EeePC Touchscreen Retrofit

March 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

Adding touch screen capabilities to your computer is really not very expensive, but it’s a huge amount of work to get everything looking the way that it should. [Deadbird] wrote up a step-by-step guide that will help you install touch screen hardware and get your netbook put back together just like new.

The hardware comes in two parts. There’s the transparent film that covers the screen and the driver board that reads the inputs. The film itself has an adhesive layer on the back that sticks to the LCD panel. But to install it you first must remove the panel from the bezel. You’re also going to need a place to house the driver board. [Deadbird] somehow found enough room inside the case for the controller, but he had to remove the keyboard and motherboard to set it in place. This translates to a complete disassembly of your eeePC. But if you’re used to touch-sensitive devices, and have ever found yourself touching an LCD monitor and wondering why the computer is not following the link, this may be worth it to you. You can see the final product in a clip after the break.

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Building A Home Automation Mesh Network

March 19, 2011 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Ian Harris] designed a bunch of home automation for his parents using X10 hardware. He was a bit disappointed by the failure rate of the modules and the overall performance of the system so he set out to replace it with his own hardware. Lucky for use he’s documented the journey in a four-part series about mesh networks.

The hardware seen above is his test rig. He’s using a couple of Sparkfun breakout boards to develop for nrf2401a RF transceiver chips. These could be used as slave modules, with a central command device, but due to the home’s architecture wireless signals don’t propagate well from one end of the house to the other. The solution is to build a mesh network that will allow each module to act as a network node, receiving and passing on messages until they arrive at the target device. He’s trying to do this with cheap hardware, selecting the PIC 16F88 which boasts 7 KB or program memory and 368 bytes of ram. In the end it doesn’t take much code to get this running, it’s the concepts that take some time and research before you’ll be comfortable working with them.

[Thanks Oakkar7]

More Radiation Test Gear

March 19, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

This is a multifunction too for measuring radiation (translated). The measurements center around gas discharge tubes that react when ionizing particles pass through them. After reading about the counting circuit for the pair of tubes used in this handheld it’s easy to understand why these are tricky to calibrate. The handheld features a real-time clock as well as a GPS module. This way, it can not only give a readout of the radiation currently measured, but can record how much radiation exposure has accumulated over time (making this a dosimeter). An accompanying dataset records the location of the exposure. An ATmega128 drives the device, which is composed of two separate boards, a series of five navigation buttons, and a salvaged cellphone LCD for the readout. The translated page can be a bit hard to read at times, but there’s plenty of information including an abundance of schematic breakdowns with accompanying explanations of each.

This is certainly feature-rich and we think it goes way beyond the type of device that Seeed is trying to develop.

[Thanks Andrew]

Add A Shutoff Timer To Your Bathroom Fan

March 19, 2011 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

Adding this board (translated) to your bathroom fan will turn it into a smart device. It’s designed to automatically shut off the fan after it’s had some time to clear humidity from the room. It replaces the wall switch which normally controls these fans by converting the fan connection to always be connected to mains. The board draws constant power to keep the ATtiny13 running via a half-wave rectification circuit. A single LED that rises from the center of the PCB lights up to signal that the fan is in operation, but it is also used as a light sensor, similar to the LED communications hack from a couple of days ago. When the lights go on in the bathroom the microcontroller will turn on the exhaust fan via a Triac. It will remain on until the light level in the bathroom drops.

There’s an interesting timing algorithm that delays the fan startup, and varies the amount of time it will stay on in the dark depending on how long the bathroom lights were on. This way, a longer shower (which will build up more humidity) will cause the fan to remain on for the base of five minutes, plus one minute longer for every two minutes the bathroom was in use. Pretty smart, and quite useful if your bathroom sees high traffic from several family members.

Building A Zoetrope Using Kinect, Processing, And A Laser Cutter

March 19, 2011 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

A zoetrope is a device that contains a disk full with a series of images that make up and animation. A couple of different methods can be used to trick the eye into seeing a single animated image. In the past this was done by placing the images inside of a cylinder with slits at regular distances. When spun quickly, the slits appear to be stationary, with the images creating the animation. But the same effect can be accomplished using a strobe light.

The disk you see above uses the strobe method, but it’s design and construction is what caught our eye. The animated shapes were captured with a Kinect and isolated using Processing. [Greg Borenstein] takes a depth movie recorded while someone danced in front of a Kinect. He ran it through a Processing sketch and was able to isolate a set of slides that where then turned into the objects seen above using a laser cutter.

You can watch a video of this particular zoetrope after the break. But we’ve also embedded the Pixal 3D zoetrope clip which, although unrelated to this hack, is extremely interesting. Don’t have a laser cutter to try this out yourself? You could always build a zoetrope that uses a printed disk.

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Seeed Looks For Help Developing An Open Source Radiation Detector

March 18, 2011 by Mike Szczys 68 Comments

Seeed Studios, makers of the Seeeduino and fabricators of small-run PCB orders have put out a call to help develop an open source radiation detector. Will it be of any help to people in the area of Japan that is at risk? We really can’t say. But if you can lend some expertise with this, it can’t hurt. We’ve already seen a simple dosimeter project but this one sounds like it’s more on the level of a DIY Geiger counter. We know it’s possible, but the hacked together unit we saw back in 2007 had very little documentation and used parts that may be hard to come by.

The specific information needed is what type of sensor to use, what supporting circuits should be included, and what method is best to calibrate each unit. There’s a discussion going in the comment thread of that post which should be interesting to read even if you think you don’t have anything to add.

[Thanks Michael]

Junkyard Jumbotron Is Begging To For An Open Source Project Clone

March 18, 2011 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

Idle developers of the world take inspiration from this project and unite to create your own version. It’s called the Junkyard Jumbotron because it takes many different displays and allows them to be used as one big interactive display. The image above shows a collection of smartphones displaying a test pattern. The pattern is unique for each device and is used to calibrate the display. Using a digital camera, a picture of these test patterns is snapped, then sent to the server. The server calculates the position of each of the screens, then sends the correct slice of a large image back to each phone.

It’s funny that they use the word Junkyard in the name of the software. Each display needs to be able to run a web browser so you can’t just use junk displays. But one nice side effect of the hardware requirements is that you can still do things like panning and zooming as seen in the video after the break. Here’s the real question: can you make this work as an open source project? How about something that can be easily set up to work with a LAMP server?

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