Arduino Tachometer Clock Fires On All Cylinders

January 18, 2019 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

We’re certainly no strangers to unique timepieces around these parts. For whatever reason, hackers are obsessed with finding new and interesting ways of displaying the time. Not that we’re complaining, of course. We’re just as excited to see the things as they are to build them. With the assumption that you’re just as enamored with these oddball chronometers as we are, we present to you this fantastic digital tachometer clock created by [mrbigbusiness].

The multi-function digital gauge itself is an aftermarket unit which [mrbigbusiness] says you can get online for as little as $20 from some sites. All he needed to do was figure out how to get his Arduino to talk to it, and come up with some interesting way to hold it at an appropriate viewing angle. The mass of wires coming out of the back of the gauge might look intimidating, but thanks to his well documented code it shouldn’t be too hard to follow in his footsteps if you were so inclined.

Hours are represented by the analog portion of the gauge, and the minutes shown digitally were the speed would normally be displayed. This allows for a very cool blending of the classic look of an analog clock with the accuracy of digital. He’s even got it set up so the fuel indicator will fill up as the current minute progresses. The code also explains how to use things like the gear and high beam indicators, so there’s a lot of room for customization and interesting data visualizations. For instance, it would be easy to scrap the whole clock idea and use this gauge as a system monitor with some modifications to the code [mrbigbusiness] has provided.

The gauge is mounted to a small project box with some 3D printed brackets and bits of metal rod, complete with a small section of flexible loom to cover up all the wires. Overall it looks very slick and futuristic without abandoning its obvious automotive roots. Inside the base [mrbigbusiness] has an Arduino Nano, a DS1307 RTC connected via I2C, a voltage regulator, and a push button to set the time. It’s a perfectly reasonable layout, though we wonder if it couldn’t be simplified by using an ESP8266 and pulling the time down with NTP.

We’ve seen gauges turned into a timepiece before, but we have to admit that this is probably the most practical realization we’ve seen of the idea yet. Of course if you want to outfit the garage with something a bit more authentic, you can always repurpose a Porsche brake rotor.

Inventors Chasing Their Dreams; What It’s Like To Quit Your Job And Hack

January 18, 2019 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

The phrase “Hindsight is 20/20” is one of those things that we all say from time to time, but rarely have a chance to truly appreciate to the fullest. Taken in the most literal context, it means that once you know the end result of a particular scenario, you can look back and clearly see the progression towards that now inescapable endgame. For example, if you’re stuck on the couch with a bad case of food poisoning, you might employ the phrase “Hindsight is 20/20” to describe the decision a few days prior to eat that food truck sushi.

Then again, it’s usually not that hard to identify a questionable decision, with or without the benefit of foreknowledge. But what about the good ones? How can one tell if a seemingly unimportant choice can end up putting you on track for a lifetime of success and opportunity? If there’s one thing Michael Rigsby hopes you’ll take away from the fascinating retrospective of his life that he presented at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference, it’s that you should grab hold of every opportunity and run with it. Some of your ideas and projects will be little more than dim memory when you look back on them 50 years later, but others might just end up changing your life.

Of course, it also helps if you’re the sort of person who was able to build an electric car at the age of nineteen, using technology which to modern eyes seems not very far ahead of stone knives and bear skins. The life story Michael tells the audience, complete with newspaper cuttings and images from local news broadcasts, is one that we could all be so lucky to look back on in the Autumn of our years. It’s a story of a person who, through either incredible good luck or extraordinary intuition, was able to be on the forefront of some of the technology we take for granted today before most people even knew what to call it.

From controlling his TRS-80 with his voice to building a robotic vacuum cleaner years before the Roomba was a twinkle in the eye of even the most forward thinking technofetishist, Michael was there. But he doesn’t hold a grudge towards the companies who ended up building billion dollar industries around these ideas. That was never what it was about for him. He simply loves technology, and wanted to show his experiments to others. Decades before “open source” was even a term, he was sharing his designs and ideas with anyone who’d care to take a look.

Continue reading “Inventors Chasing Their Dreams; What It’s Like To Quit Your Job And Hack” →

Scramjet Engines On The Long Road To Mach 5

January 16, 2019 by Tom Nardi 58 Comments

When Charles “Chuck” Yeager reached a speed of Mach 1.06 while flying the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis in 1947, he became the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound in controlled level flight. Specifying that he reached supersonic speed “in controlled level flight” might seem superfluous, but it’s actually a very important distinction. There had been several unconfirmed claims that aircraft had hit or even exceeded Mach 1 during the Second World War, but it had always been during a steep dive and generally resulted in the loss of the aircraft and its pilot. Yeager’s accomplishment wasn’t just going faster than sound, but doing it in a controlled and sustained flight that ended with a safe landing.

In that way, the current status of hypersonic flight is not entirely unlike that of supersonic flight prior to 1947. We have missiles which travel at or above Mach 5, the start of the hypersonic regime, and spacecraft returning from orbit such as the Space Shuttle can attain speeds as high as Mach 25 while diving through the atmosphere. But neither example meets that same requirement of “controlled level flight” that Yeager achieved 72 years ago. Until a vehicle can accelerate up to Mach 5, sustain that speed for a useful period of time, and then land intact (with or without a human occupant), we can’t say that we’ve truly mastered hypersonic flight.

