Why Settle For The Standard Catan Board?

February 9, 2020 by 3 Comments

Let’s face it, game night can get downright rowdy. Whether your game nights involve wine and cats, beer and dogs, or vodka and bear cubs, things happen. Maybe the robber gets batted irretrievably far under the couch, or someone gesticulates wildly and spills wine all over your sheep. [EEEEEEEEEDEN]’s gatherings were getting way out of hand, and it was time to design a custom Catan board.

But she didn’t stop with the board tiles — this is Catan redesigned from the ground up, including the pieces, the resource cards, and a custom storage box. [EEEEEEEEEDEN] even planned for player expansion by designing a leaf to drop in the middle. There are a few hundred magnets built into the frame, so there shouldn’t be any more lost pieces. And as far as liquor-proofing all the cardboard goes, [EEEEEEEEEDEN] designed new board tiles and cards, laser cut them from acrylic, and painstakingly painted them all with Plasti-Dip spray.

We think it’s gorgeous, but understand that maybe this minimalist style isn’t for everyone. If you want to go custom, it’s hard to argue against the beauty of 3D Catan.

Thanks to [Johannes] for the tip! via /r/DIY

Sort The Rainbow With An Algorithm Machine

February 9, 2020 by 12 Comments

When you’re trying to learn how an algorithm works, it’s not always easy to visualize what’s going on. Well, except for maybe binary sort, thanks to the phone book. Professor [thatguyer] is a computer science teacher who wanted a way to help his students visualize the process of algorithms and at the same time, get a grasp on their resource cost.

The Algorithm Machine can demonstrate 8 different search and sort algorithms using two 100-count strips of RGB LEDs — one to represent an array of integers, and one to create indicators pointing to the integers under scrutiny.

This functional beauty is totally interactive, too. Once the user chooses the values and the algorithm and starts the process, they can speed it up or slow it down with the rotary encoder, or pause to discuss and start again with that slick triangular play button. We particularly like the control button wiring harness [thatguyer] created to keep everything neat and hot-swappable.

This iteration uses 3D printed face plates to give the LEDs shape, but in an early version, [thatguyer] cut and sanded a ton of circles out of brass tubing, and folded as many triangles cut from disposable baking pans. The world could use more teachers as committed as [thatguyer]. This really seems like a handy teaching aid for these concepts, and we wish we’d had one in class to play around with. Here’s your algorithm for watching the demo: click break, press play, enjoy.

If you’re still confused, there are other ways to understand algorithms through visualization. Failing all that, just watch these Hungarian folk dancers work out various algo-rhythms.

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Rental Home Thermostat Gets Smart Upgrade Without Modifying The Dumb Controller

February 9, 2020 by 25 Comments

A problem facing those who live in rental properties comes with two prongs: that such properties rarely have up-to-date facilities such as heating controllers, and that landlords tend to take a dim view of tenants installing their own alternatives. [Andy] wanted to upgrade the heating controller in his home and was in this situation, so he came up with a smart controller add-on for the existing mechanical timer that does not irreversibly modify anything and is easily removable when he moves on.

This sounds like an impossible task, but it’s one he’s done very well by mounting a stepper motor on a 3D-printed frame over the timer switch. It’s the type with a motorised ring onto which plastic fingers can be placed to flip a switch on or off; he’s simply removed the plastic fingers and designed a shaft extension for the motor that simulates their passing the switch. He can now turn his heating on and off at will from an ESP8266, in this case on an Adafruit Feather Huzzah.

Behind it all lies Adafruit IO with a custom dashboard — Hackaday’s [Sean Boyce] took this service for a trial run if you’d like his take on it’s features. For this project, Adafruit IO delivered exactly what [Andy] was after but still left a few teething troubles. The stepper needed to be told not to try to hold its position, and moving a stepper very slowly generated wait periods long enough to trigger the ESP’s watchdog timers. Adding in IFTTT gave him the ability to schedule, as well as Alexa control. All in all he’s replicated some commercial offerings with a lot less cost and all without annoying his landlord. You can see it in action in the video below the break.

