LiPo Replacement Keeps Portable Scanner In The Action

November 21, 2023 by 8 Comments

If there’s anything people hate more than being locked into a printer manufacturer’s replacement cartridges, it’s proprietary batteries. Cordless power tools are the obvious example in this space, but there are other devices that insist on crappy battery packs that are expensive to replace when they eventually die.

One such device is the Uniden Bearcat BC296D portable scanner that [Robert Guildig] found for a song at a thrift store, which he recently gave a custom LiPo battery upgrade. It came equipped with a nickel-cadmium battery pack, which even under the best of circumstances has a very limited battery life. Using regular AA batteries wasn’t an option, but luckily the space vacated by the OEM battery pack left a lot of room for mods. Those include a small module with BMS functions and a DC-DC converter, a 2,400 mAh 4.2 V LiPo pillow pack, and a new barrel connector for charging. With the BMS set for six volts and connected right to the old battery pack socket, the scanner can now run for seven hours on a one-hour charge. As a bonus, the LiPo pack should last a few times longer than the NiCd packs, and be pretty cheap to replace when it finally goes too. There’s a video after the hop with all the details.

If you’re looking at a similar battery replacement project, you might want to check out [Arya]’s guide to everything you need to know about lithium-ion circuitry.

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This 3D Scanner Uses A Sensor You Might Not Know About

August 14, 2023 by 24 Comments

The huge diversity of sensors and other hardware which our community now has access to seems comprehensive, but there remain many parts which have made little impact due to cost or scarcity. It’s one of these which [Enginoor] has taken for the sensor in a 3D scanner, an industrial laser displacement sensor.

This sensor measures distance, but it’s not one of the time-of-flight sensors we’re familiar with. Instead it’s similar to a photographic rangefinder, relying on the parallax angle as seen from a sensor a distance apart from the laser. They are extremely expensive due to their high-precision construction, but happily they can be found at a more affordable level second-hand from decommissioned machinery.

In this case the sensor is mounted on an X-Y gantry, and scans the part making individual point measurements. The sensor is interfaced to a Teensy, which in turn spits the data back to a PC for processing. By their own admission it’s not the most practical of builds, but for us that’s not the point. We hope that bringing these parts to the attention of our community might see them used in other ways.

We’ve featured huge numbers of 3D scanners over the years, including a look at how not to make one.

Secret Bookshelf Door Uses Hidden Fingerprint Scanner

May 30, 2023 by 4 Comments

What is it that compels us about a secret door? It’s almost as if the door itself and the promise of mystery is more exciting than whatever could lay beyond. In any case, [Scott Monaghan] is a lover of the form, and built his own secret door hidden in a bookshelf, as all good secret doors should be.

The door is activated by pulling down on the correct book. This then reveals a fingerprint scanner. Upon presenting the right digit, the door will elegantly swing open to reveal the room beyond. Secret door experts will note there’s an obvious tell due to the light spilling through the cracks, however [Scott] reports that the finishing stages of the build solved this issue. The door was also fitted with a manual release for easier daily use.

Details are light, but the basics are all there. Really all you need is a cheap hardware store door opener, a secret activation lever or authentication method, and a well-hinged bookcase to achieve this feat yourself. We’ve seen some other great secret doors before, too. Video after the break.

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Laser Scanner Upgraded To Use PCB Motor

February 22, 2023 by 10 Comments

[Rik]’s Hexastorm laser scanner project originally used a discrete polygon mirror controller+motor module from Sharp to spin a prism. But the scanner head was a bit difficult to assemble and had a lot of messy wires. This has all been replaced by a single board featuring a PCB-printed motor, based on the work of [Carl Bugeja]. The results are promising so far — see video below the break.

Since the prism is not attached to anything, currently it will fall off if mounted in the intended vertical orientation. One of [Rik]’s next steps is to improve the mount’s design to constrain the spinning prism. The previous Sharp motor was specified to 21000 RPM, but was only driven to 2400 RPM in [Rik]’s first version. This new PCB motor spins at 2000 RPM in these tests, comparable to his previous experiments ( we’re not sure about the maximum RPM ).

See our original writeup from 2019 to review the goals of this project, and be sure to checkout details and documentation on the Hexastorm project page. To learn more about PCB motors, read our article about [Carl]’s first design and visit his Hackaday.io page. Thanks to [Jonathan Beri] for the tip.

