Paper Glows Up With This Origami Wall Piece

January 22, 2020 by 3 Comments

[Charlyn] recently found herself dissatisfied with the blank expanse of her bedroom walls. Deciding to take matters into her own hands, she set out to build this exquisite origami wall sculpture.

The piece was inspired by a work originally created by [Coco Sato], which she saw on Design Sponge. Materials were sourced, and [Charlyn] began the arduous process of cutting and folding the many, many pieces of paper that would make up the final piece. There were some missteps along the way, which served as a lesson to test early and test often, but a cup of tea and perseverance got the job done.

With the paper components completed, she looked to the electronics. Ten Neopixel LEDs were hooked up to a Particle Photon, giving the project easy IoT functionality. Thanks to IFTTT, the display can be controlled via Google Home, either glowing to create a relaxing vibe, or shutting off when it’s time to sleep. There’s also a smattering of flowers decorating the piece, somewhat of a [Charlyn] trademark.

The LEDs shine from behind the paper structure, creating a subtle, attractive glow. We’re big fans of the combination of LEDs with origami, and hope to see more projects using the material as an effective diffuser. You can even experiment with conductive materials to take things further. Video after the break.

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Winners Of The Take Flight With Feather Contest

January 22, 2020 by 10 Comments

It’s hard to beat the fidelity and durability of printed text on paper. But the e-paper display gets pretty close, and if you couple it will great design and dependable features, you might just prefer an e-reader over a bookshelf full of paperbacks. What if the deal is sweetened by making it Open Hardware? The Open Book Project rises to that challenge and has just been named the winner of the Take Flight with Feather contest.

This e-reader will now find its way into the wild, with a small manufacturing run to be put into stock by Digi-Key who sponsored this contest. Let’s take a closer look at the Open Book, as well as the five other top entries.

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A Battery Sipping Cellular Mailbox Notifier

January 22, 2020 by 16 Comments

Like many of us, [Zak Kemble] has an indeterminate number of tiny packages coming his way from all over the globe at any given time. Unfortunately, the somewhat unpredictable nature of the postal service where he lives meant he found himself making a lot of wasted trips out to the mailbox to see if any overseas treasures had arrived for him. To solve the problem, he decided to build an Internet-connected mailbox notification system that could work within some fairly specific parameters.

For one thing, the mailbox is too distant to connect directly to it over WiFi. [Zak] mentions that 433 MHz might have been an option, but he decided to skip that entirely and just connect it to the cellular network with an A9G GPRS/GSM module from A.I. Thinker. This device actually has its own SDK that allows you to create a custom firmware for it, but unfortunately the high energy consumption of the radio meant it would chew through batteries too quickly unless it had a little extra help.

Not wanting to have to change the batteries every couple months, [Zak] added a ATtiny402 to handle the notifier’s power management needs. By using a P-MOSFET to completely cut power to the A9G, the notifier can save an incredible amount of energy by only activating the cellular connection once it actually needs to send a notification; which in this case takes the form of an HTTP request that eventually works its way to a Telegram group chat.

To cut a long story short, testing seems to indicate that the notifier can fire off approximately 800 requests before needing its 10440 lithium battery recharged. Given how often [Zak] usually receives mail, he says that should last him around five years.

The A9G module, the ATtiny402, a BME280 environmental sensor (because, why not?), the battery, and all the ancillary support hardware are on a very professional looking PCB. That goes into a relatively rugged enclosure that’s designed to keep the electronics from shorting out on the mailbox’s metal case as well as keeping any particularly weighty parcels from crushing it.

If you’ve got the freedom so mount whatever you want outside, then you can certainly build a more technically impressive mailbox. But considering the limitations [Zak] had to work around, we think he did an excellent job.

Bringing The Blockchain To Network Monitoring

January 22, 2020 by 14 Comments

If you need to make sure your computer isn’t being messed with, you’ll have a look at the log files. If something seems fishy, that’s grounds for further investigation. If you run a large network of computers, you’ll probably want to look over all of the logs, but you won’t want to run around to each computer individually. Setting up a central server to analyze the logs exposes an additional attack surface: the logs in transit. How do you make sure that the attackers aren’t also intercepting and sanitizing your log file reports?

The answer to this question, and nearly everything else, is blockchain! Or maybe it’s not, but in this short presentation from the 2019 Hackaday Superconference, Shanni Prutchi, Jeff Wood, and six other college students intend to find out. While Shanni “rolls her eyes” at much of blockchain technology along with the rest of us, you have to admit one thing: recursively hashing your log data to make sure they’re not tampered with doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. Continue reading “Bringing The Blockchain To Network Monitoring” →

P-51 Cockpit Recreated With Help Of Local Makerspace

January 22, 2020 by 22 Comments

It’s surprisingly easy to misjudge tips that come into the Hackaday tip line. After filtering out the omnipresent spam, a quick scan of tip titles will often form a quick impression that turns out to be completely wrong. Such was the case with a recent tip that seemed from the subject line to be a flight simulator cockpit. The mental picture I had was of a model cockpit hooked to Flight Simulator or some other off-the-shelf flying game, many of which we’ve seen over the years.

I couldn’t have been more wrong about the project that Grant Hobbs undertook. His cockpit simulator turned out to be so much more than what I thought, and after trading a few emails with him to get all the details, I felt like I had to share the series of hacks that led to the short video below and the story about how he somehow managed to build the set despite having no previous experience with the usual tools of the trade.

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Lovebox Gives Infinite Treats Sweeter Than Chocolate

January 22, 2020 by 8 Comments

Want to make a special Valentine’s Day gift that keeps on giving well past the holiday? We do too, especially if it’s something as cute as [Marcel Stör]’s Lovebox. This is a relatively simple build, but it’s the kind that lets you make someone’s day over and over again.

The sender composes their love note in a secret GitHub gist, either as a text message or a binary image, and updates the gist. Whenever the Wemos D1 mini inside the box receives a new message, a micro servo slowly wiggles the hearts up and down to notify the recipient.

Once they remove the lid to read it, a light-dependent resistor senses the flood of light on its face and tells the servo it can stop wiggling. We think it’s neat that the heart nudges upwardly at the box lid a bit as it moves, because it increases the cuteness factor.

Everybody loves to hear from that special someone throughout the day. The idea of sending an intimate message remotely is quite romantic, and there’s something thrilling and urgent about a physical notification. Show the break button a little love, and you’ll see a truffle-sized demo featuring both an incoming image and a text message.

[Marcel] was happy to ply his woodworking skills rather than use a laser cutter. If you have neither of these, hit up a craft store or two and you’ll find unfinished wooden boxes and pre-cut hearts galore. Or, you could just say it with copper.

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Review: Testdriving LibrePCB Shows That It’s Growing Up Fast

January 22, 2020 by 54 Comments

There are a host of PCB CAD tools at the disposal of the electronic designer from entry-level to multi-thousand-dollar workstation software. It’s a field in which most of the players are commercial, and for the open-source devotee there have traditionally been only two choices. Both KiCad and gEDA are venerable packages with legions of devoted fans, but it is fair to say that they both present a steep learning curve for newcomers. There is however another contender in the world of open-source PCB CAD, in the form of the up-and-coming LibrePCB.

This GPL-licensed package has only been in development for a few years. LibrePCB brought out its first official release a little over a year ago, and now stands at version 0.1.3 with builds for GNU/Linux, Windows, MacOS, and FreeBSD. It’s time to download it and run it through its paces, to see whether it’s ready to serve its purpose.

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