Tune Into The Bonnaroo That No One Gets To Go To

August 9, 2020 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

Just like everything else in 2020, the four-day, multi-stage festival of music and art known as Bonnaroo has been cancelled. This would have been [Guy Dupont]’s fifth year making the journey to Tennessee with his friend. Since they couldn’t go, [Guy] decided to build an interactive Bonnaroo mix tape into an 80s clock radio as a birthday present.

[Guy] was able to re-purpose all the original buttons and dials to navigate through the schedule of acts that would have performed across four days and five stages. The conveniently four-way function slider is used to choose the day, and the radio tuning dial selects the stage, complete with delightful static between the positions. The rest of the buttons move back and forth through the scheduled set times, and one will scroll the track and artist name across the 16-segment displays. The snooze button has the honor of being the play/pause button.

All the inputs are controlled with a Feather M4 express, and the music comes through a DFPlayer Mini. We love that [Guy] was able to repurpose the analog tuning dial by coupling it to a slide potentiometer that fit perfectly in a slot on the underside of the plastic. Stay tuned for a great video that starts with an explanation and demo and then goes into the build.

Though the utility of the clock radio may have been supplanted by cell phone alarms and doomscrolling, that just means that there are theoretically more of them to gut and turn into other things, like this Fallout-inspired luggable Pip-Boy.

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Animal Crossing IRL With Nova Lights To Mark The Passage Of Time

August 8, 2020 by Jenny List 1 Comment

We feature a lot of clocks here at Hackaday, but it’s not often that one comes along and makes us stop in our tracks and reconsider the fundamental question: just what is a clock? [Charlyn] has managed it though, with her Nova Light clock, which doesn’t so much measure the passing of time, but mark it.

The clock itself is a set of origami pieces in the shape of the Nova lights and a star fragment from the popular Animal Crossing New Horizons game, and each has a multicolour LED underneath. The star fragment pulses, while the two Nova lights imperceptibly slowly change colour, one over the course of the day and the other over the course of the week. Except for Fridays, when in celebration of the end of the work week they pulsate with different colours. Under the hood is an Adafruit Feather with a real-time clock module, and since all the code is there for your enjoyment you can have a go at making your own. Below the break is a video showing the clock in action.

[Charlyn] is no stranger to these pages, in fact we’ve featured her exquisite use of origami before. It’s probably her rideable rocking horse that’s the most memorable among her projects though.

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Print With Plasma!

August 8, 2020 by Jenny List 29 Comments

Over the years there have been a variety of methods for a computer to commit its thoughts to paper. Be it a daisy wheel, a dot matrix, a laser, or an inkjet, we’ve all cursed at a recalcitrant printer. There’s another type of printer that maybe we don’t think of quite as often but is workhorse in a million cash registers and parking ticket machines: the thermal printer. These mechanisms can be readily found as surplus items and have made their way into more than one project here over the years. [HomoFaciens] has taken thermal printing a step further by building a plasma printer from scratch that makes use of the thermal paper.

A thermal printer does its job as its name suggests, by burning the image into the paper. It may not deliver the best quality print, but scores on not needing ink ribbons, cartridges, or toner. This DIY version uses an off-the-shelf battery-powered plasma lighter to do the job, mounted on a 3D printed XY printer mechanism driven by two stepper motors. Behind the scenes is an Arduino Uno, which receives its instructions via USB from a command-line program on a Linux box. It’s admitted that this is hardly the pinnacle of printing technology, but it does at least make for a fascinating project. You can see it in action in the video below the break.

This isn’t [HomoFaciens]’ first printer, we’re instantly reminded of this ink drop printer from a few years ago.

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Wood-Fired Hot Tub For The End Of The World

August 8, 2020 by Jenny List 13 Comments

It’s one of the idyls of our age, to imagine oneself lounging in a hot tub watching a golden sunset, glass of wine in hand and the love of your life at your side. Along the way though it’s one that’s become diverted from the original, instead of a Scandinavian style wood fired tub in the forest we’re more likely to be thinking of an electric whirlpool spa made from fibreglass, as much a status symbol as a leisure item. It’s refreshing then to see [sirClogg]’s home made hot tub, a simple wooden tub with associated wood stove to heat its water. We can’t wait to step in!

