IR Hack Turns Kid’s Lamp Into Temp Display

November 2, 2019 by 2 Comments

Sometimes a clever hack of an off-the-shelf product can come courtesy of its dismantling and hardware modification, but at other times the most elegant of hacks can be made without ever turning a screwdriver. [Brian Lough] was given the request by a friend to replicate a commercial child’s night light that changed colour with temperature, and his response was to use an off-the-shelf colour changing kids light unmodified, sending it temperature-related colour commands via its infra-red control.

His device is a spectacularly simple one hardware-wise using an off-the-shelf Wemos D2 Mini ESP8266 board running an Arduino bootloader, coupled with a BME280 temperature sensor, IR receiver, and transmitter. His video which we’ve placed below the break is a handy primer to anyone with an interest in infra-red reverse engineering, and we can see that there will be other projects that could be seeded by it. For those curious enough to look, it can be found on GitHub.

[Brian] has appeared here so many times, and is definitely worth a follow. One of his more recent builds featured another child’s toy augmented to make it something really special.

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Router Rebooter Without The Effort

November 2, 2019 by 67 Comments

It’s one of the rituals of our age, rebooting the family router when the bandwidth falters. Flip the power, and after half a minute or so your YouTube video starts up again. Consumer-grade router hardware is not the most reliable computing equipment you will own, as [Nick Sayer] found out when the router at his vacation home wasn’t reliable enough to support his remote monitoring equipment. His solution is an auto-reboot device, that power-cycles the offending device on command.

An obvious method might be to switch the mains supply, but instead he’s taken the simpler option of switching the DC from the router’s wall wart power supply with a cunning arrangement of three MOSFETs to keep the router defaulting to on under all conditions except when it is commanded to power down by the ATtiny microcontroller overseeing it. This chip provides extra fail-safe and debouncing functions to ensure no accidental rebooting.

Driving the circuit is a Raspberry Pi that handles the house monitoring, on which a Python script checks for Internet access and asks for a reboot if there is none. For extra safety it requires access to be down for a sustained period before doing so in case of a router firmware upgrade.

This isn’t the first router rebooter, for a mains-switching ESP8266 take a look at this one.

Router picture: Asim18 [CC BY-SA 3.0]

These Maple Pod Inspired Drones Silently Carry Payloads

November 2, 2019 by 15 Comments

Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) recently released a video showing their nature-inspired drone that is capable of breaking out into five separate smaller drones. The drones each have auto-rotating wings that slow their rate of descent, similar to seed pods from a maple tree. Due to their design, the drones are only made to be used for a one-way trip, with the five components each carrying a separate payload. The drones are designed to detach within a specified distance from their destination, allow the collective body to safely spiral downwards towards land.

In their paper published on the same subject, the researchers discuss how they optimized the balsa wood wings with servos, a LiPo battery, and a receiver attached to a 3D-printed body. Four are equipped with just these components, while the fifth also holds a 3-axis magnetometer, a Teensy 3.5 board, a GPS module, and a Pixracer controller.

They experimented with several motion capture setups and free-flight drop tests to verify their simulations on the models for the drones. Apart from simply detaching, they are also designed to cater to different mission profiles based on the environment they are dropped in.

We’ll admit that the implementation and design of the drones does seem fairly dystopian, especially when you wonder what could possibly be the payloads these drones are designed to carry. But in terms of nature-inspired robotics, the maple seed pod idea is pretty interesting.

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Atari Tape Drive Turned Security DVR

November 1, 2019 by 11 Comments

We know that a lot of our beloved readers don’t take kindly to abuse of vintage hardware, so the Atari fans in the audience may want to avert their eyes for this one. Especially if they’re particularly keen on spinning up their Jawbreaker cassette on authentic hardware, as [iot4c] has gutted an Atari XC12 Program Recorder to turn it into an enclosure for a Raspberry Pi video storage device.

Step one of this conversion was, as you might expect, removing all the original hardware from the cassette recorder case. From there, [iot4c] fitted the Raspberry Pi, a USB hard drive, and a YDS-5A DC-DC converter to power them. Depending on what the drive setup looks like, it might also make sense to add a USB powered hub. A length of Ethernet cable was left hanging out the back of the Atari XC12 so it could be plugged into the network, but a panel mount RJ45 connector could spruce things up a bit.

