Ferrofluid Display Fuels The Fun, And The Procrastination

May 28, 2019 by 14 Comments

When deadlines loom and your future is on the line, do what top college students through the ages have always done: procrastinate! [Simen] and [Amund] did that in grand style by starting a YouTube channel, delightfully and aptly named “Applied Procrastination”, wherein they plan to avoid their responsibilities as long as possible in favor of making a large-scale ferrofluidic display panel. (Video, embedded below.)

We suppose we should encourage them to hit the books, but honestly they look like they’re having much more fun and learning more than they would in class. The idea isn’t new; we’ve seen ferrofluid clocks before, after all. [Amund] and [Simen] have grander plans for their display, but they’re wisely starting small with basic experiments. They had an early great idea to use a double-pane window as a tank for their display, but coatings on the inside of the glass and the aluminum frame conspired to cloud the display. They also did some tests to make sure they can control 252 electromagnets safely. They did manage to get a small test display working, but really the bulk of the video is just them playing with magnets and ferrofluid. And again, we’re OK with that.

It looks like this is going to be an interesting project, with hopefully regular updates to the channel now that summer break is upon us. Unless they find something else to do, of course.

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Hacker Dosed With LSD While Restoring Historical Synth

May 28, 2019 by 54 Comments

[Eliot Curtis] found himself a little too close to 1960’s counterculture while restoring a vintage modular synthesizer — he began tripping out on acid. The instrument in question is a Buchla Model 100. The Buchla is a modular synth. Instead of a keyboard, it used capacitance-sensitive touch plates. This particular model 100 was purchased by California State University East Bay Campus. The synth was popular for a while, but eventually fell into disuse, and was stored in a classroom closet.

Modular synths are experiencing a renaissance, as can be seen right here on Hackaday. The Buchla was pulled out of storage and given a proper restoration. [Eliot Curtis] is the Broadcast Operations Manager at KPIX 5, the San Francisco CBS TV station. He also is the hacker who volunteered to restore the Buchla.
During the restoration, [Curtis] found residue and crystals stuck under one of the knobs of the Control Voltage Processing Module. Was it flux, conformal coating, or something else? [Eliot] hit the board with contact cleaner and wiped it down. Within 45 minutes, he was feeling a strange tingling. It was the beginning of a nine-hour LSD trip. Three independent tests on the module came back positive for LSD.

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD for short) can be readily absorbed through the skin, which is exactly what happened to [Eliot]. Synth designer [Don Buchla] was friends with [Owsley Stanley], who worked for the Grateful Dead and allegedly cooked up some very potent LSD. Some of Buchla’s modules even found their way into Ken Keesey’s hands, where they wound up on his famous bus “further”. As it turns out there were rumors that modules had been dipped in LSD back in the ’60s. Why someone would do that to an electronic module, we’re not sure — they must have been on drugs. [Eliot] recovered from his brush with the ’60s and continued with the restoration with gloves on.

If there is a moral here, it should be to take precautions when working on equipment which might contain dangerous substances. We’ve learned this lesson ourselves cracking open broken laptops. You might find anything from coffee to soda, to pet urine or worse. A box of nitrile gloves definitely should be standard equipment in any hacker’s lab.

Creating A Sonic Landscape With Glitching CD Player

May 27, 2019 by 5 Comments

CDs were a great advancement in audio quality when they were first put on the market. There’s no vinyl-style degradation of the medium if it’s played over and over, and there’s no risk of turning them into a giant pile of ribbon while rewinding like a cassette tape. The one downside was that if you were to take them on the move you needed special hardware and software to prevent the inevitable skipping. If you look at the skipping not as a downside, though, but as a way to produce interesting music, you might end up with a pretty unique piece of hardware.

[Dmitry] is known for his interesting art installations, and the latest one uses parts from three 1988 Sony D2 CD players that have been reassembled in order to take advantage of a skipping and glitching CD. The modified equipment is able to play during pause or rewind thanks to a processor modification, and can also change the rotational speed of the disc. There are other pieces of hardware included for more fine control of glitching and skipping of the audio being read off of the CD.

The new device functions as a working musical instrument, although [Dmitry] says that it is more useful for deconstructing the information stored on the disc, and exploring the medium itself. Of course if you have enough motivation, you can find sounds from almost anywhere on (or in) the planet too.

Virtual Reality For Alzheimer’s Detection

May 27, 2019 by 10 Comments

You may think of Alzheimer’s as a disease of the elderly, but the truth is people who suffer from it have had it for years — sometimes decades — before they notice. Early detection can help doctors minimize the impact the condition has on your brain, so there’s starting to be an emphasis on testing middle-aged adults for the earliest signs of the illness. It turns out that one of the first noticeable symptoms is a decline in your ability to navigate. [Dennis Chan] at Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre and his team are now using virtual reality to determine how well people can navigate as a way to assess Alzheimer’s earlier than is possible with other techniques.

