Stalking Last.fm Streams On Spotify

March 11, 2019 by 8 Comments

Back in the early days of social media and Web 2.0, Last.fm was one of the premier music sites on the internet. With a huge library containing what felt like every song ever, along with an excellent algorithm for recommending new tracks, it quickly gained a large following. Unfortunately, its business model and following changed over the years, but there’s still a diehard userbase. [Hexalyse] was unhappy with Spotify’s algorithms, so built a tool to allow her to shadow what Last.fm users were listening to in real time.

Last.fm’s major feature is that it allows you to tell others what you’re listening to, by “scrobbling” your tracks as you play them. It’s possible to scrape this live data from any user via the Last.fm API, making the project possible. [Hexalyse] whipped up a Python script to query a selected user’s current playing track via Last.fm, before then handing the song data to the Spotify API to play the music locally.

It’s a fun way to find new music, relying on human taste rather than a pile of data center algebra. [Hexalyse] has uploaded the code to Github if you’re eager to try it for yourself. Of course, you get bonus points if you integrate it with Spotify on the Macintosh SE/30.

Painting With Light And A Little G-Code

March 11, 2019 by 9 Comments

Most photographs are made in the fraction of a second that the camera’s shutter is gathering reflected light from the scene. But there’s fun to be had by leaving the shutter open and directing light into the camera. Called light painting, it can be as simple as a camera on a tripod in a dark room and a penlight spelling out dirty words – not like we’d know – or as complicated as this CNC dot-matrix light printer.

The first idea that [Jeremy S. Cook] had for this build didn’t go so well. He fitted an LED to the gantry of his 3D-printer, intending to send it G-code representing bitmaps. The idea would be to set it up in a dark place, open the shutter, and let the machine build up the image by rastering through the X- and Y- axes while blinking the LED on and off at the right time. But since the gantry only moves in one axis, he abandoned the printer in favor of his CNC router. He printed a collar to fit the dust collector shroud we previously featured, added a battery-powered LED, and affixed a pushbutton switch to the let the Z-axis turn on the light. It took some tweaking such as adding a translucent PLA diffuser, to get decent images, but in the end it worked. We like the soft look of the floating voxels, which were really helped by the later addition of a Nano and a Neopixel. Check out the build in the video below.

One thing we’d suggest is better reflection control. [Jeremy] used a black platen as a background, but it wasn’t quite enough. We suggest going none more black next time.

Continue reading “Painting With Light And A Little G-Code” →

Engine Turning Aluminum The Easy Way

March 11, 2019 by 25 Comments

Engine turning, or jeweling, or guilloché, or a whole host of other names, is the art of polishing a pattern of circles on a piece of metal. You see it on fine watches, and you’ll see it on art-deco metal enclosures. [Ariel] decided to explore this technique and ended up getting good results with a pencil eraser and toothpaste.

The process begins with a piece of aluminum, in this case an aluminum Open Source Hardware logo. The only other required components are a number 2 pencil, some toothpaste, and any sort of rotary tool, in this case a drill press. Toothpaste is spread over the piece to be turned, and a pencil is put in the chuck. It’s just a matter of putting circles on the aluminum after that.

This is, incidentally, exactly how engine turning and jeweling are done in the real world. Yes, the tools are a bit more expensive, but you’re still looking at a somewhat soft tool scraping a fine abrasive into a piece of metal. The trick to engine turning comes in getting a consistent pattern on the piece, something that could easily be done with a CNC machine. If anyone out there feels like putting a pencil in the collet of a CNC router, we’d love to see the results.

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What Hardware Lies Beneath? Companies Swear They Never Meant To Violate Your Privacy

March 11, 2019 by 76 Comments

“Don’t Be Evil” was the mantra of Google from years before even Gmail was created. While certainly less vague than their replacement slogan “Do the Right Thing”, there has been a lot of criticism directed at Google over the past decade and a half for repeatedly being at odds with one of their key values. It seems as though they took this criticism to heart (or found it easier to make money without the slogan), and subsequently dropped it in 2018. Nothing at Google changed, though, as the company has continued with several practices which at best could be considered shady.

The latest was the inclusion of an undisclosed microphone in parts of their smart home system, the Nest Guard. This is a member of the Nest family of products — it is not the thermostat itself, but a base station for a set of home security hardware you can install yourself. The real issue is that this base station was never billed as being voice activated. If you’re someone who has actively avoided installing “always-listening” style devices in your home, it’s infuriating to learn there is hardware out that have microphones in them but no mention of that in the marketing of the product. Continue reading “What Hardware Lies Beneath? Companies Swear They Never Meant To Violate Your Privacy” →

Learning Through Play Hack Chat With Greg Zumwalt

March 11, 2019 by 4 Comments

Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the Learning Through Play Hack Chat!

You may think you’ve never heard of Greg Zumwalt, but if you’ve spent any time on Instructables or Thingiverse, chances are pretty good you’ve seen some of his work. After a long career that ranged from avionics design and programming to video game development, Greg retired and found himself with the time to pursue pet projects that had always been on the back burner, including his intricate 3D-printed automata. His motto is “I fail when I decide to stop learning,” and from the number of projects he turns out and the different methods he incorporates, he has no intention of failing.

Please join us for this Hack Chat, where we’ll discuss:

  • Lifelong learning through play;
  • Toy-building as a means to skillset growth;
  • Sources of inspiration and getting new ideas; and
  • What sorts of projects Greg has in the pipeline.

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Learning Through Play Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 13, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Quadcopter Uses Bare Metal STM32

March 11, 2019 by 7 Comments

[Tim Schumacher] got a Crazepony Mini quadcopter and has been reprogramming it “bare metal” — that is to say he’s programming the STM32 without using an operating system or do-it-all environment. His post on the subject is a good reference for working with the STM32 and the quadcopter, too.

If you haven’t seen the quadcopter, it is basically a PC board with props. The firmware is open source but uses the Keil IDE. The CPU is an STM32 with 64K of program memory. In addition, the drone sports a wireless module, a digital compass, an altimeter, and a gyro with an accelerometer.

Although the post is really about the quadcopter, [Tim] also gives information about the Blue Pill which could be applied to other STM32 boards, as well. On the hardware side, he’s using a common USB serial port and a Python-based loader.

On the software side, he shows how to set up the linker and, using gcc, control output ports. Of course, there’s more to go to work the other peripherals, and Tim’s planning to investigate CMSIS to make that work easier. Our earlier post on STM32 prompted [Wassim] over on Hackaday.io to review a bunch of IDEs. That could be helpful, too.

Engineering For The Long Haul, The NASA Way

March 11, 2019 by 49 Comments

The popular press was recently abuzz with sad news from the planet Mars: Opportunity, the little rover that could, could do no more. It took an astonishing 15 years for it to give up the ghost, and it took a planet-wide dust storm that blotted out the sun and plunged the rover into apocalyptically dark and cold conditions to finally kill the machine. It lived 37 times longer than its 90-sol design life, producing mountains of data that will take another 15 years or more to fully digest.

Entire careers were unexpectedly built around Opportunity – officially but bloodlessly dubbed “Mars Exploration Rover-B”, or MER-B – as it stubbornly extended its mission and overcame obstacles both figurative and literal. But “Oppy” is far from the only long-duration success that NASA can boast about. Now that Opportunity has sent its last data, it seems only fitting to celebrate the achievement with a look at exactly how machines and missions can survive and thrive so long in the harshest possible conditions.

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