Camera Slide Pans And Tilts Camera Mechanically

July 5, 2017 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

A camera slider is a popular and simple project — just a linear slide, a stepper, and some sort of controller. Adding tilt and pan axes ups the complexity until you’ve got three motors, a controller, and probably a pretty beefy battery pack to run everything. Why not simplify with an entirely mechanical pan-tilt camera slider and leave all that heavy stuff at home?

There’s more than one way to program motion control, and [Enza3D]’s design uses adjustable rails to move the gimballed pan-tilt head through two axes of motion. One rail adjusts vertically to control tilt, while the other adjusts in and out relative to the slider to control pan. Arms ride on each rail and connect to the gimbals to swivel the camera in both dimensions while it travels down the manually cranked slide. It’s pretty clever and results in some clean, dynamic shots as in the video below.

Our quibble is that the “program” is only linear since the control rails are straight lengths of aluminum extrusion; seems to us that some sort of flexible control rails might make for more interesting shots. [Enza3D] has amply documented the build and is looking for feedback, so comment away. And if you don’t have a 3D printer to make the parts, wood works for a slider too.

Continue reading “Camera Slide Pans And Tilts Camera Mechanically” →

A Virtual Machine, In Google Sheets

July 5, 2017 by Jenny List 38 Comments

In the last couple of decades we have become used to the browser taking over so many of the desktop functions for which we used to rely on stand-alone software. Email clients, calendars, office suites and much more can now be found in the cloud, courtesy of the usual technology companies.

Sometimes these cloud-based alternatives to desktop software can be a little sketchy, but often they have features that might surprise you as they edge towards parity with the packages they seek to replace. Google Docs, for instance has a full-featured built-in scripting language called Apps Script, that gives your full control of a document or spreadsheet with the help of a bit of Javascript. When [Brian Steffens] saw this it piqued his interest, so of course he had to in his words “do something weird with it”. The result of his efforts is the Google Sheets Virtual Machine, a virtual computer in software using spreadsheet cells as memory, stack, and registers.

With only a 100-cell memory and dependent entirely upon the processing power available to the host browser, this machine is not likely to set the world on fire. He gives full instruction set details, there are a couple of demo programs, a Fibronacci sequence generator and a factorial generator, but its general lack of power is not really the point. Instead its value lies in an elegant demonstration for its own sake that a virtual computer can be built in the unlikeliest of places, and for those interested enough to peer into its code, some idea how that might be achieved.

[via Hacker News]

Book Review: The Art Of The Patent

July 5, 2017 by Jenny List 22 Comments

In bringing suitable illustrations to our articles, we Hackaday scribes use a variety of sources that offer images featuring permissive licences. Among the usual free image libraries there is one particularly rich source, the line drawings contained within the huge archives of patents granted by the various countries around the world. These are the illustrations used as part of the patent itself to describe the working of the patent being claimed. We use them because though the items they depict are legally protected from copying by the patents they are part of, they as part of the patents themselves are in the public domain. Thus we can easily find detailed hand drawn pictures of all kinds of technical innovations from the last couple of hundred years or so, and from time to time you as our readers reap the benefit.

The beauty in hand-rendered fonts from patent artwork, collected within the book.

If you spend a while browsing old patents through a search engine such as Google Patents, you can quickly become engrossed in these beautiful images of inventions past. Though their purpose is a functional one to convey the workings of an invention, the anonymous artists have often poured all of their skill into rendering them as considerably more than mere draughtsmanship. In those dusty Government archives lurk masterpieces, just waiting to be found.

It seems we here at Hackaday are not alone in sharing a fascination with these images, for a US patent agent, [Kevin Prince], wrote a fascinating exploration of the medium in his book, The Art of the Patent. Continue reading “Book Review: The Art Of The Patent” →

Friday Hack Chat: A Design Slam Challenge

July 5, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

Every Friday, the Hackaday.io community gathers ’round the fireplace and discusses the challenges facing the world. This is the Hack Chat, and in previous incarnations, we’ve talked about custom silicon, Arduinos, PCB fabrication, old technologies, and hardware manufacturing.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re opening up a design challenge. We’re asking the community for help on developing a wireless position sensor. This is a Design Slam Hack Chat, and we’re looking for contributors.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Naveen Nair], technology leader for GE Fuse. We’ll be discussing position sensors during this Hack Chat. If you’ve ever used a mouse, you’re using a position sensor, but for this Hack Chat we’re designing something a little more challenging. The Fuse group is attempting to build a low-cost, wireless position sensor with hand-held ultrasonic inspection units. Why is GE interested in this technology? Our guess is inspecting jet turbines, or something like that. That doesn’t mean low-cost wireless position sensors wouldn’t have other applications, though. Just imagine what a quadcopter could do if it could sense its position with 1mm resolution.

