement of the bird’s foot (an escapement mechanism). This makes the whole apparatus very similar to a real pendulum clock.

Heck, the chick toy itself is pretty cool. It’s nose-heavy, so that under normal conditions it would tip forward. But when it’s wound up, tipping forward triggers the escapement and makes it hop, tipping it backward in the process and resetting the trigger. The top-heavy chicken is an inverted pendulum!

And have a look, if you will indulge, at the very nice low-tech way he creates the pivot: a bent piece of wire, run through a short aluminum tube, held in place by a couple of beads. Surely other pivots are lower-friction, but the advantage of using a rod and sleeve like this is that the pendulum motion is constrained to a plane so that it never misses the chicken’s feet.

Our only regret is that he misses (by that much) the obvious reference to a “naked chick” at the end of the video.

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Laser-cut Album Released

November 19, 2014 by 15 Comments

In some alternate universe, where laser cutters and phonographs are more common than MP3 players, it makes a ton of sense to release laser-cutter files for your band’s new album (Translated). In this universe, it’s wacky and awesome.

The new EP from ASIC, alias [Patric] from Fablab Zürich, is out as PDF before it’s out in other forms of digital download, and the trailer video (embedded below the break) looks fantastic.

The release draws on this Instructable by Amanda Ghassaei to turn the music into PDFs suitable for feeding into a laser cutter, and we think it’s classy that she gets a shout-out on the label’s release page.  Everything else about the album will be released under a Creative Commons license to boot.

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Harmonic Analyzer Mechanical Fourier Computer

November 18, 2014 by 20 Comments

If you’re into mechanical devices or Fourier series (or both!), you’ve got some serious YouTubing to do.

[The Engineer Guy] has posted up a series of four videos (Introduction, Synthesis, Analysis, and Operation) that demonstrate the operation and theory behind a 100-year-old machine that does Fourier analysis and synthesis with gears, cams, rocker-arms, and springs.

In Synthesis, [The Engineer Guy] explains how the machine creates an arbitrary waveform from its twenty Fourier components. In retrospect, if you’re up on your Fourier synthesis, it’s pretty obvious. Gears turn at precise ratios to each other to create the relative frequencies, and circles turning trace out sine or cosine waves easily enough. But the mechanical spring-weighted summation mechanism blew our mind, and watching the machine do its thing is mesmerizing.

In Analysis everything runs in reverse. [The Engineer Guy] sets some sample points — a square wave — into the machine and it spits out the Fourier coefficients. If you don’t have a good intuitive feel for the duality implied by Fourier analysis and synthesis, go through the video from 1:50 to 2:20 again. For good measure, [The Engineer Guy] then puts the resulting coefficient estimates back into the machine, and you get to watch a bunch of gears and springs churn out a pretty good square wave. Truly amazing.

The fact that the machine was designed by [Albert Michelson], of Michelson-Morley experiment fame, adds some star power. [The Engineer Guy] is selling a book documenting the machine, and his video about the book is probably worth your time as well. And if you still haven’t gotten enough sine-wavey goodness, watch the bonus track where he runs the machine in slow-mo: pure mechano-mathematical hotness!

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$2 FM Transmitter For Raspberry Pi

November 12, 2014 by 37 Comments

We love re-purposed consumer gear. This project uses a cheap, discontinued cellphone gadget to create a Raspberry Pi controlled FM radio transmitter.

The Sony-Ericsson MMR-70 radio transmitter apparently used to connect to a cell phone and broadcast music. But the Walkman cellphones in question are a little bit old in the tooth, so one can buy the transmitter units for cheap on the resale market. What makes the transmitters even more interesting is that you can activate and deactivate the radio, change frequency or output power, and even send RDS station and song information.

It turns out (link in German) that the radios have an AVR ATMega32 microcontroller and a NS73 radio transmitter module, which can be entirely controlled over I2C. (Schematic here as PDF.) The units also have handy test points strewn all around. Once the test points were mapped out, one could completely ignore the on-board AVR microcontroller and control the FM transmitter module directly using the Raspberry Pi’s I2C outputs.

And that’s where [Manawyrm] stepped in. She wrote an I2C daemon for the Raspberry Pi that lets you control the FM transmitter via simple commands. All you have to do is solder up a bunch of test points, install [Manawyrm]’s software, write a batch script, and you’re on the air. For instance, this makes building a FM radio retransmitter for online streamed audio a one-day project. You can see his working example on youtube. Of course, you’ll want a web-based remote control interface to go with that.

If you’re interested in hacking along, and don’t have a Raspberry Pi application in mind, Sparkfun used to sell the NS73 radio transmitter so you can find lots of good information about the chip. We’d love to see a stand-alone broadcasting gizmo that actually utilizes the onboard AVR chip, but our hats are off to [Manawyrm] for making the Raspberry Pi version so accessible.

Protocol Snooping Digital Audio

November 12, 2014 by 21 Comments

More and more clubs are going digital. When you go out to hear a band, they’re plugging into an ADC (analog-to-digital converter) box on stage, and the digitized audio data is transmitted to the mixing console over Ethernet. This saves the venue having to run many audio cables over long distances, but it’s a lot harder to hack on. So [Michael] trained popular network analysis tools on his ProCo Momentum gear to see just what the data looks like.

[Michael]’s writeup of the process is a little sparse, but he name-drops all the components you’d need to get the job done. First, he simply looks at the raw data using Wireshark. Once he figured out how the eight channels were split up, he used the command-line version (tshark) and a standard Unix command-line tool (cut) to pull the data apart. Now he’s got a text representation for eight channels of audio data.

Using xxd to convert the data from text to binary, he then played it using sox to see what it sounded like. No dice, yet. After a bit more trial and error, he realized that the data was unsigned, big-endian integers.  He tried again, and everything sounded good. Success!

While this is not a complete reverse-engineering tutorial like this one, we think that it hits the high points: using a bunch of the right tools and some good hunches to figure out an obscure protocol.

Hybrid 50cc Ultracapacitor Scooter

October 27, 2014 by 40 Comments

We’re all familiar with hybrid gas-electric cars these days, but how about a hybrid scooter that uses supercapacitors instead of batteries? Our hats are off to [Alex] from Labs Bell for the almost entirely-DIY conversion.

The hybrid idea is to drive the vehicle’s wheels with electric motors, but generate the electricity with a normal gasoline engine. This allows the hybrid to control the engine speed almost independently of the wheel motors’ demand for power, allowing the gas engine to run at its most efficient speed and charge up batteries with the extra energy. As an extra bonus, many hybrids also use regenerative braking to recoup some of the energy normally wasted as heat in your brake pads.

[Alex]’s hybrid scooter does all of the above and more. Since the stock vehicle is a 50cc scooter, any increase in acceleration is doubtless welcome. We’d love to see the scooter starting from stop with a full charge. Using supercapacitors as storage instead of batteries is a win for charging efficiency. In urban stop-and-go traffic, the natural habitat of the 50cc scooter, the regenerative braking should help further with gas consumption.

What’s most impressive to us is the completely DIY hybrid control unit that takes some simple inputs (wheel speed and throttle position) and controls regenerative braking, the gas engine’s throttle, etc. Since the hybrid control system is currently under development, there’s even a button to switch between different trial algorithms on the fly. Very cool!

Oh yeah, and [Alex] points out the fire extinguisher on-board. He had occasion to use it for his hybrid motorcycle V1. Safety first!