Video games are great and all, but sometimes you just want the thrill of manipulating actual objects in addition to watching action on a screen. This must have been the reason why Nintendo’s Duck Hunt became so popular despite the simplicity of its gameplay. Prolific hacker [mircemk] similarly made a computer-plus-physical game called “Laser Shooter“, which somehow reminds us of the good old NES game.
The game is based on an Arduino Nano, to which five LEDs as well as five photoresistors (LDRs) are connected. When the game is started, the LEDs light up at random and the player has a limited time to “shoot” the corresponding LDR with a laser pointer. This time limit is decreased as the game progresses, and the game is over once the player fails to hit the target on time. The “Game Over” message is accompanied by a sad tune, but luckily no giggling dog.
Complete schematics and code are available for anyone willing to try their hand at replicating or improving this game. And no, you can’t simply sweep your laser across the five LDRs all the time, because you lose if you shoot at the wrong target. For more laser pointer-based games, try this Laser Command clone or this laser tag badge system.
The average garden dog will play fetch long beyond the average human’s endurance. If you want to keep your dog exercised without hurting your pitching arm, [brankly’s] automatic dog ball launcher might just be what you need.
The design is straightforward. The 3D printed housing features a large funnel into which a ball can be dropped. A servo then holds the ball while a pair of rollers are spun up by brushed DC motors. After two seconds, the servo releases the ball towards the rollers which launch the ball out of the machine. A Raspberry Pi Pico runs the show, controlling the timing of the ball launch and varying the motor speed to change the distance the ball is launched on each firing.
[Marco] looks at a lot of meters. However, he considers the HP3458A the best even though they were introduced more than 30 years earlier in 1989. Someone donated one to [Marco] but it presented some error messages on startup and exhibited erratic behavior, so he had some repairs to do.
The error codes hinted there were issues with the multislope analog to digital converter and that’s what sets the meter apart, according to [Marco]. The meter has 8.5 digits, so a normal conversion stage won’t cut it.
You’ve no doubt heard of the many alternatives to cow’s milk that are available these days. Perhaps you’ve even tried a few of them in your quest to avoid lactose. Some coffeehouses have already moved on from soy milk, offering only oat or almond milk instead of 2% and whole. Their reasoning is that soy milk is a highly processed product that can’t be traced back to a single source, which stands in stark contrast to all those bags of single-origin coffee beans.
These nut-based alternatives kicked off what is known as the milk wars — the dairy industry’s fight against labeling plant-based dairy alternatives as ‘milk’ and so on. Well, now it’s getting even more interesting. A company called Perfect Day is making milk using microorganisms that secrete milk proteins. It may sound kind of gross, but it’s essentially microbial fermentation, which is the normal process by which bread, cheese, yogurt, wine, and beer are made.
To be fair, what Perfect Day and other companies are doing is precision fermentation using genetically engineered microorganisms in a bioreactor, so it’s a bit more involved than what you could probably pull off in the basement. Precision fermentation lies somewhere between two modern extremes — plant-based meat and cultured meat. The latter is actual animal tissue grown from stem cells, and is only available at high-end restaurants for exorbitant prices.
We’re really excited to announce that Jeremy Fielding will give a keynote address at Hackaday Remoticon in November! Get your free ticket now!
The projects we in this community choose to tackle often take a lot to see to completion. Parts, tools, expertise, time; all are critical to getting projects from concept to reality. But how deep your parts bin is or how well-equipped your shop may be matters not a whit unless you’ve got the one thing that makes it all go: passion. Passion is what keeps a project rolling ahead paste the inevitable roadblocks and diversions; it’s what keeps us going back to the bench to try something new when we think we’ve tried it all.
The passion to understand, to create, to innovate, is something that Jeremy Fielding clearly has. Anyone who has watched even a few of his YouTube videos knows how much he loves to make things move. His current project is a seven-axis industrial robot arm, and it’s a seriously impressive build that could easily be mistaken for a commercial product. What’s perhaps most impressive about this is that many of the skills needed to pull it off, like welding aluminum and machining, are skills that Jeremy has been teaching himself on the fly. Talk about passion!
For his keynote, Jeremy is going to focus on building hardware that moves. Most of us are reasonably good at putting together projects that flash a few lights or perhaps move a few small steppers or servos. But scaling that up, as Jeremy has done for his robot arm as well as other projects, introduces new challenges: what type of electric motor do I choose? How do I figure out the trade-offs between torque and speed? Do I even want to use electric motors — maybe pneumatics will be better? What are my control options? These questions can be just as daunting to the old hands as they are to beginners, and Jeremy is going to focus on how to handle these and other mechatronic challenges that crop up in our projects.
Aside from the (literal) nuts and bolts of mechanical engineering, there’s another place where Jeremy’s passion shines through: his passion for communicating what he has learned. His presentation style and enthusiasm are infectious, and we’re sure that’s going to come across in his keynote. Jeremy fancies himself a “contraption engineer,” which is both an apt and engaging way to look at what he does. Fellow contraption builders take note — you’re going to want to make sure you don’t miss this one!
Call for Proposals is Still Open!
We’re still on the hunt for great talks about hardware creation, so the Call for Proposals has been extended to October 20. And remember, get your tickets early — knowing how many people to expect really helps us with infrastructure planning so we can give everyone a quality experience.
When building your own homebrew computer, everything is a challenge. Ultimately, that’s kind of the point. If you didn’t want to really get your hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of the thing, you wouldn’t have built it in the first place. For example, take the lengths to which [rehsd] was willing to go in order to support standard USB mice on their 6502 machine.
Code for mapping mouse movement to digital output.
The idea early on was to leverage existing Arduino libraries to connect with a standard USB mouse, specifically, the hardware would take the form of an Arduino Mega 2560 with a USB Host Shield. There was plenty of code and examples that showed how you could read the mouse position and clicks from the Arduino, but [rehsd] still had to figure out a way to get that information into the 6502.
In the end, [rehsd] connected one of the digital pins from the Arduino to an interrupt pin on the computer’s W65C22 versatile interface adapter (VIA). Then eleven more digital pins were connected to the computer, each one representing a state for the mouse and buttons, such as MOUSE_CLICK_RIGHT and MOUSE_LEFT_DOWN.
Admittedly, [rehsd] says the mouse action is far from perfect. But as you can see in the video after the break, it’s at least functional. While the code could likely be tightened up, there’s obviously some improvements to be made in terms of the electrical interface. The use of shift registers could reduce the number of wires between the Arduino and VIA, which would be a start. It’s also possible a chip like the CH375 could be used, taking the microcontroller out of the equation entirely.
From classic breadboard builds to some impressively practical portable machines, we’ve seen our fair share of 6502 computers over the years. Despite the incredible variation to be found in these homebrew systems, one thing is always the same: they’re built by some of the most passionate folks out there.
When you’re standing at the gas station filling up your car, watching those digits on the pump flip by can be a sobering experience. Fuel prices, especially the price of gasoline, have always been keenly watched, so it’s hard to imagine a time when gasoline was a low-value waste product. But kerosene, sold mainly for lighting, was once king of the petroleum industry, at least before the automobile came along, to the extent that the gasoline produced while refining kerosene was simply dumped into streams to get rid of it.
The modern mind perhaps shudders at the thought of an environmental crime of that magnitude, and we can’t imagine how anyone would think that was a good solution to the problem. And yet we now face much the same problem, as the increasing electrification of the world’s fleet of motor vehicles pushes down gasoline demand. To understand why this is a problem, we’ll start off by taking a look at how crude oil is formed, and how decreasing demand for gasoline may actually cause problems that we should think about before we get too far down the road.
