Your Own Home IR Cloner

October 3, 2022 by Abe Connelly 22 Comments

Many devices use infrared (IR) as a signalling medium like, for example, RGB LED strip controllers
modules and some TV controllers. Often times these signals aren’t meant for secure applications which means the functionality can be reproduced by simply replaying back the received signal verbatim. Sometimes, enterprising hackers want to reverse engineer the IR signals, perhaps to automate some tasks or just to get a better understanding of the electronics we use in our everyday life. To help in this effort, [dilshan] creates an open source hardware IR cloner device, capable of snooping IR signals and retransmitting them.

The IR cloner is a sweet little IR tool that can be used to investigate all sorts of IR signals.
In addition to the source code and design files, [dilshan] has also taken care to create detailed documentation as an addendum to the video on assembly and usage. Continue reading “Your Own Home IR Cloner” →

Fermenter on the desk, with the front door opened and some tempeh disks visible inside of it

Hackaday Prize 2022: An Easy-To-Build Fermenter For Tempeh

October 3, 2022 by Arya Voronova 18 Comments

[Maud Bausier] and [Antoine Jaunard] believe we should all know about tempeh — a traditional Indonesian food made out of legumes fermented with fungi. To simplify the process a bit: you get some soybeans, add a tempeh starter fungi culture to them, ferment them a while, and out comes the tempeh. It’s a great source of proteins that’s relatively easy to grow on your own. One catch, though — you do need a certain kind of climate to have it develop properly. This is why [Maud] and [Antoine] are bringing a tempeh fermenter design to this year’s Hackaday Prize.

This fermenter’s controller drives a heating element, which adheres to a pre-programmed fermentation cycle. It also has a fan for airflow and keeping the heat uniform.

The fermenter itself is a small desktop machine with a laser-cut case helped by some CNC-cut and 3D-printed parts, electronics being a simple custom PCB coupling a Pi Pico with widely-available modules. This is clearly a project for someone with access to hackerspace or fab lab resources, but of course, all of the files are on GitHub.

Once built, this design allows you to grow tempeh disks in home conditions on a small scale. It seems the design is mostly finalized, but if you’d like to hear news about this project, they have a blog and a Mastodon feed with some recent updates.

We’ve covered a whole lot of fermentation-related hacks over these years. Most of them have been alcohol-related, but every now and then we see people building fermentation equipment for other food materials, like vinegar, yogurt and sourdough. Now, having seen this fermenter, we’ve learned of one more food hacking direction to explore. This project is one of 10 finalists for our latest Hackaday Prize round, Climate-Resilient Communities. It’s a well-deserved win, and we can’t wait to see where it goes!

Big Brother Or Dumb Brother? Bus Drivers In Beijing Are Forced To Wear “Emotional Monitors”

October 3, 2022 by Lewin Day 64 Comments

Humans aren’t always great at respecting each other’s privacy. However, common sense says there’s a clear boundary when it comes to the thoughts in one’s own head and the feelings in one’s heart.

For bus drivers in Beijing though, it seems that’s no longer the case. These professional drivers are now being asked to wear emotional monitors while on the job, raising concerns from both legal and privacy advocates. But the devices aren’t really anything more than workout monitors, and whether they can actually make good on their Orwellian promise remains to be seen.

In Your Head, In Your Head!

The monitoring wristbands have been rolled out to some of Beijing’s long-distance bus drivers. Credit: Cypp0847, CC-BY-SA-4.0

When George Orwell wrote 1984, it was only 1949. However, he was able to foresee a world in which surveillance was omnipresent and inescapable. He also envsioned the concept of thoughtcrime, where simply contemplating the wrong things could get you in serious trouble with the authorities.

As we all know, Orwell was way off – these predictions didn’t become reality until well into the 2000s. In the latest horrifying development, technologies now exist that claim to be able to monitor one’s emotional state. Now, China’s transportation sector is rushing to push them on their workforces.

Long-distance bus drivers in Beijing are now being told to wear electronic wristbands when on the job. These wristbands claim to be able to capture the wearer’s emotional state, monitoring it on behalf of the employer. The scheme was the idea of the Beijing Public Transport Holding Group. The state-run organization claims the technology is intended for the safety of the public, and a trial of the wristbands began in July this year. Continue reading “Big Brother Or Dumb Brother? Bus Drivers In Beijing Are Forced To Wear “Emotional Monitors”” →

A man removing a module from a 1960s computer

Ancient Nuclear Plant Computer Finds New Home In Bletchley Museum

October 3, 2022 by Robin Kearey 20 Comments

Although technology keeps advancing every year, safety-critical systems in factories and power plants typically stay with the technology that was available when they were built, in the spirit of “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke”. When it comes to safety, there are probably few systems more critical than nuclear power plants, and as a result one power station in Dungeness, in the south-east of England, was controlled by the same Ferranti Argus 500 computer from the early 1970s until the reactor was shut down in 2018.

