Desktop Weather Monitor Leaves Nothing To Chance

May 19, 2019 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

[Mirko Pavleski] has put together a little weather station for himself that combines Internet-sourced forecasts with physical sensor data to give him a complete view of his local conditions. There’s no shortage of weather applications for our smartphones and computers that will show us the current local conditions and the forecast for the next couple of days. It’s so easy to pull weather data from the various APIs out there that you even see the functionality “baked in” to different gadgets these days. Of course, you can dig through every weather API in the world and not find the temperature and humidity inside your office; for that, you need your own sensors.

[Mirko] took a somewhat unconventional approach by essentially building two totally separate weather devices and packing them into one enclosure, which gives the final device a rather unique look thanks to the contrasting display technologies used.

Local conditions are detected by an Arduino Nano connected to a BMP180 sensor and displayed on a Nokia 5110 LCD. The screen shows not only real-time temperature and barometric pressure, but the change in pressure over the last several hours. The three-day forecast, on the other hand, is provided by a NodeMCU ESP8266 development board connected to the increasingly ubiquitous 0.96 inch OLED.

If you’re not into the whole duality thing and would rather do it all on the same device, you might be interested in one of the ESP8266 weather monitors we’ve seen in the past.

Not Happy With Smart Bulbs? Make Your Own

May 19, 2019 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

The idea of the so-called “smart bulb” sounds good; who wouldn’t want to be able to verify the porch light is on if you’re out of town for the night, or check to see if you left the bathroom lights on in your rush out the door in the morning? But in practice, it can be a nightmare. Each brand wants to push their own protocol. Even worse, it seems you can’t get anything done without signing up for three different services, each with its own application that needs to be installed on your phone. It’s a frustrating and often expensive mire to find yourself in.

[Dom Gregori] liked the Hue bulbs offered by Philips, but didn’t want to buy into the whole ecosystem of phone apps and hardware hubs they require. So he decided to create his own open source version that would do everything he wanted, without any of the seemingly unavoidable baggage of the commercial offerings. The final result is a professional looking ESP8266 controlled RGB bulb that hooks into Home Assistant via MQTT.

Looking at his Bill of Materials, it’s actually pretty amazing to see how little it really takes to pull a project like this off. Outside of the Wemos D1 Mini board, [Dom] just needed a few concentric WS2812 rings, and a USB charger small enough to fit into the base of his 3D printed enclosure.

We especially like how he handled the socket-side of the bulb, as that’s the part that would have left us scratching our heads. Rather than trying to salvage the base from an existing bulb, or come up with his own printed piece to stick in the socket, he just used a cheap and readily available light socket adapter. The solution might be a little bulky, but we like how he’s deftly avoided having to handle any AC voltages in this project.

Over the last couple years, we’ve seen more and more smart bulb related content come our way. From the ever popular teardown of a new entry into the market to the sobering realization that your light bulbs might provide the key attackers need to access your network, it’s been fascinating to see the transformation of these once simple pieces of hardware into something far more complex.

Fallout Inspired Display Is Ready For The Apocalypse

May 18, 2019 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

We’ve seen more projects based on books, TV shows, movies, and video games than we could ever hope to count. Hackers and makers derive inspiration from what they see around them, and it turns out there’s considerable overlap between the folks who sit in their labs building stuff all day and the ones who spend their free time playing games or watching movies. Big surprise, right? But among them, few can match the influence of the Fallout franchise.

As the latest entry in a long line of incredible Fallout-inspired builds, we present the Octoglow VFD by [Michał Słomkowski]. While this build isn’t trying to replicate anything directly from the games, it captures all the hallmarks that make up the game’s distinctive post-apocalyptic chic : antiquated vintage components, exposed internals, and above all, a dirty, industrial look. It’s supposed to look like somebody built the stuff out of parts they found in the trash, primarily because that’s exactly what they would’ve needed to do.

