Bike Saddle As Workshop Stool

October 12, 2016 by Jenny List 37 Comments

It is not uncommon for parts from a particular hobby or pursuit to be repurposed by enthusiasts as furniture. Car nuts will make sofas from the rear bodywork of a saloon car, for example, or coffee tables from engine blocks as you might have seen in the Top Gear studio.

A cycling enthusiast asked [Quinn Dunki] to produce a workshop stool using a bicycle seat, and the resulting piece of furniture is both elegant and functional, if probably comfortable only to those used to a racing saddle.

The stool itself rests on a vertical tube with a tripod at the bottom, each leg of which is fitted with a caster. We are taken through the steps to make the metalwork, in particular the rather tricky 45 degree tubular joint required for each leg. We see the unexpectedly high forces above the casters cracking the initial tack welds, and the resulting more substantial joint. And finally we’re treated to the stool being elegantly modelled by Sprocket the cat, as you can see below the break.

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An Easy Home Made Electroadhesive

October 12, 2016 by Jenny List 16 Comments

There was a time when if you wanted to scale a wall you had to turn a camera on its side and call [Adam West] or [Lionel Ritchie]. Unless you were a gecko, that is. Their host of tiny bristles and intramolecular forces allow them to run up walls and across the ceiling with ease.

You may have seen synthetic gecko-like adhesive surfaces using the same effect. Some impressive wall-climbing robots have used these materials, though they’ve all shared the same problem. Gecko adhesion can’t be turned off. Happily, for the robot wall climber unwilling to expend the extra force to detach a foot there is an alternative approach. Electroadhesives use electrostatic force to attach a plate held at a high potential to a surface, and today’s featured video is [Carter Hurd]’s home-made electroadhesive panel (YouTube).

He cites this paper and this description of the technology as the influences on his design, two aluminium foil electrodes sandwiched between plastic sheet and sticky tape. He applies 6kV from an Emco DC to DC converter to his plates, and as if by magic it sticks to his drywall. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that, he tried several surfaces before finding the one it stuck to. Adhesion is fully under control, and such a simple device performs surprisingly well. The Emco converters are sadly not cheap, but they are an extremely efficient product for which he only needs a few AA cells on the low voltage side.

His full description is in the video below the break.

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Reverse Engineering The Internet Of Coffee

October 11, 2016 by Jenny List 14 Comments

The public promise of the Internet Of Things from years ago when the first journalists discovered the idea and strove to make it comprehensible to the masses was that your kitchen appliances would be internet-connected and somehow this would make our lives better. Fridges would have screens, we were told, and would magically order more bacon when supplies ran low.

A decade or so later some fridges have screens, but the real boom in IoT applications has not been in such consumer-visible applications. Most of your appliances are still just as unencumbered by connectivity as they were twenty years ago, and that Red Dwarf talking toaster that Lives Only To Toast is still fortunately in the realm of fiction.

The market hasn’t been devoid of IoT kitchen appliances though. One is the Smarter Coffee coffee machine, a network-connected coffeemaker that is controlled from an app. [Simone Margaritelli] bought one, though while he loved the coffee he really wasn’t keen on its not having a console application. He thus set about creating one, starting with reverse engineering its protocol by disassembling the Android version of its app.

What he found was sadly not an implementation of RFC 2324, instead it uses a very simple byte string to issue commands with parameters such as coffee strength. There is no security, and he could even trigger a firmware upgrade. The app requires a registration and login, though this appears to only be used for gathering statistics. His coffee application can thus command all the machine’s capabilities from his terminal, and he can enjoy a drink without reaching for an app.

On the face of it you might think that the machine’s lack of security might not matter as it is on a private network behind a firewall. But it represents yet another example of a worrying trend in IoT devices for completely ignoring security. If someone can reach it, the machine is an open book and the possibility for mischief far exceeds merely pranking its owner with a hundred doppio espressos. We have recently seen the first widely publicised DDoS attack using IoT devices, it’s time manufacturers started taking this threat seriously.

If the prospect of coffee hacks interests you, take a look at our previous coverage.

[via /r/homeautomation]

Self-Driving R/C Car Uses An Intel NUC

October 10, 2016 by Jenny List 21 Comments

Self-driving cars are something we are continually told will be the Next Big Thing. It’s nothing new, we’ve seen several decades of periodic demonstrations of the technology as it has evolved. Now we have real prototype cars on real roads rather than test tracks, and though they are billion-dollar research vehicles from organisations with deep pockets and a long view it is starting to seem that this is a technology we have a real chance of seeing at a consumer level.

A self-driving car may seem as though it is beyond the abilities of a Hackaday reader, but while it might be difficult to produce safe collision avoidance of a full-sized car on public roads it’s certainly not impossible to produce something with a little more modest capabilities. [Jaimyn Mayer] and [Kendrick Tan] have done just that, creating a self-driving R/C car that can follow a complex road pattern without human intervention.

