Get In Over Your Head!

June 17, 2023 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

When you talk to hackers who’ve just finished an epic project, they’ll often start off with a very familiar refrain: “I had no idea what I was getting into.” And maybe they’ll even follow up with the traditional second line “If I knew how hard this was going to be, I probably wouldn’t have tried.” And that’s from people who have just finished wiping the sweat from their brow.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes you do get in over your head and take on more than you can chew. But let’s be honest, how often does that really happen relative to how many projects end up looking easy at first, and then end up teaching you a lot along the way, often the hard way? If you’re like me, the latter happens more than the former, and I don’t think I’m particularly clever.

Instead, it’s just the nature of learning. In the beginning, you don’t know something, so you don’t realize how difficult it is, hence the first classic line. And of course it’s going to be hard, because learning is always hard. If you knew it already, it would be easier, but it wouldn’t be learning!

Whether you get through or not depends on your own stubbornness and of course the nature of the hurdles. But whether you learn or not depends entirely on you not knowing what you’re doing in the first place.

Pay good attention to the second line in the post-hack couplet, and heed its advice. Starting off on something that you don’t already know how to do provides you with a fearlessness, and the courage to try something that you might not have otherwise dared. It’s good to get in over your head sometimes. That’s where you learn, and those are the audacious projects that end up being the most successful.

Or they end up as horrendous failures, but we’re crossing our fingers for you. Be brave! And if you can’t be brave, be incompletely informed.

Software Driving Hardware

June 3, 2023 by Elliot Williams 69 Comments

We were talking about [Christopher Barnatt]’s very insightful analysis of what the future holds for the Raspberry Pi single board computers on the Podcast. On the one hand, they’re becoming such competent computers that they are beginning to compete with lightweight desktop machines, instead of just being a hacker curiosity.

On the other hand, especially given the shortage and the increase in price that has come with the Pi’s expanding memory endowments, a lot of people who would “just throw in a Raspberry Pi” are starting to think more carefully about their options. Five years ago, this would have meant looking into what you could whip together on an Arduino-based platform, either on actual Arduino hardware or on an ESP8266 or similar, but that’s a very different beast from a programmer’s perspective. Working with microcontrollers used to be very different from working with even the smallest Linux machines.

These days, there is no shortage of microcontrollers that have enough memory – both flash and RAM – to support a higher-level environment like MicroPython. And if you think about it, MicroPython brings to the microcontrollers a lot of what people were using a Raspberry Pi for in projects anyway: a friendly interactive programming environment that was free of the compile-here, flash-there debug cycle. If you’re happy coding Python on a single-board Linux computer, you’ll be more or less happy coding in MicroPython or Circuit Python on a microcontroller.

And what this leaves us with, as hackers, is a fantastic spectrum of choices. Where before there was a hard edge between programming C on an 8-bit PIC or an AVR and working with something that had a full Linux operating system like a Pi, it’s all blurry now. And as the Pis, the Jetson, and all the other Linux SBCs are blurring the boundary with more traditional computers as they all become more competent and gain more computer-like peripherals. Nowadays your choice is much freer, and the hardware landscape more fluid. You don’t have to let software development concerns drive your hardware choices, and we think that’s a great thing.

Hackaday Prize 2023: This Challenge Makes It So Easy Being Green

May 31, 2023 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

This year’s Hackaday Prize is our first nice round number – number ten! We thought it would be great to look back on the history of the Prize and cherry-pick our favorite themes from the past. Last year’s entire theme was sustainable hacking, and we challenged you to come up with ways to generate or save power, keep existing gear out of the landfill, find clever ways to encourage recycling or build devices to monitor the environment and keep communities safer during weather disasters, and you all came through. Now we’re asking you to do it again.

There are hundreds of ways that we can all go a little bit lighter on this planet, and our Green Hacks Challenge encourages you to make them real. Whether you want to focus on clean energy, smarter recycling, preventing waste, or even cleaning up the messes that we leave behind, every drop of oil left unburned or gadget kept out of the landfill helps keep our world running a little cleaner. Here’s your chance to hack for the planet.

