Automate Your Comfort Food Prep With An IoT Grilled Cheese Robot

January 28, 2019 by 22 Comments

What exactly qualifies as comfort food is very much in the palate of the comfortee. Grilled cheese may not work for everyone under every circumstance, but we’ll risk a bet that the gooey delicacy is pretty close to universal, especially when you’re under the weather.

But if you’re too sick to grill up your own and don’t have anyone to do it for you, this grilled cheese sandwich-making robot might be the perfect kitchen accessory. Dubbed “The Cheeseborg” and built as a semester project by [Taylor Tabb], [Mitchell Riek], and [Evan Hill] at Carnegie-Mellon University, the bot takes a few shortcuts that might rankle the grilled cheese purist. Chief among these is the use of a sandwich press rather than a plain griddle. We understand that this greatly simplifies the flipping problem, but to us the flipping, especially the final high arcing double backflip onto the sandwich plate, is all part of the experience. Yes, a fair number of sandwiches end up going to the dog that way, but that’s beside the point.

As realized, Cheeseborg feeds bread and cheese from stacks using a vacuum arm, sprays the grill with butter, and uses a motorized arm to push the uncooked sandwich into the press. At the peak of grilled perfection, the press opens and ejects the sandwich to a waiting plate. As an added bonus, the whole thing is Google Assistant enabled so you can beseech Cheeseborg to fix you a sandwich from your sick bed. See it in action below.

This is far from the first culinary robot to grace our pages. There was the recent CNC sausage bot, we’ve seen plenty of pancake bots, and even [Ben Krasnow] once automated cookie making.

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Drone Sightings, A New British Comedy Soap Opera

January 28, 2019 by 41 Comments

There’s a new soap opera that I can’t stop watching. Actually, I wish I could change the channel but this is unfortunately happening in real life. It’s likely the ups and downs of drone sightings would be too far fetched for fiction anyway.

If you aren’t British, maybe you will know a little of our culture through the medium of television. We don’t all live in stately homes like Downton Abbey of course, instead we’re closer to the sometimes comedic sets, bad lighting, and ridiculously complicated lives of the residents of Coronation Street or of Albert Square in Eastenders that you may have flashed past late at night on a high-number channel.

Our new comedy soap lacks the regional accents of Emmerdale or Hollyoaks, but has no less of the farce about it. Here at Hackaday we’ve brought you news of the UK’s peculiar habit of bad reporting and shoddy investigation of questionable drone sightings several times over the last year or two. Most recently we covered a series of events before Christmas that closed Gatwick, London’s second airport for several days over what turned out to be nothing of substance.

Unfortunately it didn’t end there. We’re back once more to catch up with the latest events down on the tarmac, and come away with a fresh set of reasonable questions unanswered by the popular coverage of the matter.

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Polish Retro Silicon Brings This Computer To Life

January 28, 2019 by 12 Comments

It is an easy trap for us to write only about what we know when covering a topic, thus missing an entire facet of our subject matter. Take retrocomputing for example; we might write about American or Western European machines because we grew up with them, while completely ignoring the hardware being produced on the other side of the Iron Curtain.  Thus it’s fascinating to see [Marek Więcek]’s project, a single board retrocomputer employing a Polish clone of the Intel 8080.

With greater detail on a Polish-language forum (Google Translate), he tells a story of being given an MCY7880 CPU for his collection, only to wonder whether it could be made into a machine in its own right. As a clone of the 8080 this also required equivalents of the Intel bus controller and clock generator chips, which we are guessing must be the UCY74S405 and UCY7404 that he’s also sourced for the project.

The build is completed in true retro style with a maze of point-to-point wiring on the reverse of a protoboard, and he’s put a TinyBASIC interpreter port and 8251 UART on board as well as an 8255 triple parallel I/O port for some GPIO action. We love this computer, and appreciate the light it shines on an obscure corner of microprocessor history.

If Eastern European retrocomputing is your thing, here at Hackaday we’re lucky enough to number among our colleagues someone who’s something of an authority on the matter. [Voja Antonic] has entertained us with the tale of how he designed the Galaksija, Yugoslavia’s first home computer. Sadly though he did not use a Polish 8080 in his design.

Tiny Voltmeter Uses DNA

January 28, 2019 by 4 Comments

We use a lot of voltmeters and we bet you do too. We have some big bench meters and some panel meters and even some tiny pocket-sized meters. But biological researchers at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University have even smaller ones. They’ve worked out a way to use a DNA-based fluorescent reporter to indicate the voltage across cellular membranes.

We don’t know much about biology, but apparently measuring the voltage on the membrane around a cell is easy, but measuring the voltages across membranes inside the cell isn’t. Previous work disrupted cells and measured potentials on isolated organelles.

The indicator — called Voltair — can target specific parts of a cell and includes a reference indicator so that a ratiometric measurement is possible. In fact, there are three main parts to the 38-base pair DNA duplex. One module contains a voltage-sensing dye that fluoresces in a way that indicates voltage. The second module is a reference dye that allows researchers to judge the voltage level. The final module identifies where the probe should attach.

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Reworking MT3608 Boost Converters For Lower Idle Current Draw

January 27, 2019 by 33 Comments

The MT3608 is a popular boost converter, able to easily step up DC voltages in useful ranges, at an incredibly low cost. Modules can be sourced from eBay for less than $2, built on a PCB, ready to go. One drawback of these modules, particularly when working with batteries, is the idle current draw, on the order of 1 to 1.5mA. Fear not, however — there is a workaround, courtesy of [Aka Kasyan]. (Video, embedded below.)

