Blinky Business Card Plays Snake And Connect Four

January 16, 2023 by Anool Mahidharia 6 Comments

There’s no better way to introduce yourself than handing over a blinky PCB business card and challenging the recipient to a game of Connect Four. And if [Dennis Kaandorp] turns up early for a meeting, he can keep himself busy playing the ever popular game of Snake on his PCB business card.

Quite wisely, [Dennis] kept his design simple, and avoided the temptation of feature creep. His requirements were to create a minimalist, credit card sized design, with his contact details printed on the silk legend, and some blinky LED’s.

The tallest component on such a design is usually the battery holder, and he could not find one that was low-profile and cheap. Drawing inspiration from The Art of Blinky Business Cards, he used the 0.8 mm thin PCB itself as the battery holder by means of flexible arms.

Connect-Four is a two player game similar to tic-tac-toe, but played on a grid seven columns across and six rows high. This meant using 42 dual-colour LED’s, which would require a large number of GPIO pins on the micro-controller. Using a clever combination of matrix and charlieplexing techniques, he was able to reduce the GPIO count down to 13 pins, while still managing to keep the track layout simple.

It also took him some extra effort to locate dual colour, red / green LED’s with a sufficiently low forward voltage drop that could work off the reduced output resulting from the use of charlieplexing. At the heart of the business card is an ATtiny1616 micro-controller that offers enough GPIO pins for the LED matrix as well as the four push button switches.

His first batch of prototypes have given him a good insight on the pricing and revealed several deficiencies that he can improve upon the next time around. [Dennis] has shared KiCad schematic and PCB layout files for anyone looking to get inspired to design their own PCB business cards.

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A composite picture with a 3D printed cylinder with a magnet at one end held in a 3D printed housing ring on the left composite picture and a fridge buzzer board with buzzer, CR2032 battery, MCP430 microcontroller and hall effect sensor slid into a 3D printed base on the right part of the composite picture

Don’t Lose Your Cool With This Fridge Buzzer

January 16, 2023 by Abe Connelly 28 Comments

[CarrotIndustries] wanted to add an audible warning for when the refrigerator door was left open. The result is a fridge buzzer that attaches to the inside of a fridge door and starts buzzing if the door is left ajar for too long.

The main components of the fridge buzzer consist of an MSP430G2232 low-power MCU connected to a SI7201 hall sensor switch, along with a CR2032 battery holder, push button and buzzer. The MSP430’s sleep mode is used here, consuming less than 3 µA of current which [CarrotIndustries] estimates lasting 9 years on a 235 mAh CR2032 battery.

A 3D printed housing is created so that the board slides into a flat bed, which can then be glued onto to the fridge door. The other mechanical component consists of a cylinder with a slot dug out for a magnet, where the cylinder sits in a mounting ring that’s affixed to the side of the fridge wall that the end of the door closes on. The cylinder can be finely positioned so that when the refrigerator is closed, the magnet sits right over the hall sensor of the board, allowing for sensitivity that can detect even a partial close of the fridge door.

All source code is available on [CarrotIndustries] GitHub page, including the Horizon EDA schematics and board files, the Solvespace mechanical files, and source code for the MSP430. We’ve featured an IoT fridge alarm in the past but [CarrotIndustries]’ addition is a nice, self contained, alternative.

Ring In The New Year With This Cute Cat Doorbell

January 16, 2023 by Abe Connelly 5 Comments

What better way to ring in the new year than with [iSax Laboratories]’ charming little project that replaces a doorbell with a Maneki-Neko cat figurine to ring a physical bell?

Details are unfortunately a bit light, but it looks like the Maneki-Neko cat was disassembled to allow for a small SG92R servo motor to attach to the arm pendulum mechanism. [iSax Laboratories] added wooden platform where the Maneki-Neko cat figurine is mounted along with some indicator lights, switches and the physical bell, with a cavity routed out in the base to allow for the Arduino Nano microcontroller.

[iSax Laboratories] has what looks to be an Assa Abloy Svara 23 wired answering machine, which has one of its output lines connected to the Nano to sense when a doorbell signal has come in.

The Maneki-Neko cats are cute, easily hackable figurines and we’ve featured them in the past, using them as everything from hit counters to POV displays.

Be sure to check out the demo video after the break!

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A thermostat unit and a replacement PCB for it

Custom Thermostat PCB Connects Boiler To Home Assistant

January 15, 2023 by Robin Kearey 24 Comments

Thanks to Home Assistant, automating the various systems that run your home is easier than ever. But you still need to make a connection between those systems and your Home Assistant setup, which can be tricky if the manufacturer didn’t have this use case in mind. When [Simon] wanted to automate his home heating system, he discovered that most Home Assistant-enabled thermostats that he could find didn’t support his two separate heating zones connected to a single boiler. The easiest solution turned out to be to design his own.

The original heating system consisted of two control boxes that each had a 230 V mains connection coming in and a “request heat” control line going to the boiler. [Simon] considered replacing these with a simple off-the-shelf ESP8266 relay board and a 12 V power supply, but figured this would look messy and take up quite a bit of space. So he bought a neat DIN-rail mounted enclosure instead, and designed a custom PCB to fit inside it.

