LED Shirt Does It With Tulle

March 13, 2020 by 13 Comments

Given that we are living in what most of humanity would now call “the future”, we really ought to start acting like it. We’re doing okay on the electric cars, but sartorially we’ve got some ground to make up. Helping with this effort is [Amy Goodchild], who put together a fancy LED shirt for all occasions.

The basis of the shirt is an ESP8266 running the FastLED library, hooked up to strings of WS2812B LEDs. It’s a great combination for doing quick and simple colorful animations without a lot of fuss. The LED strips are then fastened to the shirt by sewing them on, with heatshrink added to the strips to give the thread something to attach to. Tulle fabric is used as a diffuser, hiding the strips when they’re off and providing a more pleasant glowing effect. Everything is controlled from a small box, fitted with an arcade button and 7-segment display.

It’s a fun piece that’s readily achievable for the novice maker, and a great way to learn about LEDs and sewing. We’ve seen other similar builds before, such as this glowing LED skirt. Video after the break.

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This Compact Pi Terminal Will Show You The Way

March 13, 2020 by 21 Comments

The Raspberry Pi holds incredible promise for those looking to build a small mobile terminal that they can take with them on the go, something you can throw into your bag and pull out whenever there’s some hacking to be done. But getting the diminutive Linux board to that point can take quite a bit of work. You need to find a suitably small keyboard, design a custom case, and wire it all up without letting any of that pesky Magic Smoke escape.

But a recent project from [remag293] might make things a bit easier for those looking to get their feet wet in the world of custom mobile computers. The boxy handheld device has everything you need, and nothing you don’t. A basic case, a short parts list, and an absolute minimum of wiring. What’s not to love? Even if you don’t make an exact clone of this device, it’s an excellent reference to quickly bootstrap your own bespoke terminal.

So what’s inside the 3D printed case? Not a whole lot, really. Obviously there’s a Raspberry Pi, a 3.5 inch TFT touch screen display, and a miniature keyboard. The keyboard is of the Bluetooth variety, and other than being freed from its enclosure and wired into the header on the display module for power, it’s otherwise stock.

As for the parts you can’t see from the outside, there’s a 3.7 V 4400 mAh battery pack and an Adafruit PowerBoost 1000 module to handle charging and power distribution. Beyond the big lighted button on the side (which you could certainly replace with something more low-key should you chose), that’s about it. When it’s all together, you’ve got a battery powered computer that’s ready for the road with a minimum amount of fuss.

If you’re looking for something that’s a bit larger, and more than a little unconventional, you could start by printing out a full cyberdeck. After all, if you’re going to build your own non-traditional portable computer, you might as well go all out.

Slippy Slapper Uselessly Uses All The Arduinos

March 13, 2020 by 8 Comments

Want to take that annoyingly productive coworker down a notch? Yeah, us too. How dare they get so much done and be so happy about it? How is it possible that they can bang on that keyboard all day when you struggle to string together an email?

The Slippy Slapper is a useless machine that turns people into useless machines using tactics like endless distraction and mild physical violence. It presses your buttons by asking them to press buttons for no reason other than killing their productivity. When they try to walk away, guess what? That’s another slappin’. Slippy Slapper would enrage us by proxy if he weren’t so dang cute.

You’re right, you don’t need an Arduino for this. For peak inefficiency and power consumption, you actually need four of them. One acts as the master, and bases its commands to the other three on the feedback it gets from Slippy’s ultrasonic nostrils. The other three control the slappin’ servos, the speakers, and reading WAV files off of the SD card. Slap your way past the break to see Slippy Slapper’s slapstick demo.

Need to annoy a group of coworkers all at once? Slip a big bank of useless machines into the conference room while it’s being set up.

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Hackaday Belgrade Conference Postponed

March 13, 2020 by 11 Comments

Due to uncertainties about the progress of the spread of the novel corona virus, it’s with a sad heart that we announce that we’re postponing the 2020 Hackaday Belgrade conference.

We will be rescheduling for later in the year, but for now we’ll be refunding conference tickets. We received a record number of incredible presenter proposals, and once we’ve rescheduled, we’ll get in touch with everyone who entered a proposal to check up on your availability.

In the meantime, come and hang out with us virtually on Hackaday.io’s Hackaday Belgrade page.

We know how much you were all looking forward to Belgrade in May, and it pains us to have to take this step. When we get more details ironed out, we’ll be sure to let you know! See you all a little bit later in the summer?

Retrotechtacular: Mobile Phones 1940s Style

March 13, 2020 by 24 Comments

We think of the mobile phone — well, what we would call a cell phone — as something fairly modern. Many of us can still remember when using a ham radio phone patch from your parked car would have people staring and murmuring. But it turns out in the late 1940s, Bell Telephone offered Mobile Telephone Service (MTS). It was expensive and didn’t work as well as what we have now, but it did let you make or receive calls from your automobile. After the break, you can see a promotional film about MTS.

The service rolled out in St. Louis in the middle of 1946. The 80-pound radios went in the trunk with a remote handset wired to the dashboard. At first, there were only 3 channels but later Bell added 29 more to keep up with demand. An operator connected incoming and outbound calls and if three other people were using their mobile phones, you were out of luck.

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Hackaday Podcast 058: Motorheads, 3D Prints That Bend Metal, And Homebuilt Onewheel Deathmachines

March 13, 2020 by 4 Comments

Hackaday editor Elliot Williams and contributor Jonathan Bennett discuss the past week of Hackaday. Freeman Dyson, who wanted to send us to space on the back of nuclear explosions, passed away. Only slightly less dangerous, we looked at self-balancing vehicles, 3D printed press brakes, and making rubies in the home lab. All the usual suspects make cameo appearances: robots, FPGAs, and open-source software.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

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An Epic Story Of 1980s FPV Flight

March 13, 2020 by 8 Comments

A staple of today’s remote-controlled flight is the so-called FPV transmitter, allowing the pilot of a multirotor or other craft to see the world from onboard, as a pilot might do. It’s accessible enough that it can be found on toy multirotors starting at not much more than pocket money prices, and reliable enough that in its better incarnations it can send back high definition video at surprisingly long range.

In case you think of FPV flight as a recent innovation, the video below the break from [Larry Mitschke] should come as a revelation. In 1986 he was a bona-fide rockstar playing in a band, whose radio-controlled flight hobby led him into creating an FPV system for his planes and soaring above the Texas countryside at significant distance from his base while flying it watching a CRT screen.

The video is quite long but extremely watchable, all period footage with his narration here in 2020. We see his earliest experiments with a monochrome security camera and a video sender, and a whole host of upgrades until finally he can fly three miles from base with good quality video. 70 cm amateur TV makes an appearance with a steerable tracking antenna, he even makes a talking compass for when he loses himself. It’s an epic tale of hacking with what seems rudimentary equipment by our standards but was in fact the cutting edge of available video technology at a time when the state of the video art was moving rather fast. This is the work that laid the path for today’s $30 FPV toys, and for flying FPV from space.

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