The 2022 Hackaday Supercon Is On! And The Call For Proposals Is Open

July 18, 2022 by Elliot Williams 42 Comments

After two years in remote mode, we’re very excited to announce that this year’s Hackaday Supercon will be coming back, live! Join us Nov. 4th, 5th, and 6th in sunny Pasadena, CA for three days of hacks, talks, and socializing with the Hackaday community. And we’d love to see and hear in person what you’ve been up to for the last two years – so start brainstorming what you’re going to talk about now and fill out the call for proposals.

Supercon is On!

We’ll be starting off on Friday Nov. 4th with early-bird registration, a mellow afternoon of badge-hacking and workshops, and a party to kick off the con. Saturday and Sunday will be the full enchilada: two tracks of talks, hacking stations and food set up in the alley, and workshops aplenty. (Just thinking about hacking in the alley and sharing tacos afterward again brings a tear of joy to my eye.) We’ll close up Sunday night with the 2022 Hackaday Prize Awards and a chance to demo the weekend’s badge hacking on stage.

If you haven’t ever been to a Supercon before, it’s Hackaday in real life. People bring hacks to show and share, projects to work on, and their ideas that are too big to fit in the overhead compartment anyway. The crowd is awesome. There are seasoned pros, famous YouTubers, and brand-new hackers to boot. But yet it’s not overwhelming – Supercon is too big to fit in your living room, but it’s nonetheless cozy. The folks in attendance are all fantastic and you’ll stumble into the most awesome conversations.

It’s a weekend you don’t want to miss, so start figuring out how you’re going to get to Pasadena now.

We’ll be putting tickets on sale soon, and while we can’t see into the future, they have sold out every year, so keep your eyes on Hackaday to get yours. And of course, speakers don’t need no stinking tickets. Continue reading “The 2022 Hackaday Supercon Is On! And The Call For Proposals Is Open” →

Fighting The Good Fight

July 16, 2022 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

We here at Hackaday are super-duper proponents of open source. Software, hardware, or firmware, we like to be able to see it, learn from it, modify it, and make it ourselves. Some of this is self-serving because when we can’t see how it was done, we can’t show you how it’s done. But it’s also from a deeper place than that: the belief that the world is made better by sharing and open access.

One of the pieces of open-source firmware that I have running on no fewer than three devices in my house right now is grbl – it’s a super-simple, super-reliable G-code interpreter and stepper motor controller that has stood the test of time. It’s also GPL3 licensed, which means that if you want to use the code in your project, and you modify it to match your particular machine, you have to make the modified version available for those who bought the machine to modify themselves.

So when Norbert Heinz noticed that the Ortur laser engravers were running grbl without making the code available, he wrote them a letter. They responded with “business secrets”, he informed them again of their responsibility, and they still didn’t comply. So he made a video explaining the situation.

Good news incoming! Norbert wrote in the comments that since the post hit Hackaday, they’ve taken notice over at Ortur and have gotten back in touch with him. Assuming that they’re on their way to doing the right thing, this could be a nice win for grbl and for Ortur users alike.

Inside the free software world, we all know that “free” has many meanings, but I’d bet that you don’t have to go far outside our community to find people who don’t know that “free” software can have tight usage restrictions on it. (Or maybe not – it all depends on the license that the software’s author chose.) Reading software licenses is lousy work better left for lawyers than hackers anyway, and I can no longer count how many times I’ve clicked on a EULA without combing through it.

So what Norbert did was a good deed – educating a company that used GPL software of their obligations. My gut says that Ortur had no idea what they needed to do to comply with the license, and Norbert told them, even if it required some public arm-twisting. But now, Ortur has the opportunity to make good, and hackers everywhere can customize the firmware that drives their laser engravers. Woot!

It’s probably too early to declare victory here, but consider following Norbert’s example yourself. While you can’t bring a lawsuit if you’re not the copyright owner, you can still defend your right to free software simply by explaining it politely to companies that might not know that they’re breaking the law. And when they come around, make sure you welcome them into the global open-source hive mind, because we all win. One of us!

