2022 Hackaday Supercon Speakers Will Inspire You

October 4, 2022 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

The return of Supercon is taking place in just a month. We’ve got 45 fantastic talks and workshops planned for the three-day weekend, and they are as varied and inspiring as the Hackaday community itself. From molecules to military connectors, here’s an even dozen talks to whet your appetite.

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops over the next couple weeks. Supercon will sell out so get your tickets now before it’s too late. And stay tuned for the next round of talk reveals next week! Continue reading “2022 Hackaday Supercon Speakers Will Inspire You” →

Unintentional Emissions

October 1, 2022 by Elliot Williams 40 Comments

First, it was the WiFi router: my ancient WRT54G that had given me nearly two decades service. Something finally gave out in the 2.4 GHz circuitry, and it would WiFi no more. Before my tears could dry, our thermometer went on the fritz. It’s one of those outdoor jobbies that transmits the temperature to an indoor receiver. After that, the remote for our office lights stopped working, but it was long overdue for a battery change.

Meanwhile, my wife had ordered a new outdoor thermometer, and it too was having trouble keeping a link. Quality control these days! Then, my DIY coffee roaster fired up once without any provocation. This thing has worked quasi-reliably for ten years, and I know the hardware and firmware as if I had built them myself – there was no way one of my own tremendously sophisticated creations would be faulty. (That’s a joke, folks.) And then the last straw: the batteries in the office light remote tested good.

We definitely had a poltergeist, a radio poltergeist. And the root cause would turn out to be one of those old chestnuts from the early days of CMOS ICs – never leave an input floating that should have a defined logic level. Let me explain.

The WRT54G was the hub of my own home automation system, an accretion of ESP8266 and other devices that all happily speak MQTT to each other. When it went down, none of the little WiFi nodes could boot up right. One of them, described by yours truly in this video, is an ESP8266 connected to a 433 MHz radio transmitter. Now it gets interesting – the thermometers and the coffee roaster and the office lights all run on 433 MHz.

Here’s how it went down. The WiFi-to-433 bridge failed to connect to the WiFi and errored out before the part of the code where it initialized GPIO pins. The 433 MHz transmitter was powered, but its digital input was left flopping in the breeze, causing it to spit out random data all the time, with a pretty decent antenna. This jammed everything in the house, and apparently even once came up with the command to turn on the coffee roaster, entirely by chance. Anyway, unplugging the bridge fixed everything.

This was a fun one to troubleshoot, if only because it crossed so many different devices at different times, some homebrew and some commercial, and all on different control systems. Until I put it together that everything on 433 MHz was failing, I hadn’t even thought of it as one event. And then it turns out to be a digital electronics classic – the dangling input!

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the ride. And spill some copper for the humble pull-down resistor.

Honor Your Hacker Heroes

September 24, 2022 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

We recently ran an article on a sweet percussion device made by minimal-hardware-synth-madman [Gijs Gieskes]. Basically, it amplifies up an analog meter movement and plays it by slamming it into the end stops. Rhythmically, and in stereo. It’s got that lovely thud, plus the ringing of the springs. It takes what is normally a sign that something’s horribly wrong and makes a soundtrack out of it. I love it.

[Gijs] has been making electro-mechanical musical hacks for about as long as I’ve been reading Hackaday, if not longer. We’ve written up no fewer than 22 of his projects, and the first one on record is from 2005: an LSDJ-based hardware sequencer. All of his projects are simple, but each one has a tremendously clever idea at its core that comes from a deep appreciation of everything going on around us. Have you noticed that VU meters make a particular twang when they hit the walls? Sure you have. Have you built a percussion instrument out of it? [Gijs] has!

Maybe it’s a small realization, and it’s not going to change the world by itself, but I’ve rebuilt more than a couple projects from [Gijs]’ repertoire, and each one has made my life more fun. And if you’re a regular Hackaday reader, you’ve probably seen hundreds or thousands of similar little awesome ideas played out, and maybe even taken some of them on as your own as well. When they accumulate up, I believe they can change the world, at least in the sense of filling up a geek’s life. I hope that feeling comes across when we write up a project. Those of you out there hacking, we salute you!

Who Is Responsible For Your Safety?

September 10, 2022 by Elliot Williams 182 Comments

We recently posted a video where some ingenious metal-shop hackers made a simple jig to create zig-zag oil grooves on the inside of a cylinder, and the comment section went wild. What ensued was a flood of complaints that the video displayed unsafe shop practices, from lack of safety glasses to wearing flip-flops while operating a lathe.

