Building A Tilt Rotor UAV

October 4, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

We see a lot of quadcopters, and even the occasional octocopter around here. But this build does it with just two propellers. It’s a tiltrotor build which allows the two upward-pointing propellers to tilt forward and backward. The real world equivalent of this UAV design that pops to mind is the V-22 Osprey.

The motors are mounted on a beam running perpendicular to the direction of travel. Each of them is mounted on a bearing which can be rotated by a servo motor. They rotate independently of each other, which allows for yaw. Of course roll is controlled by driving the propellers at different speeds and pitch is adjusted by tilting both mounts at the same time.

[Stephen] mentions that the tiltrotor design has several advantages over its relatives that use more than two props. This design costs less to build, uses less electricity, and makes for an easier autopilot implementation. If you want to see it in the air, don’t miss the clip after the break.

This is just the second tiltrotor build we remember seeing. The other one was a Halloween prop.

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Light Bulb Efficiency Exhibit Updated With LED Bulb Option

October 4, 2012 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

It seems like tinkerers are always being tapped to build or repair exhibit hardware. This time around it’s [Dino’s] turn. He’s been asked to alter a light bulb efficiency demo so that it includes an LED option.

The idea here is that you crank a generator to power different types of light bulbs. There’s an ammeter built in, but possibly the best feedback is knowing how hard you have to crank to illuminate the most inefficient choice. As it stands there is a toggle switch to choose between incandescent and CFL bulbs. [Dino’s] solution is to use a three-position rotary switch. He removes the toggle switch and replaces it with a socket for the LED bulb. A new location for the rotary switch is chosen and he does a bit of work to get it mounted securely. If you haven’t worked with this type of switch before he takes the time in the video after the break to explain how they work.

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Laser-etched LED Zeotrope Looks Like A Circular Monochrome Screen

October 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

The still image of this animated display really doesn’t do it justice. But you can get an idea of how this really does look like an old monochrome display. It’s actually a zeotrope made from LEDs and etched acrylic. The LEDs blink at a rate that synchronizes with the spinning acrylic to produce an animated image.

You probably already know that a zeotrope uses moving physical models to trick the eye into seeing an animation. In this case the models are etched into a piece of acrylic so that their outline glows when the material is edge-lit. Twelve pie piece shaped panes were designed in Inkscape to look like a scene from the Linux game World War IV. A stepper motor spins the ring which allows for the perfect synchronization seen in the clip after the break.

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LVDS On An FPGA Could Make It Possible To Reuse Laptops LCDs And The Like

October 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 41 Comments

Search around the Internet and you’ll find a landfill of forum threads asking how to drive the LCD screen from a dead laptop. The answer is always that there is just no way to do it. That’s because most of them use a Low-Voltage Differential Signalling protocol that just isn’t available through the hardware used in hobby projects. But the appearance of this board could signal that things are about to change. We don’t want to get your hopes up too much. This isn’t an open source project, but it is a piece of hardware that can make LVDS available for the 8, 16, and 32-bit microcontrollers you’re used to working with.

It’s a derivative of a project [Thomas Jespersen] worked on for a customer. It uses an FPGA to implement the LVDS standard used by high-pixel-count LCD displays. It contains enough memory for a full frame-buffer, and includes a Motorola-8080 communication standard. [Thomas] gives a full description of how the setup works in the video after the break. Demonstrations start about 7:30 into the video with an STM32 F4 Discovery board driving the display.

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Breadboarding With A 144-core Processor

October 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

At the center of that green PCB is a tiny little processor with way too many cores. It’s the GA144 which was taken for a test-drive on a breadboard by [Andrew Back]. We saw a multi-core Kickstarter project last month. This will cost a lot less and get you more than twice the number of cores. But as was mentioned in the comments on that post, the drawback is the programming language. This chip’s IDE uses Forth.

There is a dev board available, but [Andrew] went instead with a QFN-to-Through-Hole adapter board which he hand soldered. Once he has access to the pins the chip can be programmed with an FTDI adapter which is compatible with the 1.8V logic levels. The provided Forth IDE (arrayForth) is a Windows only program but it does run under Wine. We followed the project through to see him twiddling I/O pins. But we still have trouble thinking of applications for it. In a world of complex and inexpensive FPGA chips, what would you use this type of processor for?

Hackaday Links: October 3, 2012

October 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Cheap ergonomic mouse

If your had keeps cramping while using the computer mouse why not grab a hunk of wood and a couple of buttons to make your own ergonomic input device?

C# GUI for Arduino testing

Here’s a Windows GUI for controlling Arduino. [Rohit] put it together using C#. It should make development very simple as you have control of almost everything before you need to worry about writing your own server-side software.

Networked strip lighting replaces the office overheads

[Jeremy] got tired of replacing the halogen bulbs in his office. He upgraded to ten meters of RGB LED strips. We can’t think they do as well at lighting up the room. But he did add network control so they can flash or change colors depending on what type of alert they’re signalling.

Woven QR codes

Now that [Andrew Kieran] proved you can weave a working QR code into textiles do you think we’ll see garments that have a QR code leading to care instructions? We could never figure out what all those strange icons stood for.

World’s largest QR code in a corn maze

The world’s largest QR code was cut out of this field of corn. It’s at the Kraay Family Farm in Alberta, Canada. Gizomodo called it “Stupidly Pointless”. But we figure if it got them a world record and put their website on the front page of Giz and Hackaday they’re doing okay. Plus, we whipped out our Android and it read the QR code quite easily.

Through-hole Electroplating In Your Home Lab

October 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

For the few double-sided PCBs we’ve actually etched at home we simply soldered a piece of wire to either side of a via and clipped off the excess. But if you want to go the extra mile you can’t beat electroplated through holes. The setup seen above is an electroplating tank build from simple materials which [Bearmos] has been working on.

The two sets of copper structures are both used as anodes. Some copper water pipe (like you’d use for a refrigerator ice maker) was cut into short rods and soldered onto pieces of bus wire. The portion of the metal which will stick above the chemical bath was coated with a generous layer of hot glue. This will protect it from corrosion cause by the off-gassing during the plating process. The traces of the etched PCB act as the anodes, but the holes themselves must be conductive in order for the plating process to work. A water proof glue with powdered graphite mixed in is applied to all of the holes in the substrate. This technique is based on the huge electroplating guide published by Think & Tinker.