Overwhelmed By Odd Inputs: The Contest Winners And More

July 13, 2022 by Elliot Williams 1 Comment

The Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest wrapped up last week, and our judges have been hard at work sifting through their favorite projects. And this was no easy task – we had 75 entries and so many of them were cool in their own right that all we can say is go check them all out. Really.

But we had to pick winners, not the least because Digi-Key put up three $150 gift certificates. So without further ado, here are the top three projects and as many honorable mentions as you have fingers and toes – if you don’t count your thumbs.

The Prize Winners

Keybon should be a mainstream commercial product. It’s a macro keypad with an OLED screen per key. It talks to an application on your desktop that detects the program that you currently have focused, and adapts the keypress action and the OLED labels to match. It’s a super-slick 3D-printed design to boot. It’s the dream of the Optimus Maximus, but made both DIY and significantly more reasonable as a macro pad. It’s the coolest thing to have on your desk, and it’s a big winner!

On the ridiculous side of keyboards, meet the Cree-board. [Matt] says he got the idea of using beefy COB LEDs as keycaps from the bad pun in the name, but we love the effect when you press down on the otherwise blinding light – they’re so bright that they use your entire meaty finger as a diffuser. Plus, it really does look like a keypad of sunny-side up eggs. It’s wacky, unique, and what’s not to love about that in a macropad?

Finally, [Josh EJ] turned an exercise bike into a wireless gamepad, obliterating the choice between getting fit and getting high scores by enabling both at the same time. An ESP32-turned-Bluetooth-gamepad is the brains, and he documents in detail how he hooked up a homebrew cadence sensor, used the heart-rate pads as buttons, and even added some extra controls on top. Watching clips of him pedaling his heart out in order to push the virtual pedal to the metal in GRID Autosport, we only wish he were screaming “vroooom”. Continue reading “Overwhelmed By Odd Inputs: The Contest Winners And More” →

When Is One Pixel Cooler Than Millions?

July 9, 2022 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

On vacation, we went to see a laser show – one of the old school variety that combines multiple different lasers of many different colors together into a single beam, modulates them to create different colors, and sends it bouncing off galvos to the roof of a planetarium. To a musical score, naturally.

When I was a kid, I had no idea how they worked, but laser shows were awesome. As a younger grownup hacker, and after some friends introduced me to the dark arts, I built my own setup. I now know how they work from the deepest innards out, and they are no less awesome. Nowadays, you can get a capable set of galvos and drivers for around a hundred bucks from the far east, it’s fair to say that there’s no magic left, but the awesome still remains.

RGB laser — “laser show” by Ilmicrofono Oggiono

At the same time, lasers, and laser shows, are supremely retro. The most stunning example of this hit me while tearing apart a Casio projector ages ago to extract the otherwise unobtainable brand new 455 nm blue laser diodes. There I was pulling one diode out of an array of 24 from inside the projector, and throwing away the incredibly powerful DSP processor, hacking apart the precision optical path, and pulling out the MEMS DLP mirror array with nearly a million little mirrors, to replace it with two mirrors, driven around by big old coil-of-wire electromagnets. Like a caveman.

But still, there’s something about a laser show that I’ve never seen replicated – the insane color gamut that they can produce. It is, or can be, a lot more than just the RGB that you get out of your monitor. Some of the colors you can get out of a laser (or a prism) are simply beautiful in a way that I can’t explain. I can tell you that you can get them from combining red, blue, green, cyan, and maybe even a deep purple laser.

What you get with a laser show pales in comparison to the multi-megapixel projectors in even a normal movie theater. Heck, you’ve really got one pixel. But if you move it around fast enough, and accompany it with a decent soundtrack, you’ve still got an experience that’s worth having while you still can.

[Banner image from a positively ancient RGB laser hack. We need more! Send us yours!]

