Harvesting Power From Microwave Popcorn

July 15, 2018 by 22 Comments

One of the challenges in this year’s Hackaday Prize is Power Harvesting where we’re asking everybody to create something that harvests energy from something. It could be solar, it could be harvesting energy from a falling weight. If you’d like to give a TED talk, it could be harvesting energy from sound waves. It could be harvesting energy from ambient RF, and where’s the best place to harvest ambient RF? That’s right, next to a microwave.

[Jurist]’s entry for the Power Harvesting Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize is a simple device that mounts to the front door of a microwave. The design uses a simple PCB antenna to harvest energy, an LTC3108 DC/DC converter that was lying around in a junk drawer, and a bunch of passives to suck down some photons escaping from a microwave. The idea for this whole device is to use the harvested power to send off a message over Bluetooth (or whatever) when the microwave is done. Really, though, this falls right into the ‘because I can’ category of weird builds.

So, does this power harvesting PCB work? The initial tests were iffy because there was no trimming of the antenna and no tuning of the circuit. However, after [Jurist] connected the board to a voltmeter and cooked some beans, he was seeing an entire volt across the circuit. It’s a start, and the beginning of a truly ‘smart’ microwave add-on. Really, though, it’s just cool to see a circuit harvest power from a leaking Faraday cage.

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Interactive Mandelbrot Set Viewer Runs On FPGAs

July 15, 2018 by 22 Comments

The Mandelbrot Set is a mathematical oddity where a simple function creates an infinitely complex landscape that you can literally zoom into forever. Like most people, I’ve downloaded Mandelbrot set viewers and marveled at the infinite whorls and spirals, and then waited while each frame took minutes or hours to render as I zoomed in. [Michael Henning], [Max Rademacher] and [Jonathan Plattner] decided to throw some modern computational muscle at this problem by building an interactive Mandelbrot set viewer using a laptop and two FPGA boards.

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Stepper Motor? Encoder? It’s Both!

July 15, 2018 by 22 Comments

We always think it is interesting that a regular DC motor and a generator are about the same thing. Sure, each is optimized for its purpose, but inefficiencies aside, you can use electricity to rotate a shaft or use a rotating shaft to generate electricity. [Andriyf1] has a slightly different trick. He shows how to use a stepper motor as an encoder. You can see a video of the setup below.

It makes sense. If the coils in the stepper can move the shaft, then moving the shaft should induce a current in the coils. He does note that at slow speeds you can miss pulses, however. Again, the device isn’t really optimized for this type of operation.

The circuit uses an opamp-based differential amplifier to read the pulses from the coil. Two opamps on two coils produce a quadrature signal just like a normal encoder. When the shaft turns in one direction, one pulse will lead the other. In the other direction, the lead pulse will be reversed.

There’s code to let an Arduino read the pulses. And here’s plenty of code that will read quadrature on an Arduino or other processors. We’ve seen similar hacks done with hard drive motors which are quite similar, by the way.

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Drive Big Servos With Ease

July 15, 2018 by 5 Comments

CNC machines of all types are a staple here at Hackaday, in that we have featured many CNC builds over the years. But the vast majority of those that we see are of relatively modest size and assembled in a home workshop, using small and readily available components such as small stepper motors. These drives are a world away from those used in industrial CNC machines, where you will find high-voltage servos packing a much greater punch. With good reason: driving a small low-voltage motor is easy while doing the same with a high-voltage servo requires electronics that have hitherto been expensive.

STMBL (for STM32 microprocessor and BrushLess motor) is a servo driver for STM32F4 microcontrollers that is specifically designed to use in retrofit projects to industrial CNC machines that have those high-voltage servos. When assembled, it takes the form of two PCBs arranged in a T configuration over a heatsink, with high-power connectors for the motor terminals, and RJ45s for feedback and serial control. In fact each of the boards has its own STM32, one on the high voltage side and the other on the low voltage, to enable only the simplest of isolated serial connections between them.  A significant variety of combinations of motor and feedback system is supported, making it as versatile as possible a module for those whose CNC needs have escaped their home bench setup. We’re sure we’ll see this module pop up in quite a few builds we show you over the coming years.

Thanks [Andy Pugh] for the tip.

