There’s a new embedded hacking tool on the scene that gives you an interactive Python interface for a speedy chip on a board with oodles of GPIO, the ability to masquerade as different USB devices, and a legacy of tricks up its sleeve. This is the GreatFET, the successor to the much loved GoodFET.
I first heard this board was close to launch almost a year ago and asked for an early look. When shipping began at the end of April, they sent me one. Let’s dig in for a hands-on review of the GreatFET from Great Scott Gadgets.
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams dish their favorite hacks from the past week. Seems like everyone is trying to mill their own Mac Pro grille and we love seeing how they go about it. Elliot is gaga over a quintet of power latching circuits, Mike goes crazy for a dough sheeter project, and we dig through the news behind methane on Mars, the Raspberry Pi 4 release, and spoofing Presidential text alerts with SDR. If you like mini-keyboards you need to see the Fauxberry, Artificial Intelligence became an art critic this week, and poorly-lit rooms have been solved with a massive mirror system.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
And note: next week we’re taking a break to go outside and shoot off some 4th of July fireworks, so there will be no podcast and you’ve got some time to listen through our 24 previous episodes for anything you’ve missed. You’ll hear from us again the week after.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys wade through the fun hacks of the week. Looks like Google got caught ripping off song lyrics (how they got caught is the hack) and electric cars are getting artificially noisier. We look at 3D Printing directly from used plastic, and building a loom with many hundreds of 3D printed parts. The Sound Blaster 1.0 lives again thanks to some (well-explained) reverse engineered circuitry. Your smartphone is about to get a lot more buttons that work without any extra electronics, and we’ll finish things up with brass etching and downloadable nuclear reactor plans.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
We’re on the lookout for the most interesting connected projects, things that communicate wirelessly to do something clever. Show us your creations and you can win the Connected World contest.
We’ll pick the top 20 entries based on your creativity, execution, functionality, and how well you tell the backstory. Each will receive a free PCB coupon for up to $50 from OSH Park. Additionally, we’ll award the title of Best Project, Best Aesthetic, Best Documentation, and Best Media to four entries and give each a $100 Tindie gift card.
Don’t delay, put your project up on Hackaday.io and use the dropdown box on the left sidebar to enter it in the Connected World contest.
The twenty projects that won this year’s Hackaday Prize bootstrap competition have just been certified. The purpose of this is to help great examples of early entries offset the cost that goes into prototyping as they work on their projects throughout the summer.
We know this has had a big impact on entries in the past. When working on hard projects it’s easy to doubt yourself, but you can usually get over that with just a bit of outside validation. Alex Williams encountered this when he first entered his Open Source Under Water Glider into the 2017 Hackaday Prize. He wanted to show off his work but didn’t think there’d be much interest and wasn’t sure if he’d continue development. He was shocked by the number of people who were excited about it, continued working feverishly on it, and went on to win the grand prize.
You’ll find all 20 bootstrap winners listed below, but we wanted to feature a couple of examples to show the kind of work that is happening during the Hackady Prize. The results of the bootstrap competition have no bearing on the top prizes: they are all still up for grabs, so enter your project today!
Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams talk news and great hacks from the past seven days. Sad word this week as Maker Media, the company behind Make Magazine and Maker Faire, have closed their doors. There seems to be a lot of news about broken hardware and software to discuss, with ADS-B problems grounding hundreds of flights in the US, Hackaday itself having a site outage, the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ can be bricked with a really easy mistake, and Lewin wrote a great overview of the Takata airbag debacle. Don’t worry there are still plenty of hacks as we look at old computers that sing, microcontrollers that chiptune, beat boxes that are actually boxes, and some very neat cartridge hacks for NES and Arduboy.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Back in the day, all of your music was on a shelf (or in milk crates) and the act of choosing what to listen to was a tangible one. [Michael Teeuw] appreciates the power of having music on demand, but misses that physical aspect when it comes time to “put something on”. His solution is a hardware controller that he calls MusicCubes.
Music cube makes selection using RFID, and touching to the right raises the volume level
This is a multi-part project, but the most recent rework is what catches our eye. The system uses cubes with RFID tags in them for each album. This part of the controller works like a charm, just set the cube in a recessed part of the controller — like Superman’s crystals in his fortress of solitude — and the system knows you’ve made your decision. But the touch controls for volume didn’t work as well. Occasionally they would read a false touch, which ends up muting the system after an hour or so. His investigations led to the discovery that the capacitive touch plates themselves needed to be smaller.
Before resorting to a hardware fix, [Michael] tried to filter out the false positives in software. This was only somewhat successful so his next attempt was to cut the large touch pads into four plates, and only react when two plates register a press at one time.
He’s using an MPR121 capacitive touch sensor which has inputs for up to 12-keys so it was no problem to make this change work with the existing hardware. Surprisingly, once he had four pads for each sensor the false-positives completely stopped. The system is now rock-solid without the need to filter for two of this sub-pads being activated at once. Has anyone else experienced problems with large plates as the touch sensors? Can this be filtered easily or is [Michael’s] solution the common way to proceed? Share your own capacitive touch sensor tips in the comments below!
Want to get a look at the entire project? Start with step one, which includes a table of contents for the other build logs.
