Katherine Scott: Earth’s Daily Photo Through 200 Cubesat Cameras

September 14, 2018 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

Every year at Supercon there is a critical mass of awesome people, and last year Sophi Kravitz was able to sneak away from the festivities for this interview with Katherine Scott. Kat was a judge for the 2017 Hackaday Prize. She specializes in computer vision, robotics, and manufacturing and was the image analytics team lead at Planet Labs when this interview was filmed.

You’re going to chuckle at the beginning of the video as Kat and Sophi recount the kind of highjinks going on at the con. In the hardware hacking area there were impromptu experiments in melting aluminum with gallium, and one of the afternoon’s organized workshop combined wood and high voltage to create lichtenberg figures. Does anyone else smell burning? Don’t forget to grab your 2018 Hackaday Superconference tickets and join in the fun this year!

Below you’ll find the interview which dives into Kat’s work with satellite imaging.

Continue reading “Katherine Scott: Earth’s Daily Photo Through 200 Cubesat Cameras” →

You Can’t Build A Roland TR-808 Because You Don’t Have Faulty Transistors

September 6, 2018 by Mike Szczys 55 Comments

That headline sounds suspect, but it is the most succinct way to explain why the Roland TR-808 drum machine has a very distinct, and difficult to replicate noise circuit. The drum machine was borne of a hack. As the Secret Life of Synthesizers explains, it was a rejected part picked up and characterized by Roland which delivers this unique auditory thumbprint.

Pictured above is the 2SC828-R, and you can still get this part. But it won’t function the same as the parts found in the original 808. The little dab of paint on the top of the transistor indicates that it was a very special subset of those rejected parts (the 2SC828-RNZ). A big batch of rejects were sold to Roland back in the 1970’s — which they then thinned out in a mysterious testing process. What was left went into the noise circuit that gave the 808 its magical sizzle. When the parts ran out, production ended as newer processes didn’t produce the same superbly flawed parts.

This is an incredible story that was highlighted in 808, a documentary premiered at SXSW back in 2015. The film is currently streaming on Amazon Prime (and to rent everywhere else) and is certainly worth your time just to grasp how seminal this drum machine has been in hip hop and several other music genres.

For modern product developers, betting your production on a batch of reject parts is just batty. But it was a very different time with a lot fewer components on the market. What worked, worked. You do have to wonder how you stumble upon the correct trait in an obscure batch of reject parts? Looks like we’ll be adding Ikutar Kakehashi’s book I Believe in Music: Life Experiences and Thoughts on the Future of Electronic Music by the Founder of the Roland Corporation to our reading list.

[via EMSL]

All The Badges Of DEF CON 26 (vol 4)

September 5, 2018 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

From a cockroach filled with LEDs, to an impressively dense 576 RGB LED display, and even a hunk of carpet, our final installment of the unofficial hardware badges at DEF CON 26 are beyond impressive. I tried to see every badge and speak to every badge maker this year. So far we’ve covered a ton of badges in volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3 of this series, and now it’s time to finish up!

If I didn’t get a chance to cover your badge in these articles, we still want to hear about it. What everyone wants is to dig into the details of these gorgeous examples of unique hardware. So post a project page for you badge on Hackaday.io, and make sure you get on the Conference Badges list that has been growing by leaps and bounds.

Continue reading “All The Badges Of DEF CON 26 (vol 4)” →

New Mooltipass Begins Development With Call For Collaborators

August 31, 2018 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

One of the most interesting aspects of our modern world is the ability to work collaboratively despite the challenges of geography and time zones. Distributed engineering is a trend which we’ve watched pick up steam over the years. One such example is the Mooltipass offline password keeper which was built by a distributed engineering team from all over the world. The project is back, and this time the goal is to add BLE to the mini version of the hardware. The call for collaborators was just posted on the project page so head over and check out how the collaboration works.

The key to the hardware is the use of a smartcard with proven encryption to store your passwords. Mooltipass is a secure interface between this card and a computer via USB. The new version will be a challenge as it introduces BLE for connectivity with smart phones. To help mitigate security risks, a second microcontroller is added to the existing design to act as a gatekeeper between the secure hardware and the BLE connection.

Mathieu Stephan is the driving force behind the Mooltipass project, which was one of the first projects on Hackaday.io and has been wildly successful in crowd funding and on Tindie. Mathieu and five other team members already have a proof of concept for the hardware. However, more collaborators are needed to help see all aspects of the project — hardware, firmware, and software — through to the end. This is a product, and in addition to building something awesome, the goal is to turn a profit.

