Junked Inspection Camera Given 15-Year Face-lift With Raspberry Pi

August 13, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 28 Comments

The nice thing with having a hacker cred is that family and friends are always on the lookout for stuff they think might be useful to you. [Craig Hollabaugh]’s son-in-law found an inspection camera and thought it would be handy for his hobby work. The MagniSight Explorer was first introduced in 2001. It is good for surface mount board work and inspection, except that its analog 480p video is quite dated by today’s standards. So [Craig] upgraded it for crystal clear 1080P/30 video and 5 megapixel images using a $35 Raspberry Pi 2 and a $26 Raspberry Pi Camera Module. After the upgrade, the unit is now a great tool for SMT rework.

There’s not a lot to the upgrade, but [Craig] gives a nice rundown in the 15 minute video of the MagniSight’s internals. He shows us the original analog camera module and its video card, which is able to do some additional processing like black and white output and reverse video (negative). As he mentions, it would be easy for him to do the same via software on the Raspberry Pi. A video camera lens takes care of magnification and two shafts coupled to it via flat belts (rubber bands?) take care of zoom and focus. A front coated mirror angled 45 degrees in front of the lens turns the optical path 90 degrees to allow the lens/camera to “look down”. After experimenting a bit to find the correct focal spot behind the lens unit for the Raspberry Pi camera, he covered the camera module with insulation tape and then just glued it to the old camera mount. After hooking it up to an HDMI monitor, the results are quite nice and he reckons he can easily work with components down to 0402 in size.

He’s got a couple of more upgrades in mind to make the system even better. He plans to replace the existing compact fluorescent lamps with a string of LED’s which will provide more uniform illumination. Plus, he can control their brightness, and selectively turn them on or off to get the optimum lighting. The other interesting upgrade would be to add stepper motors to the X-Y translation stage and automate their movement. After looking up a board file and its BoM, he may even be able to search for a part designator and move the stage to bring the part into focus.

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Chaos Communication Camp 2015 Teaser

August 11, 2015 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

It happens every four years in Germany. The days are at their longest and the summer heat’s penetrating. It’s time to break out the tent and go camping. But who wants to go camping in the wilderness, where there’s no Gigabit Ethernet and nobody to hack on projects with? Much better to attend the Chaos Communications Camp 2015 with 5,000 other nerds. And Hackaday will be there!

If you’ve never been to a Chaos Camp, it’s an amazing experience. It’s like a DIY version of DEF CON, except that it takes place in tents in the countryside outside Berlin instead of gambling-themed hotels in the dry, dusty desert. There’s a lot more emphasis on actually doing stuff while at camp. (It’s meant to be a vacation, after all.) Indeed, presentations are shut down in the middle of the day for three and a half hours to give people time to hack and interact.

Have a look at the list of projects, events, sessions, villages, or talks to get a feeling of scale, and bear in mind that a lot of the most interesting activities are often unofficial: people getting together to work on stuff. There’s plenty of inspiration and room for cooperation to go around.

Like many cons these days, the badge itself will doubtless serve as at least one such source of inspiration, and the 2015 Camp’s badge is awesome. It’s essentially a HackRF One with an LPC4300 ARM Cortex M4 micro, large flash memory, USB, battery, audio, and an LCD screen on-board. Add an antenna and you’ve got an insanely versatile standalone radio hacking platform. We’re digging through the docs in anticipation. So expect some to see a bunch of SDR and RF hacks in the next few months as 5,000 hackers get these in their hands.

If you can’t make it (tickets have been sold out for a while now), you can check out the live streams. Not only will the talks be shown as they happen, but in keeping with the democratic ethos of the CCC, anyone who can set up an icecast server can set up their own stream.

And of course, we’ll be there reporting on as much as we can. If anything strikes your fancy and you’d like us to check it out for you, post up in the comments here. We can’t promise the impossible, but we’ll try. And if you’re going to camp as well, keep an eye out for Elliot and say Hi.

Hackaday Links: August 2, 2015

August 2, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

Over the last few years, Maker’s Asylum in Mumbai has grown from a garage to a very well stocked workspace with 140 members. They’re getting kicked out at the end of the month and they need some help. We just had a meetup at the Delhi branch of Maker’s Asylum, and these guys and gals are really cool.

Speaking of crowdfunding campaigns for hackerspaces, South Central Pennsylvania might be getting its own hackerspace. The 717 area code is a vast wasteland when it comes to anything anyone reading Hackaday would consider interesting, despite there being plenty of people who know their way around CNC machines, soldering irons, and welders. This needs to happen.

Need some help with Bluetooth standards? Tektronix has you covered with a gigantic poster of the physical layer. If only there were a repository of these handy, convenient reference posters.

Forgings and castings make for great YouTube videos, and this aluminum bell casting is no exception. There’s about 18 pounds of aluminum in there, which is pretty large as far as home casting goes.

Electronic Goldmine has an assortment of grab bags – spend a few dollars get a bag of chips, LEDs, diodes, or what have you. What’s in these grab bags? [alpha_ninja] found out. There’s some neat stuff in there, except for the ‘SMD Mixture’ bag.

Remember the found case molds for the Commodore 64C that became a Kickstarter? It’s happening again with the Amiga 1200. This is a new mold with a few interesting features that support the amazing amount of upgrades that have come out for this machine over the years. Being new molds, the price per piece is a little high, but that’s your lesson in manufacturing costs for the day.