Inspiration

One thing we really loved about last year’s Green Hacks was that it encouraged people to think outside the box. For instance, we got some solar power projects as you’d expect, but we also got a few really interesting wind power entries, ranging from the superbly polished 3D Printed Portable Wind Turbine that won the Grand Prize to the experimental kite turbine in Energy Independence While Travelling, to say nothing of the offbeat research project toward making a Moss Microbial Fuel Cell.

3D Printed Portable Wind Turbine

Moss Microbial Fuel Cell

Energy Independence While Travelling

Plastic was also in the air last year, as we saw a number of projects to reuse and recycle this abundant element of our waste stream. From a Plastic Scanner that uses simple spectroscopy to determine what type of plastic you’re looking at, to filament recyclers and trash-based 3D printers to make use of shredded plastic chips.

Polyformer

The Trash Printer – Version 3

Plastic Scanner

Finally, you all really put the science into citizen science with projects like OpenDendrometer that helps monitor a single tree’s health, and the Crop Water Stress Sensor that does the same for a whole field. Bees didn’t get left out of the data collection party either, with the Beehive Monitoring and Tracking project. And [Andrew Thaler]’s tremendously practical Ocean Sensing for Everyone: The OpenCTD brought the basics of oceanic environmental monitoring down to an affordable level.

OpenDendrometer

Crop Water Stress Sensor

Beehive Monitoring and Tracking

Ocean Sensing for Everyone: The OpenCTD

Now It’s Your Turn to be Green

If any of the above resonates with your project goals, it’s time to put them into action! Start up a new project over on Hackaday.io, enter it into the Prize, and you’re on your way. Ten finalists will receive $500 and be eligible to win the Grand Prizes ranging from $5,000 to $50,000. But you’ve only got until Tuesday, July 4th to enter, so don’t sleep.

As always, we’d like to thank our sponsors in the Hackaday Prize, Supplyframe and DigiKey, but we’d also like to thank Protolabs for sponsoring the Green Hacks challenge specifically, and for donating a $5,000 manufacturing grant for one finalist. Maybe that could be you?

Mangle Videos With RecurBOY And A Raspberry Pi Zero

May 28, 2023 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

You used to need a lot of equipment to be a video DJ. Now you can do it all with a Raspberry Pi Zero and [cyberboy666]’s recurBOY. And if you missed out on the 1970’s video-editing psychedelia, now’s your chance to catch up – recurBOY is a modern video synth with all of the bells and whistles, and it’ll fit in your pocket. Check out [cyberboy666]’s demo video if you don’t yet know what you’re getting into. (Embedded below.)

RecurBOY has four modes: video, shader, effects, and external input, and each of these is significantly cooler than the previous. Video mode plays videos straight off of the SD card through the recurBOY’s composite video out. Shader mode lets you program your own shaders using the GLES shader dialect for resource-constrained devices. And this is where the various knobs and buttons come in. You can program the various shader routines to read any of the pots as input, allowing you to tweak the graphics demos on the fly.

Effects mode overlays your shaders on the video that’s playing, and external mode allows you to plug in a USB video capture card or a webcam so you can do all that same mangling with a live camera feed. And these two modes are where it gets awesome. The shader effects in the demo video cover all of the analog classics – including bloom and RGB separation – but also some distinctly digital effects. And again, you can tweak them all live with the knobs. Or plug in a MIDI controller and control it all externally. What hasn’t he thought of?

Old school analog video effects are really fun, and recurBOY brings them to you with the flexibility of modern shader coding. What’s not to love? If you want to see the pinnacle of the pre-digital era, that would be the Scanimate. For a video synth that integrates with your audio synth, check out Hypno. And if glitching the video is more your style, you can hijack the RAM of a VGA/composite converter.

Trippy, man!

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Minecraft In Minecraft On The CHUNGUS II

May 27, 2023 by Elliot Williams 16 Comments

Minecraft is a simple video game. Well, it’s a simple video game that also has within it the ability to create all of the logic components that you’d need to build a computer. And building CPUs in Minecraft is by now a long-standing tradition.