So what is it? Well, that’s a little hard to nail down. Frankly we’d say it’s a little more like art than anything, but it does have some useful functions. Currently it shows the time, date, weather information, and various RSS feeds on its dual vacuum fluorescent displays. There’s also a real-life Geiger-Müller counter onboard, because what says Fallout more than a little radiation?

The build itself is absolutely fascinating, and [Michał] leaves no stone unturned in his comprehensive write-up. Every module of the Octoglow has its own page on his site, and each one is bristling with hardware details, schematics, and firmware documentation. Reading along you’ll run into all sorts of interesting side notes: like how he reverse engineered a wireless temperature sensor with his sound card, or devised his own ten-pin bus to interconnect all the modules.

If the Octoglow doesn’t quite scratch that Vault-Tec itch, there’s plenty more where that came from. How about this replica of the wall terminals from Fallout 4, or this radiation monitor perfect for roaming the wastelands? Don’t forget to bring along this 3D printed Thirst Zapper for protection.

A Cyclonic Vacuum Cleaner On A Hacker’s Budget

May 17, 2019 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

Have you ever seen a product in the store and been shocked at what the manufacturer was trying to charge for it? Since you’re reading Hackaday, we can safely assume the answer to that question; building a homebrew version of some commercial product for a fraction of its retail price is practically a rite of passage around these parts. So it’s fitting that for his entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Madaeon] submitted the “DIYson”, an open source version of a popular high-end vacuum made by a British company who’s name you can surely guess.

As [Madaeon] explains on the project’s Hackaday.io page, the idea behind “cyclonic” vacuums is not particularly complex. Essentially, with a powerful enough blower and carefully designed chamber, the incoming air will spin around so fast that dust is pulled out by centrifugal force. The trick is getting it working on a small enough scale to be a handheld device. Especially given the energy requirements for the blower motor.

Luckily for the modern hacker, we’re living in the “Golden Age” of DIY. With a 3D printer you can produce plastic components with complex geometry, and thanks to a resurgence in remote controlled aircraft, powerful motors and high capacity lithium-ion batteries are easily obtainable. Powered by what’s essentially the hardware that would go into an electric ducted fan plane, the total cost of all the electronics for the DIYson comes in right around $60 USD. Even with a roll of printer filament added to the mix, you’re still comfortably at half the cost of the “name brand” alternative.

With some refinements, [Madaeon] hopes that this open source dust-buster will be a staple of labs and hackerspaces all over the world. Judging by the performance his early prototype shows in the video after the break, we know we wouldn’t mind having one.

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Building An ESP8266 Game System With MicroPython

May 16, 2019 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

After a seemingly endless stream of projects that see the ESP8266 open doors or report the current temperature, it can be easy to forget just how powerful the little WiFi-enabled microcontroller really is. In fact, you could argue that most hackers aren’t even scratching the surface of what the hardware is actually capable of. But that’s not the case for [Brian Wagner] and his students from the Kentucky Country Day School.

Their project, the GamerGorl, is a completely custom handheld game system running on a Wemos D1 Mini development board. The team’s PCB, which was developed over several iterations, is essentially a breakout board which allows them to easily connect up peripheral devices. Given the low total component cost of the GamerGorl and relative simplicity of its construction, it looks like a phenomenal project for older STEM students.

Beyond the ESP8266 board, the GamerGorl features a SSD1106 1.3″ OLED display, a buzzer for sound effects, two tactile buttons, and an analog joystick originally intended for an Xbox controller. Around the backside there’s a WS2812B RGB LED strip that’s at least partially for decoration, but it’s also actively used in some of the games such as the team’s take on Simon.

Even if you aren’t in the market for a portable game system, the GameGorl does provide an interesting case study for MicoPython applications on the Wemos D1 Mini. Browsing through the team’s source code as well as the helpful hints that [Brian] gives about getting the software environment up and running could be useful if you’re looking to expand your ESP8266 programming repertoire. We’d also love to see this device running the “ESP Little Game Engine” we covered recently.