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SDR Scanner Listens To Everything

February 6, 2023 by 39 Comments

In the old days, scanners would listen to a bunch of channels in a round-robin fashion. If a signal breaks the squelch, the scanner stops and scanning continues scanning after a few seconds of inactivity. But with modern SDRs, you don’t have to listen to one channel at a time. You can listen to all of them. [Tech Minds] shows RTL-SDR Scanner on Linux to record up to 20 MHz of the band simultaneously. It records all the channels in the band of interest. The actual project is on GitHub.

Once recorded, you can use a web interface to listen to the channels and see some statistics about them. [Tech Minds] tried recording aircraft traffic. It worked, but the program doesn’t know how to demodulate AM yet so if you want to record the entire shortwave band, aircraft, or other AM sources, you’ll have to wait a bit before this software is ready for your use case.

If you need to run the program under Windows like [Tech Minds] did, you can use VMWare Workstation Player to get a free copy of Linux on Windows. We wondered if WSL version two might work, too, but we don’t know. Once you have Linux running, Docker makes the installation straightforward.  Since the interface is a web interface, you could probably run this on a small computer on the network and then access it at your leisure from another computer.

Of course, old-fashioned scanners were often used to listen to police and fire radios. Those have all gone trunked these days. This isn’t a new idea, but it did seem like a well-packaged solution.

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The display of a medical ultrasound scanner showing "HackedScan II"

Medical Ultrasound Scanner Gives Up Its Secrets, Runs DOOM

December 18, 2022 by 4 Comments

Medical equipment often makes for interesting teardown videos: the strict requirements imposed by certification bodies mean you’ll find good quality components and a high standard of design and manufacturing. But when [Buy It Fix It] bought an ultrasound scanner on eBay, he wasn’t interested in tearing it down: his plan was to use it to find out if his sheep are in lamb, so he went on to repair it and modify it for its new purpose.

The device in question is a Mediwatch Bardscan II, which is meant to be used for scanning people’s bladders. The mainboard has a completely different model number however, which suggests that the basic design is used for several types of ultrasound scanners. The system is powered by an AMD Geode processor that runs Windows XP Embedded stored on a CompactFlash card, so examining the internal software is easy: the scanner interface even runs on a regular Windows PC.

Several files on the internal drive point at hidden features, with filenames like kidney.dib and liver.dib indicating that the instrument can scan more than just bladders. The drive also holds several versions of the scanning app, as well as a .ini file in which lots of features can be enabled or disabled. By running the executable through x32dbg, [Buy It Fix It] was even able to recover the password to enable the “Advanced Settings” menu — it’s “u10” in case you were wondering.

With a bit of file editing, [Buy It Fix It] managed to turn the rather basic system into a way more flexible ultrasound scanner. For example, he can now adjust the scan depth, replay previous scans and make notes on top of any captured images. It can even run DOOM, as he demonstrates at the end of the video — though we can imagine his sheep might not enjoy the sight of their owner approaching them with a box full of flame-throwing demons.

Medical ultrasound scanners, which have been around for quite a while, may appear to be complex machines, but it is possible to make a simple version with easily available components.

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Old Barcode Scanner Motherboards Live Again

September 21, 2022 by 1 Comment

Sometimes, hacking is just for the pleasure of diving into the secrets of old hardware. That was very much the case when [glitch] and a friend started hacking on some old Intel 8080 boards that had been living in the junk pile for too long.

The boards in question were motherboards from Identicon barcode scanners, running the Intel 8080 CPU. Hacking on the 8080 is a little different, with the ancient CPU requiring three separate voltages to run. However, with the power rails figured out and power applied, it was possible to get the old boards up and running.

The boards were first run with test ROMs which showed the 8080 CPU to be functional. The ROMs hosted a simple program which got the 8080 to spit out the word “HELO” on to an HP HDSP-2416 ASCII character display. From there, the barcode scanner boards were installed in a chassis and hooked up to a bigger Siemens character display, and the memory was mapped out.

The result was that [glitch] and co were able to largely reverse engineer the Identicon hardware, learning it was fairly similar to the Intel MCS-80 reference design of the era. They were able to get code running on the platform, access the RAM, and fit a larger 8-character display. However, without the original barcode scanner attachment, the boards weren’t able to return to their original duty.

As far as hacks go, it’s pretty old school. The boards don’t talk to Twitter, nor run the lights or help with the dishes. However, plenty of fun was had seeing if this old metal could be made to follow instructions once more. Hacking for the pleasure of it is always a good thing by our book!