Building A Tricorder Prop Worthy Of Mr Spock

March 19, 2018 by 24 Comments

We’ve all been there. You want to assemble a proper Star Trek: The Original Series landing party prop set, but the TOS tricorders you can find on the market are little more than overpriced toys. Imagine the embarrassment of beaming down to Cestus III with a plastic tricorder. The Metrons wouldn’t have even bothered with the trial by combat with such a sorry showing.

Unhappy with the state of Star Trek props, [Dean O] decided to take matters into his own hands. He purchased a TOS tricorder from Diamond Select Toys and set out to modify it into something a bit closer to Starfleet standards. Anything painted metallic silver on the toy was replaced with a machined aluminum duplicate, adding some much needed heft. He even spruced up the controls and display.

To start, [Dean] stripped the tricorder down, separating all of the silver plastic parts and finding aluminum stock that was close enough to the desired dimensions. This ended up being .125″ plate for the sides, and .500″ bars for the horizontal dividers. To make the side panels he placed the original plastic parts over the aluminum, marked the mounting holes with a punch, and used the belt sander to shape them.

[Dean] then put in a more screen accurate Moire disc, and went as far as to get real watch crowns for the buttons (just like the prop used in the show). In a particularly bold move, he even drilled out the center of watch crowns to install plastic light pipes for LED illumination.

Last year we saw a build that crammed a Raspberry Pi into the same Diamond Select tricorder toy to excellent effect. Now somebody just needs to combine both projects and they’ll have the slickest tricorder in the Alpha Quadrant.

Water Level Sensors, Alexa In A Fish, And Modular Synths During World Create Day

March 19, 2018 by 3 Comments

On Saturday we saw a flood of interesting hacks come to life as more than 100 community organized meetups were held for World Create Day. Thank you to all of the organizers who made these events possible, and for everyone who decided to get together and hack.

Students Learning Hardware Design in Islamabad, Pakistan

The students at LearnOBots took on a slew of great projects during World Create Day like a smart medicine dispenser, electronics that control mains appliances, parking sensors, and a waste bin that encourages you to feed it. The group did a wonderful job of showing off their event by publishing several updates with pictures, stories, and video presentations from all the students. Nice work!

Daniyal LED Matrix
Haya and Taha water level sensor

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CUDA Is Like Owning A Supercomputer

March 19, 2018 by 51 Comments

The word supercomputer gets thrown around quite a bit. The original Cray-1, for example, operated at about 150 MIPS and had about eight megabytes of memory. A modern Intel i7 CPU can hit almost 250,000 MIPS and is unlikely to have less than eight gigabytes of memory, and probably has quite a bit more. Sure, MIPS isn’t a great performance number, but clearly, a top-end PC is way more powerful than the old Cray. The problem is, it’s never enough.

Today’s computers have to processes huge numbers of pixels, video data, audio data, neural networks, and long key encryption. Because of this, video cards have become what in the old days would have been called vector processors. That is, they are optimized to do operations on multiple data items in parallel. There are a few standards for using the video card processing for computation and today I’m going to show you how simple it is to use CUDA — the NVIDIA proprietary library for this task. You can also use OpenCL which works with many different kinds of hardware, but I’ll show you that it is a bit more verbose.
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Emulating Handheld History

March 19, 2018 by 32 Comments

There’s a certain class of hardware only millennials will cherish. Those cheap ‘LCD Video Games’ from Tiger Electronics were sold in the toy aisle of your old department store. There was an MC Hammer video game. There was a Stargate video game. There was a Back To The Future video game. All of these used the same plastic enclosure, all of them had Up, Down, Left, Right, and two extra buttons, and all of them used a custom liquid crystal display. All of them were just slightly disappointing.

Now, there’s an effort to digitize and preserve these video games on archive.org, along with every other variety of ancient handheld and battery powered video game from ages past.

Double Dragon. You remember this, don’t you?

This is an effort from volunteers of the MAME team, who are now in the process of bringing these ‘LCD Video Games’ to the Internet Archive. Unlike other games which are just bits and bytes along with a few other relatively easily-digitized manuals and Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, preserving these games requires a complete teardown of the device. These are custom LCDs, after all. [Sean Riddle] and [hap] have been busy tearing apart these LCDs, vectorizing the segments (the game The Shadow is seen above), and preserving the art behind the LCD. It’s an immense amount of work, but the process has been refined somewhat over the years.

Some of these games, and some other earlier games featuring VFD and LED displays, are now hosted on the Internet Archive for anyone to play in a browser. The Handheld History collection joins the rest of the emulated games on the archive, with the hope they’ll be preserved for years to come.

