ESP32-S2 Hack Chat With Adafruit

May 4, 2020 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, May 6 at noon Pacific for the ESP32-S2 Hack Chat with Limor “Ladyada” Fried and Scott Shawcroft!

When Espressif released the ESP8266 microcontroller back in 2014, nobody could have predicted how successful the chip was to become. While it was aimed squarely at the nascent IoT market and found its way into hundreds of consumer devices like smart light bulbs, hackers latched onto the chip and the development boards it begat with gusto, thanks to its powerful microcontroller, WiFi, and lots of GPIO.

The ESP8266 was not without its problems, though, and security was always one of them. The ESP32, released in 2016, addressed some of these concerns. The new chip added another CPU core, a co-processor, Bluetooth support, more GPIO, Ethernet, CAN, more and better ADCs, a pair of DACs, and a host of other features that made it the darling of the hacker world.

Now, after being announced in September of 2019, the ESP32-S2 is finally making it into hobbyist’s hands. On the face of it, the S2 seems less capable, with a single core and neither Bluetooth nor Ethernet. But with a much faster CPU, scads more GPIO, more ADCs, a RISC-V co-processor, native USB, and the promise of very low current draw, it could be that the ESP32-S2 proves to be even more popular with hobbyists as it becomes established.

To talk us through the new chip’s potential, Limor “Ladyada” Fried and Scott Shawcroft, both of Adafruit Industries, will join us on the Hack Chat. Come along and learn everything you need to know about the ESP32-S2, and how to put it to work for you.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, May 6 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.
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Doom Clone Shows What An Alternate-Reality Amiga Could’ve Had

May 4, 2020 by Erin Pinheiro 31 Comments

Can you run Doom on the Amiga? No, not really, and arguably that was one of the causes for the computer’s demise in the mid-90s as it failed to catch up on the FPS craze of the PC world. [Krzysztof Kluczek] of the Altair demogroup has managed not exactly to remedy that status with the original article, but to show us how a potential contender could’ve been designed for the unexpanded Amiga hardware back in the day.

Many developers tried to emulate the thrill and ambiance of the id Software shooter, but they all required high-end Amigas with faster processors and expanded memory, limiting their player base on an already diminished demographic. Not only that, but even with fancier hardware, none of them quite managed to match how well Doom ran on your run-of-the-mill 486 at the time. [Krzysztof] isn’t trying to port Doom itself, but instead creating an engine custom-designed to take advantage of, and minding the limitations of the OCS Amiga as it existed in 1987. The result is Dread, a 2.5D engine that resembles the SNES port of Doom and uses assets from the Freedoom project in order to remain copyright-abiding.

It might not be Doom, but it’s a good peek at what the 33-year old hardware could’ve done in the right hands back then. Technically it already surpasses what the Wolfenstein 3D engine could do, so there’s an idea if someone ever aims to make a straight up port instead of their own game. If you like seeing Doom run on machines it wasn’t meant to, boy do we have some posts for you. Otherwise, stick around after the break for two videos of Dread’s engine being demonstrated.

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Time Enough At Last: Reviving An Heirloom Typewriter

May 4, 2020 by Erin Pinheiro 28 Comments

You may find yourself living in interesting times. The world we knew two months ago is gone, and there is time enough at last, to finally go through those projects we’ve been putting off for one reason or another. Today, I wanted to explore and possibly repair an old unidentified typewriter that belonged to my late aunt for many decades.

A small disclaimer though, I am not an avid typewriter collector or connoisseur. I enjoy looking at them and using them, but by no stretch of the imagination I want to claim to be an expert in their history or inner workings — I’m a hacker after all. What follows is a layman’s adventure into her first typewriter repair, an exciting tale that explores typewriter anatomy and troubleshooting. Let’s dig in.

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Take This Cylindrical Coupler Design For A Spin

May 4, 2020 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

We’re not exactly sure what kind of shenanigans [Conrad Brindle] gets himself into, but apparently it often requires cylindrical couplings to attach 3D printed parts to each other. He found himself designing and redesigning this type of connector so often that he decided to just make a parametric version of it that could be scaled to whatever dimensions are necessary for that particular application.

In the video after the break, [Concrad] explains the concept behind the coupler and how he designed it. Put simply, the tabs inside of the coupler are designed to grab onto each other once the coupler is spun. When he demonstrates the action, you can see that both sides of the coupler are pulled together tightly with a satisfying little snap, but then can be easily removed just by rotating them back in the opposite direction.

