Casein, Cello, Carrotinet, And Copper Oxide, Science Grab Bag

December 6, 2017 by Brian McEvoy 3 Comments

One of our favorite turnips, oops, citizen scientists [The Thought Emporium], has released his second Grab Bag video which can also be seen after the break. [The Thought Emporium] dips into a lot of different disciplines as most of us are prone to do. Maybe one of his passions will get your creative juices flowing and inspire your next project. Or maybe it will convince some clever folks to take better notes so they can share with the rest of the world.

Have you ever read a recipe and thought, “What if I did the complete opposite?” In chemistry lab books that’s frowned upon but it worked for the Reverse Crystal Garden. Casein proteins make cheese, glue, paint, and more so [The Thought Emporium] gave us a great resource for making our own and demonstrated a flexible conductive gel made from that resource. Since high school, [The Thought Emporium] has learned considerably more about acoustics and style as evidence by his updated cello. Maybe pulling old projects out of the closet and giving them the benefit of experience could revitalize some of our forgotten endeavors.

If any of these subjects whet your whistle, consider growing gorgeous metal crystals, mixing up some conductive paint or learning the magnetic cello. Remember to keep your lab journal tidy and share on Hackday.io.

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When Is A 10-bit A/D An 8-bit A/D?

December 6, 2017 by Al Williams 25 Comments

Marketing guys love bigger numbers. Bigger is better, right? After all, Subway called it a “footlong” not an 11-incher. So when it comes to analog to digital (A/D) conversion, more bits are better, right? Well, that depends. It is easy to understand that an A/D will have a low and high measurement and the low will be zero counts and the high will result in the maximum count for the number of bits. That is, an 8-bit device will top out at 255, a 10-bit at 1023, and so on.

The question is: are those bits meaningful? The answer depends on a few factors. Like most components we deal with, our ideal model isn’t reality, but maybe it is close enough.

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Woman Gets Diabetes, Builds Own Pancreas

December 6, 2017 by Will Sweatman 64 Comments

For the most part, when we break out the soldering iron to make a project for ourselves – we do so for fun. Sometimes we do so for necessity. Rarely do we, however, do so to save our own lives. [Dana Lewis] is one of the 30 million people in the US who suffer from diabetes. It’s a condition where the pancreas fails to make insulin, resulting in a buildup of sugar in the bloodstream. Managing the levels of insulin and sugar in their bodies is a day-to-day struggle for the millions of diabetics in the world. It’s a great deal more for [Dana], however. She sleeps with machines that monitor the glucose levels in her blood, but lives with constant worry.

“I was afraid at night because I am a super-deep, champion sleeper,” Lewis said, “I sleep through the alarms on the device that are supposed to wake me up and save my life…”

What she needed was the glucose data from the device and use it to trigger a louder alarm. It wasn’t long until she found someone who had done just this. Using a Raspberry Pi, she was able to capture the data and then alarm her via her phone. She then setup a web interface so others could see her data and call her if she didn’t wake.

The next step is obvious. Why not make the state of the insulin pump a function of the data? And thus, a sort of artificial pancreas.

The project is open source for anyone to use and improve upon. She was placed on a list for the 100 most creative people in the US for 2017. We’re not strangers to the idea of an artificial pancreas, but it’s always great to see people using things we make video game consoles out of to save lives.

Thanks to [Dave Zzzz] for the tip!

Floppy Drive Music By Emmy Winning Composer

December 6, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 25 Comments

We’ve featured a lot of awesome music made using floppy drives before, but this is the first time we’ve seen it used as the main instrument in a movie score, and by Emmy winning composer [Bear McCreary]. The movie, in this case is alien invasion film, Revolt, but you’ve surely heard Bear’s amazing work in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series, The Walking Dead, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (my favorite of his), or the one for which he won an Emmy, Da Vinci’s Demons wherein the main theme sounds the same backwards as forwards, to name just a few. So when someone of [Bear]’s abilities makes use of floppy drives, we listen.

[Bear] works with a team, and what they learned was that it’s a clicking sound which the drives make that we hear. It’s just so fast that it doesn’t come across as clicks. The speed at which the clicks are made determines the pitch. And so to control the sound, they control the floppy drives’ speed. They also found that older floppy drives had more of the type of sound they were looking for than newer ones, as if floppy drives weren’t getting hard to find as is. In the end, their floppy orchestra came out to around twelve drives. And the result is awesome, so be sure to check it out in the video below.

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Astro Cat: Raspberry Pi Telescope Controller

December 5, 2017 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

When somebody tackles an engineering problem, there are two possible paths: they can throw together a quick and dirty fix that fits their needs (the classic “hack”, as it were), or they can go the extra mile to develop a well documented solution that helps the community as a whole. We cover it all here at Hackaday, but we’ve certainly got a soft spot for the latter approach, even if some may feel it falls into the dreaded territory of “Not A Hack”.

When [Gary Preston] wanted to control his telescope and astrophotography hardware, he took the second path in a big way. Over the course of several posts on his blog, [Gary] walks us though the creation of his open source Raspberry Pi add-on board that controls a laundry list of sensors and optical gear. Just don’t call it a HAT, while it may look the part, [Gary] is very specific that it does not officially meet the HAT specifications put out by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Even if you aren’t terribly interested in peering into the infinite void above, the extremely detailed write-up [Gary] has done contains tons of multidisciplinary information that you may find useful. From showing how to modify the Pi’s boot configuration to enable true hardware UART (by default, the Pi 3 ties it up with Bluetooth) and level shifting it with a ST3232 to a breakdown of the mistakes he made in his PCB layout, there’s plenty to learn.

Astro CAT is a completely open source project, with the hardware side released under the CERN Open Hardware License v1.2, and the INDI driver component is available under the GPL v3.

If this looks a bit daunting for your first stab at astrophotography with the Raspberry Pi, fear not. We’ve covered builds which can get you up and running no matter what your budget or experience level is.

Need A Hand? How About Two?

December 5, 2017 by James Hobson 22 Comments

A helping hand goes a long way to accomplishing a task. Sometimes that comes in the form of a friend, and sometimes it’s a pair of robotic hands attached to your arm.

Italian startup [Youbionic] have developed this pair of 3D printed hands which aim to extend the user’s multi-tasking capacity. Strapped to the forearm and extending past the user’s natural hand, they are individually operated by flexing either the index or ring fingers. This motion is picked up by a pair of flex sensor strips — a sharp movement will close the fist, while a slower shift will close it halfway.

At present, the hands are limited in their use — they are fixed to the mounting plate and so are restricted to gripping tasks, but with a bit of practice could end up being quite handy. Check out the video of them in action after the break!

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