Current tests mostly measure your ability to remember things, but by the time that’s a problem, things have often progressed. The test has the subject walk to different cones and remember their locations, and has already proven more effective than the standard test.

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ESP8266 Upgrade Gives IKEA LEDs UDP Superpowers

May 27, 2019 by 39 Comments

It can be difficult to resist the impulse buy. You see something interesting, the price is right, and even though you know you should do your research first, you end up putting it in your cart anyway. That’s how [Tobias Girstmair] ended up being the not-so proud owner of a LEDBERG RGB LED strip from IKEA, and what eventually pushed him to replace wimpy original controller with an ESP8266.

So what was the problem with the original controller? If you can believe it, it was incapable of producing white light. When IKEA says an LED is multi-color, they apparently mean it’s only multi-color. A quick check of the reviews online seem to indicate that the white version is sold as a different SKU that apparently looks the same externally and has confused more than a few purchasers.

Rather than having to pick one or the other, [Tobias] decided he would replace the original controller with an ESP-03, hoping that would give him granular enough control over the LEDs to coax a suitably white light out of them. He didn’t want to completely start from scratch, so one of the first decisions he made was to reuse the existing PCB and MOSFETs. Some handy test points on the PCB allowed him to hook the digital pins of the ESP right to the red, blue, and green LED channels.

Then it was just a matter of coming up with the software. To keep things simple, [Tobias] decided to create a “dumb” controller that simply sets the LED color and intensity according to commands it receives over a simplified UDP protocol. Anything beyond that, such as randomized colors or special effects, is done with scripts that run on his computer and fire off the appropriate UDP commands. This also means he can manually control his newly upgraded LEDBERG strips from basically anything that can generate UDP packets, such as an application on his Android phone.

It might not be the most robust implementation we’ve ever seen, but all things considered, it looks as though this modification could be a pretty good way to get some cheap network controlled RGB lighting in your life.

Depotting An Ancient Car Computer

May 27, 2019 by 25 Comments

Carburettors were king for decades, until the onward march of technology brought electronic fuel injection to the fore. During their final years, a handful of automakers experimented with computer control of the humble carb, trying to squeeze out every last bit of efficiency and reduce pollution as much as possible. [NeXT] happened to own a vehicle fitted with AMC’s Computerized Engine Control system, and decided to see what made it tick.

This was easier said than done due to choices made by Ford, who manufactured the engine computer for AMC. Unlike modern ECUs which usually feature a metal case fitted with rubber gaskets, the CEC computer was potted in epoxy. [NeXT] was able to de-pot the circuit board by placing it in a stock pot of boiling water, and then slowly peeling the epoxy away.

With the potting removed, it was possible to begin reverse engineering the board. The main microcontroller is an Intel 8049, of the MCS-48 family. The board uses through-hole technology, and only features a handful of other small ICs.

It’s always interesting to look back at forgotten technologies and see how things were done in decades past. [NeXT] hopes to keep working on the project, intending to dump the ROM from the CEC module and build a replacement computer with an Arduino. It’s possible to build your own ECU from scratch, so we’re looking forward to seeing [NeXT]’s AMC Eagle running on modern silicon real soon.

PiFX, The Pi-Powered Pedal Board

May 27, 2019 by 6 Comments

Since the beginnings of the Raspberry Pi, [Tibbbbz] has wanted to build a DIY guitar effects board and amp simulator. A device like this, and similar ones sold by Boss and Kemper, put a bunch of processing power inside a metal enclosure with some footswitches and a pair of quarter inch jacks for input and output. Mash some buttons and wicked toanz come out the other end. Now this is actually possible with a Pi, and it’ll sound great too.

Because this is an audio application, latency is critical. It doesn’t really matter if you have 200 milliseconds of latency when scrolling through your Facebook feed, but for real-time audio processing anything over five milliseconds is disorienting and nearly unusable. [Tibbbbz] is using a standard, off-the-shelf USB audio adapter that gets the latency down to about that level. A Raspberry Pi is never going to have latency as low as a handful of transistors in a analog effects pedal, but it’s close enough.

For the audio system, it’s all about JACK audio: a wonderful frontend for the Linux audio system. The actual pedal emulation is happening with Guitarix. For the hardware part of this build, there’s actually not that much going on here apart from a USB sound card and a touch screen display. The footswitches are the most interesting as they’re wired up as buttons in a repurposed USB keyboard controller board. This repurposing of a USB keyboard is rather interesting, because it vastly simplifies the entire build. All of this is wrapped up in a wedge-shaped walnut pedalboard that’s sturdy enough to live on the stage at least part of the time. You can check out the demos here.