How do you reconcile work on an Open Source project with a share of the spoils? Their plan is to log hours spent bringing the new Mooltipass to life and share the revenue using a site like colony.io. This is a tool built on the Ethereum blockchain to track contributions to open projects, assigning tokens that equate to value in the project. It’s an interesting approach and we’re excited to see how it takes shape.

You can catch up on the last few years of the Mooltipass adventure my checking out Mathieu’s talk during the 2017 Hackaday Superconference. If this article has you as excited about distributed engineer as we are, you need to check out the crew that’s building this year’s Open Hardware Summit badge!

All The Badges Of DEF CON 26 (vol 3)

August 29, 2018 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

I tried my best to see every badge and speak with every badge maker at DEF CON 26. One thing’s for sure, seeing them all was absolutely impossible this year, but I came close. Check out the great badges shown off in volume 1 and in volume 2 of this series. The game is afoot, and if you are headed to a hacker conference there’s never been a better time to build your own hardware badge — whether you build 5 or 500!

All right, let’s look at the badges!

Continue reading “All The Badges Of DEF CON 26 (vol 3)” →

Let The Musical Instrument Challenge Begin!

August 27, 2018 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

Today is the start of the Musical Instrument Challenge. This newest part of the 2018 Hackaday Prize asks you to go far beyond what we’re used to seeing from modern musical instrumentation. Twenty entries will be awarded $1,000 each and go on to compete in the final round of the Hackaday Prize.

Imagine music without the electric guitar amp, violin, two turntables and a microphone, the electric drum pad, or in the absence of autotune. Maybe that last one made you groan, but autotune is a clever use of audio manipulation and when used to augment the music (rather than just to correct off-key voices) it shows its value as a new tool for creativity.

Musicians have always been hackers. The story of Brian May’s handmade guitar — the Red Special — is one of not being able to buy it, so he built it. Unlocking emotion in the listener has always meant finding new and different ways to use sound. This is a natural motivator to re-imagine and invent new ways of doing that. That first hand-built guitar got him in the door, but iterative improvements to the tremolo bar, the pickups, and even just the mechanical engineering of the neck made it a new instrument that you’ve heard in every Queen performance since.

So what’s next? What does a brand new instrument, interface, tool, or trick look like? That’s what we want to see from this Hackaday Prize challenge. From instrument makers to the people who write software for sampling, synthesizing, sequencing, and manipulating sound, we’re looking for things that let others make music. These creations are the tools of the trade that help more people unlock their musical creativity. Show off your work by sharing all the details of your design, and demonstrate the music you can make with it.

You have until October 8th to put your entry up on Hackaday.io. The top twenty entries will each get $1,000 and go on to the finals where cash prizes of $50,000, $20,000, $15,000, $10,000, and $5,000 await.

You Can Add Wireless Charging To IPhone… Kinda

August 26, 2018 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

We could watch cellphone teardown videos all day long. There’s something pleasing about seeing how everything is packed into such a small enclosure. From the connectors, to that insidious glue, to the minuscule screws, [Scotty Allen] has a real knack for giving us a great look at the teardown process. Take a look at his latest video which attempts to add wireless charging to an iPhone. I think there’s a lot to be said for superb lighting and a formidable camera, but part of this is framing the shots just right.

Now of course we’ve taken apart our fair share of phones and there’s always that queasy “I think I’m going to break something” feeling while doing it. It’s reassuring that [Scotty] isn’t able to do things perfectly either (although he has the benefit of walking the markets for quick replacement parts). This video is a pretty honest recounting of many things going wrong.

The iPhone 6 and 7 are not meant to have wireless charging, but [Scotty’s] working with a friend named [Yeke] who created an aftermarket kit for this. The flexible PCB needs to be folded just right, and adhesive foam added (along with a magical incantation) to make it work. That’s because the add-on is a no-solder job. Above you can see it cleverly encircles one of the mating connectors and relies on mechanical pressure to make contact with the legs of that connector. Neat!

In the second half of the video [Scotty] meets up with [Yeke] to discuss the design itself. We find it interesting that [Yeke] considers his work a DIY item. Perhaps it’s merely lost in translation, but perhaps [Yeke’s] proximity to multiple flexible PCB manufacturers makes him feel that this is more like playing around for fun than product design. Any way you look at it, the ability to design something that will fit inside that crazy-tight iPhone case is both impressive and mesmerizing. Having seen some of the inductive charging hacks over the years, this is by far the cleanest way to go about it.

We caught up with [Scotty] during last year’s Supercon. We may not be able to drop everything and move to Shenzhen, but hearing about the experience is just enough to keep us wanting to!

Continue reading “You Can Add Wireless Charging To IPhone… Kinda” →