Where the comments went off the rails were people asking Hackaday to remove our discussion of the video, because the commenters thought that we were somehow implicitly encouraging open-toed footwear in the presence of machine tools. We certainly weren’t! We wanted you all to see the clever machining hack, and be inspired to build your own. We figure that you’ve got the safety angle covered.

Now don’t get me wrong – there were safety choices made in the video that I would not personally make. But it also wasn’t my shop and I wasn’t operating the machines. And you know who is ultimately responsible for the safety in my basement shop? Me! And guess who is responsible for safety in your shop.

But of course, none of us know everything about every possible hazard. (Heck, I wrote just that a few weeks ago!) So while we’re sympathetic with the “that’s not safe!” crew, we’re not going to censor inspiring hacks just because something done along the way wasn’t done in the way we would do it. Instead, it’s our job, in the comment section as in Real Life™, to help each other out and share our good safety tips when we can.

You’ll see some crazy stuff in videos, and none of it is to be repeated without thinking. And if you do see something dodgy, by all means point it out, and mention how you would do it better. Turn the negative example around for good, rather than calling for its removal. Use the opportunity to help, rather than hide.

But also remember that when the chips are flying toward your personal eyeballs, it’s up to you to have glasses on. We all do potentially hazardous things all the time, and it’s best to be thinking about the risks and their mitigation. So stay safe out there. Keep on learning and keep on hacking!

Why You’ve Never Heard About Nintendo’s U-Force

September 5, 2022 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

90’s kids think that the Power Glove was the coolest game peripheral of the epoch. We might have thought so too, until we heard about Don’t Touch: The Story of the U-Force from [The Gaming Historian].

The device itself folded up like a laptop, and on the two surfaces had four IR LED/sensor pairs. All of these combined would localize your fist in space for playing Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, or would work with various other passive controller add-ons like a flight yoke for playing Top Gun. (One of the coolest bits is the flip-out IR reflectors triggered by the buttons in the yoke.)

All-in-all, the video’s take is that a number of factors doomed the U-Force to play second fiddle to the Power Glove. Battling Mattel’s marketing prowess is obvious, but other things like manufacturing problems due to bad hinges and inconsistent IR sensors delayed release and added cost. In the end, though, [Dave Capper], the U-Force’s inventor, puts it down simply to non-convincing gameplay. There were no blockbuster games that used it to its full potential.

At the time, the U-Force utilized more IR LEDs than any other consumer electronic device.

We think there’s interesting hacker potential in a simple interface like this. Perhaps its biggest Achilles heel outside of the lack of a killer application was the fact that it required calibration. We can imagine all sorts of awesome interactions, and we’re not afraid of a little tweaking. Or maybe we would update the sensors to something more modern, like those inexpensive time-of-flight distance units.

Thanks [Karl Koscher] for bringing this documentary to our attention in the comments about the very similarly interesting laser theremin project we featured last year. It’s definitely opened our eyes to an old interaction of the past that would seem no less magical today.

Continue reading “Why You’ve Never Heard About Nintendo’s U-Force” →

Streamlining The Toolchain

September 3, 2022 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

Sometimes I try to do something magical, and it works. Most of the time this happens because other people have done a good part of the work for me, and shared it. I just cobble a bunch of existing tools into a flow that fits my needs. But the sum of all the parts is often less than the whole, when too many of the steps involve human intervention. Tools made for people simply keep the people in the loop.

For instance, I wanted to take a drawing that my son made into a stamp, by way of a CNC machine and whatever scrap wood we have kicking around in the basement. It’s easy enough, really. Take the photo, maybe use a little tweaking in GIMP to get the levels right, export it into Inkscape for the line detection and maybe even make the GCode right there, or take it off to any convenient SVG-to-GCode tool.

While this works straight out of the box for me, it turns out that’s because I have experience with all of the sub-tools. First, it helps a lot if you get the exposure right in the first place, and that’s not trivial when your camera’s light meter is aiming for grey, but the drawing is on white paper. Knowing this, you could set it up to always overexpose, I guess.

Still, there’s some experience needed in post-processing. If you haven’t played around with both image processing and image editing software, you don’t know how they’re going to interact. And finally, there are more parameters to tweak to get the CNC milling done than a beginner should have to decide.

In short, I had a toolchain up and running in a jiffy, and that’s a success. But in terms of passing it on to my son, it was a failure because he would have to learn way too many sub-tools to make it work for him. Bummer. I’m left wondering if I can streamline all of the parts to work together well enough, or whether I’m simply needed in the loop.