Why Not Build Your Quadcopter Around An Evaluation Board?

January 31, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 3 Comments

Quadcopters are flying machines. Traditionally, that would mean you’d optimize the design for lightweight and minimum drag, and you’d do everything in a neat and tidy fashion. The thing is, brushless motors and lithium batteries are so power-dense that you really needn’t try so hard. A great example of that is this barebones quadcopter build from [hebel23] all the way back in 2015.

The build is based around the STM32F4 Discovery Board, which [hebel23] scored as a giveaway at Electronica in Munich way back when. It’s plopped on top of a bit of prototyping board so it can be hooked up to the four controllers driving the motors at each corner. The frame of the quadcopter similarly uses cheap material, in the form of alloy profiles left over from an old screen door. Other equipment onboard includes a GY-273 electronic compass module, a MPU6050 3-axis gyroscope and accelerometer to keep the thing on the straight and level, and the Fly Sky R9B RC receiver for controlling the thing.

It might look crude, but it gets off the ground just fine. We’ve seen quadcopters using the STM32 in more recent years with more refined designs, but there’s something amusingly elegant about lacing one together with an evaluation board and some protoboard in the middle. If you’re working on your own flying projects, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

Ancient Pocket Computer Gets A USB-C Upgrade

January 31, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 9 Comments

Remember the ZEOS Pocket PC? Perhaps you knew it as the Tidalwave PS-1000. Either way, it was a small clamshell computing device that was first released all the way back in 1992, and perhaps most accurately known as a DOS-based palmtop. Over at [Robert’s Retro] on YouTube, one of these fine devices was put through a repair and a modern upgrade program.

[Robert] educates us on the basics of the machine as he sets about the routine repairs so familiar to anyone in the retrocomputing scene. The first order of business is to clean up the damage to the battery compartment, which had suffered corrosion from leaking AA batteries. We get a solid look inside, and a walk-through on how to modify the device to run off USB-C power. It’s as simple as wiring up a small power module PCB and integrating that into the case, but it’s a neat mod done well—and it makes toying with the device much easier in 2025.

[Robert] has a cause he’s pursuing, though, when it comes to these old palmtops. He’s trying to identify the name of the oddball connectors these things used for the parallel and serial interfaces, and ideally, a source for the same. If you’ve got a tip on that, drop it in the comments.

Funnily enough, these things were cloned like crazy back in the day, so you might even find one under another name in your retro travels. They might be old, but somehow, it’s impossible for a piece of tech to feel old when you’re hooking it up with a USB-C port. We’ve featured [Robert’s] work before, too!

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Digital Paint Mixing Has Been Greatly Improved With 1930s Math

January 30, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 41 Comments

You might not have noticed if you’re not a digital artist, but most painting and image apps still get color mixing wrong. As we all learned in kindergarten, blue paint and yellow paint makes green paint. Try doing that in Photoshop, and you’ll get something altogether different—a vague, uninspiring brownish-grey. It’s the same story in just about every graphics package out there.

As it turns out, there’s a good reason the big art apps haven’t tackled this—because it’s really hard! However, a team of researchers at Czech Technical University has finally cracked this long-standing problem. The result of their hard work is Mixbox, a digital model for pigment-based color mixing. Once again, creative application of mathematics has netted aesthetically beautiful results!

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Contrails Are A Hot Topic, But What Is To Be Done?

January 27, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 76 Comments

Most of us first spot them as children—the white lines in the blue sky that are the telltale sign of a flight overhead. Contrails are an instant visual reminder of air travel, and a source of much controversy in recent decades. Put aside the overblown conspiracies, though, and there are some genuine scientific concerns to explore.

See, those white streaks planes leave in the sky aren’t just eye-catching. It seems they may also be having a notable impact on our climate. Recent research shows their warming effect is comparable to the impact of aviation’s CO₂ emissions. The question is then simple—how do we stop these icy lines from heating our precious Earth?

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‘Robotic’ Dress Uses Simple Techniques To Combine 3D Printed Parts With Fabric

January 22, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 19 Comments

By and large, our clothes don’t actively move. They’re simple pieces of fabric assembled to sit nicely on our bodies, and little more. [anoukwipprecht] created something a little more technological and confronting, though, with the Robotic Open-Source Scale Dress.

Right from the drop, you can see what the dress is all about. It’s an open-shoulder design that has eight large moving scales mounted on the front. These scales are printed, and each features its own servo for independent movement. The scale baseplates are designed to hide the servos themselves, creating a sleeker look that hides the mechanism underneath. Each baseplate is also perforated with holes, allowing it to be sewn on to the base garment in a stout fashion. The dress itself is created with thick neoprene fabric, enabling it to take the weight of the scale assemblies without sagging or pulling away from the body. You can even customize the scales in various ways—such as adding feathers instead.

The dress is a neat piece, and would catch eyes for its pointy scales alone. The fact that they can start moving at any time only increases the garment’s impact. We’ve seen some other great fashionable uses of 3D printing before, too, like these awesome printed shoes. Meanwhile, if you’re printing your own garments in your home lab, don’t hesitate to let us know! Or, even better… wear them to the next Hackaday event!

Interactive LED Matrix Is A Great Way To Learn About Motion Controls

January 21, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 4 Comments

It’s simple enough to wire up an LED matrix and have it display some pre-programmed routines. What can be more fun is when the LEDs are actually interactive in some regard. [Giulio Pons] achieved this with his interactive LED box, which lets you play with the pixels via motion controls.

The build runs of a Wemos D1 mini, which is a devboard based around the ESP8266 microcontroller. [Giulio] hooked this up to a matrix of WS2812B addressable LEDs in two 32×8 panels, creating a total display of 512 RGB LEDs. The LEDs are driven with the aid of an Adafruit graphics library that lets the whole display be addressed via XY coordinates. For interactivity, [Giulio] added a MPU6050 3-axis gyroscope and accelerometer to the build. Meanwhile, power is via 18650 lithium-ion cells, with the classic old 7805 regulator stepping down their output to a safe voltage. Thanks to the motion sensing abilities of the MPU6050, [Giulio] was able to code animations where the LEDs emulate glowing balls rolling around on a plane.

It’s a simple build, but one that taught [Giulio] all kinds of useful skills—from working with microcontrollers to doing the maths for motion controls. There’s a lot you can do with LED matrixes if you put your mind to it, and if you just start experimenting, you’re almost certain to learn something. Video after the break.

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Family Bass Is Musical NES Magic

January 21, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 6 Comments

The Family BASIC keyboard was a peripheral that was built for programming on the Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom. As [Linus Åkesson] demonstrates, though, it can do so much more. Meet the Family Bass.

The core of the project is a special adapter which [Linus] created to work with the Family BASIC keyboard. Traditionally, the keyboard plugs into the Famicom’s expansion port, but [Linus] wanted to hook it up to the controller port on a Nintendo Entertainment System instead. Getting them to talk was achieved with an ATtiny85 which could cycle through the 72-key matrix in the keyboard and spit out a serial stream of data the controller port could understand.

On the NES end, the console is set up to run custom code from [Linus] that lets him play the internal sound chip’s triangle wave with the keyboard. He demonstrates this ably in a video where he performs a song called Platform Hopping along with some of his other retro computer instruments.

We’ve seen [Linus] build some other great instruments in the past too, which are both creative and nostalgic. Video after the break.

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