The nature of desktop 3D printing means that the female side of the connection requires support when printing, and depending on your printer, that might mean a relatively rough mating surface. [Conrad] notes that you’ll need to experiment a bit to find how small your particular machine can print out the design before things get too gummed up.

We can see how this would be useful for some applications, but if you need a printed joint that can handle a decent amount of torque before giving up the ghost, you might want to look into (mis)using one half of a spider coupling.

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Go The Extra Mile For Your LED Driver

May 4, 2020 by Kerry Scharfglass 7 Comments

Addressable RGB LED strips may be all the rage, but that addressability can come at a cost. If instead of colors you expect to show shades of white you may the find less flickery, wider spectrum light from a string of single color LEDs and a nice supply desirable. Of course there are many ways to drive such a strip but this is Hackaday, not Aliexpressaday (though we may partake in the sweet nectar of e-commerce). [Niklas Fauth] must have really had an itch to scratch, because to get the smoothest fades for his single color LED strips, he built an entire software defined dual 50W switched-mode AC power supply from scratch. He calls it his “first advanced AC design” and we are suitably impressed.

Switched-mode power supplies are an extremely common way of converting arbitrary incoming AC or DC voltage into a DC source. A typical project might use a fully integrated solution in the form of a drop-in module or wall wart, or a slightly less integrated controller IC and passives. But [Niklas] went all the way and designed his from scratch. Providing control he has the ubiquitous ESP-32 to drive the control nodes of the supply and giving the added bonus of wireless connectivity (one’s blinkenlights must always be orchestrated). We can’t help but notice the PCBA also exposes RS485 and CAN transceivers which seem to be unused so far, perhaps for a future expansion into wired control?

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Re-used Materials Make Tiny Offroad Track For Micro R/C

May 3, 2020 by Donald Papp 3 Comments

What does one do with tiny 1:35 scale remote controlled off-road vehicles? Build appropriately-tiny tracks for them to drive on, of course. That’s exactly what [David] did when he created his fantastic rock crawling track that he has dubbed the ‘4×4 Arena’, and what’s even better is that he used leftover foam inserts and acrylic paints and materials to do it, and didn’t have to spend a penny.

The original track is only just visible in the back; the new track expands it considerably.

This isn’t [David]’s first track. He originally made a smaller rock-crawling track he called Rubble Wasteland for the tiny vehicles, and he liked it so much he expanded it considerably. The new track builds on the original and is three levels deep, sports tight cave-like passages, tunnels, tricky climbs, and and realistic terrain textures.

An enormous photo gallery is right here, and other than the first and final images, it’s roughly in chronological build order. If your curiosity has been piqued about the tiny 1:35 scale remote controlled vehicles that this track is built for, around gallery page nine is where pictures of what makes these tiny things tick begins.

We have seen some amazing projects in the RC field; like this tiny 3D printed truck, and in-depth details of a micro RC plane that weighs only 2.9 grams.

Using Smartphone Cameras To Make Sure Drivers Are Looking At The Road

May 3, 2020 by Maya Posch 25 Comments

Most of us are probably quite aware of the damage that a car can inflict when driven by a distracted driver. In an ideal world, people who are driving a car would not allow something like their phone to distract them from their primary task of being the primary navigation system for the 1+ metric ton vehicle which they are controlling.

Many smartphone apps as well as in-car infotainment systems have added features over the years that try to prevent a driver from using them, but they run into the issue that it’s hard to distinguish between passenger and driver. As it turns out, asking the human driver whether they are the driver doesn’t always get the expected result. This is where [Rushil Khurana] and his team at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have come up with a more fool-proof approach.

In their paper (PDF), they cover the algorithm and software implementation that uses the smartphone’s own front (selfie) and back cameras to determine from the car’s interior which side of the car the user is sitting in, and deducing from that whether the user is sitting in the driver’s seat or not. From there it is a fairly safe assumption to make that if the user is sitting in the driver’s seat, and the car is moving, that this user should not be looking at the phone’s screen.

In a test involving 16 different cars and 33 users, they achieved an overall accuracy of 94% with the phone held in the hand, and 92.2% while docked. This is more reliable than the other approaches covered in the paper, and as a benefit does not require any extra hardware. Who knows, upcoming smartphones may include a feature like this, so that apps can easily determine what feature set should be made available to a driver, if any.

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