Neat Soldering Station Design Has Workshop & Portable Versions

October 5, 2023 by Richard Baguley 15 Comments

The warm and rather stinky heart of any hacker’s lair is the soldering station, where the PCB meets the metal (solder). A good soldering station lets you get on with the business of building stuff without worrying about piffling details like temperature and remembering to turn the thing off. The AxxSolder is a neat design from [AxxAxx] that fulfills these criteria, as it includes full PID control of the iron and an auto sleep feature. It will run from any DC power source from 9 to 26 Volts, so you can run it off your bench power supply and have one less thing to plug in. There is even a portable version for those on-the-go hackathons.

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Life-Sized Rock’em Sock’em Robot Will Definitely Knock Your Block Off

October 3, 2023 by Richard Baguley 2 Comments

He knocked his block off! That’s what [Zach] of Byte Sized Engineering is planning on saying when he completes this Rock’em Sock’em Robots replica. The twist? His replica is going to be life-sized. The original game involved two players, each controlling a robot that could punch and block with two lever-driven arms. [Zach] is looking to scale that up to human sized, but with a few interesting technical additions.

This build might be a bit large to be driven by a small child, so for the punching action [Zach] is using a four-bar linkage moved by a pneumatic cylinder. After some modelling, he decided on a 16mm bore and 100mm stroke cylinder that should provide a good, quick pneumatic action, but without putting so much force in that it destroys the whole thing. The aim is to knock his block off, not to permanently remove his block and take someone else’s block with it. This first video details his first prototype of the arm and the first set of tests, with later videos hopefully getting more into the mechanism and technical details of the build. We’d also like to see (hint, hint [Zach]) some of the files and code to follow up with.

Bonus fact: as older Brits may tell you, the game was marketed for some time there under the name “Raving Bonkers“, with the robots renamed as Basher Bonker and Biffer Bonker. The name didn’t catch on, and they changed back to the Rock’em Sock’em robots name. Ask someone in the UK these days if they want to play raving bonkers with your basher, and you will probably get your own block knocked off. Video below the break. Continue reading “Life-Sized Rock’em Sock’em Robot Will Definitely Knock Your Block Off” →

Computer Space Replica Is Up And Running

October 2, 2023 by Richard Baguley 8 Comments

You never forget your first time — watching someone pour several quid’s worth of 10p pieces into a Space Invader machine in 1978, upsetting for a youngster who wanted to have a turn. We’re still waiting, but [Alston] has found an interesting way to get around those arcade video game hoggers by building a replica of Computer Space, the first commercial arcade video game.

Released in 1971, the groundbreaking game was designed by gaming legends [Nolan Bushnell] and [Ted Dabney], and came in a striking curvy fiberglass case that was molded by a manufacturer of swimming pools. [Alston] hasn’t built the case yet, but he does have the electronics up and running.

The electronics of Computer Space are interesting, because there is no microprocessor in there. Instead, it is built from discrete components. [Nolan] had originally planned to use a mini computer called the Data General Nova 800. However, he realized that he could make it cheaper by building it out of discrete components. As [Nolan] described it in an oral history at the Smithsonian [PDF link], the idea came to him after a post-Thanksgiving dinner nap:

“Screw the minicomputer. Get rid of it. Do it all in hardware. Make the game out of this collection, just make it a simple state machine. And the minute that happened, it was like knife through butter. Not only did I get the cost down, but what was budgeted for $1,500 worth of minicomputer, the whole damn computer cost me less than $300 in glue parts. So, I knew that I had something.”

That decision makes it an interesting project to build a replica. Although you can emulate it on a modern computer easily (there is even a version that runs in CSS in the browser). [Alston] is going the hard route, building replica PCBs and using the same components where possible, helped by people who have documented it. So far, the boards are and running and displaying a grainy, pixelated image on a portable TV.

The next step is to take the replica electronics box he has built and make a cabinet to put it into. That’s a big project, and [Alston] is looking for someone with an original cabinet that he can examine and document.

String Art Build Uses CNC To Make Stringy Art

September 27, 2023 by Richard Baguley 12 Comments

String art is as old as, well, string and something to hang it from. But, like most things, it gets more enjoyable when you involve a CNC. [Paul MH] went the whole hog with this build, creating a CNC string art builder that could handle the whole process, from placing the nails to running the string.

