A bike computer sits on a wooden background. The back of the bike computer has a 3D printed attachment with two white translucent zip ties running through the back.

Repairing A Bike GPS With 3D Printing

October 7, 2022 by 10 Comments

We love hacks that keep gadgets out of the trash heap, and [Brieuc du Maugouër] has us covered with this 3D printable replacement mount he designed for his bike GPS.

One of the most frustrating ways a gadget can fail is when a small, but critical part of the device fails. [du Maugouër] combined a 3D printed back and four M2x6mm screws to make a robust new mount to replace the broken OEM mount on his handlebar-mounted GPS. Slots for zip tie mounting are included in case the replacement mount breaks before yet another replacement can be printed. Apparently [du Maugouër] agrees with Chief O’Brien that “in a crunch, I wouldn’t like to be caught without a second backup.” [Youtube]

It’s exciting that we’re finally in a time when 3D printed replacement parts are living up to their potential. This would be a lot easier if more manufacturers posted 3D printed design files instead of getting them pulled from 3D file platforms, but makers will find a way regardless of OEM approval.

We’ve covered a lot of bike hacks over the years including DIY Bike Computers and GPS Trackers. Do you have a project that keeps something from becoming trash or might save the world another way? There’s still time to enter the Save the World Wildcard round of the Hackaday Prize (closes October 16th).

High-Altitude Balloon Tracker Does Landing Prediction With Pi Pico

March 10, 2021 by 1 Comment

[Dave Akerman]’s ongoing high altitude balloon (HAB) work is outstanding, and we’re all enriched by the fact that he documents his work like he does. Recently, [Dave] wrote about his balloon tracker based on the Raspberry Pi Pico, whose capabilities brought a couple interesting features to the table.

In a way, HAB trackers have a fairly simple job: read sensors such as GPS and constantly relay that data to someone on the ground so that the balloon’s location can be tracked, and the hardware recovered when it ultimately returns to Earth. There are a lot of different ways to do this tracking, and one thing [Dave] enjoys is getting his hands on a new board and making a HAB tracker out of it. That’s exactly what he has done with the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Nothing builds familiarity like actually using a part, and the Pico had some useful things to contribute to a HAB tracker application. For one thing, the Pico has an onboard buck-boost converter that allows it to be powered from a relatively wide voltage range (~1.8 V to 5.5 V), so running it directly from batteries is both possible and desirable from a tracker perspective. But a really useful feature was possible thanks to the large amount of memory on the Pico: dynamic landing prediction.

[Dave] does landing prediction prior to launch based on environmental conditions, but it’s always better if the HAB tracker can also calculate its own prediction based on actual observed events and conditions. A typical microcontroller board like an Arduino doesn’t have enough memory to store the required data upon which to do such calculations, but the Pico does so easily. [Dave]’s new board transmits an updated landing site prediction along with all the rest of the telemetry, making the retrieval process much more reliable.

Want to see a completely different approach to HAB recovery? Check out a payload guided by steerable parachutes.

A Tracker For Radio Sondes

December 27, 2020 by 12 Comments

Radiosondes – the telemetry packages carried aloft by sounding balloons for atmospheric weather data measurements – are regularly used by weather bureaus around the world to collect data, and there are quite a number of launches daily. Most of them are in Europe, but they also happen at many locations in North and South America, Japan, and Australia. The balloons burst when they reach a high enough altitude, the radiosonde falls back, and most often there is no effort made to recover them since they are deemed “expendable”. So it’s Finders Keepers, and rich pickings for any hacker who is fortunate enough to grab the fallen radiosondes. For successful recovery, you need to first be able to track those radiosondes, and that’s why leet guy [Robert Stefanowicz aka p1337] built his Weather ballon tracker (sic) project.

The hardware is all off-the-shelf, packaged in a pretty cool 3D printed package designed to make it look like the hand held radio that it is. At its heart is the ESP32 based TTGO T-BEAM V1.0 which has almost everything needed for this project. Add an OLED display, 18650 Li-Po cells, antenna and connectors and you can put it all together in an evening over your favourite beverage.

[DL9RDZ] wrote the software which runs on the T-Beam, available at the RDZ-Sonde repo on Github, that allows hunting these balloons. Setup is straightforward, and you need to fiddle with just a couple of well-explained config parameters. Once connected to your WiFi, config and settings can be accessed via convenient web URL’s and the single user action button on the TTGO offers quick access to different functional modes. At the moment, the software is written to decode signals from the widely used Vaisala RS41, Graw DFM06 and Graw DFM09 radiosondes. This LINK provides details for some of the popular radiosonde models.

Once you’re done building this piece of hunting gear, you’ll need some additional help finding out when and where the launches are taking place. If you’re in Europe, you luck out – there is a live radiosonde tracker map, thanks to the great work done by [Michał Lewiński – SQ6KXY]. If you live else where and know of similar resources, let us know in the comments. As a side note, Wikipedia tells us there are about 1300 launch sites worldwide and twice a day missions, so there’s quite a number of fallen pieces of hardware lying around just waiting to be picked up. At the very least, each will have a GPS module and temperature and humidity sensors that you can recover.