The national Museum of Computing in Bletchley was lucky enough to be allowed to scavenge the old computer from the decommissioned plant, and volunteers at the museum have managed to get it running again in its new home. They describe the process in the video embedded below, and demonstrate a few features of this rather unique piece of 1970s technology.

The computer consists of several large cabinets that house enormous PCBs full of diode-transistor logic (DTL) chips, made by Ferranti itself. It comes with 32 kilo-words, or 96 kilobytes, of magnetic core memory, and was designed to run programs stored on punched tape. However, the paper tape reader was removed at some point in the computer’s life and replaced with a PC-based system that emulates the tape reader’s output through its parallel port. This was probably sometime during the 1990s, judging from the fact that the https://hackaday.com/tag/magnetic-core-memory/PC runs OS/2.

Setting up the computer in its new home was complicated by the fact that hundred of cables had to be disconnected in order to move the system out of the power plant. With the help of decades-old documentation, and the experience of one volunteer who used to be a Ferranti engineer, they eventually got it into a state where it could run programs again.

Ultimately, the Argus 500 will be turned into a live exhibit that will simulate a power station alongside another computer that was rescued from a different nuclear plant. Depending on the availability of some parts that are still missing, this might happen later this year, or perhaps next year. In any case, the museum already has a collection that’s well worth visiting if you’re in the area. The story of how they rescued a neglected IBM 360 also makes for fascinating reading. Continue reading “Ancient Nuclear Plant Computer Finds New Home In Bletchley Museum” →

Lithium-Ion Batteries Are Easy To Find

October 3, 2022 by Arya Voronova 43 Comments

In the first article, I’ve given you an overview of Lithium-Ion batteries and cells as building blocks for our projects, and described how hackers should treat their Lithium-Ion cells. But what if you don’t have any LiIon cells yet? Where do you get LiIon cells for your project?

Taking laptop batteries apart, whether the regular 18650 or the modern pouch cell-based ones, remains a good avenue – many hackers take this road and the topic is extensively covered by a number of people. However, a 18650 cell might not fit your project size-wise, and thin batteries haven’t quite flooded the market yet. Let’s see what your options are beyond laptops. Continue reading “Lithium-Ion Batteries Are Easy To Find” →

An Automated Digitizer For 35mm Slides

October 3, 2022 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Slides make for great old-timey fun, but it’s awesome to have a digital backup of your old photos, too. An automatic digitizer can make quick work of your collection, and this build from [rbwood53] will do just that.

The digitizizer is based on a Kodak carousel slide projector. It’s fitted with LED strips instead of the original light source, which are used to illuminate the slides themselves. An Arduino Nano is used to command a camera to take photos, via a hacked-up shutter release remote. The camera is set up with a zoom lens and relies on auto-focus to get crisp, clear images of the slides. The Arduino is also charged with telling the carousel system to advance to the next slide as required. It keeps count as the slides go by, so it stops when the entire carousel has been imaged.

Overall, it’s a straightforward build that automatically imaged over 40 boxes of slides for [rbwood53] without issue. If you’ve got a smaller collection to digitize, you might find this simple 3D-printed adapter to be useful, too!

Homebrew LED Strips That Are HomeKit-Compatible

October 3, 2022 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Google, Amazon and Apple are all duking it out for supremacy in the smart home space. As you’ve probably noticed, cheaper smart lights and the like typically don’t offer connectivity with Apple’s HomeKit system. However, if you want some smart lighting that works in that ecosystem without breaking the bank, you can always build your own!

This simple build uses an ESP8266-01S as the brains of the operation. It’s a cut-down board that only has two GPIO pins available, but for this job, that’s enough. It’s paired with a simple relay for switching a single-color LED strip on and off, and an MP2307 buck converter for power. The code loaded onto the ESP8266 is simple, and allows it to connect to Wi-Fi and link up with Apple HomeKit for control.

Let’s say you’re a real fancy-pants, though, and you want RGB-addressable LEDs for your HomeKit setup. No problem, you can do that too! It’s as straightforward as hooking up an ESP8266 to some WS2812B LED strip and flashing the right firmware that emulates an Elgato EVE LED strip. You can even activate special lighting effects on the via the EVE app if you so desire, to take advantage of the fully-addressable nature of the strip.

There are plenty of off-the-shelf solutions in this space, but many of them are quite expensive for what you actually get in the box. Sometimes building your own is more fun, too. Alternatively, if you don’t like Apple’s smart home solutions, you can always try a more open alternative. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Homebrew LED Strips That Are HomeKit-Compatible” →