Fresh Food Year Round? You Can Thank Frederick McKinley Jones

August 4, 2020 by 27 Comments

When you’re a kid, one of the surest signs of summer is hearing the happy sound of the ice cream truck crawling through the neighborhood. You don’t worry about how that magical truck is keeping the ice cream cold, only that it rolls down your street, and that the stars align and your parents give you money for a giant ice cream-cookie sandwich with the edge rolled in tiny chocolate chips.

In the early days of mobile refrigeration, ice cream trucks and other food delivery vehicles relied first on ice, and then dry ice to keep perishables cold. Someone eventually invented an electric cooling system, but those had to be recharged periodically at power stations. There was also a short-lived mechanical system, but it was highly susceptible to road vibrations.

Until Frederick McKinley Jones came along, mobile refrigeration was fledgling, and sources of perishable food were extremely localized and limited. In the early 1940s, Frederick patented the first practical automated refrigeration system for trucks, and it revolutionized the shipping and storage of food and medicine.

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Unbricking A $2,000 Exercise Bike With A Raspberry Pi Zero And Bluetooth Hacks

August 4, 2020 by 17 Comments

Really, how did we get the point in this world where an exercise bike can be bricked? Such was the pickle that [ptx2] was in when their $2,000 bike by Flywheel Home Sports was left without the essential feature of participating in virtual rides after Peloton bought the company. The solution? Reverse engineer the bike to get it working with another online cycling simulator.

Sniffing Flywheel Bluetotooth packets with Bluetility

We have to admit we weren’t aware of the array of choices that the virtual biking markets offers. [ptx2] went with Zwift, which like most of these platforms, lets you pilot a smart bike through virtual landscapes along with the avatars of hundreds of other virtual riders. A little Bluetooth snooping with Bluetility let [ptx2] identify the bytes in the Flywheel bike’s packets encoding both the rider’s cadence and the power exerted, which Zwift would need, along with the current resistance setting of the magnetic brake.

Integration into Zwift was a matter of emulating one of the smart bikes already supported by the program. This required some hacking on the Cycling Power Service, a Bluetooth service that Zwift uses to talk to the bike. The final configuration has a Raspberry Pi Zero W between the Flywheel bike and the Zwift app, and has logged about 2,000 miles of daily use. It still needs a motor to control the resistance along the virtual hills and valleys, but that’s a job for another day.

Hats off to [ptx2] for salvaging a $2,000 bike for the price of a Pi and some quality hacking time, and for sticking it to The Man a bit. We have to say that most bike hacks we see around here have to do with making less work for the rider, not more. This project was a refreshing change.

[Featured images: Zwift, Flywheel Sports]

[via r/gadgets]

Hackaday Remoticon: Our 2020 Conference Is Packed With Workshops And We’re Calling For Proposals

August 4, 2020 by 13 Comments

We’re proud to announce the Hackaday Remoticon, taking place everywhere November 6th – 8th, 2020. It’s a weekend packed with workshops about hardware creation, held virtually for all to enjoy.

Update: Tickets are now available for 2020 Remoticon!

But we can’t do it without you. We need you to host a workshop on that skill, technique, or special know-how that you acquired through hard work over too many hours to count. Send in your workshop proposal now!

What is a Remoticon?

The Hackaday Remoticon achieves something that we just couldn’t do at the Hackaday Superconference: host more workshops that involve more people. Anyone who’s been to Supercon over the past six years can tell you it’s space-limited and, although we do our best to host a handful of workshops each day, those available seats are always in high demand.