The tub is simplicity itself, being made from softwood planks held together under tension by some steel cables. He admits though that he made a mistake using green wood, as it has now contracted leaving the tub with some gaps. But it’s a simple enough build that he can contemplate dismantling and rebuilding it to correct for that oversight.

Heat meanwhile is provided by a pipe that circulates water from the bottom of the tub through a heat exchanger coil inside a brick-built wood stove adjacent to the tub. The fabrication of the heat exchanger is detailed in the video below, we enjoyed seeing the copper piping filled with salt to ensure it doesn’t collapse when being bent around a five-gallon bucket. It doesn’t get much simpler than this, and the reward of a hot tub must be a sweet one indeed.

For hot tub enthusiast hackers, it’s always worth remembering that the excellent Danish hacker camp BornHack has a hot tub as part of its wellness area.

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Vintage Gauges Turned Classy Weather Display

August 8, 2020 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

It’s always good to see old hardware saved from the junk pile, especially when the end result is as impressive as this analog gauge weather display put together by [Build Comics]. It ended up being a truly multidisciplinary project, combing not only restoration work and modern microcontroller trickery, but a dash of woodworking for good measure.

Naturally, the gauges themselves are the real stars of the show. They started out with rusted internals and broken glass, but parts from a sacrificial donor and some TLC from [Build Comics] got them back in working order. We especially like the effort that was put into making the scale markings look authentic, with scans of the originals modified in GIMP to indicate temperature and humidity while retaining the period appropriate details.

To drive the 1940s era indicators, [Build Comics] is using an Arduino Nano and a DHT22 sensor that can detect temperature and humidity. A couple of trimmer pots are included for fine tuning the gauges, and everything is mounted to a small scrap of perfboard hidden inside of the custom-made pine enclosure.

This is hardly the first time we’ve seen analog gauges hooked up to modern electronics, but most of the projects are just that: modern. While the end look might be somewhat polarizing, we think maintaining the hardware’s classic style was the right call.

A Shell? A Programming Language? Relax! It’s Both!

August 8, 2020 by Al Williams 55 Comments

Every time we publish a Linux hack that uses a shell script, someone will chime in about how awful it is to program shell scripts. While we like the ubiquity and efficiency, we can’t disagree that the shell is a bit of a hack itself. [Axel Lijencrantz] wants to change your shell to be a full-blow programming language called Crush.

On the face of it, it looks like a shell. Want to see the contents of the current directory? Simple: ls.

The difference is underneath. In Crush, ls is a built-in and it returns data in rows like a database. You can manipulate that database with SQL-like commands: ls | where {type=="directory"}.

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DIY HID, OMG!

August 8, 2020 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

William English, one of the creators of the mouse back in the 60s, passed away last week. And that got me thinking of how amazing it would have been to be in the place that was inventing what would become modern computing interfaces. What a special time! Of course, they probably had no idea.

From here, it looks like the mouse changed everything, but you have to realize that they were working in a world with light-pens, where you could actually draw on the screen. In contrast, the mouse seems positively non-futuristic. They must have known they’d come up with an improvement over the status quo, but did they know they’d created a revolution?

So where has the revolutionary spirit in DIY human interface devices gone? I’d claim it’s still alive and kicking. Indeed our own Kristina Panos has a series called “Inputs of Interest” and we’ve seen a ton of DIY keyboards of late. Then there are many varieties of dial inputs. I used to have a dedicated scroll wheel made out of a hard-drive platter, and when I was reading lots of PDFs on-screen, I have to say it earned its desk-space. Heck, we’ve even seen people make their own mouse.

But what I love about the story of the development of the mouse is that they asked the question “what is the best way to locate a point on a screen” and tried to answer it. Half of their success is probably in simply asking the right question, and the other half in prototyping something half-workable. My gut says that we don’t have inputs figured out 100% on mobile yet. This sounds like a job for Hackaday. What’s the next big human-interface design need? And have you got any crazy ideas to solve it?

Hackaday Remoticon

And this week, we announced the Hackaday Remoticon, our shelter-in-place version of the Supercon. It’s going to take place in November as usual, but online instead of IRL.

The good news? It’s going to be chock full of workshops, all streamed online and recorded for posterity. And for that we need your proposals. If you’d like to teach a group of distributed hackers learning your favorite techniques and tricks, this is your chance!

The bad news is of course that we won’t get to see you all in person. That’s going to make the 2021 Hackaday Supercon seem even more super.