Author: Jenny List

3291 Articles

Flexible PCB Becomes The Actuator

July 29, 2018 by 13 Comments

An electromagnetic coil gun takes a line of electromagnets working together to form a moving electromagnetic field. These fields accelerate a project and boom, you have electricity moving matter, often at an impressive rate of speed.

[Carl Bugeja] has taken the idea and in a sense turned it upon its head with his flexible PCB actuator. Now the line of electromagnets are the moving part and the magnetic object the stationary one. There is still a line of flat PCB inductors in the classic coil gun configuration, but as the title suggests on a flexible substrate.

The result is a curiously organic motion reminiscent of some lizards, caterpillars, or snakes. It can move over the magnet in a loop, or flex in the air above it. It’s a novel moving part, and he’s treated us to a video which we’ve placed below the break.

He has plans to put it to use in some form of robot, though while it certainly has promise we’d be interested to know both what force it can produce and whether flexible PCB is robust enough for repeated operation. We salute him for taking a simple idea and so effectively proving the concept.

We’ve brought you [Carl]’s work before, most notably with his PCB motor.

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The Apocalypse Bicycle

July 28, 2018 by 66 Comments

It seems to be a perennial among humans, the tendency among some to expect the End Times. Whether it was mediaeval Europeans who prepared for a Biblical Armageddon at the first sight of an astronomical phenomenon, 19th-century religious sects busy expecting a Noah’s flood, cold-war survivalists with bunkers under the lawn, or modern-day preppers buying survival gear, we have a weakness for thinking that Time’s Up even when history shows us repeatedly that it isn’t. Popular culture has even told us that the post-apocalyptic world will be kinda cool, with Mad Max-style rusty-looking jacked-up muscle cars and Tina Turner belting out ballads, but the truth is likely to be a lot less attractive. Getting away from danger at faster than walking pace as a starving refugee would likely be a life-or-death struggle without the industrial supply chain that keeps our 21st-century luxury cars on the road, so something more practical would be called for.

[Don Scott] has written a paper describing an extremely straightforward solution to the problem of post-apocalyptic transport, which he calls the Apocalypse Bicycle. As you might expect it’s a two-wheeler, though it’s not the kind of machine on which you’d lead a break-away from the Tour de France peloton. Instead this is a bicycle pared down to its minimum,, without advanced materials and with everything chosen for durability and reliability. Bearings would have grease nipples, for instance, the chain would be completely enclosed for better retention of lubrication, and the wheels would be designed to have strips of salvaged tyre attached to them. Interestingly, the machine would also be designed not to attract attention, with muted matte colours, and no chrome. It occurs to us that many of the durability features of this machine are also those that appear on the rental bicycles owned by bike sharing companies that have been spread liberally on the streets of many cities.

You might wonder what use the idea might have, and why a prepper might consider one alongside their tins of survival rations. But it’s also worth considering that these machines have a real application in the here-and-now, rather than just an imagined one in an apocalyptic future. Many Hackaday readers are fortunate enough to live in countries unaffected by wars or natural disasters, but there are plenty of places today where an aid agency dropping in a load of these machines could save lives.

Apocalyptic cycling has featured little here. But we have brought you at least one bike made from wood.

Become The Rockstar Developer You’ve Always Dreamed Of Being

July 28, 2018 by 6 Comments

If you have ever worked in software-related industries, the chances are that the word “Rockstar” will elicit a visceral reaction. It’s a word used by a Certain Type Of Manager for an elite software developer who’s so 1337 they don’t play by the rules of ordinary mortals. In reality it’s use is invariably an indication of trouble ahead, either from clueless startups or troublesome rockstar developers making a toxic atmosphere for the mere members of the backing band. Hackaday has a team that brings together a huge breadth of experience, and we’ve been there.

Would you like to be a rockstar developer, but without the heartache? No silly incentives, or even guitars required! [Dylan Beattie] can help, because he’s come up with a specification for the Rockstar programming language, a Turing-complete programming language whose syntax follows the conventions of 1980s rock power ballads. Of course, it’s a joke, and an excuse of some “Certified Rockstar Developer” laptop stickers, but it’s also an entertaining journey into lyrical language and compiler parsing, and the discovery that yes indeed, a singable set of classic rock lyrics can also be a compilable program.

Our particular favourite comes from the scheme used to represent numbers, as sentences in which a decimal is built from the lengths of the sentence words, and poetic licence can be employed to the fullest. The example is

 My dreams were ice. A life unfulfilled; wakin' everybody up, taking booze and pills

which line of code places the value 3.1415926535 into a variable called “my dreams”.

There does not appear to be a working Rockstar compiler at the time of writing, but we are sure that the amazing community of Rockstar developers will shortly create one. And we would be hugely disappointed were we not to hear some performative coding from spandex-clad guitar-wielding developers as a result. After all, how else will they get their work noticed!

Esoteric languages have featured before here, but they have usually been far more challenging ones.

The $4 Z80 Single-Board Computer, Evolved.

July 28, 2018 by 33 Comments

We feature hundreds of projects here at Hackaday, and once they have passed by our front page and disappeared into our archives we often have no opportunity to return to them and see how they developed. Sometimes of course they are one-off builds, other times they wither as their creator loses interest, but just occasionally they develop and evolve into something rather interesting.