The PCB holds a Wemos D1 Mini connected to two relays that switch the two heating circuits. The D1 runs ESPhome and needs just a few lines of configuration to connect it to [Simon]’s home network. There’s no separate power supply — the 230 V line is connected directly to a 12 V DC power module mounted on the PCB, so the new system is plug-and-play compatible with the old.

Complete PCB design files are available on [Simon]’s website and GitHub page. There are several other ways to make custom thermostats for your home, with an Arduino for example. If you’re interested in repairing your own heating system, or want to optimize it even further, there’s a whole community out there to help you.

An ATX motherboard sits on a grey surface with the I/O in the foreground. Behind the I/O is a large image of Tux, the Linux penguin, taking up most of the PCB and winding its way around different components on the board. Tux is part of the PCB itself, with his feet, beak, and outline in gold, body in black silkscreen, and belly in green soldermask.

Designing Aesthetically-Pleasing PCBs

January 15, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 28 Comments

We’ve seen our share of custom PCBs here on Hackaday, but they aren’t always pretty. If you want to bring your PCB aesthetics up a notch, [Ian Dunn] has put together a guide for those wanting to get into PCB art.

There are plenty of tutorials about making a functional PCB, but finding information about PCB art can be more difficult. [Ian] walks us through the different materials available from PCB fabs and how the different layer features can affect the final aesthetic of a piece. For instance, while black and white solder mask are opaque, other colors are often translucent and affected by copper under the surface.

PCB design software can throw errors when adding decorative traces or components to a board that aren’t connected to any of the functional circuitry, so [Ian] discusses some of the tricks to avoid tripping up here. For that final artistic flair, component selection can make all the difference. The guide has recommendations on some of the most aesthetically pleasing types of components including how chips made in the USSR apparently have a little bit of extra panache.

If you want to see some more on PCB art, check out this work on full-color PCBs and learn the way of the PCB artist.

Hackaday Links: January 15, 2023

January 15, 2023 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

It looks like the Martian winter may have claimed another victim, with reports that Chinese ground controllers have lost contact with the Zhurong rover. The solar-powered rover was put into hibernation back in May 2022, thanks to a dust storm that kicked up a couple of months before the start of local winter. Controllers hoped that they would be able to reestablish contact with the machine once Spring rolled around in December, but the rover remains quiet. It may have suffered the same fate as Opportunity, which had its solar panels covered in dust after a planet-wide sandstorm and eventually gave up the ghost.

What’s worse, it seems like the Chinese are having trouble talking to the Tianwen-1 orbiter, too. There are reports that controllers can’t download data from the satellite, which is a pity because it could potentially be used to image the Zhurong landing site in Utopia Planitia to see what’s up. All this has to be taken with a grain of dust, of course, since the Chinese aren’t famously transparent with their space program. But here’s hoping that both the rover and the orbiter beat the odds and start doing science again soon.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 15, 2023” →

Stadia Says Goodbye With Bluetooth And Crap Game

January 15, 2023 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

In just a few days time, Google’s Stadia game streaming service will finally shut down for good. But not for any technical reason, mind you. Microsoft has managed to demonstrate that streaming modern games over home and even mobile Internet connections is viable with their immensely popular Game Pass Ultimate service, and NVIDIA is making similar inroads with GeForce Now. No, like so many of Google’s failed experiments, they’ve simply decided they don’t want to play anymore and are taking their proverbial ball home back with them.

But not all is lost for those who shelled out money for Stadia’s wares. Not only will Google be refunding any money players spent on games, but a company representative has also announced they will be releasing a tool to unlock the latent Bluetooth capabilities of the service’s custom controller — hopefully stemming a surge of e-waste before it starts.

In a forum thread titled “A Gift from the Stadia Team”, Community Manager [DanFromGoogle] explains that information on how you can enable Bluetooth on the controller will be coming next week. In the meantime, he also announced the immediate release of “Worm Game”, a tech demo that staffers apparently used to test out capabilities of the streaming service before its public release.

That this ridiculously simple game, which looks all the world like something a kid would crank out during an after-school programming class, will be the final title to officially release on Stadia is a stunningly insulting epitaph for the fledgling service. But then, Google seems to have developed a special affinity for mistreating their most loyal ~~cattle~~ users over these last few years.

Enabling Bluetooth on a game controller might not seem like such a big deal, but in this case, it will potentially give the piece of hardware a second chance at life. The Stadia controller is unique in that it uses WiFi to communicate directly over the Internet to Google’s streaming service, so once those servers stop responding, the orphaned device will end up being little more than a curiosity. Although it does technically work over USB, being able to use it wirelessly will not only provide a more modern experience, but help justify its internal batteries.

The last time we mentioned the Stadia controller, it was to document one user’s attempt to rid it of an internal microphone they didn’t feel comfortable with. Now that the service is being put to pasture, we wonder if we’ll start to see more hacks involving the admittedly interesting peripheral. We’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for them, but if you see anything we miss, you know where to send it.