Giant Bearing Is At The Heart Of A Camera Mount

June 15, 2020 by 9 Comments

We bet you have all some cool part in your bin that is just gnawing at you to build something cool. That doodad, possibly from a garage sale, surplus store, or clearance rack deserves a project fitting of its near-infinite potential. [isaac879] finally marries a giant ball bearing with his passion for photography in the form of a pan-tilt camera mount for his Canon DSLR. The problem with tossing your golden-ticket part into a project is that not everyone has a MacGuffin, or a brand new one might be bank-breakingly expensive, so he does us a favor and makes a drop-in replacement that you can print and fill with 6mm brass bbs. This sort of thing is why we love hackers.

The camera mount has the features we expect to see in a robust stepper mount, such as infinite spinning, time delay, and an Xbox controller interface. Inside the base is the industrial bearing or its plastic replica, and that wide base won’t be tipping over anytime soon. Gearing all around is of the herringbone style, of the type you find in classroom pencil sharpeners because they transfer power smoothly. Speaking of things going smoothly, we enjoyed his assembly montage where every part fits together perfectly and there is not a naughty word to be uttered. Just like real life.

If you like homemade bearings, check out this slew bearing that looks like it was made with Perler beads, and we have a self-aligning camera tripod mount for the photography buffs.

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Electronic Connect Four Has No Pieces To Lose

June 15, 2020 by 6 Comments

Recreating classic games in software is a great way to get better at coding or learn to code in the first place. If you do it in hardware though, you’ll gain a lot more than coding skills. Just ask [Kelly] and [Jack] did, when they built this Arduino-based electronic Connect Four for a school project.

We love that their interpretation manages to simplify game play and make it more fun than the original version. All the players have to do is turn it on and start pushing the arcade buttons along the bottom to choose the column where they want to make a play. The LEDs animate from top to bottom to imitate the plastic disc dropping down through the board. If a win is detected — four in a row of the same color going any direction — the board fills up with the winning color and the game starts over.

The state machine doesn’t currently do anything about tie situations, so there’s a reset button hidden on the side. As [Kelly] and [Jack] explain in their walk-through video after the break, that is something they would like to address in the future, along with making it possible to choose whatever battle color you want. We think a reset animation that mimics the look of the discs spilling out the bottom would be cool, too.

If you’ve never implemented a game on hardware before, something like this might be a bit daunting. May we suggest a game of 4×4 Tic Tac Toe instead?

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Hacking A Cheap Disco Light For UV Effects

June 15, 2020 by 21 Comments

Back in the early days of disco, filament bulbs were all the rage. Whether tungsten, halogen, or other obscure types, party lighting involved lots of watts and lots of heat. These days, the efficiency of LEDs makes everything a lot cheaper, lighter, and lower power. [Big Clive] decided to dive into a cheap moonflower-type disco light from China, replacing the insides along the way.

The final effect particularly shines when used on fluorescent materials.

The light originally consisted of an 8×8 grid of LEDs, driven by shift registers for a simple chase effect. Surprisingly, the power supply and other hardware inside seemed to at least make an attempt to meet UK regulations. However, [Big Clive] had other plans, whipping up a replacement PCB packing 64 UV LEDs. The video is informative, showing how with a few simple passive components, it’s easy to drive these LEDs from mains without excessive circuitry required to step down to more usual DC voltages.

The final result is a neat UV grid light that would look excellent through some fog on the dance floor. We’ve seen [Big Clive]’s teardowns before, too – like this nefarious CAN bus interceptor found in a Mercedes. Video after the break.

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Linux-Fu: Automation For Chrome And The Desktop By Matching Screenshots

June 15, 2020 by 11 Comments

I will be the first to admit it. This is almost not — at least not specifically — a Linux article. The subject? An automation tool for Chrome or Firefox. But before you hit the back button, hear me out. Sure, this Chrome plugin started out as a tool to automatically test web pages and automate repetitive tasks in the browser. However, it can extend that power to all programs on your computer. So, in theory, you can use it to graphically build macros that can interact with desktop applications in surprisingly sophisticated ways. In theory, anyway; there are a few problems.

