Playing Tetris On An Oscilloscope

April 26, 2014 by James Hobson 13 Comments

Have engineers stopped putting Easter eggs into technology lately? It’s always been a fun way to connect with your more advanced customer base (i.e. hackers) — anyway, here’s a great Easter egg you can find on the Hewlett Packard 54600B Oscilloscop — Tetris!

[RaffttaM] discovered this trick when a coworker let him know that one of the oscilloscopes in the lab had the hidden feature. A little fiddling later and a game of Tetris was revealed. If you press the Print/Utility button on the 54600B oscilloscope, followed by pressing the second and third button below the screen at the same time, you can launch the game!

Another cool embedded Easter egg is in the Game Boy Printer — If you hold the feed button during power up it spits out a Mario themed image! One of our readers even managed to hack the printer to show the Hack a Day Logo instead!

Do you know of any more modern tech with cool (and sneaky!) Easter eggs? Let us know by sending in a tip!

[Thanks Gregory!]

3D Printing Homes In Less Than 24 Hours Using Recycled Materials

April 26, 2014 by James Hobson 46 Comments

While many 3D printer companies are racing towards smaller and smaller accurate printers, a company in China called the Shanghai WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Company is experimenting with a monstrous 3D printer the size of half of an Olympic sized swimming pool.

The mammoth of a printer measures 32m by 10m by 6.6m and can print 200sqf detached single story homes. The printer uses FDM technology and deposits a mixture of cement and construction waste to build the walls. According to the company, it can cost less than $5000 a house, and the printer can spit out 10 houses a day!

The printer was designed a few years ago, and WinSun purchased the parts for it from overseas, and then had it assembled in a factory in Suzhou. They plan to print an entire villa of these homes, and to start building recycling facilities in China to collect material for use in the printer. The first home for sale will be located in Qingdao.

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A H-Bridge Motor Controller Tutorial Makes It Simple To Understand

April 25, 2014 by James Hobson 13 Comments

hbridge tutorial

[Afroninja] is back with another great tutorial on basic electronics. This time around he’s explaining H-Bridge motor controllers and how they work!

Even if you don’t have much (or any) experience with basic electrical circuits, [Afroninja] explains the concept of an H-Bridge motor controller in a clear, concise and easy way to understand. So what’s an H-Bridge anyway? For any project using DC motors, if you want to be able to spin up the motor in either direction, you’re going to need a method to power the motor in two different configurations, i.e. you’re going to have to swap the polarity some how.

The easiest way of doing this is with an H-Bridge. It’s called an H-Bridge… because it’s shaped like an H, with the motor in the very middle. It allows both polarities to control the motor — however if you do it with just plain old switches or relays, you could short the circuit if you try going in both directions at once! To solve this, [Afroninja] explains how to poka-yoke (Japanese term for Idiot-Proof) the circuit, by using transistors which will sink the voltage if you try to abuse the circuit.

It’s a 5 minute video and well worth the watch — stick around after the break to learn more!

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Interactive LED Beer Pong Table Has More Features Than You Can Shake A Stick At

April 25, 2014 by James Hobson 10 Comments

LED Beer Pong

Holy cow. The amount of detail and functionality that went into this Interactive LED Beer Pong Table is absolutely incredible.

The table features 384 individually controlled RGB LEDs, covered with a 2′ x 8′ Lexan sheet to protect them from spills. Each cup holder (pod) contains an additional 4 RGB LEDs and an IR sensor that can detect whether or not the cup is in place — if it is removed, the IR sensor triggers an animation on either the 32 x 12 LED grid across the middle of the table or the other pods.

The rings of LEDs on the outside edge act as VU meters and pulse to the music in different animation patterns. What is really impressive is that [Jeff] also included a ping pong ball washer — A water reservoir connects under the table between the two LED rings at either end. When you put the ball into one, it gets sucked underneath and pops out the other side clean!

You seriously have to see the video of this thing in action.

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3D Printed Hydrofoil Boat RC Flies

April 25, 2014 by James Hobson 20 Comments

hydrofoil boat

[Wersy] has been trying out different designs for 3D printed RC boats — his latest is a hydrofoil!

He’s using a high power RC plane out-runner motor, which he found is simply… too powerful. It would cause his first boat to flip and sink if he opened the throttle up too much! To counter this — and make full use of his motor — he’s made new two boats; a hydrofoil, and a dual-hulled air(?) boat.

He based the hydrofoil’s profile off of NACA 63-412, a typical profile for sailboat hydro foils like the Moth. What he found was it’s still extremely difficult to get the right balance between the pitch of the wings, and the throttle output to hit a steady condition for driving smoothly. It works, but it will still needs a few more iterations!

His other solution, a quasi-jet engine-dual-hulled-boat is pretty fun too — he’s 3D printed a large impeller for his motor, and strapped it in between two of his boats! It’s quite a bit more stable to drive, and looks pretty unique!

Stick around after the break to see both of them in action.

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HexDrake — A Low Cost 2-DOF Hexapod

April 24, 2014 by James Hobson 6 Comments

hexdrake low cost hexapod

[David’s] been making robots since he was 16. After conquering the basics, he wanted to build something a bit more interesting than a simple wheeled-robot — he wanted to buy a hexapod but they were too expensive — so he decided to design his own low-cost version!

It’s made out of hand-cut wood, SG90 servos, an Arduino and a 16-channel servo controller. A 2.4GHz remote control sends commands to the Arduino which then communicates to the USC servo controller, allowing for intricate control of the 14 servos that make up the HexDrake.

He’s also added a few LED arrays for the eyes of his robot, which in the future will be animated to give expression to his little hexapod.

It’s an extremely well built little bot, and [David’s] made a very in-depth Instructable for anyone who would like to follow in his footsteps. Stick around after the break to see it scurry around!

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Sphere Morphing Hexabot Takes On The Wilderness

April 24, 2014 by James Hobson 16 Comments

[Zenta’s] sphere morphing hexabot, the MorpHex, continues to impress us. He’s just released a video showing it off — by having it roll down a hill!

We’ve been following the MorpHex since 2011, and it really is an amazing project — especially when it started to roll around on its own! In this latest update, [Zenta] was trying to get a good outdoor test video, as he’s never seen a hexapod robot roll down a hill. The video (and rolling) goes smoothly until about 3 minutes 36 seconds in, when the MorpHex experiences a catastrophic inner body servo failure!

Surprisingly, it didn’t fail during its tumble down the hill, but when it was just walking around afterwards. [Zenta] attributes it to a poor quality servo and had bad feelings about it breaking previously. Not fixing it earlier resulted in having to spend 10 hours of his Easter holiday taking Morphex apart and repairing it! Just goes to show… don’t wait until it’s too late to fix something!

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