Won’t be able to make the Hack Chat? Don’t worry, we’ll be putting a transcript up here sometime after the event.

Here’s How To Take Part:

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat will take place at noon Pacific time on Friday, July 7th. Confused about where and when ‘noon’ is? Here’s a time and date converter!

Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Classic IBM TR-2 Flip-Flop Reproduction

July 5, 2017 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

As useful as computers are, most of them have all the design charm of a rubber doorstop. Oh, for the heady early days of computing, when vacuum tubes ruled, hardware was assembled by hand, and engineers always wore a tie.

Looking to recreate an elegant bit of computing hardware from that more civilized age, [updatebjarni] built a reproduction of a 1948 IBM TR-2 flip-flop module — 1,250 of which once formed the memory of the IBM Model 604 Calculating Punch. Admittedly more of a high-speed adding machine than a computer, the 604 is still an important piece of computing history, and [updatebjarni]’s scrap-bin reproduction of the field-replaceable module served as part of a computer history exhibit.

With a single 6J6 double triode tube nestled inside a bent aluminum frame, the goal was to reproduce the appearance of the original TR-2 module, and so the passive components wired up point-to-point style below the tube socket were chosen for their vintage look. That’s not to say the flip-flop won’t function. Although [updatebjarni] hasn’t tested it, he’s built other functional flip-flops from vintage components before, so this one should work too. Only 1,249 left to build and he’ll have enough for a working 604.

If you like this kind of build, you should probably check out some of our Vintage Computer Festival coverage. VCF East in April was a huge success, and VCF West is coming up in August in Mountain View. Hackaday will be well represented there, so stop by.

[via r/geekporn]

Free As In Beer, Or The Story Of Windows Viruses

July 5, 2017 by Elliot Williams 211 Comments

Whenever there’s a new Windows virus out there wreaking global havoc, the Linux types get smug. “That’ll never happen in our open operating system,” they say. “There are many eyes looking over the source code.” But then there’s a Heartbleed vulnerability that keeps them humble for a little while. Anyway, at least patches are propagated faster in the Linux world, right?

While the Linuxers are holier-than-thou, the Windows folks get defensive. They say that the problem isn’t with Windows, it’s just that it’s the number one target because it’s the most popular OS. Wrong, that’d be Android for the last few years, or Linux since forever in the server space. Then they say it’s a failure to apply patches and upgrade their systems, because their users are just less savvy, but that some new update system will solve the problem.

There’s some truth to the viruses and the patching, but when WannaCry is taking over hospitals’ IT systems or the radiation monitoring network at Chernobyl, it’s not likely to be the fault of the stereotypical naive users, and any automatic patch system is only likely to help around the margins.

So why is WannaCry, and variants, hitting unpatched XP machines, managed by professionals, all over the world? Why are there still XP machines in professional environments anyway? And what does any of this have to do with free software? The answer to all of these questions can be found in the ancient root of all evil, the want of money. Linux is more secure, ironically, at least partly because it’s free as in beer, and upgrading to a newer version is simply cheaper.

Continue reading “Free As In Beer, Or The Story Of Windows Viruses” →

[Daito Manabe] Interview: Shocking!

July 5, 2017 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

We’ve loved [Daito Manabe]’s work for a while now. Don’t know [Daito]? Read this recent interview with him and catch up. Is he a hacker’s artist, or an artist’s hacker?

My personal favorite hack of his is laser painting apparatus from 2011. The gimmick is that he uses the way the phosphors fade out to create a greyscale image. Saying that is one thing, but watching it all come together in time is just beautiful.

Maybe you’ve seen his facial-electrocution sequencer (words we never thought we’d write! YouTube link). He’s taken that concept and pushed it to the limit — setting up the same sequences on multiple people make them look eerily like the sacks of meat that they are, until everyone laughs at the end of the experiment and they’re all back to being human.

Anyway, if you didn’t know [Daito], check out the rest of his work. Have any other favorite tech artists that we’re missing? Drop us a line.