A Portable Home Air Quality Meter With The ESP32

July 20, 2020 by 19 Comments

Around the world, rolling pandemic lockdowns have left many working from home. [kn100] is in just such a predicament, and while spending nearly 24 hour a day in a residential flat, got wondering about air quality. Thus, it was time to build some gear to keep an eye on things!

Grafana may require a database and some work to set up, but the results are to die for.

The build consists of an ESP32 hooked up to a Bosch BME680 air quality sensor. It measures pressure, temperature, humidity and gas resistance, and then with a closed source library, uses this to calculate an “Air Quality Index” as well as estimate CO2 and VOC levels in the air. Data is passed from the ESP32 over MQTT to a Raspberry Pi. This runs Mosquitto for handling the MQTT queries, saving the data in an Influxdb instance. Grafana is then used to query this database and produce attractive graphs of the data.

It’s a build that not only helps keep an eye on things in the flat, but is great practice for building solid Internet of Things devices with top-notch data visualisation. We’ve talked about how to do this before, too – so if you need this capability in your life, there’s no excuse not to get hacking!

Finding The Random Seed Of Minecraft’s Title Screen

July 20, 2020 by 12 Comments

Minecraft is a game about exploring procedure-generated worlds. Each world is generated from a particular “seed” value, and sharing this seed value allows others to generate the same world in their own game. Recently, the distributed computing project Minecraft@Home set about trying to find the seed value of the world shown in the Minecraft title screen, and have succeeded in their goal.

The amount of work required to complete this task should not be underestimated. 137 users contributed 181 hosts with 231 GPUs to the effort, finding a solution in under 24 hours. The list of contributors to the project is a long one. It appears the method to find the seed involved comparing screenshots from various seed worlds to the original image. This took a lot of reverse engineering in order to calculate the camera FOV and other settings of the original capture, such that the results could be compared accurately. Interestingly, the group found two seeds that can generate the requisite world, suggesting the world generator code has some collisions between seed values.

We’re not sure what’s more astounding, the amount of work that went into the project, or that there’s a distributed computing project tackling advanced Minecraft research. Either way, we’re no strangers to Minecraft hacks around these parts. Video after the break. Continue reading “Finding The Random Seed Of Minecraft’s Title Screen” →

There’s An Engineer In Germany I’d Like A Word With; Tale Of A Crumbling Volkswagen Lock

July 20, 2020 by 149 Comments

In common with quite a few in the hardware hacking community, I have a fondness for older vehicles. My “modern” ride is an older vehicle by today’s standards, a Volkswagen Polo 6N made in the late 1990s. It’s by my estimation a Good Car, having transported me reliably back and forth across the UK and Europe for several years.

Last week though, it let me down. Outside the church in a neighbouring village the driver’s door lock failed, leaving me with my igniton key stuck in the door, and a mildly embarrassing phone call to my dad to bring the Torx driver required to remove the assembly and release it. I am evidently not 1337 enough, I don’t carry a full set of Torx bits with me everywhere I go. The passenger side lock has never worked properly while I’ve had the car, and this is evidently my cue to sort it all out.

Continue reading “There’s An Engineer In Germany I’d Like A Word With; Tale Of A Crumbling Volkswagen Lock” →

Ubuntu Update Hack Chat

July 20, 2020 by 18 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, July 22 at noon Pacific for the Ubuntu Update Hack Chat with Rhys Davies and Alan Pope!

Everyone has their favorite brands, covering everything from the clothes they wear to the cars they drive. We see brand loyalty informing all sorts of acquisition decisions, not only in regular consumer life but in technology, too. Brand decisions sort people into broad categories like Mac versus PC, or iPhone versus Android, and can result in spirited discussions of the relative merits of one choice over the others. It’s generally well-intentioned, even if it gets a bit personal sometimes.