The NUC's-eye view. The green line is a human's steering, the blue line the computed steering. — The NUC’s-eye view. The green line is a human’s steering, the blue line the computed steering.

Unexpectedly they have eschewed the many ARM-based boards as the brains of the unit, instead going for an Intel NUC mini-PC powered by a Core i5 as the brains of the unit. It’s powered by a laptop battery bank, and takes input from a webcam. Direction and throttle can be computed by the NUC and sent to an Arduino which handles the car control. There is also a radio control channel allowing the car to be switched from autonomous to human controlled to emergency stop modes.

They go into detail on the polarizing and neutral density filters they used with their webcam, something that may make interesting reading for anyone interested in machine vision. All their code is open source, and can be found linked from their write-up. Meanwhile the video below the break shows their machine on their test circuit, completing it with varying levels of success.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Raspberry Pi Zero Smart Glass

October 8, 2016 by Jenny List 4 Comments

Some of the more interesting consumer hardware devices of recent years have been smart glasses. Devices like Google Glass or Snapchat Spectacles, eyewear incorporating a display and computing power to deliver information or provide augmented reality on an unobtrusive wearable platform.

Raspberry Pi Zero Smart Glass aims to provide an entry into this world, with image recognition and OCR text recognition in a pair of glasses courtesy of a Raspberry Pi Zero. Unusually though it does not take the display option of other devices of having a mirror or prism in the user’s field of view, instead it replaces the user’s entire field of view with a display and re-connects them to the world through the Raspberry Pi camera.

The display in question is an inexpensive set of “3D Virtual Stereo Digital Video glasses”, of the type that can be found fairly easily on your favourite auction site. They aren’t particularly high-resolution, but the Pi can easily drive them with its composite video output. The electronics and camera are mounted on a headband, in a custom 3D-printed enclosure. All files can be downloaded from the project page.

There is some Python software, but it’s fair to say that there is not a clear demo on the project page showing it working. However this is no reason to disregard this project, because even if its software has yet to achieve its full potential there is value elsewhere. The 3D-printed Raspberry Pi enclosure should be of use to many other similar wearable projects, and we’d almost say it’s worthy of a project all of its own.

Wireless Trivia Game Buzzers Using HopeRF RFM69

October 8, 2016 by Jenny List 2 Comments

TV game shows follow a formula that hasn’t changed much in sixty years. The celebrity presenter, the glamorous assistant, the catch phrases, the gaudy plywood sets, the nervous contestants, and of course the buzzers.

If you want to do a trivia quiz of your own it’s easy enough to dispense with presenter, assistant, set, and catch phrase, but as well as the contestants you’ll still need the buzzers. You can make a mess of wires that the TV technicians of old would have concealed within that set, but in your home or at the pub that could rapidly become inconvenient.

[Larry] solved his trivia game buzzer problems by building a wireless buzzer set. It features 3D printed enclosures containing Adafruit Feather microcontrollers, and instead of wires it uses RFM69 900MHz radio modules. The master unit displays the quickest contestant on an OLED screen, it features a low power standby mode between button presses to save battery power, and care has been taken to add a random timing to button presses to try to avoid collisions.

The buttons themselves started with a 3D printed button working a single tactile switch, but moved to a set of three switches in a triangle after edge presses failed to activate the single switch.

We’ve featured a wired game show buzzer before, but for the complete game show experience how about this countdown timer?

Hackaday Prize Entry: Vendotron

October 7, 2016 by Jenny List 11 Comments

A recurring idea in hackspaces worldwide seems to be that of the vending machine for parts. Need An Arduino, an ESP8266, or a motor controller? No problem, just buy one from the machine!

Most such machines are surplus from the food and drink vending industry, so it’s not unusual to be able to buy an Arduino from a machine emblazoned with the logo of a popular chocolate bar. These machines can, however, be expensive to buy second-hand, and will normally require some work to bring into operation.

A vending machine is not inherently a complex machine nor is it difficult to build when you have the resources of a hackspace behind you. [Mike Machado] is doing just that, building the Vendotron, a carousel vending machine constructed from laser cut plywood and MDF. The whole thing is controlled by an Arduino, with the carousel belt-driven from a stepper motor.

It’s not doing anything commercial vending machines haven’t been doing for years, except maybe having a software interface that allows phone and Bitcoin payments. Where this project scores though is in showing that a vending machine need not be expensive or difficult to build, and broadening access to them for any hackspace that wants one.

We’ve had a few vending machines here before, like this feature on the prototyping process for commercial machines, or even this one that Tweets. Sadly few have a secret button to deliver a free soda though.