Inventing The Digital Watch Again And Again And…

March 19, 2018 by 97 Comments

In the 1950s, artwork of what the future would look like included flying cars and streamlined buildings reaching for the sky. In the 60s we were heading for the Moon. When digital watches came along in the 70s, it seemed like a natural step away from rotating mechanical hands to space age, electrically written digits in futuristic script.

But little did we know that digital watches had existed before and that our interest in digital watches would fade only to be reborn in the age of smartphones.

Mechanical Digital Watches

Cortébert jump-hour wristwatch by Wallstonekraft CC-BY-SA 3.0
Cortébert jump-hour wristwatch.
Image by Wallstonekraft CC-BY-SA 3.0

In 1883, Austrian inventor Josef Pallweber patented his idea for a jumping hour mechanism. At precisely the change of the hour, a dial containing the digits from 1 to 12 rapidly rotates to display the next hour. It does so suddenly and without any bounce, hence the term “jump hour”. He licensed the mechanism to a number of watchmakers who used it in their pocket watches. In the 1920s it appeared in wristwatches as well. The minute was indicated either by a regular minute hand or a dial with digits on it visible through a window as shown here in a wristwatch by Swiss watchmaker, Cortébert.

The jump hour became popular worldwide but was manufactured only for a short period of time due to the complexity of its production. It’s still manufactured today but for very expensive watches, sometimes with a limited edition run.

The modern digital watch, however, started from an unlikely source, the classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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A Taste Of Who’s Speaking At Hackaday Belgrade

March 19, 2018 by 1 Comment

We’re busy confirming speakers at the Hackaday Belgrade conference, taking place in Belgrade Serbia on 26 May. Now’s the time to grab a ticket and be part of something special. Here’s a teaser.

Asier Marzo // Build Principles of an Acoustic Levitator
Applications of acoustic levitation in mid-air chemistry, spectroscopy, and tissue engineering.

Vanessa Julia Carpenter // Designing for Meaningfulness in Smart Products
Creating new smart products which focus on value over function, self development, critical reflection, and behaviour change to enable meaningful experiences.

Marcel van Kervinck // Building a TTL Microcomputer without a Microprocessor
Building a small 8-bit homebrew computer out of a few dozen 1970s TTL chips, an oscillator, some RAM, and an EPROM.

Hackaday Belgrade is the hardware community you love gathered together for one exquisite weekend. Get to town Friday for a meetup at the pub, then spend a marathon Saturday enjoying the best talks, badge hacking, workshop, and live music. What we’ve just listed are of course all just the events… the real value of Hackaday Belgrade is the culture and the people that make up this community. Don’t miss it!

More Excitement to Come

Join the Hackaday Belgrade project page to get in on the live chat where we drop early info as it comes along. Also keep your eye on Hackaday, we’ll announce more speakers as we receive final confirmation. Right now we’re reviewing workshop proposals and expect to send out acceptances later this week.

Of course there’s a lot more to get really excited about. For instance, Voja Antonic and Jaromi Sukuba are hard at work on the hardware badge for the conference. It’s alive, and that’s an awful lot of switches!

Brush up on your BASIC language skills and dig that PICkit out of your tool bag. We can’t wait to see the hacks that come together with this one. If you have suggestions for features we should roll into the stock firmware, leave a comment on the badge project page!

Learn Programming From Ants

March 19, 2018 by 14 Comments

Humans and insects think on a different scale, but entomologists study the behavior of these little organisms, so they’re not a complete mystery. There isn’t much intelligence in a single ant or a cubic millimeter of gray matter, but when they all start acting together, you get something greater than the sum of the parts. It is easy to fall into the trap of putting all the intelligence or programming into a single box since that’s how we function. Comparatively, itty-bitty brains, like microcontrollers and single-board computers are inexpensive and plentiful. Enter swarm mentality, and new tasks become possible.

[Kevin Hartnett] talks about a paper researching the simple rules which govern army ants who use their bodies as bridges when confronted with a gap in their path. Anyone with a ruler and a map can decide the shortest route between two places, but army ants perform this optimization from the ground, real-time, and with only a few neurons at their disposal. Two simple rules control bridge building behavior, and that might leave some space in the memory banks of some swarm robots.

A simpler example of swarm mentality could be robots which drive forward anytime they sense infrared waves from above. In this way, anyone watching the swarm could observe when an infrared light was present and where it was directed. You could do the same with inexpensive solar-powered toy cars, but we can already see visible light.

We’re not saying ants should be recruited to control robots, but we’re not objecting to the humane treatment of cyborg bugs either. We’ve been looking into swarm robots for a long time.

Thanks for the tip, [JRD].

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