This week Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off with a traffic report from the Moon, which has suddenly become a popular destination for wayward robots.
Anonymizing an ATtiny85 via laser
From there, they’ll go over a fire-tending contraption that’s equal parts madness and brilliance, two decades of routers being liberated by OpenWRT, impressive feats of chip decapping, and USB-C’s glorious rise to power.
You’ll also hear about the latest developments in laptop RAM, exploits against the flash encryption used on the ESP32, and Android powered oscilloscopes. The duo will wrap things up with horror stories from the self-checkout aisle, and a look at the fantastical rolling power station that Dan Maloney has been building in his driveway.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
It might seem a little bit counterintuitive, but one of the more carbon-neutral ways of heating one’s home is by burning wood. Since the carbon for the trees came out of the air a geologically insignificant amount of time ago, it’s in effect solar energy with extra steps. And with modern stoves and well-seasoned wood, air pollution is minimized as well. The only downside is needing to feed the fire frequently, which [Anders] solved by building a robot.
[Anders]’ system is centered around a boiler, a system which typically sits in a utility area like a basement and directs its heat to the home via another system, usually hot water. An Arduino Mega controls the system of old boat winches and various motors, with a grabber arm mounted at the end. The arm pinches each log from end to end, allowing it to grab the uneven logs one at a time. The robot also opens the boiler door and closes it again when the log is added, and then the system waits for the correct set of temperature conditions before grabbing another log and adding it. And everything can be monitored remotely with the help of an ESP32.
The robot is reportedly low-maintenance as well, thanks to its low speed and relatively low need for precision. The low speed also makes it fairly safe to work around, which was an important consideration because wood still needs to be added to a series of channels every so often to feed the robot, but this is much less often than one would have to feed logs into a boiler if doing this chore manually. It also improves on other automated wood-burning systems like pellet stoves, since you can skip the pellet-producing middleman step. It also eliminates the need to heat your home by burning fossil fuels, much like this semi-automated wood stove.
[Clay Builds] found a bit of a gem at a recent auction, picking up a Nomadic Technologies N150 robot for just $100. It actually looks like something out of science fiction, with its cylindrical design, red bumpers, and many sensors. He decided to try and restore the research-grade robot to functionality with the aid of modern hardware.
Right away, it’s clear this was an expensive and serious bit of kit. It’s full of hardcore gears and motors for driving three rubber-tired wheels, each of which has a pivoting mount for steering the thing. Through his research, [Clay] was able to find some ancient websites documenting university work using the robots. His understanding is that the platform was designed for researchers experimenting with simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms, and other robotic navigation tasks.
[Clay] doesn’t just settle for a teardown, though. He’s been able to get the platform running again in one sense, using an Arduino to manually run the robot’s drive controls under the command of a gamepad. Without official software or resources, it’s perhaps unlikely he’ll be able to get the stock hardware to do much without completely rebraining it, so this method makes sense. In future he hopes to get the bumper sensors and sonar modules working too.
Anyone who has ever processed real analog film in a darkroom probably remembers two things: the awkward fumbling in absolute darkness while trying to get the film loaded into the developing reel, and the tedium of getting the timing for each solution just right. This automatic film-developing machine can’t help much with the former, but it more than makes up for that by taking care of the latter.
For those who haven’t experienced the pleasures of the darkroom — and we mean that sincerely; watching images appear before your eyes is straight magic — film processing is divided into two phases: developing the exposed film from the camera, and making prints from the film. [kauzerei]’s machine automates development and centers around a modified developing tank and a set of vessels for the various solutions needed for different film processes. Pumps and solenoid valves control the flow of solutions in and out of the developing tank, while a servo mounted on the tank’s cover gently rotates the reel to keep the film exposed to fresh solutions; proper agitation is the secret sauce of film developing.
The developing machine has a lot of other nice features that really should help with getting consistent results. The developing tank sits on a strain gauge, to ensure the proper amount of each solution is added. To avoid splotches that can come from using plain tap water, rinse water is filtered using a household drinking water pitcher. The entire rig can be submerged in a heated water bath for a consistent temperature during processing. And, with four solution reservoirs, the machine is adaptable to multiple processes. [kauzerei] lists black and white and C41 color negative processes, but we’d imagine it would be easy to support a color slide process like E6 too.