Perhaps no choice is more personal in hacker circles than which Linux distribution to use. There are tons to choose from, each with their various features and particular pros and cons. Ubuntu has become a very popular choice for Linux aficionados, attracting more than a third of the market. Canonical is the company behind the Debian-based distro, providing editions that run on the desktop, on servers, and on a variety of IoT devices, as well as support and services for large-scale users.

To fill us in on what’s new in the world of Ubuntu, Canonical product manager Rhys Davies and developer advocate Alan Pope will stop by the Hack Chat this week. They’ll be ready to answer all your questions about the interesting stuff that’s going on with Ubuntu, including the recently announced Ubuntu Appliances, easy to install, low maintenance images for Raspberry Pis and PCs that are built for security and simplicity. We’ll also talk about snaps, desktops, and whatever else crops up.

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, July 22 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. Continue reading “Ubuntu Update Hack Chat” →

Raspberry Pi Shuffler Is Computerized Card Shark

July 20, 2020 by 11 Comments

If you’re playing Texas Hold’em or other card games with a small group, you may get tired of shuffling over and over again. [3dprintedLife] was in just such a position, and realized there were no good automatic card shufflers in his budget. Instead, he elected to build one, and put in some extra functionality to corrupt the game to his whims.

The mechanicals of the machine took much development, as accurately handling and dispensing cards is a challenge, particularly with the loose tolerances of 3D printed parts. After developing a reliable transport mechanism, it was more than capable of shuffling a deck well with some basic commands.

However, the real magic comes from installing a camera and Raspberry Pi running OpenCV. This is capable of reading the value and suit of each card, and then stacking the deck in a particular order to suit the dealer’s wishes. It’s all controlled through a web interface and is capable of creating guaranteed wins in Blackjack and Texas Hold’em. Files are on Github for those eager to delve deeper into how the machine works.

The mechanism does such a beautiful job of shuffling, that your friends may not even notice the ruse. It goes to show that you should always have your wits about you when gambling with the aid of machines. Of course, if you wish only to create havoc, this Lego card machine gun may be more your speed. Video after the break.

[via Reddit]

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Shuffler Is Computerized Card Shark” →

Automated Part Removal Gets Serious With The Chain Production Add-on

July 20, 2020 by 46 Comments

Giving a 3D printer the ability to remove its own prints means that it can crank out part after part automatically, without relying on a human operator between jobs. [Damien Weber] has done exactly that to his Prusa MK3/S printer, with what he calls the Chain Production Add-on.

[Damien]’s approach is one we haven’t quite seen before. When printing is complete, a fan cools the part then an arm (with what looks like utility knife blades attached at an angle) swings up and behind the bed. The arm zips forward and scoops the print off the bed, dumping the finished part in the process. It’s all made from 3D printed parts, aluminum extrusion and hardware, two stepper motors, and a driver PCB. The GitHub repository linked above holds all the design files, but there is also a project page on PrusaPrinters.org.

Not quite sure how it all works? Watch it in action in the video embedded below.

Continue reading “Automated Part Removal Gets Serious With The Chain Production Add-on” →

3D Printer Revives Large Format Camera

July 19, 2020 by No comments

With a quarter-century of more of consumer digital cameras behind us, it’s easy to forget that there was once another way to see your photos without waiting for them to be developed. Polaroid Land cameras and their special film could give the impatient photographer a print in about a minute, but sadly outside a single specialist producer, it is no longer a product that is generally available.  [The Amateur Engineer] sought an alternative for a large format camera, by adapting a back designed for Fuji Instax film instead.

Lomography, the retailer of fun plastic cameras, had produced an Instax back for one of their cameras, and to adapt it for a Tachihara large format camera required a custom 3D-printed frame. Being quite a large item it had to be printed in three pieces and stuck together with epoxy. Then a series of light leaks had to be chased down and closed up. The result is a working Instax back for the camera, which appears to deliver the photographic goods.

We’ve seen a few digital backs for larger cameras produced with scanners, but we rather like this linear CCD one.