GGWave Sings The Songs Of Your Data

July 6, 2022 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

We’re suckers for alternative data transmission methods, and [Georgi Gerganov]’s ggwave made us smile. At its core, it’s doing what the phone modems of old used to do – sending data encoded as different audio tones. But GGwave does this with sophistication!

It splits the data into four-bit chunks, and uses 16 different frequency offsets to represent each possible value. But for each chunk, these offsets are added to one of six different base frequencies, which allows the receiving computer to tell which chunk it’s in. It’s like a simple framing concept, and it makes the resulting data sound charmingly like R2-D2. (It also uses begin and end markers to be double-sure of the framing.) The data is also sent with error correction, so small hiccups can get repaired automatically.

What really makes ggwave shine is that it’s ported to every platform you care about: ESP32, Arduino, Linux, Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and anything that’ll run Python or JavaScript. So it’ll run in a browser. There’s even a GUI for playing around with alternative modulation schemes. Pshwew! This makes it easy for a minimalist microcontroller-based beeper button to control your desktop, or vice-versa. An ESP32 makes for an IoT-style WiFi-to-audio bridge. Write code on your cell phone, and you can broadcast it to any listening microcontroller. Whatever your use case, it’s probably covered.

Now the downside. The data rate is slow, around 64-160 bits per second, and the transmission is necessarily beepy-booopy, unless you pitch it up in to the ultrasound or use the radio-frequency HackRF demo. But maybe you want to hear when your devices are talking to each other? Or maybe you just think it’s cute? We do, but we wouldn’t want to have to transmit megabytes this way. But for a simple notification, a few bytes of data, a URL, or some configuration parameters, we can see this being a great software addition to any device that has a speaker and/or microphone.

Oh my god, check out this link from pre-history: a bootloader for the Arduino that runs on the line-in.

Continue reading “GGWave Sings The Songs Of Your Data” →

UART Can’t? Arduino CANSerial Can!

July 4, 2022 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

[Jacob Geigle] had a problem. A GPS unit and a Bluetooth-to-serial were tying up all the hardware UARTs on an AVR Arduino project. “Software serial”, I hear you say. But what if I told you [Jacob] already had the board in question sending out data over CAN bus?

[Jacob]’s sweet hack creates an arbitrary number of CAN “devices” inside the Arduino code, and can treat each one of them as its own serial data channel. The “N” in CAN stands for network, after all. The trick is to create a device ID for each desired CANSerial interface, which is done in his library using the usual Arduino setup step. A buffer takes care of storing all the different channels until they can be pushed out over the hardware CAN peripheral. On the big-computer side of things, some software listens for the different “device” enumeration IDs and assigns each a virtual serial port.

While this was a hack born of necessity, we can see it as a clever opportunity to segregate information coming from the microcontroller into different streams. Maybe a debug channel, a command channel, and a data channel? They’re virtual devices, so go nuts!

While we usually see CANbus in its native habitat – inside your car – it’s also cool to think of the uses we could put it to. For instance, controlling a 3D printer. Need a CAN refresher? We’ve got just the ticket.

[Bus photo: Malta Bus; The terminus, Valletta by John Haslam. Can photo: Paint Cans by Daniel R. Blume. Horrible visual pun: I’m afraid that’s on us. You try finding images for CANbus code!]

Fighting All That Can Go Wrong With Resin

July 4, 2022 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

[Jan Mrázek] is on a quest to make your resin 3D prints more accurate, more functional, and less failure prone. Let’s start off with his recent post on combating resin shrinkage.

When you want a part to have a 35 mm inner diameter, you probably have pretty good reasons, and when you draw a circle in your CAD software, you want a circle to come out in the real world. Resin shrinkage can put a kink in both of these plans. [Jan] identifies three culprits: resin squeezing, resin shrinkage, and exposure bleeding. And these three factors can add up in unexpected ways, so that you’ll get a small reference cube when you print it on its own, but large reference cubes when printed as a group. [Jan]’s article comes with a test piece that’ll help you diagnose what’s going on. Continue reading “Fighting All That Can Go Wrong With Resin” →