Hackaday Links: February 1, 2015

February 1, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

It’s Sunday evening, and that means Hackaday Links, and that means something crowdfunded. This week it’s UberBlox. It’s a modular construction system based on Al extrusion – basically a modern version of an Erector set. Random musings on the perceived value UberBlox offers in the comments, I’m sure.

[Trevor] sent in something from his Etsy shop. Normally we’d shy away from blatant self-promotion, but this is pretty cool. It’s reproductions of 1960s Lockheed flying saucer plans. We’re not sure if this is nazi moon base/lizard people from the inner earth flying saucer plans or something a little more realistic, but there you go.

3D computer mice exist, as do quadcopters. Here’s the combination. It looks like there’s a good amount of control, and could be used for some aerobatics if you’re cool enough.

Who doesn’t love LED cubes? They’re awesome, but usually limited to one color. Here’s an RGB LED cube. It’s only 4x4x4, but there’s a few animations and a microphone with a beat detection circuit all powered by an ATMega32u4.

A while ago we had a post about a solar powered time lapse rig. Time lapse movies take a while, and the results are finally in.

Hackaday Links: January 25, 2015

January 25, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

Misumi is doing something pretty interesting with their huge catalog of aluminum extrusions, rods, bolts, and nuts. They’re putting up BOMs for 3D printers. If you’ve ever built a printer with instructions you’ve somehow found on the RepRap wiki, you know how much of a pain it is to go through McMaster or Misumi to find the right parts. Right now they have three builds, one with linear guides, one with a linear shaft, and one with V-wheels.

So you’re finally looking at those fancy SLA or powder printers. If you’re printing an objet d’arte like the Stanford bunny or the Utah teapot and don’t want to waste material, you’re obviously going to print a thin shell of material. That thin shell isn’t very strong, so how do you infill it? Spheres, of course. By importing an object into Meshmixer, you can build a 3D honeycomb inside a printed object. Just be sure to put a hole in the bottom to let the extra resin or powder out.

Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer invented an automatic hammer? It’s been reinvented using a custom aluminum linkage, a freaking huge battery, and a solenoid. Next up is the makeup shotgun, and a reclining toilet.

[Jan] built a digitally controlled analog synth. We’ve seen a few of his ~~FM synths~~ VA synths built from an LPC-810 ARM chip before, but this is the first one that could reasonably be called an analog synth. He’s using a digital filter based on the Cypress PSoC-4.

The hip thing to do with 3D printers is low-poly Pokemon. I don’t know how it started, it’s just what the kids are doing these days. Those of us who were around for Gen 1 the first time it was released should notice a huge oversight by the entire 3D printing and Pokemon communities when it comes to low-poly Pokemon. I have corrected this oversight. I’ll work on a pure OpenSCAD model (thus ‘made completely out of programming code’) when I’m sufficiently bored.

*cough**bullshit* A camera that can see through walls *cough**bullshit* Seriously, what do you make of this?

Hackaday Links: January 18, 2015

January 18, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

A little while ago, we complained that there aren’t many projects using the Microview, a very cool Arduino and OLED thing that might be just too big for a ring. [Johannes] answered the call with a slot car track timer. He’s using an infrared distance sensor to count off lap times for his slot car track and a mini thermal printer to print out the times. Video right here.

Too many cables in your freshman college dorm room? Here’s the solution.

Our Internet travels frequently take us to strange auctions (we’re still looking for a US Mail truck, btw), but this one takes the cake. 24kt gold plates that were flown in space for five and a half years weighing 6,015.5 grams (212.191 oz). At the current price of $1277.06/oz, this auction should go for $270,980 USD. I’m 99% sure this was part of the Long Duration Exposure Facility, but I have no clue why this much gold was flown. Surely they could have done the same amount of science with only a hundred thousand dollars worth of gold, right?

So here’s this, but this isn’t your everyday, “put an Arduino in a vibrator” crowdfunding campaign. No, they actually have some great tutorials. Did you know that a stroke sensor looks like shag carpeting? [Scott] tells us, “I believe the founders are all graduate students getting PhDs in something or other, starting a sex toy company on the side.” More power to ’em.

Speaking of dildonics, the guy who coined that term will be giving one of the keynotes at the Vintage Computer Festival East this year. Yes, we’ll be there in full force.

Hackaday Links: January 11, 2015

January 11, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

Listening tests reveal significant sound quality differences between various digital music storage technologies. Finally the audiophile press is tackling the important questions. This listening test looks at the difference between two four-bay NAS boxes, with one making the piano on Scherzo and Trio from Penguin Café Orchestra’s Union Cafe sound more Steinway-like, while another NAS makes it sound more like a Bosendörfer. Yes, your choice of digital storage medium can change the timbre of a piano. Another gem: “Additionally, the two units also had different processor architectures, which might also affect perceived audible differences.” There must be a corollary to Poe’s Law when it comes to audiophiles…

[10p6] has begun a project that can play every old Atari cartridge. Right now it’s just a few bits of plastic that fits every non-Jaguar Atari cartridge, but it’s a start.