The program has a few different names. Most documentation says UI Vision RPA, although there are some references to Kantu, which appears to be an older name. RPA is an acronym for Robotic Process Automation, which is an industry buzz word.

Let’s take it for a spin and see what it’s all about.

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PPE Testing Hack Chat

June 15, 2020 by 2 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, June 17 at noon Pacific for the PPE Testing Hack Chat with Hiram Gay and Lex Kravitz!

When the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in early 2020, the hacker community responded in the most natural way possible: by making stuff. Isolation and idleness lead to a creative surge as hackers got to work on not only long-deferred fun projects but also potential solutions to problems raised by an overloaded medical system and choked supply chains. And so workshops and hackerspaces the world over churned out everything from novel ventilators to social-distancing aids.

But perhaps the greatest amount of creative energy was set loose on the problem of personal protective equipment, or PPE. This was due in no small part to predictions of a severe shortage of the masks, gowns, and gloves that front-line medical workers would need to keep them safe while caring for pandemic victims, but perhaps also because, at least compared to the complexity of something like a ventilator, building a mask seems easy. And indeed it is as long as you leave unanswered the crucial question: does the thing work?

Answering that question is not as easy as it seems, though. It’s not enough to assume that putting some filtration between the user and the world will work; you’ve got to actually make measurements. Hiram Gay and Lex Kravitz, colleagues at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, actually crunched the numbers on the full-face snorkel mask they modified for use as a face shield for medical PPE, and they have a lot of insights to share about proper testing of such devices. They’ll join the Hack Chat this week to discuss their findings, offer advice to builders, and reveal how they came up with their idea for a different way to build and test PPE.

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, June 17 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.
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Bluetooth Development Board Goes The Distance

June 15, 2020 by 13 Comments

Have you ever come across an interesting chip or component that you wanted to experiment with, only to find that there doesn’t seem to be a development board for it? Spinning up your own board is a lot easier today than it has been in the past, but it’s still a bit of a hassle to do it just for your own personal use. This is why [Nikolaj Andersson Nielsen] has decided to release RFCat, his custom long-range Bluetooth development board, onto the community.

The board is based around a module from MeshTek that’s essentially an amplified version of the Nordic nRF52832. According to [Nikolaj], this gives the module 30 times the transmit power of the base model chip.

RFCat is compatible with the Arduino IDE and uses the Adafruit nRF52 bootloader, making it easy to write your own code to take advantage of all this new-found power. Primarily you’d be programming the board over USB-C, but it also supports Serial Wire Debug (SWD) and over-the-air updates that can be triggered with a physical push button on the device.

If you want to get an RFCat of your own, it’s available on Tindie now. The amplified modules were originally intended for building Bluetooth mesh networks, but we’re sure there are other interesting applications out there just waiting to be discovered.

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Samsung’s Leap Month Bug Teaches Not To Skimp On Testing

June 15, 2020 by 23 Comments

Date and time handling is hard, that’s an ugly truth about software development we’ll all learn the hard way one day. Sure, it might seem like some trivial everyday thing that you can easily implement yourself without relying on a third-party library. I mean, it’s basically just adding seconds on top of one another, roll them over to minutes, and from there keep rolling to hours, days, months, up until you hit the years. Throw in the occasional extra day every fourth February, and you’re good to go, right?

Well, obviously not. Assuming you thought about leap years in the first place — which sadly isn’t a given — there are a few exceptions that for instance cause the years 1900 and 2100 to be regular years, while the year 2000 was still a leap year. And then there’s leap seconds, which occur irregularly. But there are still more gotchas lying in wait. Case in point: back in May, a faulty lunar leap month handling in the Chinese calendar turned Samsung phones all over China into bricks. And while you may not plan to ever add support for non-Gregorian calendars to your own project, it’s just one more example of unanticipated peculiarities gone wild. Except, Samsung did everything right here.

So what happened?

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