CommVEx 2015: What Happens When Commodore Users Gather

July 28, 2015 by Bil Herd 27 Comments

I’m not getting any younger, in fact I’m getting older by the day. This fact along with the fact that this year is the 30^th anniversary of the Commodore C-128 and the original Commodore Amiga prompted me to attend this year’s CommVEx in Las Vegas lest I not be around for the next significant anniversary. For those that don’t know me, I designed the C-128 at the ripe old age of 25 back in 1984-85, though I would ask that you not hold that against me as it was a very long time ago.

Also this year Dr. Leonard Tramiel, son of Commodore’s founder Jack Tramiel, was able to swing by which was an unprecedented and unforgettable event.

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Hackaday Links: July 19, 2015

July 19, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Everybody needs an external USB drive at some time or another. If you’re looking for something with the nerd cred you so desperately need, build a 5 1/4″ half height external drive. That’s a mod to an old Quantum Bigfoot drive, and also serves as a pretty good teardown video for this piece of old tech.

The Woxun KG-UV2D and KG-UV3D are pretty good radios, but a lot of amateur radio operators have found these little handheld radios eventually wear out. The faulty part is always a 24C64 Flash chip, and [Shane] is here to show you the repair.

Last year there was a hackathon to build a breast pump that doesn’t suck in both the literal and figurative sense. The winner of the hackathon created a compression-based pump that is completely different from the traditional suction-based mechanism. Now they’re ready for clinical trials, and that means money. A lot of money. For that, they’re turning to Kickstarter.

What you really need is head mounted controls for Battlefield 4. According to [outgoingbot] it’s a hacked Dualshock 4 controller taped to a bike helmet. The helmet-mounted controller has a few leads going to another Dualshock 4 controller with analog sticks. This video starts off by showing the setup.

[Jan] built a modeling MIDI synth around a tiny 8-pin ARM microcontroller. Despite the low part count, it sounds pretty good. Now he’s turned his attention to the Arduino. This is a much harder programming problem, but it’s still possible to build a good synth with no DAC or PWM.

Hackaday Links: July 12, 2015

July 12, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 36 Comments

Adafruit is working on a series of videos that’s basically Sesame Street for electronics. G is for Ground is out, where [Adabot] discovers pipes and lightning rods are connected to ground. Oh, the rhyming. Here’s the rest of the videos so far. We can’t wait for ‘Q is for Reactive Power’.

Think you’re good enough to build an airlock 70 cubic meters in volume that can cycle once every thirty seconds? How about building a 500 mile long steel tube with zero expansion joints across active fault lines? Can you stop a 3 ton vehicle traveling at 700 miles per hour in fifteen seconds? These are the near-impossible engineering challenges demanded of the hyperloop. The fact that no company will pay for this R&D should tell you something, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t contribute.

Calling everyone that isn’t from away. [Paul] lives near Augusta, Maine and can’t find a hackerspace. Augusta is the capital of the state, so there should be a hackerspace nearby. If you’re in the area, go leave a message on his profile.

Last week we found memristors you can buy. A few years ago, [Nyle] found them while hiking. They were crudded up shell casings, and experiments with sulfur and copper produced a memristor-like trace on a curve tracer.

Need a way to organize resistors? Use plastic bags that are the same size as trading cards.

The Arduino is too easy. It must be packaged into a format that is impossible to breadboard. It should be shaped like a banana. Open source? Don’t need that. The pins are incorrectly labelled, and will be different between manufacturing runs.

CCCamp 2015 Rad1o Badge

July 12, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 9 Comments

Conference badges are getting more complex each year. DEFCON, LayerONE, Shmoocon, The Next Hope, Open Hardware Summit, The EMF, SAINTCON, SXSW Create, The Last Hope, TROOPERS11, ZaCon V and of course the CCC, have all featured amazing badges over the years. This years CCCamp 2015 rad1o badge is taking things several notches higher. The event will run from 13th through 17th August, 2015.

The rad1o Badge contains a full-featured SDR (software defined radio) transceiver, operating in a frequency range of about 50 MHz – 4000 MHz, and is software compatible to the HackRF One open source SDR platform. The badge uses a Wimax transceiver which sends I/Q (in-phase/quardrature-phase) samples in the range of 2.3 to 2.7 GHz to an ARM Cortex M4 CPU. The CPU can process the data standalone for various applications such as FM radio, spectrogram display, RF controlled power outlets, etc., or pass the samples to a computer using USB 2.0 where further signal processing can take part, e.g. using GnuRadio. The frequency range can be extended by inserting a mixer in the RF path. Its got an on-board antenna tuned for 2.5GHz, or an SMA connector can be soldered to attach an external antenna. There’s a Nokia 6100 130×130 pixel LCD and a joystick, which also featured in the earlier CCCamp 2011 badge known as the r0ket.

A 3.5mm TRRS audio connector allows hooking up a headphone and speaker easily. The LiPo battery can be charged via one of the USB ports, while the other USB port can be used for software updates and data I/O to SDR Software like GnuRadio. Check out the project details from their Github repository and more from the detailed wiki which has information on software and hardware. There’s also a Twitter account if you’d like to follow the projects progress.

This years Open Hardware Summit also promises an awesome hackable badge. We’ll probably feature it before the OHS2015 conference in September.

Thanks to [Andz] for tipping us off about this awesome Badge.