So why, nearly a century after we broke the sound barrier, are we still without practical hypersonic aircraft? One of the biggest issues historically has been the material the vehicle is made out of. The Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” struggled with the intense heat generated by flying at Mach 3, which ultimately required it to be constructed from an expensive and temperamental combination of titanium and polymer composites. A craft which flies at Mach 5 or beyond is subjected to even harsher conditions, and it has taken decades for material science to rise to the challenge.

With modern composites and the benefit of advanced computer simulations, we’re closing in on solving the physical aspects of surviving sustained hypersonic flight. With the recent announcement that Russia has put their Avangard hypersonic glider into production, small scale vehicles traveling at high Mach numbers for extended periods of time are now a reality. Saying it’s a solved problem isn’t quite accurate; the American hypersonic glider program has been plagued with issues related to the vehicle coming apart under the stress of Mach 20 flight, which heats the craft’s surface to temperatures in excess of 1,900 C (~3,500 F). But we’re getting closer, and it’s no longer the insurmountable problem it seemed a few decades ago.

Today, the biggest remaining challenge is propelling a hypersonic vehicle in level flight for a useful period of time. The most promising solution is the scramjet, an engine that relies on the speed of the vehicle itself to compress incoming air for combustion. They’re mechanically very simple, and the physics behind it have been known since about the time Yeager was climbing into the cockpit of the X-1. Unfortunately the road towards constructing, much less testing, a full scale hypersonic scramjet aircraft has been a long and hard one.

Continue reading “Scramjet Engines On The Long Road To Mach 5” →

Particle Paves Way For LTE Selfies

January 15, 2019 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

From cars to refrigerators, it seems as if every new piece of tech is connected to the Internet. For better or for worse, we’re deep into the “Internet of Things”. But what about your camera? No, not the camera in your smartphone; that one’s already connected to the Internet and selling your secrets to the highest bidder. Don’t you think your trusty DSLR could be improved by an infusion of Wide Area Networking?

Regardless of what you’re answer to that question might be, [Thomas Kittredge] decided his life would be improved by making his beloved Canon EOS Rebel T6 an honorary member of the Internet of Things. Truth be told he says that he hasn’t quite figured out an application for this project. But since he was looking to mess around with both the LTE-enabled Particle Boron development board and designing his own PCB for professional production, this seemed a good a way to get his feet wet as any.

The resulting board is a fairly simple “shield” for the Particle Boron that let’s [Thomas] trigger up to two cameras remotely over the Internet or locally with Bluetooth. If LTE isn’t your sort of thing though, don’t worry. Since the Boron follows the Adafruit Feather specification, there’s a whole collection of development boards with various connectivity options that this little add-on can be used with.

In the GitHub repository, [Thomas] has put up the files for the PCB, the STLs for the 3D printed enclosure, and of course the firmware source code to load onto the Particle board. He currently has code to expose the two shutter triggers as functions the the Particle Cloud API, as well as a practical example that fires off the camera when specific words are used in a Slack channel.

Out for a little over a year, the Particle Boron is a fairly new addition to the world of cellular development boards. Historically we haven’t seen a whole lot of cellular capable projects, likely because it’s been such a hassle to get them online, but with new boards like the Boron we might start seeing an uptick in the random pieces of gear that have this form connectivity and an internet-facing IP address. Surely nothing bad could come of this!

Arduino Hunts (and Sees) The Wumpus

January 15, 2019 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

For anyone who’s been fiddling around with computers since the days before VGA, “Hunt the Wumpus” probably brings back fond memories. Developed in 1973, this text game has you move around a system of caves searching for the foul-smelling Wumpus, a vile creature which you must dispatch with your trusty bow and arrow. Some consider it to be one of the very first survival horror games ever developed, a predecessor to the Resident Evil franchise as well as the video game version of Hannah Montana: The Movie.

If the concept of “Hunt the Wumpus” sounds interesting to you, but you just can’t get over the whole text adventure thing, you may be in luck. [Benjamin Faure] has developed a semi-graphical version of the classic horror title which might better appeal to your 21st century tastes. Running on an Arduino Mega 2560 with graphics displayed on a 8 x 8 LED matrix, it’s not exactly DOOM; but at least you won’t have to type everything out.

For his handheld version of “Hunt the Wumpus”, [Benjamin] 3D printed a nice enclosure and adorned it with labels and instructions that look like tiny scrolls, a neat touch for a game that’s so old contemporary players would have called Zork a “next gen” game. While playing you can see where you’ve been and where you are currently thanks to illuminated dots on the MAX7219 display, and there are LEDs to warn you of your proximity to bottomless pits and the Wumpus itself. There’s even a piezo speaker that will chirp when a bat is nearby, which is important as they have a tendency to ruin your day by carrying you away to a random location in the cave.

