A 3D-Printable Mecanum Wheeled Robot Platform

July 28, 2019 by 8 Comments

If your interest lies with robotics there are a multitude of different platforms for you to build. [Teemu Laurila] was frustrated with what was on offer, so designed his own with four-wheel double wishbone suspension and mecanum wheels for maximum flexibility.

It’s a design that has been through multiple revisions since its first iteration in 2015, and along the way it’s clear some thought has gone into it. That double wishbone suspension features an angle for a high ground clearance, and is fully sprung. Drive comes from small motor/gearboxes at each axle. The chassis meanwhile has plenty of space for a single-board computer, and has been specifically designed with the BeagleBone Black in mind.

This build isn’t fully DIY, as the mecanum wheels appear to be off-the-shelf items, but the rest of the project makes up for this. If you need to make your own, it’s hardly as though there aren’t any projects from which you can borrow components.

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Adding Linux To A PDP-11

November 15, 2018 by 14 Comments

The UNIBUS architecture for DEC’s PDPs and Vaxxen was a stroke of genius. If you wanted more memory in your minicomputer, just add another card. Need a drive? Plug it into the backplane. Of course, with all those weird cards, these old UNIBUS PDPs are hard to keep running. The UniBone is the solution to this problem. It puts Linux on a UNIBUS bridge, allowing this card to serve as a memory emulator, a test console, a disk emulator, or any other hardware you can think of.

The key to this build is the BeagleBone, everyone’s second-favorite single board computer that has one feature the other one doesn’t: PRUs, or a programmable real-time unit, that allows you to blink a lot of pins very, very fast. We’ve seen the BeagleBone be used as Linux in a terminal, as the rest of the computer for an old PDP-10 front panel and as the front end for a PDP-11/03.

In this build, the Beaglebone’s PRU takes care of interfacing to the UNIBUS backplane, sending everything to a device emulator running as an application. The UniBone can be configured as memory or something boring, but one of these can emulate four RL02 drives, giving a PDP-11 an amazing forty megabytes of storage. The real killer app of this implementation is giving these emulated drives a full complement of glowing buttons for load, ready, fault, and write protect, just like the front of a real RL02 drive. This panel is controlled over the I2C bus on the Beaglebone, and it’s a work of art. Of course, emulating the drive means you can’t use it as the world’s largest thumb drive, but that’s a small price to pay for saving these old computers.

This Weekend: Hackaday X Tindie Meetup At Bay Area Maker Faire.

May 14, 2018 by 4 Comments

Maker Faire Bay Area is this weekend, and the Hackaday and Tindie crew are getting ready to jack some cupcake cars. The Bay Area Maker Faire is one of the greatest gatherings of all the cool people we know, and five years ago we started host a meetup. This Saturday, we’re blowing the roof off our favorite joint in San Mateo yet again. Join us at O’Neill’s Irish Pub for the 5th annual Hackaday x Tindie BAMF Meetup!

This meetup is a well established tradition — it’s all the cool kids at Maker Faire, hanging out in a bar. Well, all the cool 21+ kids that is. There will be blinky, there will be bring-a-hack, and there will be the people who build stuff and make things happen. This is the mixer for everyone who is passionate about hardware, and a refreshing escape from the heat and the five dollar bottles of water.

Want an idea of what’s in store for the Hackaday x Tindie Bay Area Meetup? Last year it spilled into the streets. We cajoled [Josef Prusa] to head out, we had tiny 3D printers in action, [Ben Heck] made an appearance, and someone brought a HoloLens. the MOnSter 6502 was there, slowly increasing its program counter. If you want to see the coolest DIY hardware without the dealing with the masses at Maker Faire, this is the event you want to hit up.

But wait, there’s more: HDDG is Thursday!

Are you heading to San Fransisco early? Awesome, because we’re also hosting the Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic on the Thursday before the Faire! The HDDG is our monthly expand-your-mind gathering for hardware developers in the Bay Area. We have some amazing guests that will be talking about the latest hardware they’ve been developing.

On deck for this installment of HDDG is [Tanya Fish] who has been working at Pimoroni for the past couple of years. She’ll be discussing the ‘invisible magic’ of electronics and how to explain electrons to the uninitiated. Also on board for HDDG is [Roy Jui Liang Hung], the founder of Perkūnas Studio, one of the most renowned 3D printing experts in Taiwan. He’ll be talking about 3D sculpture. Also on board is [Jason Kridner], co-founder of BeagleBone.org, who will be talking about simplifying hardware design with the BeagleBone On A Chip.

Cutting Edge Of 3D Printing Revealed At Last Weekend’s Midwest RepRap Festival

March 26, 2018 by 47 Comments

The last three days marked the 2018 Midwest RepRap Festival. Every year, the stars of the 3D printing world make it out to Goshen, Indiana for the greatest gathering of 3D printers and printing enthusiasts the world has ever seen. This isn’t like any other 3D printing convention — everyone here needs to take the time to get to Goshen, and that means only the people who want to be here make it out.

Over the weekend we covered some amazing hacks and printer builds from MRRF. The ‘BeagleBone On A Chip’ has become a complete solution for a 3D printer controller. This is a great development that takes advantage of the very under-used Programmable Real-Time Units found in the BeagleBone, and will make an excellent controller for that custom printer you’ve been wanting to build. E3D has announced they’re working on an automatic tool-changing printer. It’s a slight derivative of their now-defunct BigBox printer, but is quite possibly the best answer to multi-material filament printers we’ve ever seen. There’s some interest from the community, and if everything goes well, this printer may become a kit, or something of the sort. Filament splicing robots also made an appearance at this year’s MRRF, and the results are extremely impressive. Now you can create multi-color prints with the printer you already own. Is it expensive? Yes, but it looks so good.