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See In The Dark, The Simple Way

February 9, 2020 by 42 Comments

Night vision googles used to be the exclusive preserve of the military, and then of the well-heeled. Image intensifier tubes were very expensive, and needed high-voltage power supplies to keep them going. Now that we have solid-state infra-red cameras the task of seeing in the dark had become much simpler, and [Alex Zidros] is here to show us just how easy that can be. His night vision goggles take a selection of off-the-shelf parts and a little bit of 3D printing to produce a complete set-up for a fraction of the cost of those night-vision goggles of old.

At its heart is a little NTSC/PAL LCD display in a 3D printed bracket. These used to be a small display of choice, but we see them rarely now because standalone displays and the microcontrollers to drive them have become so much more useful. Driving the display is a video camera with its IR filter removed, and providing illumination is an IR flashlight. In effect it’s a classic analogue CCTV system in miniature, but the most important thing is that it works.

We might have expected a Raspberry Pi Zero and NoIR camera, but it’s difficult to argue with a functioning night vision system. If you want to look at a project with an image intensifier tube though, we’ve covered one of those in the past.

Hands-Free Oreo Dispenser, Now With Milk

February 9, 2020 by 15 Comments

A while back, [Emiel] aka [The Practical Engineer] created a hands-free Oreo dispenser for his shop. This was a necessary addition to his fleet of handy tools, and allowed him to multitask much more effectively by using a sander, for example, at the same time that he needed to eat a cookie. Of course, this time-saving device was missing one crucial element: milk. [Emiel] is back in this video to show off his milk-dispensing upgrade to his original Oreo dispenser.

A few ideas were considered before [Emiel] decided to build a separate unit for the milk dispenser, so as not to create a gigantic mess any time an Oreo was delivered, and also to maintain some decorum in the shop. He rebuilt the Oreo dispenser with a 3D printer and then also 3D printed the milk dispenser. The chin-activated switch inside the device turns on a small pump which squirts milk into the user’s mouth, presumably after an Oreo has been delivered.

There are a few problems with the build, but most are easily solved by replacing non-food-grade parts with plastic that is more safe for being around consumables. The only other thing we can see here is that it might be a little hard to keep things clean, both inside and out, but most Oreo-related builds like this one have at least some problem with cleanliness that isn’t impossible to keep up with.

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A Barn Find 6502 Is Restored

February 8, 2020 by 26 Comments

The phrase “Barn find” is normally associated with the world of older cars, where enthusiasts live in the hope that they may one day stumble upon a dusty supercar lurking unloved for decades on a remote farm. It’s not so often found in the context of electronics, but that’s the phrase that [John Culver] uses for a mid-1970s Atari arcade board that had been through a very hard time indeed and was in part coated with cow dung. It’s interesting because it sports a very early example of a MOS 6502 in a ceramic package, whose date code tells us was manufactured in week 22 of 1976.

Finding a microprocessor, even a slightly rare one, is not that great an event in itself. What makes this one interesting is the state it was in when he got it, and the steps he used to retrieve it from the board without it sustaining damage, and then to clean it up and remove accumulated rust on its pins. We are fast approaching a point at which older microprocessors become artifacts rather than mere components, and it’s likely that more than one of us with an interest in such things may one day have to acquire those skills.

We’re rewarded at the end with a picture of the classic chip passing tests with flying colours, and the interesting quirk that this is a chip with the famous rotate right bug that affected early 6502s. If you are interested in the 6502 then you should definitely read our colleague [Bil Herd]’s tribute to its recently-departed designer, [Chuck Peddle].

Lightbulb Glows When You Have That Eureka Moment

February 8, 2020 by 9 Comments

We’re not entirely sure where the lightbulb-idea concept came from, but it’s a cultural touchstone rapidly becoming outmoded by the prevalence of compact fluorescent and LED lighting. Despite this, [Alex Glow] and [Moheeb Zara] whipped up the Prometheus Lamp to let you experience it for real.

The build starts with a glass lightbulb souvenir from the Neon Museum in Las Vegas. Inside, a TinyLily Mini microcontroller board is tasked with talking to an accelerometer to detect movement. When the lightbulb is picked up and oriented in the vertical axis, it lights up a NeoPixel LED, glowing to indicate that you’ve just had a remarkable idea! It’s all powered off a single CR2032 coin cell, thanks to the low voltage requirements of the modern TinyLily components.

It’s a build that serves as a good way to learn about accelerometers, and it makes a fun desk toy, too. We’ve seen some other projects go by the name “Prometheus”, too — like a wrist mounted flame thrower. How’s that for variety?