The trick is to modify the behavior of the converter when no load is connected. The enable pin of the boost converter is held low through a pull-down resistor, keeping the boost converter switched off. In this state, the output voltage is equal to the input voltage. A current sense resistor is then installed in the output path. When a load is connected, this causes a voltage drop across the current sense resistor. This is then used to switch a transistor, which then connects the enable pin to the positive rail, switching the converter on, leading to the full boosted output voltage being reached.

[Aya] reports that this drastically cuts the idle current draw, which is particularly useful for battery powered projects. It’s important to note that the current sense resistor must be appropriately sized for the given load, however. If you’re a little hazy on the background, fear not — we’ve discussed the nature of boost converters before. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Baldpower for the tip!]
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Badland Brawler Lets Arduino Tackle Terrain

January 27, 2019 by 6 Comments

For an electronics person, building the mechanics of a robot — especially a robust robot — can be somewhat daunting. [Jithin] started with an off-the-shelf 4 wheel drive chassis to build an off-road Arduino robot he calls the Badland Brawler. The kit was a bit over $100, but as you can see in the video below, it is pretty substantial, with an enclosed frame and large mud tires.

The remaining parts include an Arduino, a battery, and a motor driver IC. The Arduino is one with WiFi (an MKR 1000, in fact) and there’s a phone app for controlling the robot.

Honestly, once you have the chassis taken care of, the rest is pretty easy. Of course, the phone app is a bit more effort, but you could replace it in a number of ways. Blynk, comes to mind, for example.

The motor drivers are easy to figure out. This would be a great platform for some sensors to allow for more autonomy. We liked how the frame had mount points for a lot of different boards and sensors and could hold everything, for the most part, inside. That’s probably a good idea for a robot which will be traversing rugged terrain.

If you do decide to roll your own app with Blynk, we’ve done it with a very different kind of robot. Four-wheel drive robots don’t have to be big, as we’ve seen in the past.

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Hackaday Links: January 27, 2019

January 27, 2019 by 15 Comments

Once again, Uber found a company to build their ‘air taxis’. This time it’s Boeing. While there are no details on the Boeing bird, I’m going to propose again that Uber buy the Santa Monica airport as a hub for their air taxi program; SMO is going to be shut down anyway, and this is the funniest reality that can come from the idea of an ‘air taxi’ program.

According to ancient astronaut theorists, one of the bigger problems with full-time tech YouTubers (think Dave and Fran here) is the insistence that YouTube suggests conspiracy theory videos as a related video. If you do a video teardown on Apollo flight hardware, you’re going to fall into the same category as people who believe the moon is hollow, people who believe the moon landing was faked, and recently, flat-earthers. This is a ‘bad move’ by YouTube because the Venn diagram of people who want to watch conspiracy videos and people who want to watch teardowns is two circles. It makes community engineering hard, and you get a lot of idiots on YouTube comments. YouTube is now changing the recommendation algorithm. There are other reasons YouTube is doing this, specifically relating to videos that aren’t about weird electronics, but we’re not going to talk about that here, thx.

This week was Winter NAMM, the National Association of… music, something something. That means you can go to Anaheim and check out all the musical instrument related stuff that will be released this year. Think of it as CES, only you don’t get the flu and want to murder everyone, and it’s about guitars and synths instead of Alexas duct taped to Roombas. Here’s what it was like last year, with the tl;dr being a wall of cabs, Euroracks everywhere, and the best way to get started in the industry is to buy some old trademarks, not by actually designing something new. Speaking of, here are some Kay reissues.

So, what’s cool at NAMM this year? Let’s do guitars first. Gibson’s 2019 lineup is not dumb, a reversal of the previous twenty years; There’s a Les Paul Standard with humbuckers or P90s, and there’s a TV Junior. Fender? There’s an acoustasonic Tele that was terrible the first time around, and it’s decidedly not terrible. The Electric XII is back, finally, and it’s even cooler than the Electric Six wait never mind it has a 1 11/16th nut. There is no Tele Plus with a Honda Goldwing emblem, but we make do with what we can. The pyramids are upside-down. Buy a dookie pedal.

How about some synths?  Behringer is cranking out another clone, this time an Oberheim OB-Xa. Word on the street is that a 303 is on the horizon, but the vocoder is out now. The Odyssey exists, and the SH-101 clone comes with a handle so you can keytar it.  Guitars with Raspberry Pis? Could it be? Yes, Lucern Custom Instruments is collaborating with Tracktion to put a synth in a guitar. There’s a touchscreen BioTek 2 synth installed below the bridge. It’s like something [Matt Bellamy] would play, but it’s got a Raspberry Pi.

Elektron has a new sampler. Oh my god, the only way to make money in the instrument industry is to buy up trademarks. Well, trademarks and signature amps and guitars. Speaking of, where’s the signature Vangelis synths?

The news that will have the biggest impact a decade from now is the announcement that MIDI 2.0 is getting ready for release. New features include auto-config with DAWs, extended resolution, and expressiveness (to stop the Western hegemony on electronic music), and backward compatibility with MIDI 1.0.

This isn’t explicitly NAMM-related, but Eurorack is now a thing and [Jan] is always coming up with some interesting synths-on-a-chip. This time, it’s a drum machine in a Eurorack format. Is it based on anything? Not really, although it would go well in any Detroit acid track. Check out the video.