Design An Electronic Catan Board In A Day

May 23, 2021 by 5 Comments

One of the things that makers sometimes skip over is the design of the project that they’re creating. Some of us don’t do any design at all, we just pants it. The design part of making something can take quite a while – there is sketching to do, as well as 3d-modelling and PCB creation. [Sam March] wanted to try and create something interesting where he did the design in a single day. The result is, or will be, a 3D printed, electronic, Settlers of Catan game board.

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Modifying Lights For DIY Ambiance

May 23, 2021 by 13 Comments

The ESP32 and ESP8266 spread like wildfire a few years ago due to their small form factor, low price, and wireless capability. They didn’t just take over the DIY scene, though. Plenty of mass market products began to incorporate these tiny chips as well, which means that there are some interesting pre-made devices around that are ripe for modification. In this case, using an off-brand smart light bulb as a base for an semi-proprietary lighting setup.

The lighting in this build is a generic RGB light bulb with the ability to control its color over Wi-Fi. Since it has an ESP8266 chip in it, it can be made to work with Philips Hue lights with some minor modifications, allowing a much wider range of control than otherwise available. For this one, [Vadim] needed to pry open the bulb case to access the chip, then solder wires to it for reprogramming. It needed power during this step which meant plugging the resulting mess of wires back into a lamp socket, but after this step the new programming allows the bulb to be reprogrammed remotely.

After that step is complete, though, the generic bulb is ready for its inclusion into a Hue lighting system. In this case, [Vadim] is using diyHue, a Hue emulator that allows control of the bulbs without needing to use any cloud services, running on a BeagleBone. It’s a fairly comprehensive way of adding many different types and brands of bulbs to one system, and avoids any subscription models or the use of a cloud service, which is always something we can get behind.

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Adding Remote Controls To A Blackmagic Studio Camera Without Breaking The Bank

May 22, 2021 by 2 Comments

What to do when one ends up in the possession of a 4K studio camera, but without the requisite hardware and software to remotely control it? When [Glen Akins] ended up in this situation, he took the reasonable option here and developed his own knob-based remote control to adjust exposure and focus on the Blackmagic Designs Micro Studio Camera 4K. Without a remote control option, the only adjustment options are via fiddly small buttons on the camera itself, which wouldn’t have been a fun experience during the webcam usage that this camera would be used for.

This camera is normally controlled via the control channel on the SDI input which also handles the video output from the camera. For larger installations the proprietary ATEM software is commonly used, and there’s a $99 Arduino expansion board as well that’s apparently rarely stocked. With SDI not an option, the second option was LANC, which runs into pretty much the same issue with proprietary protocols and very expensive hardware.

Behind door number three is the more curious control option of the Futaba S.BUS protocol. Originally created for remotely controlling radio-controlled aircraft and similar remotely controlled systems, the thought here appears to be that this studio camera can also be used with systems that already have an S.BUS receiver, such as large drones.

With this S.BUS protocol having been reverse-engineered for a while now, it was a fairly straightforward procedure from there to create an MCU-based board with a lot of encoder knobs on it that map to a specific adjustment on the camera. The result of [Glen]’s labor can be found on GitHub.

Main image: The finished knob-box with the Blackmagic Designs camera. (Credit: Glen Akins)

Affordable Transilluminator Helps Visualize DNA

May 22, 2021 by 2 Comments

If you want to examine the results of gel electrophoresis — and who doesn’t — you need a transilluminator. These devices can be quite pricey, though, so you might want to check out [Gabriel St-Pierre’s] plans to make an affordable blue-light version. You can see a video about the device below.

Using a UV filter, an Arduino Nano, an LED strip, 3D printing, and some mechanical items, it looks like this is a very easy project if you need such a device. There are a few miscellaneous parts like a hinge and some mirror material, but nothing looks too exotic.

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Portable Drill Press

May 22, 2021 by 31 Comments

We aren’t sure that [John Heisz’s] build is really what we think of as a drill press, but it is a very portable way to convert a regular drill into something like a drill press. Your drill will probably be different, but you can follow along with his build in the video below.

On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like this would be very hard, but there are a few tricks. Finding the exact center of the drill axis on the back of the drill takes a bit of effort.

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A Close Look At USB Power

May 22, 2021 by 29 Comments

It’s not a stretch to say that most devices these days have settled on USB as their power source of choice. While we imagine you’ll still be running into the occasional wall wart and barrel jack for the foreseeable future, at least we’re getting closer to a unified charging and power delivery technology. But are all USB chargers and cables created equal?

The answer, of course, is no. But the anecdotal information we all have about dud USB gear is just that, which is why [Igor Brkić] wanted to take a more scientific approach. Inspired by the lighting bolt icon the Raspberry Pi will flash on screen when the voltage drops too low, he set out to make a proper examination of various USB chargers and cables to see which ones aren’t carrying their weight.

In the first half of his investigation, [Igor] tests four fairly typical USB chargers with his TENMA 72-13200 electronic load. Two of them were name brand, and the other just cheap clones. He was surprised to find that all of the power supplies not only met their rated specifications, but in most cases, over-performed by a fair amount. For example the Lenovo branded charger that was rated for only 1 A was still putting out a solid 5 V at 1.7 A. Of course there’s no telling what would happen if you ran them that high for hours or days at a time, but it does speak to their short-term burst capability at least.

He then moved onto the USB cables, were things started to fall apart. The three generic cables saw significant voltage drops even at currents as low as 0.1 A, though the name brand cable with 20 AWG power wires did fare a bit better. But by .5 A they were all significantly below 5 V, and at 1 A, forget about it. Pulling anything more than that through these cables is a non-starter, and in general, you’ll need to put at least 5.2 V in if you want to actually run a USB device on the other side.

Admittedly this might not be groundbreaking research, but we appreciate [Igor] taking a scientific approach and tabulating all the information. If you’re still getting low voltage warnings on the Pi after swapping out your cheapo cables, then maybe the problem is actually elsewhere.

Yee Haw: Full Set Of Cowboy Emojis Now Available

May 22, 2021 by 8 Comments
This cat looks like he plays bassoon in a jazz band.

Emojis are all well and good if you want to add a fun tiny picture to your textual communication to try and add some finer context or zing, but what if the appropriate tiny picture doesn’t accurately represent you or how you feel? Never fear, cowboys, the emoji set you’ve been dreaming of has now been created.

The set was initially created by the appropriately-named [pensivecowboy], by using scripts to place cowboy hats atop existing emojis from the twemoji set automatically. Over time, it was decided to instead just apply these hats to the 300 most-used emojis instead, with some manual fettling in cases where the script-generated result needed a little work.

The fire is coming out of the hat, which is just absolutely fantastic attention to detail.

The result is a complete set of Unicode-compatible cowboy and pensive_cowboy emojis, for when you’re feeling like a cowboy, or feeling like a sad cowboy. Scripts are included for those wishing to work more intimately with the emojis, and there’s even Discord channels to give instant access to the new emojis for those with Nitro subscriptions.

Is this important, groundbreaking work? Your opinion on that likely depends on how much of a cow or a boy you are. But down at the ranch, it’ll likely bring many a smile to a pensive cowboy’s face. A quick search did note the absence of a :snake_in_my_boot: emoji, however, which could be a safety issue down the line.

We’d love to see some open tools built for programmatically hacking emojis; if you’ve developed some, drop us a line. Alternatively, consider this emoji gun that shoots small foam emojis at other people to delight or annoy them.