Watney: A Fully 3D Printed Rover Platform

July 15, 2018 by 9 Comments

We’re getting to the point that seeing 3D printed parts in a project or hack isn’t as exciting as it was just a few years ago. The proliferation of low-cost desktop 3D printers means that finding a printer to squirt out a few parts for your build isn’t the adventure it once was. Gone are the days of heading to a local hackerspace or college hoping their janky Mendel felt like working that day. But all that really means is that hackers and makers now have the ability to utilize 3D printing even more. Forget printing one or two parts of your design, just print the whole thing.

That’s exactly what [Nik Ivanov] did with Watney, his fully 3D printed rover project. After lamenting that many so-called 3D printed rovers were anything but, he set out to design one that was not only made primarily of printed parts, but was robust enough to put some real work in. Over the course of several design iterations, he built a very capable all-wheel drive platform that needs only some electronics and a handful of M3 screws to leap into action.

As long as you’ve got a 3D printer big enough to handle the roughly 120mm x 190mm dimensions of this bot’s body, you’re well on the way to owning your very own video rover. [Nik] recommends printing everything in PETG, no doubt for its increased strength when it comes to things like the drive gears. Plus it’s low warp, which is really going to help when printing the top and bottom sections of the body. TPU is advised for the tires, but if you don’t have any (or your printer chokes on flexible filaments) you can just wrap the wheels with wide rubber bands.

[Nik] is using a Raspberry Pi Zero W as the brains of the operation, but the beauty of an open platform like this is that you could easily swap out the controls for something else to meet your needs. In addition to the Pi, there’s a L298N H-bridge motor controller to interface with the dual geared motors, as well as a servo to provide tilt for the SainSmart camera module.

We’ve often been surprised at just how expensive commercial robotics platforms can be, so we’re keenly interested in seeing if the availability of designs like this spur on DIY rover development. Though if you’re looking for something a little more rough and tumble, we’ve seen a 3D printed rover that looks combat-ready.

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Robot Maps Rooms With Help From IPhone

July 14, 2018 by 9 Comments

The Unity engine has been around since Apple started using Intel chips, and has made quite a splash in the gaming world. Unity allows developers to create 2D and 3D games, but there are some other interesting applications of this gaming engine as well. For example, [matthewhallberg] used it to build a robot that can map rooms in 3D.

The impetus for this project was a robotics company that used a series of robots around their business. The robots navigate using computer vision, but couldn’t map the rooms from scratch. They hired [matthewhallberg] to tackle this problem, and this robot is a preliminary result. Using the Unity engine and an iPhone, the robot can perform in one of three modes. The first is a user-controlled mode, the second is object following, and the third is 3D mapping.

The robot seems fairly easy to construct and only carries and iPhone, a Node MCU, some motors, and a battery. Most of the computational work is done remotely, with the robot simply receiving its movement commands from another computer. There’s a lot going on here, software-wise, and a lot of toolkits and software packages to install and communicate with one another, but the video below does a good job of showing what you’ll need and how it all works together. If that’s all too much, there are other robots with a form of computer vision that can get you started into the world of computer vision and mapping.

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IoT Solar Pool Heating

July 14, 2018 by 10 Comments

A backyard swimming pool can be a great place to take a refreshing dip on a summer’s day. It can also be a place to freeze your giblets off if the sun has been hiding for even a few hours. That can make pools an iffy proposition unless they’re heated, and that starts to get really expensive in terms of upfront costs and ongoing charges for fuel or power. Unless you put the sun and the IoT to work for pool-heating needs.

Preferences vary, of course, but [Martin Harizanov] and his family clearly like their swims on the warm side. With nobody using the pool when it was below 25°C (77°F), [Martin] picked up a few bits to harness the sun to warm the water. Loops of PVC lawn irrigation tubing were tossed onto a shed roof with a favorable solar aspect and connected to the pool with a length of garden hose. The black thin-wall tubing is perfect for capturing the sun’s energy, and 200 meters of the stuff can really heat things up fast. A small pump is controlled by a microcontroller — it’s not explicitly stated but we suspect it’s a Raspberry Pi — with a pair of temperature sensors to sample the water in the pool and in the heating loop. Metrics are gathered and logged by Emoncms, an open source energy monitoring app. [Martin] says he’s harvesting about 10 kW from the sun on a good day, and that the pool water in the heating loop has gotten up to a steamy 55°C (131°F) without any other energy inputs other than the pump.

Plenty of others have made the leap to solar for pool season extension, with designs from the simple to the more complex. And if you live where the sun doesn’t shine, there’s always a compost water heater.