We’re sad that we can’t get together in person for Supercon this year, but now we have an opportunity to host more workshops, engaging more live instructors and participants because they will be held virtually. This also means that we can make recordings of them available so that more people can learn from the experience. This is something that we tried way back during the first Supercon with Mike Ossmann’s RF Circuit Design workshop and 140,000 people have watched that video. (By the way, that link is worth clicking just to see Joe Kim’s excellent art.) Continue reading “Hackaday Remoticon: Our 2020 Conference Is Packed With Workshops And We’re Calling For Proposals” →

Don’t Let Endianness Flip You Around

August 4, 2020 by 26 Comments

Most of the processor architectures which we come into contact with today are little-endian systems, meaning that they store and address bytes in a least-significant byte (LSB) order. Unlike in the past, when big-endian architectures, including the Motorola 68000 and PowerPC, were more common, one can often just assume that all of the binary data one reads from files and via communication protocols are in little-endian order. This will often work fine.

The problem comes with for example image formats that use big-endian formatted integers, including TIFF and PNG. When dealing directly with protocols in so-called ‘network order’, one also deals with big-endian data. Trying to use these formats and protocol data verbatim on a little-endian system will obviously not work.

Fortunately, it is very easy to swap the endianness of any data which we handle. Continue reading “Don’t Let Endianness Flip You Around” →

[NileRed] Makes Superconductors

August 4, 2020 by 8 Comments

We always enjoy [NileRed’s] videos. His latest shows how he made some relatively high-temperature superconducting ceramic. After finding what appeared to be some really good instructions on the Internet, [NileRed] found there were some things in the paper that didn’t make sense. You can watch the video, below.

The superconductor was YBCO, sometimes known as 123 because of the ratio of its components. Turns out that most of the materials were available online, except for one exotic chemical that he had to buy from a more conventional source.

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Facial Detection With Pi + MATLAB

August 4, 2020 by 2 Comments

[Monica] wanted to try a bit of facial detection with her Raspberry Pi and she found some pretty handy packages in MATLAB to help her do just that. The packages are based on the Viola-Jones algorithm which was the first real-time object detection framework for facial detection.

She had to download MATLAB’s Raspbian image to allow the Pi to interpret MATLAB commands over a custom server. That setup is mostly pretty easy and she does a good job walking you through the setup on her project page.

With that, now she can control the Pi in MATLAB: configure the camera, toggle GPIO, etc. The real fun comes with the facial detection program. In addition to opening up a live video feed of the Pi camera, the program outputs pixel data. [Monica] was mostly just testing the stock capabilities, but wants to try detecting other objects next. We’ll see what cool modifications she’s able to come up with.

If MATLAB doesn’t quite fit your taste, we have a slew of facial detection projects on Hackaday.

IOT Pinball Puts Oktoberfest Fun On Tap

August 3, 2020 by 6 Comments

We don’t really miss going out to bars all that much, unless you’re talking about the one downtown with all the pinball machines. Don’t get us wrong — pinball emulators have gotten crazy good, and you can find exact digital replicas of most machines to play on your phone or whatever. But it just doesn’t compare to the thrill of playing a real cabinet.

Don’t despair, because for the next couple of weeks, you can queue up to play on a real Oktoberfest pinball machine that’s sitting in Espoo, Finland. The controls are hooked up to a Raspberry Pi 4 through a custom HAT, along with a camera pointed at the playfield and another focused on the backglass screen. The game development/video streaming company Surrogate is hosting a tournament over the internet, and will be giving prizes to the top ten high rollers.

We usually have to wait until the holiday season to come across these remote-reality gaming opportunities. Having played it several times now, we recommend spamming the flippers until you get a feel for the lag. Also, just holding the flippers up while the ball is in the upper half of the playfield will catch a lot of balls that you might otherwise lose due to flipper lag, and sometimes they end up back in front of the launcher to shoot again. After the break, check out a brief but amusing video of setting up the cameras and Pi that includes a taste of the Oktoberfest music.

The tournament runs until the end of August, which should be enough time for somebody to set up CV and a keyboard to play this automatically. Need inspiration? Here’s an open-source pinball machine that can play itself.

Continue reading “IOT Pinball Puts Oktoberfest Fun On Tap” →