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An Impeccably Designed High-Speed LED Flash

May 16, 2019 by Tom Nardi 58 Comments

If you want to take a picture of something fast, and we mean really fast, you need to have a suitably rapid flash to illuminate it. A standard camera flash might be good enough to help capture kids running around the back yard at night, but it’s not going to do you much good if you’re trying to get a picture of a bullet shattering a piece of glass. For that you’ll need something that can produce microsecond flashes, allowing you to essentially “freeze” motion.

You can buy a flash that fast, but they aren’t common, and they certainly aren’t cheap. [td0g] thought he could improve on the situation by developing his own microsecond flash, and he was kind enough to not only share it with the world, but create a fantastically detailed write-up that takes us through the entire design and construction process. Even if you aren’t in the market for a hyper-fast flash for your camera, this is a fascinating look at how you can build an extremely specialized piece of gear out of relatively common hardware components.

So what goes into a fast LED flash? Rather unsurprisingly, the build starts with high-quality LEDs. After some research, [td0g] went with an even dozen CREE CXA2530 arrays at just shy of $7 USD each. Not exactly cheap, but luckily the rest of the hardware is pretty garden variety stuff, including a ATMega328P microcontroller, some MOSFETs, and a TC4452 driver. He did pack in some monstrous 400 V 10μf capacitors, but has since realized they were considerably overkill and says he would swap them out if doing it all over again.

To make development easier (and less costly, should anything go wrong), [td0g] designed the flash so that the LEDs are arranged in banks of three which can be easily removed or swapped in the 3D printed case. Each trio of LEDs is in a removable “sled” that also holds the corresponding capacitor and MOSFET. Then it was just a matter of getting the capacitors charged up and safely dumping their energy into the banks of LEDs without frying anything. Simple.

At this point, the astute reader is probably thinking that a high speed flash is worthless without an equally fast way of triggering it. You’d be right, but [td0g] already figured that part. A couple years back we covered his incredible ballistic chronometer which is being used as a sensor to fire off his new flash.

Lifelike Dinosaur Emerges From The Plumbing Aisle

May 15, 2019 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

Despite the incredible advancements in special effects technology since the film’s release, the dinosaurs in 1993’s Jurassic Park still look just as terrifying today as they did nearly 30 years ago. This has largely been attributed to the fact that the filmmakers wisely decided to use physical models in many of the close-up shots, allowing them to capture the nuances of movement which really helps sell the idea you’re looking at living creatures.

[Esmée Kramer] puts that same principle to work in her incredible articulated dinosaur costume, and by the looks of it, Steven Spielberg could have saved some money if he had his special effects team get their supplies at the Home Depot. Built out of PVC pipes and sheets of foam, her skeletal raptor moves with an unnerving level of realism. In fact, we’re almost relieved to hear she doesn’t currently have plans on skinning the creature; some things are better left to the imagination.

In her write-up on LinkedIn (apparently that’s a thing), [Esmée] explains some of the construction tricks she used to help bring her dinosaur to life, such as heating the pipes and folding them to create rotatable joints. Everything is controlled by way of thin ropes, with all the articulation points of the head mirrored on the “steering wheel” in front of her.

Now to be fair, it takes more than a bundle of PVC pipes to create a convincing dinosaur. Obviously a large part of why this project works so well is the artistry that [Esmée] demonstrates at the controls of her creation. Judging by her performance in the video after the break, we’re going to assume she’s spent a not inconsiderable amount of time stomping around the neighborhood in this contraption to perfect her moves.

In the past we’ve seen the Raspberry Pi used to upgrade life-sized animatronic dinosaurs, but even with the added processing power, those dinos don’t hold a candle to the smooth and organic motion that [Esmée] has achieved here. Just goes to show that sometimes low-tech methods can outperform the latest technological wizardry.

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