Hackaday Links: March 22, 2015

March 22, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

[Liam Kennedy] built a wearable space station notifier it’s on Kickstarter, and now the campaign is in its final hours. It’s very cool; doubly so if you don’t have to talk to a crazy lady who doubts the existence of NASA.

[countkillalot] lost a Raspberry Pi. It was in his apartment, and responded to ping, but he couldn’t find it. Turning the Pi into an FM transmitter revealed its location. Relevant bash.org.

If you don’t listen to the Amp Hour podcast, oh man are you in for a treat. This time it’s [Chuck Peddle], father of the 6502, designer of the KIM-1, and someone with at least three hours’ worth of interesting stories.

MakeIt Labs, the Nashua, New Hampshire hackerspace, has done everything right – they have their 501(c)(3), and they’ve been talking to the city about getting a new space. They have the option of moving into a space three times the size as their current one, and it’s cheaper than the current space. They have an indiegogo to raise the renovation funds for the new space. Oh, hackaday.io supports pages for hackerspaces. Just pointing that out.

Speaking of hackerspaces, yours needs this sign.

A 3-DAY DESERT CAMPING AND TECH-FEST WITH BEER. That’s all you need to know about Arduino Day, an event being held next weekend in the Mojave.

Want to hide from the NSA, or whatever governments or corporate interests are listening in on your phone? Stick it in a microwave. [WhiskeyTangoHotel] tested out a Tek RSA306 spectrum analyzer in a microwave, once with the door open, once with the door closed. If you’re exceptionally clever or have access to Wikipedia, you can figure out what frequencies will leak out of a microwave given the size of the holes in the metal mesh.

Here’s a Flintstones toilet paper holder. It would have been a phonograph, but no one could find a cooperative turtle and bird.

It has been brought to our attention that everyone should be aware ucapps.de still exists. If you want something that does everything with MIDI and SID chips, there you go.

Hackaday Links: March 15, 2015

March 15, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

[Fran] and [Bil] are back again for the first Dinosaur Den of 2015. Highlights of this edition include a surprisingly young tri-power supply and Nixie display cards from 1965.

The game of Go has been turned into a sequencer. That’s a project from [Kristian Gohlke] and [Michael Hlatky]. It’s an industrial camera placed above a Go board, and some computer vision algorithms to detect stones on the board. There’s a 16×16 section to create drum patterns (black stones) or synth notes (white stones). Below that there’s a 16×3 grid for the bass notes, two 3×8 grids to control filters and effects, and a 3×3 grid to play percussive loops.

HOW TO REMOVE A GPS ANKLE MONITOR. We had to get the SEO right on this one. Here’s how you can ditch your probation officer for a weekend. Great news: his parents used their house for bail, now an entire family is homeless. Lesson learned: use a burner phone and call forwarding until you’re out of the country.

The Computer History Museum is doing a great series of interviews, and this one is with [Bob Dobkin], former director at National Semiconductor, and co-founder of Linear. Analog design isn’t wizardry, you just need a decade of experience.

[Simon] over at the Hack42 hackerspace finally found the time to repair their old Holborn 9120 terminal – the most space-age terminal ever built. The keyboard is an old Keytronic unit, and the foam underneath the keys had turned to dust. This was replaced with an Ikea mousepad, foam tape, and the foil from a discarded bag of chips. It worked, and they got their terminal to load our retro edition:

If you have some old hardware, try to point it at our retro site, take a picture (or post a writeup) and send it on in.

Happy Pi Day. 3.14159265359……

March 14, 2015 by George Graves 72 Comments

Unless you were alive in 1592, this is the closest to the perfect “Pi day” you’ll ever get. 3/14/15. And if you want to take a moment to pause at 9:26:53 (am or pm? Time zone? Country?) we’ll be right there with you. Well, sorta of.

Now, before you laugh, and think Pi is just a number, think again. It’s almost magical in nature. It’s effects on our daily lives is found everywhere. From biology to astrophysics. In the perspective of history, it can be used as a milestone to mark many different culture’s advancement of math and science. In short, Pi is a keystone of the modern world. With out it, we’d never would have gone to the moon. We might sill be on horse back. And forget electronics. That fun stuff never would have happened.

(As a side note, on this day, 3/14, just happens to be Albert Einstein birthday. Happy birthday!)

We hope you have an awesome Pi day. We would love to see you in the comments too. For example, we’d love to hear about and see posts of algorithms that can compute Pi. How far can you compute Pi on a Raspberry Pi? Or even child hood stories of your first encounter with that magical number. Post up, and let us know your thoughts.

We’ll leave you with this cute video after the break, It’s an 8-year-old reciting 200 digits of Pi . But if you need more digits….There is 1 million digits of pi.

Continue reading “Happy Pi Day. 3.14159265359……” →

TwitterPrinter Keeps Track Of 2015 Hack-A-Day Prize

March 11, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

[Mastro Gippo] is getting to be somewhat of a Hackaday legend. He didn’t win the 2014 Hackaday prize but was in attendance at the event in Munich, and to make sure he keeps up with this year’s Prize, he built this old-school printer that prints all of the updates from the Hackaday Prize Twitter account.