Enter CHUNGUS II. The Computational Humongous Unconventional Number and Graphics Unit by [Sammyuri] is the biggest and baddest Minecraft computer that we’ve ever seen. So big, in fact, that it was finally reasonable to think about porting a stripped-down version of Minecraft to the computer itself. Yes, that’s right, Minecraft running in Minecraft. (Video embedded below.) Writing the compiler and programming the game brought two more hackers to the party, [Uwerta] and [StackDoubleFlow], and quite honestly, we’re amazed that a team as small as three people pulled this off.

Anyway, once you’ve picked your jaw up off the floor, also check out [Sammyuri]’s video on just the CHUNGUS II computer itself. (Also embedded below.) Seeing the architecture is interesting, even if you don’t speak Redstone as fluently as our heroes here. We love that the assembler creates a block of ROM – out of Minecraft blocks – that you can then cut/paste into the game’s reality.

For a “simple” game about breaking blocks and punching trees, Minecraft has inspired hackers to make the game better both inside and outside of the real world. For instance, for the latest in performant open-source Minecraft servers, check out Folia. Maybe, one day, they’ll build CHUNGUS II in the real world. It could happen.

Thanks [dbcdr] for the tip!

Continue reading “Minecraft In Minecraft On The CHUNGUS II” →

Hack Simple

May 27, 2023 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

Here at Hackaday, we definitely love to celebrate the hard hacks: the insane feats of reverse engineering, the physics-defying flights of fancy, or the abuse of cutting edge technology. But today I’d like to raise a rhetorical glass in tribute of the simple hacks. Because, to be perfectly honest, the vast majority of my hacks are simple hacks, and it’s probably the same for you too. And these often go unsung because, well, they’re simple. But that doesn’t mean that something simple can’t be helpful.

Case in point: an ESP8266 press-buttons device that we featured this week. It doesn’t do much. It’s main feature is that it connects to a home automation network over WiFi and enables you to flip three relays. Wires coming off the board are to be soldered to the not-yet-smart device in question, simply connected to each side of the button you’d like to press. In the example, a coffee machine was turned on and the “go” button pressed, automating one of the most essential kitchen rituals. While recording the podcast, I realized that I’ve built essentially this device and have it controlling our house’s heating furnace.

For the experienced hacker, there’s not much here. It’s a simple board design, the software heavily leverages ESPHome, so there’s not much work on that front either. But imagine that you lacked any of the wide-ranging skills that it takes to make such a device: PCB layout, ESP8266 software wrangling, or the nuances of designing with relays. You could just as easily build this device wrong as right. The startup costs are non-trivial.

Making a simple design like this available to the public isn’t a technical flex, and it’s not contributing to the cutting edge. But it just might be giving someone their first taste of DIY home automation, and a sweet taste of success. There’s not much easier than finding a switch and soldering on two wires, but if that’s the spark that pushes them on their path to greater hacks, that’s awesome. And even if it doesn’t, at least it’s another appliance under user control, connected to a private WiFi network rather than spying you out and phoning home to Big Toaster.

So here’s to the simple hacks!

How Far Can An EULA Go?

May 20, 2023 by Elliot Williams 70 Comments

We read this news with mixed glee and horror: a company called Telly is giving TVs away, for the low price of having to live with an always-on advertisement bar and some pretty stringent terms and conditions. Break the terms, and they’ll repossess your TV. If you don’t give them the TV, they have your credit card on record and they think the set is worth $1,000.

The hacker in me sees free hardware, so I checked out the terms and conditions, and it doesn’t look good. They’ve explicitly ruled out opening up or physically modifying the device, and it has to continually have WiFi – for which you pay, naturally. It sounds like it could easily tell if you try to tamper with it. My next thought was, perhaps too cynically, to get one, put it in the closet, and wait for the company to go bankrupt. Because you know that business model isn’t going to last.

But it’s clear that they’ve seen through me. The most bizarre clause is that you have to “Use the Product as the primary television in Your household”. Now, we’re not lawyers, but it seems like an amazing stretch that they can tell you how intensively you are to use the product. Can you imagine a license with a keyboard that demanded that you only use it to write sci-fi novels, or that you have to use it more than any other keyboard?

Nope. Too many hoops to jump through for a silly free TV. You can keep your dystopian future.