This looks like a great build, and while it’s not the first darkroom bot we’ve seen — we even featured one made from Lego Technics once upon a time — this one has us itching to get back into the darkroom again.
Once upon a time, the poor humans of the past had to lug around suitcases and trunks with their own arms. Then, some genius figured out that you could just put wheels on and make everyone’s life a million times easier. Now, what if you didn’t even have push, because your luggage could just follow you instead? Well, students [Yuqiang Ge] and [Yiyang Zhao] have figured out a proof of concept for how that could work.
Their build is a small robotic platform that they assembled for their ECE5730 final project. The tiny wheeled robot is programmed to rotate on the spot until its infrared sensors pick up a signal. In turn, the user is intended to carry an infared beacon for it to lock onto. A pair of sensors are used on the robot platform, separated by a board to serve as a blind. The robot determines the relative signal strength from each sensor, and uses that to vary PWM signals to the two DC drive motors to steer the robot platform to seek and follow the infrared beacon.
It’s a neat idea, and looks to work pretty well in a university corridor. It even has an ultrasonic range sensor to (ideally) stop when it gets too close to the user. Whether it would survive the tumult of a crowded airport is another thing entirely, but that’s what the engineering process is about. Indeed, the very concept has been commercialized already!
In Disney’s 1991 film Beauty and the Beast, an enchantress curses the young (10 or 11-year-old) prince to beast-hood for spurning her based solely on her appearance. She gives him a special rose that she says will bloom until his 21st birthday, at which time he’ll be turned back into a prince, provided that he learned to love by then. If not, he’ll be a beast for eternity. As the years go by, the rose drops the occasional petal and begins to wilt under the bell jar where he keeps it.
[Gord Payne] was tasked with building such a rose of enchantment for a high school production and knocked it out of the park. With no budget provided, [Gord] used what he had lying about the house, like nylon trimmer line. In fact, that’s probably the most important part of this build. A piece of trimmer line runs up through the stem made of tubing and out the silk rose head, which connects with a custom 3-D printed part.
Each loose petal hangs from the tubing using a short length of wire. Down at the base, the trimmer line is attached to a servo horn, which is connected to an Adafruit Circuit Playground. When the button is pressed on the remote, the servo retracts the trimmer line a little bit, dropping a petal. Be sure to check out the demo after the break.
There are many places where you’d want to use remotely controlled robots, but perhaps forestry isn’t the first application to come to mind. Yet there are arguments to be made for replacing something like a big logging machine with grapple for a much smaller robot. The reduced ground pressure can be beneficial in fragile ecosystems, and removing the operator is much safer if felling a tree goes wrong.
This is where a US company called Forest Robots tried to come in, with their Logg Dogg, of which [Wes] over at Watch Wes Workfound a very unique prototype abandoned in a barn, courtesy of Zuckerberg’s marketplace of wonders.
One of the two receivers on the Forest Robots’ Logg Dogg logging robot prototype. (Credit: Watch Wes Work)
After lugging the poor abandoned robot back into a warm repair shop, he set to work on figuring out what it was that he had bought. At the time he knew only that it was some kind of logging robot, but with no model number or name on the robot, it was tough to find information. Eventually he got tipped off about it being the Logg Dogg, with even a video of the robot in action, helpfully uploaded to YouTube by [Hankey Mountain Garage] and embedded below for your viewing pleasure.
As [Wes] noticed during teardown and inspection was that it has that distinct mix-and-match feel to it of a prototype, ranging from metric and US customary bolts to both European and US/Canadian supplied components. Although it has two RF receivers on the device, no remote(s) came with the device, and the seller only knew that it was already in the barn when they purchased the place. After getting the engine working again on the robot, [Wes] contacted one of the people behind the robot: [Dean Edwards], a professor at the University of Idaho, hoping to learn more about this robot and how it ended up abandoned in a barn.
Hopefully we’ll find out in a Part 2 whether [Wes] got a response, and whether this robot will get a second chance at life. Meanwhile, in countries such as Portugal such robots are already finding significant use, including for fire protection in its forests, tackling difficult terrain more easily than humans. With forest fires an increasing risk, perhaps the Logg Dogg and kin could find a use there.