One that is taking that final trajectory is [Just4Fun]’s Z80-MBC, a single board computer with only 4 ICs, using an Atmel microcontroller to simulate the Z80 support chips. It has appeared as a revised version, on a smart new PCB rather than its original breadboard, and with built-in SD card and RTC support through readily available breakout boards, and banked RAM for CP/M support. You may remember the original from last year, when it was also a Hackaday Prize entry and stage finalist. From a Hackaday perspective this is particularly interesting, because it shows how the Prize can help a project evolve.

The Atmega32A uses the Arduino bootloader with programming through the ICSP port, and full instructions are given in the hackaday.io project page alongside all the files required to build your own board. There is no mention of whether boards can be bought, but we’d say this could be a commercial-quality product if they chose to take it in that direction.

Why Have Only One Radio, When You Can Have Two?

July 28, 2018 by 4 Comments

There are a multitude of radio shields for the Arduino and similar platforms, but they so often only support one protocol, manufacturer, or frequency band. [Jan Gromeš] was vexed by this in a project he saw, so decided to create a shield capable of supporting multiple different types. And because more is so often better, he also gave it space for not one, but two different radio modules. He calls the resulting Swiss Army Knife of Arduino radio shields the Kite, and he’s shared everything needed for one on a hackaday.io page and a GitHub repository.

Supported so far are ESP8266 modules, HC-05 Bluetooth modules, RFM69 FSK/OOK modules, SX127x series LoRa modules including SX1272, SX1276 and SX1278, XBee modules (S2B), and he claims that more are in development. Since some of those operate in very similar frequency bands it would be interesting to note whether any adverse effects come from their use in close proximity. We suspect there won’t be because the protocols involved are designed to be resilient, but there is nothing like a real-world example to prove it.

This project is unique, so we’re struggling to find previous Hackaday features of analogous ones. We have however looked at an overview of choosing the right wireless tech.

Share Bike Surrenders Its Secrets To A Teardown

July 27, 2018 by 67 Comments

If you are fortunate enough to live in a tiny settlement of no significance then perhaps you will be a stranger to bike sharing services. In many cities, these businesses have peppered the streets with bicycles secured by electronic locks for which the “open sesame” command comes through a Bluetooth connection and an app, and it’s fair to say they have become something of a menace. Where this is being written there are several competing brands of dubious market viability, to take a trip across town is to dodge hundreds of them abandoned across pavements, and every one of our waterways seems to sport one as jetsam courtesy of our ever-creative late-night drunks.

However annoying they might be, these bikes are electronic devices, and it’s thus interesting to read a teardown of one courtesy of [Electric Dreams]. The bike in question is in Australia and comes from Ofo, and it is very much worth pointing out that it is their property and prying it open is almost certainly a crime.

The bike itself is a fairly unexciting and rugged, with the electronics sitting in a module incorporating a back wheel lock sitting somewhere above where the rear brake might be. Inside is a custom board with GPS, GSM, and Bluetooth, and unexpectedly for an Aussie bike, a Netherlands SIM. Underneath the board is a motor and gearbox to activate the lock, but none of these parts are unexpected. The interesting angle of us comes from the power source, which is a D-sized lithium thionyl chloride cell, a primary cell rather than the expected rechargeable. These cells have a huge energy capacity, but at the expense of a truly nasty electrolyte and a high internal resistance which means they are limited to delivering tiny currents lest they explode.  To power the radios and motor in the Ofo, the designer has added a supercapacitor which presumably charges slowly and can then dump the required power when needed.

So bike share bikes have no great surprises in their electronics but a minor one in their power source. Curiosity sated, no need for anyone else to break the law for another look. It’s interesting to see a large lithium thionyl chloride cell in the wild, and it would be even more interesting to know whether Ofo get good life from them. Maybe our commenters will know. Or perhaps someone should ask the Feds.

Thanks [xtra] for the tip.

A BCD Wristwatch You’d Want To Wear

July 24, 2018 by 4 Comments

Timepieces are a staple of Hackaday, we have featured so many of them over the years that for us to become really excited by a fresh one it must be particularly special. The days when simply breaking out the Nixies was enough are long past.

So this binary wristwatch project by [Sverd Industries] definitely caught our eye. Not for being particularly novel, after all binary LED clocks are not in themselves hard, but for the exceptionally high quality of its construction. It’s a simple enough design, with a real-time clock chip and an ATmega328 in its most power-sipping mode on a circular PCB with an array of LEDs as the display, and all contained within a 3D-printed shell.

This design has real quality, the discrete components are tucked underneath the board leaving the  ICs on the top with only the LEDs for company. The glass front is glued into place, and the shell is professionally 3D-printed. Power comes from a single CR2032, and to save battery life the LEDs are only activated by the press of a concealed button. We would wear this watch. For that matter, you would wear this watch. Take a look at the video below the break, and we’re sure you’ll agree. Looks like a few are even available over on Tindie.

This isn’t the first binary watch we’ve featured, so it’s tough to pick a comparison. This very low BoM example might lack some of the polish of the one presented here, but it has the same ability to catch our eye.

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