Author: Navarre Bartz

306 Articles

A diagram showing an LED on the left, a lever-style plumbing valve in the center, and an Arduino Uno on the right.

Plumbing Valves As Heavy Duty Analog Inputs

October 24, 2022 by 36 Comments

Input devices that can handle rough and tumble environments aren’t nearly as varied as their more fragile siblings. [Alastair Aitchison] has devised a brilliant way of detecting inputs from plumbing valves that opens up another option. (YouTube) [via Arduino Blog]

While [Aitchison] could’ve run the plumbing valves with water inside and detected flow, he decided the more elegant solution would be to use photosensors and an LED to simplify the system. This avoids the added cost of a pump and flow sensors as well as the questionable proposition of mixing electronics and water. By analyzing the change in light intensity as the valve closes or opens, you can take input for a range of values or set a threshold for an on/off condition.

[Aitchison] designed these for an escape room, but we can see them being great for museums, amusement parks, or even for (train) simulators. He says one of the main reasons he picked plumbing valves was for their aesthetics. Industrial switches and arcade buttons have their place, but certainly aren’t the best fit in some situations, especially if you’re going for a period feel. Plus, since the sensor itself doesn’t have any moving parts, these analog inputs will be easy to repair should anything happen to the valve itself.

If you’re looking for more unusual inputs, check out the winners of our Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals contest or this typewriter that runs Linux.

Continue reading “Plumbing Valves As Heavy Duty Analog Inputs” →

A widescreen slate-style cyberdeck with a small keyboard sits in front of a cassette deck stereo. Headphones sit to the left of the deck and an old Casio calculator watch is to the right.

2022 Cyberdeck Contest: QAZ Personal Terminal

October 22, 2022 by 9 Comments

The slabtop form factor has had a resurgence in the cyberdeck community, and [Greg Leo] has designed the QAZ Personal Terminal to be about as small as a slabtop could be while still having full-sized keys.

Since the device is using a 35% QAZ keyboard as its primary input device, [Leo] has helpfully given a quick overview of how text is input in the video below. Coupled with that surprisingly popular 4:1 LCD screen we’ve seen elsewhere, this cyberdeck looks like a modern interpretation of a TRS-80 Model 100. The Banana Pi powering the QAZ Personal Terminal is running Debian with spectrwm, a tiling window manager making arranging windows a breeze with either a mouse or keyboard. The integrated mouse layer on the keyboard means you don’t need a separate mouse at all if you don’t want to spoil the 1980s mobile chic.

[Leo] has another video all about doing calculus on this cyberdeck with the math shortcuts integrated into the keyboard. Fractions, exponents, and common Greek letters are demonstrated. We can see this being a really great note-taking device for engineering and math courses if you wanted something more portable than a laptop.

It’s hard to get very far hacking without a little math. For more math-focused input devices, check out the Mathboard or the MCM/70.

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An ortholinear keyboard with predominantly blank white keycaps. There are two red keycaps on the bottom outside corners. The center of the keyboard houses a large LCD in portrait orientation on a red PCB.

2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Keezyboost40 Is A Cyberdeck Masquerading As A Keyboard

October 20, 2022 by 5 Comments

There’s something to be said for über-powerful cyberdecks, but there’s also a certain appeal to less powerful decks squeezed into a tiny form factor. [Christian Lo] has designed a cyberdeck that looks like a simple ortholinear keyboard but is running a more flexible environment.

There are games and animations you can play on QMK, but [Lo] felt that a different framework would give him more flexibility to really stretch the limits of what this Raspberry Pi Pico-powered deck could do. He decided to go with a Rust-based firmware with the keyberon library and says, “it felt like I was in control of the firmware.” While the board is using Rust for now, [Lo] says he’s open to conversations about other firmware options to achieve his goals, like a virtual pet game for the board.

The PCB is described as “bog standard” with the possible exception of placing the Pi in a cutout on the board to keep things as low profile as possible. The trade-off comes in the form of reduced board rigidity and potentially increased strain on the connections to the microcontroller.

Looking for more cool cyberdecks? Check out the Winners of the 2022 Cyberdeck Contest or go see all the entries on the Contest Page.
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An exploded diagram of the spot welder. Shown are the capacitor bank, trigger, 12 V relay, DC power input, power out, step up converter, voltmeter, industrial SCR module, and capacitor bank.

Hackaday Prize 2022: A Not-So-Smart Spot Welder

October 17, 2022 by 5 Comments

DIY spot welders often use high-powered components that can be a bit frightening, given the potential for dangerous malfunctions. [Wojciech “Adalbert” J.] designed his capacitive discharge spot welder to be safe, easy to build, and forego the microcontroller.

Many projects work great with just a single Li-ion cell, but when you need more power, you’ve got to start connecting more cells together into a battery. [Wojciech]’s spot welder is designed to be just powerful enough to weld nickel tabs onto a cell without any overkill. The capacitor bank uses nineteen Nichicon UBY 7500uF/35V capacitors, all wired in parallel using solder wick saturated with solder. They sit atop on a perfboard with metallicized holes to carry the high current.