This wasn’t all that could be found at MRRF. There were hundreds of printers at the event, and at last count, over 1300 attendees. That’s amazing for a 3D printer convention that is held every year in the middle of nowhere, Indiana. What were the coolest sights and sounds coming out of MRRF this year? Check out the best-of list below.

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Real-Time Audio For The PocketBeagle

February 25, 2018 by 11 Comments

The BeagleBone has long been a favorite for real-time I/O, and now with the release of the PocketBone — the tiny key fob-sized BeagleBone — there are ever increasing uses for this tiny little programmable real-time Linux module. The Bela Mini, just released, is the latest add-on cape to take advantage of the processing power of the micro-sized PocketBone.

The Bela Mini is a shrinkification of the original Bela, a cape add-on for the BeagleBone. The original breaks out eight analog inputs and eight analog outputs, both sixteen-bits deep. With the addition of powered speaker outputs, the Bela turns the BeagleBone into the perfect tiny audio-Linux-thing, with a special emphasis on Pure Data and other audio wizardry.

The Bela Mini does away with the powered speaker outputs, and instead replaces those ports with stereo audio in and stereo audio out on a three-pin connector. Compared to the original Bela, the Mini loses the eight sixteen-bit analog outputs, but still keeps the analog inputs.

There have been many attempts to add real-time audio to microcontrollers and Linux boards, but few examples have lived up to the hype. Most of the time, this comes down to the choice of microcontroller or module; an ATmega-based Arduino doesn’t have real analog outputs and instead relies on PWMing a digital signal. A Raspberry Pi-based Pure Data box does not have a real-time I/O. This is where the choice of the PocketBone shows its strength. The PocketBone uses the same chip as the BeagleBone, and with that comes the Programmable Real-Time Units (PRUs). This enables the Bela to interface with signals with a dedicated controller in real-time. It’s exactly what you want for audio applications.

Upgrading A 3D Printer With OctoPrint

January 3, 2018 by 56 Comments

If you’ve been hanging around 3D printing communities, or reading the various 3D printing posts that have popped up here on Hackaday, you’ve almost certainly heard of OctoPrint. Created and maintained by Gina Häußge, OctoPrint allows you to turn an old computer (or more commonly a small ARM board like the Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone) into a network-accessible control panel for your 3D printer. Thanks to a thriving collection of community developed plugins, it can even control other hardware such as lights, enclosure heaters, smart plugs, or anything else you can think to hook onto the GPIO pins of your chosen ARM board. The project has become so popular that the new Prusa i3 MK3 has a header on the control board specifically for connecting a Pi Zero W running OctoPrint.

Even still, I never personally “got” OctoPrint. I was happy enough with my single printer connected to my computer and controlled directly from my slicer over USB. The majority of the things I print are of my own design, so when setting up the printer it only seemed logical that I would have it connected to the machine I’d be doing my designing on. If I’m sitting at my computer, I just need to rotate my chair to the right and I’m at my printer. What do I need to control the thing over WiFi for?

But things got tricky when I wanted to set up a second printer to help with speeding up larger projects. I couldn’t control them both from the same machine, and while I could print from SD on the second printer if I really had to, the idea seemed painfully antiquated. It would be like when Scotty tried talking into the computer’s mouse in “Voyage Home”. Whether I “got it” or not, I was about to dive headfirst into the world of OctoPrint.

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Friday Hack Chat: High Speed Data Acquisition

November 15, 2017 by 1 Comment

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about High-Speed Data Acquisition. If you’ve ever needed to shove voltages, currents, logic signals, temperature, pressure, or sound into a computer, you’ve used a DAQ. If you’ve ever needed to acquire a signal at a very high speed, you’ve probably paid a lot of money for that piece of equipment.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Kumar Abhishek], engineering student, Hackaday Prize finalist, and creator of the very, very cool Beaglelogic, a logic analyzer for the BeagleBone. The interesting bit about the Beaglelogic is its utilization of the Programmable Real-Time Units (PRUs) found in every BeagleBone.

These PRUs are basically DMA machines, shuttling bits back and forth between memory and GPIOs. This year, [Kumar] turned the Beaglelogic cape into the Beaglelogic Standalone, a device based on the Octavo Systems OSD3358 (the ‘BeagleBone On A Chip‘) that gives those Saleae logic analyzers a run for their money.

In this Hack Chat, we’ll be discussing the PRUs found in various iterations of the BeagleBoard, how the Beaglelogic performs its data acquisition, and how programming the PRUs is actually accomplished. If you have a question for [Kumar], leave a comment on the Hack Chat page

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Usually, our Hack Chats go down at noon, PDT, Friday. This one is different. Because [Kumar] is in India, we’ll be running this Hack Chat at 9:30a PST, Friday, November 17th. What time is that in India, and what time is that where you live? Who cares! Here’s a time zone converter!

Click that speech bubble to the left, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

We’re also looking for new Hack Chat guests! If you’ve built something cool, you’re working on an interesting project, or you’re about to introduce a really cool product, hit us up! Email our wonderful community managers, and we’ll see if we can slot you in.