Solar Powered Weeding Tractor Uses Manual Labour

October 15, 2019 by 2 Comments

You might not have realised this, but there’s a group of hackers out there without whom you wouldn’t be able to put food on the table. They hack under the blazing sun and pouring rain, and have been doing it for thousands of years. Known more commonly as farmers, their creative problem solving skills with whatever is lying around can be absolutely jaw dropping. [Andrew Mans] is one such individual. He built a solar powered weeding tractor that uses human labour to do the actual weeding.

We’ll be honest, this made us go “Wait, what?” for a few seconds, until the ingenuity of it all sank in. Crawling at a snails pace across the onion fields at Mans Organics, the contraption allows 3 workers to lie comfortably on their stomachs in a shaded tent, while pulling weeds that grow too close to the crop for conventional mechanised weeding methods. While this might seem like a slightly crappy job at first glance, there are definitely worse jobs a farm (or in an office) and actually looks quite relaxing. While the picking could of course be automated, this is no small task, especially when your business is food production, not robotics.

Power is provided from four 250 W solar panels on the roof, which charge a bank of deep cycle batteries and the drive train. A pure sine wave converter provides power to a 240 V motor driver which turns it back into DC to run the drive motor. [Andrew] admits this back and forth voltage conversion is overcomplicated and inefficient but it’s the sort of thing that quickly happens when you hack a hacked design. The axle and 5-speed gearbox was salvaged from an old 3 ton truck and is mounted vertically to save space. The hydraulic steering is controlled by one of the human weed pickers, who just makes small course corrections as required.

We love the weird combo of old and new in this hack. Check out the machine in action and detailed walk-around after the break. Continue reading “Solar Powered Weeding Tractor Uses Manual Labour” →

Reverse Engineering Liberates Dash Cam Video

October 15, 2019 by 12 Comments

If you’ve purchased a piece of consumer electronics in the last few years, there’s an excellent chance that you were forced to use some proprietary application (likely on a mobile device) to unlock its full functionality. It’s a depressing reality of modern technology, and unless you’re willing to roll your own hardware, it can be difficult to avoid. But [krishnan793] decided to take another route, and reverse engineered his DDPAI dash camera so he could get a live video stream from it without using the companion smartphone application.

Like many modern gadgets, the DDPAI camera creates its own WiFi access point that you need to connect to for configuration. By putting his computer’s wireless card into Monitor mode and running Wireshark, [krishnan793] was able to see that the smartphone was communicating with the camera using some type of REST API. After watching the clear-text exchanges for awhile, he not only discovered a few default usernames and passwords, but the commands necessary to configure the camera and start the video stream.

After hitting it with the proper REST messages, an nmap scan confirmed that several new services had started up on the device. Unfortunately, he didn’t get any video when he pointed VLC to the likely port numbers. At this point [krishnan793] checked the datasheet for the camera’s Hi3516E SoC and saw that it supported H.264 encoding. By manually specifying that as the video codec when invoking VLC, it was able to play a video stream from port 6200. A little later, he discovered that port 6100 was serving up the live audio.

Technically that’s all he wanted to do in the first place, as he was looking to feed the video into OpenCV for other projects. But while he was in the area, [krishnan793] also decided to find the download URL for the camera’s firmware, and ran it through binwalk to see what he could find out. Not surprisingly the security turned out to be fairly lax through the entire device, so he was able to glean some information that could be useful for future projects.

Of course, if you’d rather go with the first option and build your own custom dash camera so you don’t have to jump through so many hoops just to get a usable video stream, we’ve got some good news for you.

Hackaday Prize China Finalists Announced

October 15, 2019 by 3 Comments

In the time since the Hackaday Prize was first run it has nurtured an astonishing array of projects from around the world, and brought to the fore some truly exceptional winners that have demonstrated world-changing possibilities. This year it has been extended to a new frontier with the launch of the Hackaday Prize China (Chinese language, here’s a Google Translate link), allowing engineers, makers, and inventors from that country to join the fun. We’re pleased to announce the finalists, from which a winner will be announced in Shenzhen, China on November 23rd. If you’re in Shenzen area, you’re invited to attend the award ceremony!

All six of these final project entries have been translated into English to help share information about projects across the language barrier. On the left sidebar of each project page you can find a link back to the original Chinese language project entry. Each presents a fascinating look into what people in our global community can produce when they live at the source of the component supply chain. Among them are a healthy cross-section of projects which we’ll visit in no particular order. Let’s dig in and see what these are all about!

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize China Finalists Announced” →

How To Build The Strongest Arches

October 15, 2019 by 13 Comments

When it comes to architectural features, there are probably not many as quintessentially memorable as arches. From the simplicity of the curved structure to the seemingly impossible task of a supposedly collapsable shape supporting so much weight in mid-air, they’ve naturally fascinated architects for generations.