[Wojciech] has detailed every step of building the welder, including changes to the off-the-shelf relay board and adding a potentiometer to the step-up converter board. The level of detail makes this seem like a good starting place if you’re hoping to hop into the world of DIY spot welders. Safe is always a relative term when dealing with high powered devices, so be careful if you do attempt this build!

DIY spot welders have graced these digital pages many times, including this one built with safety in mind, and this other one that was decidedly not.

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A left-hand side unit of a split keyboard. The keys are black with RGB lighting and the key legends are displayed on small OLED screens in each key.

Poly Keyboard Has Screens In Every Key

October 17, 2022 by 18 Comments

Aspiring polyglots can be stymied by differing keyboard layouts and character sets when switching between languages. [Thomas Pollak]’s Poly Keyboard circumvents this problem by putting a screen in every key of the keyboard.

In his extensive build logs, [Pollak] details the different challenges he’s faced while bringing this amazing keyboard to life. For example, the OLED screens need glyph rendering to handle the legends on the keys. Since the goal is true universal language support, he used the Adafruit-GFX Library as a beginning and was able to extend support to Japanese, Korean, and Arabic so far in his custom fork of QMK.

The attention to detail on this build is really impressive. Beside the dedication to full glyph support, [Pollak] has measured the amount of extra force the flex cables from the OLEDs add to the actuation of the keyswitches. For the Gateron yellow switch he tested, the difference was about 62.2 g versus the initial 49.7 g.

In case you’re thinking you’ve seen other screen keyboard projects, [Pollak] includes a roundup of similar projects in his logs as well. This isn’t the first keyboard we’ve seen here at Hackaday with an OLED on top of a keyswitch, although [Voidstar Lab]’s MiRage only has three screen keys that were removed in a later iteration. If you’d like a more conventional fixed display in your keyboard, check out [Peng Zhihui]’s modular board with an e-ink display and haptic feedback knob.

Continue reading “Poly Keyboard Has Screens In Every Key” →

A small keyboard form factor retrocomputer with blue keys on a black background sits in front of a display and a LEGO model of the Space Shuttle. There are a number of jumper wires and a breadboard coming from an open panel on the right side of the machine.

Aqua PCB Is A Big Upgrade For The Mattel Aquarius

October 15, 2022 by 9 Comments

In case you weren’t around in the 80s, or you happened to blink, you may have missed the Mattel Aquarius computer. [Nick Bild] has a soft spot in his heart for the machine though and built the Aqua cartridge to make the Aquarius into a more usable machine.

Originally equipped with a mere 4 KB of RAM and a small, rubbery keyboard, it’s not too surprising that the Aquarius only lasted five months on the market. [Nick] decided on the cartridge slot to beef up the specs of this little machine given the small number of expansion ports on the device. Adding 32 KB of RAM certainly gives it a boost, and he also designed an SD card interface called Aqua Write that connects to the Aqua cartridge for easily transferring files from a more modern machine.

The Aqua Write uses an Arduino Mega 2560 to handle moving data between the SD card and the system’s memory. This is complicated somewhat because a “PLA sits between the Z80 and data bus that XORs data with a software lock code (initialized to a random value on startup).” [Nick] gets around this by running a small program to overwrite the lock code to zero after startup.

Getting data on and off retrocomputers can certainly be a challenge. If you’re trying to get files on or off another old machine, check out this Simple Universal Modem or consider Using a Raspberry Pi as a Virtual Floppy Drive.

A futuristic bed headboard has a continuous light with a hexagonal grid overlaid on top of it that wraps around the bed, much like an ovoid MRI machine.

This Headboard Contains An Artificial Sun

October 12, 2022 by 22 Comments

Despite the proliferation of artificial lighting, humans are still highly dependent on sunlight for regulation of our circadian rhythms. Accordingly, [Sector 07] has built a futuristic headboard that can help with the waking up side of things whether you’re headed to space or just in the dead of winter.

The interior of the headboard includes custom 3D printed panels to mount the electronics and a light diffusion screen made of nylon fabric. The printed parts were all joined by “welding” the pieces with a soldering iron and extra filament. Besides the futuristic hexagon motif in the diffusion screen, the most eye-catching part of this build is the curved ends making it look like a set piece from Star Trek: TNG. [Sector 07] was able to get the unique shape by kerf bending the plywood ends before joining them to the flat sections with dowels and wood glue.

Since this build also includes an integrated coffee maker and voice assistant, there’s a bit more going on with the electronics than you might have in a normal circadian lamp. Powering the project are two Arduino Mega boards and a SpeakUp Click that handles the voice commands. Wake-up times are controlled via a keypad, and the voice assistant, Prisma, will ask if you are awake once the 30 minute sun simulation has completed before your alarm goes off. If you don’t confirm wakefulness, Prisma will escalate alarms until the system is sure you’re awake and then will ask if you want coffee. If you want a deep dive into the system’s functionality, be sure to checkout the video after the break.

We’ve covered artificial suns before, so if you’re interested in trying to build you’re own you should check out this Hugely Bright Artificial Sun, a Sunrise Alarm Clock Mounted Above the Bed, and this Artificial Sun Via Old Satellite Dishes.

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