The Android IMSI-Catcher Detector. You’ve heard about Stingrays, devices used by law enforcement that are basically fake cell towers. These Stingrays downgrade or disable the encryption present in all cellphones, allowing anyone, with or without a warrant, to listen in on any cell phone conversation. Now there’s an effort to detect these Stingrays. It’s open source, and they’re looking for volunteers.

[Rob] sent in something that’s the perfect application of projection mapping. It’s called Face Hacking, and it’s pretty much just a motion capture systems, a few projectors, a whole lot of CG work, and just a tiny bit of dubstep. It look cool, but we’re wondering what the applications would be. Theatre or some sort of performance art is the best I can come up with.

A while ago, [4ndreas] saw a 3D printed industrial robot arm. He contacted the guy for the files, but nothing came of that. [4ndreas] did what anyone should do – made his own 3D printable industrial robot arm. The main motors are NEMA 17, and printing this will take a long time. Still, it looks really, really cool.

Hackaday Links: January 4, 2015

January 4, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

Chips as furniture is now a thing. It started off with a 555 footstool from Evil Mad Scientist and moved on to an EPROM coffee table. Now [msvm] over on the War Thunder forums has constructed a Nixie tube driver table. It’s based on the K155, and as a neat little addition, he’s included a real vintage chip under glass in the table.

Have some tongs, an anvil, and a blowtorch? Make some bottle openers out of framing nails. There’s a lot of variety here in the shapes of the bottle openers.

[Stephen] used a solid state relay he found on eBay to drive some Christmas lights. The SSR failed. That meant it was time to see inside of this relay looked like. The short answer is, ‘a lot of goop and epoxy’, but the traces look big enough to support the current it’s rated for.

Imagine a part of your 3D printer breaks. That’s alright, just print another…. oh, yeah. Well, I guess it’s time to make a bearing bracket out of wood.

The Electronica MK-54 and MK-61 (actually the Электроника МК-54) were incredibly popular Soviet programmable calculators. Now there’s an emulator for them.

[Rue Mohr] found a very cheap TFT display on an Arduino shield. The chip for the display was an SPF5408, a chip that isn’t supported by the most common libraries. He eventually got it to work after emailing the seller, getting some libraries, and renaming and moving a bunch of stuff. If you have one of these displays, [Rue] just saved you a bunch of time.

$15 Car Stereo Bluetooth Upgrade

December 1, 2014 by Marsh 29 Comments

We’ve seen all sorts of ways to implement Bluetooth connectivity on your car stereo, but [Tony’s] hack may be the cheapest and easiest way yet. The above-featured Bluetooth receiver is a measly $15 over at Amazon (actually $7.50 today—it’s Cyber Monday after all) and couldn’t be any more hacker-friendly. It features a headphone jack for plugging into your car’s AUX port and is powered via USB.

[Tony] didn’t want the receiver clunking around in the console, though, so he cracked it open and went about integrating it directly by soldering the appropriate USB pins to 5V and GND on the stereo. There was just one catch: the stereo had no AUX input. [Tony] needed to rig his own, so he hijacked the CD player’s left and right audio channels (read about it in his other post), which he then soldered to the audio output of the Bluetooth device. After shoving all the bits back into the dashboard, [Tony] just needed to fool his stereo into thinking a CD was playing, so he burned a disc with 10 hours of silence to spin while the tunes play wirelessly. Nice!

Ghost Gunner Machines Your AR-15

October 12, 2014 by Adam Fabio 193 Comments

Defense Distributed and founder [Cody Wilson] have released Ghost Gunner. Defense Distributed entered the public eye a couple of years ago with The Liberator, the world’s first 3D printed gun. Since anyone with a 3D printer can print a Liberator, it is effectively untraceable. This raised a lot of questions in the media and public eye.

Ghost Gunner is a variation on the untraceable theme. Essentially, Ghost Gunner is a CNC designed for one purpose: final drilling and milling steps for AR-15 lower receivers. The reason for this has to do with federal gun laws in the United States. According to US law, the lower receiver is the actual firearm, and is regulated. But when does a block of aluminum become a lower receiver? Here, US law states that the metal becomes a regulated receiver when the machining operations are more than 80% complete.

Anyone can legally buy a barrel, trigger, stock, upper receiver, and various other parts to build an AR-15. To complete the weapon, they only need to buy an 80% lower receiver and perform the last 20% of the metal work. This work can be performed with everything from a drill press to a milling machine to hand tools. Ghost Gunner partially automates this process, making it easier and faster to complete lower receivers and build weapons.

Defense Distributed calls Ghost Gunner an open source hardware project, though we were unable to find the files available for download at this time. It appears that the slides are made up of MakerSlide or a similar aluminum extrusion. The steppers appear to be standard Nema 17 size.

Defense Distributed says that they’ve been having a hard time keeping up with the Ghost Gunner pre-orders. At $1300 each though, we think a general purpose mill or small CNC would be a better deal.

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