Most of the game looks like an advanced version of Snake, but [Benjamin] did go through the trouble of adding some rudimentary animations and sound effects that play during specific parts of the game. When you shoot your arrow or get carried away by a bat, you’ll see a “cutscene” of sorts on the LED display. It’s a fairly simple effect, but helps break up the otherwise fairly spartan graphics and might just be enough to keep a youngins’ attention.

If you subtract a dimension, this project is reminiscent of the 1D dungeon crawler we covered last year. But if even one dimension is too many, you could always run the text version of “Hunt the Wumpus“ on your trusty Arduino.

Continue reading “Arduino Hunts (and Sees) The Wumpus” →

A Cloned Bluetooth Tracker Meets Its Maker

January 14, 2019 by Tom Nardi 30 Comments

The holidays bring us many things. Family and friends are a given, as is the grand meal in which we invariably overindulge. It’s a chance for decades old songs and movies to somehow manage to bubble back up to the surface, and occasionally a little goodwill even slips in here or there. But perhaps above all, the holidays are a time for every retailer to stock themselves to the rafters with stuff. Do you need it? No. Do they want it? No. But it’s there on display anyway, and you’re almost certainly going to buy it.

Which is precisely how I came to purchase a two pack of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) “trackers” for the princely sum of $10 USD. I didn’t expect much out of them for $5 each, but as this seemed an exceptionally low price for such technology in a brick and mortar store, I couldn’t resist. Plus there was something familiar about the look of the tracker that I couldn’t quite put my finger on while I was still in the store.

That vague feeling of recollection sent me digging through my parts bin as soon as I got home, convinced that I had seen something among the detritus that reminded me of my latest prize. Sure enough, I found a “Cube” Bluetooth tracker which, ironically, I had received as a Christmas gift some years ago. Putting them side by side, it was clear that the design of these “itek” trackers took more than a little inspiration from the better known (and five times as expensive) product.

The Cube was a bit thicker, but otherwise the shape, size, and even button placement on the itek was nearly identical. Reading through their respective manuals, the capabilities also seemed in perfect parity, down to being able to use the button on the device as a remote camera control for your smartphone. Which got me thinking: just how similar would these two devices be internally? Clearly they looked and functioned the same, but would they be built the same as well? They would have to cut costs somewhere.

Determined to find out how a company can put out what for all the world looks like a mirror image of a competitor’s device while undercutting them by such a large margin, I cracked both trackers open to get a bit more familiar with what makes them tick. What I found on closer inspection of these two similar gadgets is perhaps best summarized by that age old cautionary adage: “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

Continue reading “A Cloned Bluetooth Tracker Meets Its Maker” →

Blowing The Dust Off Of An IBM AS/400 Server

January 13, 2019 by Tom Nardi 111 Comments

If you’ve never seen an IBM AS/400 machine, don’t feel bad. Most people haven’t. Introduced in 1988 as a mid-range server line, it used a unique object-based operating system and was geared specifically towards business and enterprise customers. Unless you’re a particularly big fan of COBOL you probably won’t have much use for one today, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth playing around with if the opportunity presents itself.

So when a local IT company went belly up and was selling their old hardware, including a late 90’s era IBM AS/400e Series, [Rik te Winkel] jumped at the chance to take this unique piece of computing history home. He knew it was something of a risk, as maintenance and repair tasks for these machines were intended to be done by IBM certified technicians rather than the DIYer, leaving little in the way of documentation or even replacement parts. But in the end it worked out, and best of all, he documented the successful process of dragging this 90’s behemoth into the blinding light of the twenty-first century for all the world to see.

After getting the machine home and sitting through its thirty minute boot process, [Rik] was relieved to see the code 01 B N pop on the server’s display. This meant the system passed all the internal checks and was ready to go, he just had to figure out how to talk to the thing. Built to be a pure server, the machine didn’t offer any video output so he’d have to log into it over the network.

[Rik] noted that there was no new DHCP entry in his router for the server, but of course that was hardly surprising as the machine would have certainly had a static IP when it was in use. So he shut the server down, plugged it directly into his laptop’s Ethernet port, and watched the output of Wireshark as it went through its arduous boot sequence. Eventually he started to pick up packets coming from the IP address 10.10.10.9, and he had his target.

There are a few clients out there that allow you to remotely log into an AS/400, so he downloaded one and pointed it to the server’s IP. He was surprised to see the operating system was apparently in Dutch, but at least he was in. He tried a few common usernames and passwords, helped along by the fact that this OS from a somewhat more innocent era will actually tell you if you have the username right or wrong, and eventually managed to hack the Gibson with the classic admin/admin combo.

So he was in, but now what? [Rik] decided that he couldn’t truly call this machine bested until he could pull up the Hackaday Retro Edition, so he started work on writing a program to let him pull down the page directly on the AS/400 in IBM’s proprietary Report Program Generator (RPG) programming language. You know, as one does. He didn’t quite feel up to writing a whole HTML parser, but he got as far as generating a HTTP GET request, downloading the page’s source, and opening it up as a local file. That’s good enough for us.

Our very own [Al Williams] documented his adventures poking around an Internet-connected AS/400 machine, which might serve as a helpful primer if you ever find one of these delightfully oddball computers kicking around the local recycling center.