For civil engineers, learning to calculate the forces acting on an arch, the material strength and properties, and the weight distribution across several arches may be familiar, but for anyone with only a basic physics and CAD background, it’s easy to take arches for granted. After all, they grace the Roman aqueducts, the Great Wall of China, and are even present in nature at Arches National Park. We see them in cathedrals, mosques, gateways, and even memorialized in the case of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. Even the circular construction of watch towers and wells, as well as our own rib cages, are due to the properties of arches.

But what really goes into constructing a strong arch? Continue reading “How To Build The Strongest Arches” →

A DIY Bench-Sized Milling Machine

October 15, 2019 by 25 Comments

Hanging around the machining community online, you’d be more than familiar with clapped out Bridgeport mills, which are practically a meme at this point. But mills come in all shapes and sizes, from the stout old iron from the days of yore, to smaller, compact builds. [Honus] decided to build the latter, and shared the details of the project.

The aim of [Honus’s] build is to create a small benchtop mill, capable of handling the smaller tasks. The frame of the mill is built out of 80/20 extrusion, with plenty of aluminium plate to go along with it. Igus linear slides handle the X, Y and Z axes. An old brushed Makita drill motor serves as the spindle drive, controlled by an old R/C speed controller hooked up to an Arduino. [Honus] then fabbed up various bits and pieces as neccessary to bring it all together.

The mill is neat and tidy, and looks to do a good job machining aluminium. We imagine it should prove highly useful in [Honus’s] workshop. If you’re contemplating getting yourself some desk-sized tools, perhaps consider an engraver as well! Video after the break.

Continue reading “A DIY Bench-Sized Milling Machine” →

The Final Days Of The Fire Lookouts

October 15, 2019 by 72 Comments

For more than a century, the United States Forest Service has employed men and women to monitor vast swaths of wilderness from isolated lookout towers. Armed with little more than a pair of binoculars and a map, these lookouts served as an early warning system for combating wildfires. Eventually the towers would be equipped with radios, and later still a cellular or satellite connection to the Internet, but beyond that the job of fire lookout has changed little since the 1900s.

Like the lighthouse keepers of old, there’s a certain romance surrounding the fire lookouts. Sitting alone in their tower, the majority of their time is spent looking at a horizon they’ve memorized over years or even decades, carefully watching for the slightest whiff of smoke. The isolation has been a prison for some, and a paradise for others. Author Jack Kerouac spent the summer of 1956 in a lookout tower on Desolation Peak in Washington state, an experience which he wrote about in several works including Desolation Angels.

But slowly, in a change completely imperceptible to the public, the era of the fire lookouts has been drawing to a close. As technology improves, the idea of perching a human on top of a tall tower for months on end seems increasingly archaic. Many are staunchly opposed to the idea of automation replacing human workers, but in the case of the fire lookouts, it’s difficult to argue against it. Computer vision offers an unwavering eye that can detect even the smallest column of smoke amongst acres of woodland, while drones equipped with GPS can pinpoint its location and make on-site assessments without risk to human life.

At one point, the United States Forest Service operated more than 5,000 permanent fire lookout towers, but today that number has dwindled into the hundreds. As this niche job fades even farther into obscurity, let’s take a look at the fire lookout’s most famous tool, and the modern technology poised to replace it.

Continue reading “The Final Days Of The Fire Lookouts” →

Hacking Pixmob Bands And Finding A Toolchain

October 15, 2019 by 16 Comments

The Pixmob band is an LED wrist strap, of the type often used at big concerts or other public events. Many have tinkered with the device, but as of yet, nobody was running custom code. It wouldn’t be easy, but [JinGen Lim] got down to work.

The wristbands are given out to concertgoers to create synchronized light shows in the crowd.

A teardown of a 2016 device revealed it consisted of an RGB LED, an IR sensor, a small EEPROM and a coin cell, which were all common parts. Unfortunately, the ABOV MC81F4204 microcontroller was a little more obscure. It’s a part that’s quite hard to find, and uses a proprietary programmer and an ancient IDE.

Searches online proved fruitless, and a working programmer remained outside [JinGen]’s grasp. Undeterred, he decided to simply walk into the company’s Korean headquarters and ask for help. As the part was end-of-life, they were unable to supply a programming device, but happily provided documentation for the chip that wasn’t publicly available. With this in hand, it was possible for [JinGen] to build his own programmer instead.

Booting up a copy of the ABOV IDE, with his newly-built programmer in hand, it was relatively easy to get the chip running custom code. Going the extra mile, [JinGen] even hacked the Arduino IDE to be partially compatible with the platform! A silicon error in the MC81F4204 design bricks the chips after only a few flash rewrites, so its never going to be the most useful platform, but it works nonetheless.

The Pixmob hardware has continued to evolve, and it’s unlikely modern units still use the same chip. Despite this, it’s a great example of what can be achieved by a little sleuthing and asking the right people the right questions. Others have attempted to hack similar products before, found at Disneyland and Coldplay concerts. You won’t catch this author at either, but if you’ve hacked something similar, be sure to reach out on the tip line!