This Arduino Is Feeding The Fishes

July 2, 2019 by 11 Comments

Fish are easy to keep as pets, requiring little more than regular feeding to keep them happy in the short-to-medium term. If you’re going on holiday, it can be nice to know that your pets are being taken care of, but finding someone to take on the chore can be hard. [Trevor_DIY] doesn’t need to worry about that, however – he’s built an automatic feeder to handle the job.

The build uses an Arduino Uno as the brains, with the only additional hardware required being a stepper motor and driver. The stepper motor drives a 3D printed wheel, with 14 slots – each one holding one meal for the fish. This allows the feeder to deliver two meals a day for a full week before requiring attention.

The feeder is configured to feed a breakfast meal, then a dinner meal 8 hours later, and then wait 16 hours before breakfast comes around again. Rather than use a real-time clock, this is simply handled with the Arduino’s built in delay function. While it isn’t super accurate, this should be close enough over a week to keep the fish alive. We’d be interested as to just how far it drifts over time.

Overall, it’s a quick and tidy way to keep the pets going without a lot of fuss. Pet feeders are a popular project, as they solve a common problem faced by owners the world over; this one can even handle wet cat food. Video after the break.

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Why Fix A Remote When You Can Just Build A New Device?

July 2, 2019 by 17 Comments

Those who have been around the block, and the sun, a fair few times will know that they certainly don’t make ’em like they used to. It doesn’t particularly matter what “them” is; it’s merely a widely accepted fact that society has trended towards more disposable products over ones that have a long service life. [mcu_nerd] was suffering from this very problem, as their TV remote had its power button begin to fail. Of course, hackers don’t see problems – they merely see opportunities for projects.

[mcu_nerd] decided to skip repairing the TV remote, under the suspicion that disassembling the device would likely lead to its destruction. Instead, an Atmega328P development board was pressed into service as a replacement remote, with the addition of an IR LED and a push button. Whereas the TV-B-Gone existed as a device to cause havoc by switching televisions off, [mcu_nerd]’s TV-B-On does the opposite job.

A later revision was spun up with its own PCB, and features an Attiny85, which is more than capable of handling the job. Showing thoughts of the future in the design, there are provisions for extra buttons to be added should the project require a nicer enclosure, and a space for an external crystal if necessary.

These devices have a long and storied history; we reported on a particularly powerful version back in 2009.

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Mary Sherman Morgan, Rocket Fuel Mixologist

July 2, 2019 by 52 Comments

In the fall of 1957, it seemed as though the United States’ space program would never get off the ground. The USSR had launched Sputnik in October, and this cemented their place in history as the first nation in space. If that weren’t bad enough, they put Sputnik 2 into orbit a month later.

By Christmas, things looked even worse. The US had twice tried to launch Navy-designed Vanguard rockets, and both were spectacular failures. It was time to use their ace in the hole: the Redstone rocket, a direct descendant of the V-2s designed during WWII. The only problem was the propellant. It would never get the payload into orbit as-is.

The US Army awarded a contract to North American Aviation (NAA) to find a propellant that would do the job. But there was a catch: it was too late to make any changes to the engine’s design, so they had to work with big limitations. Oh, and the Army needed it two days before yesterday.

The Army sent a Colonel to NAA to deliver the contract, and to personally insist that they put their very best man on the job. And they did. What the Army didn’t count on was that NAA’s best man was actually a woman with no college degree.

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New Contest: Beautiful Hardware

July 2, 2019 by 13 Comments

We all have awesome hardware projects to show off. Great photos of them are how you unlock the excitement others see in your work. Whether you’re using a DSLR or the camera in your smartphone, it’s not difficult to capture an amazing picture of the project you pour so much effort into. We want you to unleash your photography skills for the Beautiful Hardware contest. Show us your epic hardware photos and win prizes.

The Skeleton Watch by Mile is a great example of superb photography. Excellent framing, focus, and color make it great.

The only real barrier between us and superb hardware photos is having an eye for framing your shots, and a few simple tricks to get everything else right. Think about good lighting, shooting with an interesting background, framing off to the side and at an angle (as just one example) for more interest, and spending a few moments with an image editor to complement what the camera captured. With this contest, we want you to take those tricks for a spin on your own workbench.

Lee Wilkins put together a simple guide to get you going with spectacular hardware photography. From the basics of photography and the tricks used for making product hype photos, to capturing great images of LEDs and getting the colors just right, this is a comprehensive quickstart. There’s even a collection of great examples to strive for.

There are three top prizes of $100 cash waiting for you. Just start a new project on Hackaday.io and upload the finest photos you can take of some fun hardware. In the left sidebar of that project use the “Submit project to…” menu to enter it in the Beautiful Hardware contest.

Ramen Lamp Has Us Feeling Hungry

July 2, 2019 by 7 Comments

Ramen comes in many forms, and whether you’re eating the 10 cent instant packets during the school year, or dining out at a fancy noodle bar, it’s a tasty meal either way. [ramenkingandi] has long been in love with the classic Japanese fare, and decided to create a homage to the dish – in lamp form.

The lamp build begins, somewhat unsurprisingly, with a lamp – but not how you’d think. A Walmart floor lamp is harvested for its lampshade, which approximates the dimensions of a typical ramen bowl. It’s then fitted with warm yellow LEDs to give it a pleasing glow. Polymer clay is used to create fake ramen ingredients – including noodles, pork, and choy sum. Jewelery wire is used to suspend the chopsticks in mid-air, before resin is poured into the bowl and the ingredients arranged on top. For a final touch, the bowl is painted with an artistic stripe to hide the electronics inside, and the lamp is complete.

It’s a great example of fake Japanese food, which is actually a huge industry in that part of the world. We’d love to have this lamp on display in our own home, fully expecting ramen consumption to increase considerably over time.

Lamps are a common feature around these parts – and some of them have even learned to leap. 

Hands-On: GreatFET Is An Embedded Tool That Does It All

July 2, 2019 by 43 Comments

There’s a new embedded hacking tool on the scene that gives you an interactive Python interface for a speedy chip on a board with oodles of GPIO, the ability to masquerade as different USB devices, and a legacy of tricks up its sleeve. This is the GreatFET, the successor to the much loved GoodFET.

I first heard this board was close to launch almost a year ago and asked for an early look. When shipping began at the end of April, they sent me one. Let’s dig in for a hands-on review of the GreatFET from Great Scott Gadgets.

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The Arduboy Gets A Crank Mod

July 2, 2019 by 10 Comments

You’ve seen VR headsets and wearable video game controllers and flight yokes and every other type and kind of video game controller, but a crank? Yes, the Arduboy now has a crank modification in tribute to (or blatant ripoff of) the PlayDate, a video game console created by Panic and Teenage Engineering.

The basis for this build is the Arduboy, a miniature game system the size of a credit card. This game console features candy-like buttons, compatibility with the Arduino IDE, and a community that has produced dozens of games already. Where there’s software developers there’s inevitably a few hardware engineers waiting in the wings, and this is no exception. [bateske] created a crank mod for the Arduboy that gives this miniature, toy-like game console a crank. Ready to write a bass fishing simulator? This is your shot.

The hardware for this build consists of a 360° rotary encoder for the internals of the device. For the handle, [bateske] found an interesting ‘premium grinder for herbs and spices’ on Amazon. Shockingly, this crank handle just sort of works with the rotary encoder.

As for games, this is a brand new user interface for the Arduboy game console, so of course there are some interesting possibilities. There’s a fishing simulator that’s more interesting than real fishing and something like Flappy Bird only instead of flapping it’s bouncing over bottomless pits. You can check out this crank console out below.

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