Of course, gutting an old piece of hardware and sticking a Pi into it isn’t exactly breaking any new ground at this point. But we did appreciate that [iot4c] went the extra mile to wire it up so the “Save” LED now doubles as a network activity indicator. Which pretty much brings it full circle in terms of functionality for a network-attached video recorder.

Earlier in the year [iot4c] converted a 65XE into a USB keyboard with the help of an Arduino Leonardo, but the vintage Atari aficionados will be happy to note that at least in that case the donor machine remained fully functional.

SPARC CPU In A Cheap FPGA

November 1, 2019 by 12 Comments

There was a time when SPARC CPUs were the sole realm of pricey Sun workstations, but now you can put one on an FPGA with just a little trouble. The problem is you need a fairly big FPGA which isn’t always cheap unless someone goes out of business and you get lucky. [Ttsiodras] picked up a Pano logic thin client. Pano went under and their entire inventory is out on the surplus market at cheap prices. With a little FPGA magic, you can turn a few bucks into a SPARC-based computer.

The insides of the workstation have a Spartan 6 FPGA inside and you’ll need to solder in some JTAG wires, but that shouldn’t put anybody here off.  Of course, the Spartan 6 isn’t the newest tech so you’ll have to get an old version of the Xilinx tools but that’s not hard either. However, there is a strange irony you’ll need to be aware of if you use Linux.

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Josef Prusa Wants You To Change File Formats

November 1, 2019 by 65 Comments

We’ve all been there. You find that cool cat model on Thingiverse — we won’t judge. You download the STL, all ready to watch the magic of having it materialize on your print bed. But the slicer complains it isn’t manifold or watertight or something like that. What a let down. Part of this is due to shortcomings in the STL file format. There’s a newer format available, 3MF, and Josef Prusa and Jakub Kočí would like you to start using it.

STL — short for stereolithography — is a simple format that just holds a bunch of triangles. If you need any information about the part — like colors or materials. Worse still, as in our hypothetical example, there are no definition about how the triangles relate so you can create “bad” STL files. Even properly formed files can be tough to work with. You might scale for inches and the file is set for millimeters, for example.

Turns out 3MF is actually a ZIP archive and it can contain lots of information. The file can contain one or more models, colors, slicing data, copyrights, images, and lots more. The ZIP file is often shorter, too because of the compression. The big deal, though, is that the file format won’t allow nonmanifold models and removes ambiguity so that everything nicely prints. If your slicer stores data into the file — as the Prusa one does — other people using the same software can grab your settings, too.

The format isn’t really that new — it appeared around 2015 — but it hasn’t seen widespread adoption yet. Prusa encourages you to upload models in 3MF even if you also add an STL copy for people who haven’t made the switch yet.

So will you start using 3MF? Or are you already? The file format is open, they say. So if your favorite tool doesn’t like 3MF, you could always add support for it yourself.

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Adding USB-C To The TS100

November 1, 2019 by 6 Comments

The TS100 is a popular entry into the new breed of small temperature-controlled soldering irons that, at least for some of us, have started to replace the bulky soldering stations of old. Unfortunately, one downside of this particular model is the need to plug it into a fairly ungainly laptop-style power supply, which certainly hinders its otherwise portable nature. But [Dennis Schneider] has come up with a very slick solution to that problem by adding a USB-PD module to his TS100.

The idea here is very simple: just remove the original DC barrel connector, and in its place install a USB-PD trigger module. In practice it took more than a little fiddling, cutting, persuasion, and creative soldering (ironically, with a soldering station), but the end result does look quite professional.

It helps that the USB-PD module [Dennis] used was almost the exact same width as the TS100 PCB, meaning that the modified iron could go back into its original case. Though as we saw not so long ago, there’s a growing community of 3D printed replacement cases should you select a trigger module that doesn’t so neatly fit the footprint of the original board. Or if you didn’t want to modify the iron at all, you could always just make an external adapter.

Those that have some experience with these irons might be wondering what the point of modifying the TS100 to take USB-C is when we already have the TS80. As it turns out, while the TS80 is using a USB-C connector it doesn’t actually use USB-PD, so its not taking advantage of the enhanced power delivery capabilities. We know, it’s all kind of confusing.