So, what do you do with the recovered radiosondes ? Here’s a tip on a “Fallen Radiosonde reborn as active L-band antenna“. And If you’d like to get the skinny on radiosondes, check out “Radiosondes: getting data from upstairs”

Thanks for the tip, [Alex aka MD23F3].

Busting GPS Exercise Data Out Of Its Garmin-controlled IoT Prison

July 28, 2020 by 21 Comments

If you take to the outdoors for your exercise, rather than walking the Sisyphusian stair machine, it’s nice to grab some GPS-packed electronics to quantify your workout. [Bunnie Huang] enjoys paddling the outrigger canoe through the Singapore Strait and recently figured out how to unpack and visualize GPS data from his own Garmin watch.

By now you’ve likely heard that Garmin’s systems were down due to a ransomware attack last Thursday, July 23rd. On the one hand, it’s a minor inconvenience to not be able to see your workout visualized because of the system outage. On the other hand, the services have a lot of your personal data: dates, locations, and biometrics like heart rate. [Bunnie] looked around to see if he could unpack the data stored on his Garmin watch without pledging his privacy to computers in the sky.

Obviously this isn’t [Bunnie’s] first rodeo, but in the end you don’t need to be a 1337 haxor to pull this one off. An Open Source program called GPSBabel lets you convert proprietary data formats from a hundred or so different GPS receivers into .GPX files that are then easy to work with. From there he whipped up less than 200 lines of Python to plot the GPS data on a map and display it as a webpage. The key libraries at work here are Folium which provides the pretty browsable map data, and Matplotlib to plot the data.

These IoT devices are by all accounts amazing, listening for satellite pings to show us how far and how fast we’ve gone on web-based interfaces that are sharable, searchable, and any number of other good things ending in “able”. But the flip side is that you may not be the only person seeing the data. Two years ago Strava exposed military locations because of an opt-out policy for public data sharing of exercise trackers. Now Garmin says they don’t have any indications that data was stolen in the ransomware attack, but it’s not a stretch to think there was a potential there for such a data breach. It’s nice to see there are Open Source options for those who want access to exercise analytics and visualizations without being required to first hand over the data.

Custom Firmware Makes A LoRA-Enabled HAB Tracker Watch

May 6, 2020 by 4 Comments

High Altitude Balloons (HAB) are a great way to get all kinds of data and shoot great photos and video, but what goes up must come down. Once the equipment has landed, one must track it down. GPS and LoRA, with its long wireless range and ease of use, are invaluable tools in tracking payloads that have returned to Earth. [Dave Akerman] has made handheld receivers to guide him to payloads, but wanted something even smaller; ideally something that could be worn on the wrist.

One day he came across the affordable LilyGo T-Watch which includes GPS and LoRA functionality, and he started getting ideas. The watch has the features, but the stock firmware didn’t measure up. Not to be deterred, [Dave] wrote new firmware to turn the device into a wrist-worn GPS and LoRA chase watch.

Not only is the new firmware functional, but it’s got a wonderful user interface. GitHub repository for the new firmware is here, and you can see the UI in action in the brief video embedded below.

Continue reading “Custom Firmware Makes A LoRA-Enabled HAB Tracker Watch” →

The CLUE Tracker Points You To A Target, Using CircuitPython

April 5, 2020 by 2 Comments
The main components are an Adafruit CLUE, Stemma GPS, and a lithium-polymer battery. No soldering required.

[Jay Doscher] shares a quick GPS project he designed and completed over a weekend. The device is called the CLUE Tracker and has simple goals: it shows a user their current location, but also provides a compass heading and distance to a target point. The idea is a little like geocaching, in that a user is pointed to a destination but must find their own way there. There’s a 3D printed enclosure, and as a bonus, there is no soldering required.

The CLUE Tracker uses the Adafruit CLUE board (which is the same size as the BBC micro:bit) and Stemma GPS sensor, with the only other active component being a lithium polymer battery. The software side of the CLUE Tracker uses CircuitPython, and [Jay] has the code and enclosure design available on GitHub.

[Jay] did a nice job of commenting and documenting the code, so this could make a great introductory CircuitPython project. No soldering is required, which makes it a little easier to re-use the parts in other projects later. This helps to offset costs for hackers on a budget.

The fact that a device like this can be an afternoon or weekend project is a testament to the fact that times have never been better for hobbyists when it comes to hardware. CircuitPython is also a fast-growing tool, and projects like this can help make it easy and fun to get started.

Star Trackers: Telling Up From Down In Any Space

April 2, 2020 by 28 Comments

Keeping track of position is crucial in a lot of situations. On Earth, it’s usually relatively straight-forward, with systems having been developed over the centuries that would allow one to get at least a rough fix on one’s position on this planet. But for a satellite out in space, however, it’s harder. How do they keep their communications dishes pointed towards Earth?

The stars are an obvious orientation point. The Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem (AACS) on the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes has the non-enviable task of keeping the spacecraft’s communication dish aligned precisely with a communications dish back on Earth, which from deep space is an incomprehensibly tiny target.

Back on Earth, the star tracker concept has become quite popular among photographers who try to image the night skies. Even in your living room,  VR systems also rely on knowing the position of the user’s body and any peripherals in space. In this article we’ll take a look at the history and current applications of this type of position tracking. Continue reading “Star Trackers: Telling Up From Down In Any Space” →