The device uses the now-famous ESP8266 module for connecting the printer to the Internet. It doesn’t scrape data straight from Twitter though, it looks at [Mastro Gippo]’s own server to avoid getting inundated with too many tweets at once. The program splits the tweets into a format that is suitable for the printer (plain text) and then the printer can parse the data onto the paper. The rest of the design incorporates a 3.3V regulator for power and some transistors to turn the printer on and off. Be sure to check out the video of the device in action after the break!

[Mastro Gippo] notes that this eliminates the need to have a smartphone in order to keep up with the 2015 Hackaday Prize, which is ironic because his entry into the Trinket Everyday Carry Contest was a smarter-than-average phone. We’ll be expecting something that doesn’t waste quite as much paper for his official contest entry, though!

Continue reading “TwitterPrinter Keeps Track Of 2015 Hack-A-Day Prize” →

2015 THP Inspiration: Renewable Energy

March 10, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

Most of our energy comes from dead algae or dead ferns right now, and we all know that can’t continue forever. The future is by definition sustainable, and if you’re looking for a project to change the world for this year’s Hackaday Prize, you can’t do better than something to get the world off carbon-based fuels.

The simplest solar builds can be as fun as a redneck hot tub – a solar thermal water heater repurposed into a heated swimming pool with the help of a pump and JB Weld. You can even build a hose-based version for $100. They can be as useful as a Maximum Power Point Tracking charger for a solar setup – a few bits of electronics that ensure you’re getting the most out of your solar cells. You can, of course, access solar power in a roundabout way with a wind generator built from a washing machine and a 555 timer.

Getting energy from the sun is one thing, and putting it to use is another thing entirely. We spend a lot of energy on transportation, and for that there’s a solar power bike, an electric scooter, or a completely open source electric car.

Building the machines that make sustainable energy possible or even just the tools that will let us use all that energy are just a few ideas that would make great entries for The Hackaday Prize. You could go another direction and build the tools that will build and maintain these devices, like figuring out a way to keep these batteries and generators out of the landfill. Any way you look at it, anything that actually matters would make a great entry to The Hackaday Prize.

2015 THP Inspiration: The Environment

March 10, 2015 by Brian Benchoff No comments

It’s not as flashy as Tesla coils or electric vehicles going 200 mph, but the environment is more important than a bunch of cool baubles and sparks flying everywhere. When it comes to this year’s Hackaday Prize, you’re going to need a project that matters, and what’s a better way to do it than with something to help the environment?

While not traditionally a domain that rocks people’s socks, there are a lot of cool builds that can help the environment like this hyperspectral imager that’s a mashup of a spectrometer and a camera, or something that takes an image of an object, complete with the spectral data of each pixel. It’s useful for everything from farming, to forestry, to medicine.

Perhaps you want to get your hands messy by mucking about in the dirt. You’ll probably find something interesting to build for this year’s Hackaday Prize, like the modular farmer’s market we saw in Detroit last year. How about an urban farming and aquaponics setup? Tilapia do well in giant buckets, you know.

If robots are more your speed, then how about an RC tractor or an entire robotic farm? You could always eradicate invasive plants with a quadcopter if flying around is more suited to your expertise. There are plenty of ways to do something that matters for this year’s Hackaday prize, but we’d be lying if we had all the answers. That’s where you come in with your entry for The Hackaday Prize.

2015 THP: Judges And Sponsors

March 10, 2015 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

And now it’s time to recognize a big part what makes the Hackaday Prize possible: our Judges and our Sponsors. First up are the Judges. We are fortunate again this year to be joined by top experts from around the world. We are going to briefly touch on each in this post, but you really should hit the Judge’s page for bios and links on everyone.

New Judges in 2015

We have seven judges new to the panel this year:

We love seeing a project pic used as an avatar and [Akiba] of freaklabs didn’t disappoint; we covered that project in 2013. [Pete Dokter], known well for According to Pete, joins us from Sparkfun. [Lenore Edman] and [Windell Oskay] are the force behind Evil Mad Scientist Labs. [Heather Knight] of Marilyn Monrobot is finishing her PhD in Robots at Carnegie Mellon. [Ben Krasnow] should need no introduction; formerly of Valve, currently of Google[x], and always of Applied Science. [Micah Scott] is artist/engineer/hacker and her Blu-Ray drive RE work is among our most favorite of 2014 hacks.

Returning Judges

Five of our friends from the 2014 Hackaday Prize are returning this year:

We have a hard time calling the founder of Adafruit anything other than [Ladyada] but you may know her as [Limor Fried]. The hardware design site The Ganssle Group is spearheaded by [Jack Ganssle]. You know [Dave Jones] from his electronics design and reverse engineering videos on EEVblog and also from the Amp Hour podcast. [Ian Lesnet] is a Hackaday alum, creator of Dangerous Prototypes, and expert regarding manufacturing in China. And finally, [Elecia White] is an extraordinary embedded engineer, founder of Logical Elegance, and the Embedded podcast.

Welcome back, and so happy to have the new Judges this year!

2015 Hackaday Prize Sponsors

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The 2015 Hackaday Prize is presented by Supplyframe (parent company of Hackaday). This year we have added five giants of the hardware world as sponsors. We don’t recall having seen so many major players come together for a single initiative. We’re excited that they share our vision of supporting design initiatives. Please thank them by following their Hackaday.io pages: Atmel, Freescale Semiconductor, Microchip, Mouser Electronics, and Texas Instruments. Thank you sponsors!