It’s an impressive build: you feed in an image, and the system calculates the location of the pins and the path that the string will need to follow. It then puts the nails into the board, pushes them in, and, with a custom attachment for the CNC, runs the string to create the art.

Of course, the path to this was filled with prototypes, failures, and dead ends. [Paul] has laid these out pretty well in the video for the project, which he just released. In this, problems like detecting when the nails are picked up and placed are detailed, and the prototypes and Rube Goldberg solutions that [Paul] came up with are covered.

Like all great projects, it is still a work in progress, but [Paul] has made some impressive progress, although he hasn’t posted the code and models for his custom parts yet. We’ve featured several string art builds, from polar platforms to fully formed commercial-grade builds that print your work for you.

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3D Printed Robot Wants To Be Your Pet

September 21, 2023 by Richard Baguley 1 Comment

Robots are cool. Robots you build yourself are cooler, especially ones that use stuff you have lying around already. Snoopy is a new open-source robot that uses an Arduino as a brain but with a 3D printed body and a short list of parts that can probably be sourced from the junk drawer. It’s still being developed, but it looks like a cool project heading in the right direction to produce an interesting robot.

It’s based on a new robot software platform called Kaia.ai that is built on top of the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2), but with a more friendly and beginner-focused interface. Currently, the Snoopy project includes enough to get up and running with a printed frame and the electronics to install an Arduino running ROS2 that controls it. That’s an excellent place to start if you want to get into robotics, but without diving straight into the technical challenges of working with real-time operating systems.

It is also interesting that the previous project from the creator (called Kiddo) fell into the complexity trap, where you keep adding features and create an overly complex design that is a pain to build. Hopefully the designers have learned from Kiddo and will keep Snoopy simple.

We’ve covered plenty of other robot projects here at Hackaday, from ones that venture into nuclear reactors to ones that write your thank-you notes for you or give you hugs. We’ve even looked at how to give your robots a personality. Combine all those together with Snoopy and you could build a hugging, compassionate robot that has nice handwriting and can repair a nuclear reactor. And if you do, write it up and send it to our tips line!

Open Source Tracker Keeps An Eye On Furry Friends

September 19, 2023 by Richard Baguley 49 Comments

Most of the time, you’ll know where your cats are — asleep on the bed about 23.5 hours a day and eating or pooping the rest of the time. But some cats are more active than others, so there’s commercial options for those who want to keep tabs on their pet. Unfortunately, [Sahas Chitlange] didn’t like any of them, so he designed and built his own open source version: FindMyCat.io.

The system is in two parts: a module that fits onto a cat collar, and a home station that, well, stays at home. It offers a variety of tracking modes. In home mode, the home station signals the collar every 10 seconds, which stays in a deep sleep most of the time. If the collar doesn’t get a signal from the home station, it switches to ping mode, where it will wait for a signal from the FindMyCat over the LTE-M connection and report its location.

Finally, the app can set the collar to Lost Kitteh mode, where the collar will send a location to the app every seven minutes or thirty seconds. The collar also supports a direction-finding feature, using the ultra wideband (UWB) feature of recent Apple iPhones to point you in the direction and distance of the tracked cat.

The collar is built around a Nordic Semiconductor NRF-9160, a System in a Package (SiP) that does most of the heavy lifting as it includes GPS, an LTE-M modem, and an ARM processor. One interesting feature here: [Sahas] doesn’t make his antennas on the PCB, but instead uses an Ignion NN03-310, an off-the-shelf antenna that is already qualified for LTE-M use. That means this system can be connected to almost any LTE-M network without getting yelled at for using unqualified hardware and making the local cell towers explode.

The collar also includes a DWM3001CDK ultrawideband (UWB) module used for the locator feature. The accompanying app uses this and Apple’s UWB support to show the user which direction the cat is in, and how far away it is. The app isn’t in the Apple App Store yet, so you’ll need to sign up for an Apple Developer account to use it. We’d love to hear from anyone who takes it for a test drive with their own pet.

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Helping Robots Learn By Letting Them Fail

September 17, 2023 by Richard Baguley 12 Comments

The [MIT Technology Review] has just released its annual list of the top innovators under the age of 35, and there are some interesting people on this list of the annoyingly accomplished at a young age. Like [Lerrel Pinto], an associate professor of computer science at NY University. His work focuses on teaching robots how to do things in the home by failing.

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