R.O.B. Gets A Proper RC Resurrection

March 3, 2018 by 3 Comments

More than 30 years ago, Nintendo’s R.O.B graced toy shelves, helping usher in an age of video games that is here to stay. For the few of us lucky to own one of these relics, we’ll find that R.O.B’s internal mechanisms that drive the arms and neck movements are just begging to be modified. That’s exactly what [Kenny Storm] did, installing a few continuous-rotation servos to give R.O.B a new mobile life of its own.

The original R.O.B featured a surprisingly intricate gearbox configuration embedded inside the shoulders for both up-and-down shoulder movement and hand-pinching. (For a more detailed investigation on the internals of the original hardware, have a look at this teardown.) This hack is sparsely documented, but from what we can gather, the mobile R.O.B uses all three existing degrees of freedom that the original supported while furthermore adding mobility with continuous rotation servos.

Glancing at the dates from this forum post, this find is almost 8 years old. Age is never a dealbreaker here, though, as the sheer quaintness of this hack will surely stand the test of time. Watching R.O.B take up a presence with mobility on this desk hearkens back to our childhood mysticism of unboxing this companion with our Nintendo when we were children. Finally (shameless plug!), if you’re just as excited as the author at the chance of seeing R.O.B back on your shelf with at-home-manufacturing techniques, have a go at printing my 1:1 scale R.O.B head replica.

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Automated Syrup System Is Sweet Sweet Madness

March 3, 2018 by 33 Comments

Here at Hackaday we are big fans of the TV show, “How It’s Made”. It’s not much of a stretch to assume that, as somebody who is currently reading this site, you’ve probably seen it yourself. While it’s always interesting to see the behind the scenes process to create everyday products, one of the most fascinating aspects of the show is seeing how hard it is to make things. Seriously, it’s enough to make you wonder how companies are turning a profit on some of these products when you see just how much technology and manual work is required to produce them.

That’s precisely the feeling we got when browsing through this absolutely incredible overview of how [HDC3] makes his maple syrup. If that’s not a sentence you ever thought you’d see on Hackaday, you aren’t alone. But this isn’t a rusty old pail hanging off of a tap, this is a high-tech automated system that’s capable of draining 100’s of gallons of sap from whole groves of trees. We’ll never look at a bottle of syrup in the store the same away again.

It all starts with hundreds of tiny taps that are drilled into the trees and connected to a network of flexible hoses. The plumbing arrangement is so complex that, in certain, areas high tension support wires are necessary to hold up the weight of the hoses and their sweet contents. The main hose leads to an Arduino-powered collection station which maintains a 100 kPa (29 inHg) vacuum throughout the entire system.

The sap is temporarily held in a 250 gallon container, but at this point it’s still just that: sap. It needs to be refined into something suitable for putting on your pancakes. The first step of that process utilizes a reverse osmosis filtration system to pull the water out of the sap and increase its sugar concentration. [HDC3] says the filtration system is built from eBay scores and parts from the home improvement store, and it certainly looks the part of something that would be under a kitchen sink. This system is able to increase the sugar concentration of the sap from around 2% as it comes out of the trees to 8%. But it’s still a far way off from being ready to use.

Interestingly enough, the last steps of the process are about as old-school as they come. The semi-concentrated sap is placed in a long low metal pan, and heated over a wood fire to drive off more of the water. This process continues until the sap is roughly 60% sugar, at which point it is filtered and moved into the house to finish boiling on the stove.

All told, the syrup is boiled for eight hours to bring its sugar content up to 66%. Even with the improvements [HDC3] has made to the system, he reveals that all this hard work only results in slightly more than a half-gallon of final syrup. Talk about dedication.

It probably comes as no surprise that this is the first time Hackaday has ever run a story about producing maple syrup. However we’ve seen a number of automated beer brewing systems that seem to have been tackled with similar zeal. There’s probably a conclusion to be drawn there about the average hacker’s diet, but that’s a bit outside our wheelhouse.

[via /r/DIY]

Thermal Camera Diagnoses Thermal Issue On A Sonoff Switch

March 3, 2018 by 47 Comments

No matter what your experience level with troubleshooting, there’s always at least a little apprehension when you have to start poking through a mains powered device. A little fear is a good thing; it keeps you focused. For some, though, the aversion to playing with high voltage is too much, which can cause problems when something fails. So what do you do when you’re reluctant to even open the case? Easy — diagnose the problem with an infrared camera.

[Bald Engineer]’s electrophobia started early, with some ill-advised experiments in transcutaneous conduction. So when his new Sonoff WiFi switch failed soon after deploying it to control a lamp in his studio, popping the top while it was powered up was out of the question. The piquant aroma of hot plastic was his first clue to the problem, so he whipped out his Flir One Thermal Camera and watched the device as it powered up. The GIF nearby shows that there was clearly a problem, with a bloom of heat quickly spreading out from the center of the unit. A few IR images of the top and bottom gave him some clues as to the culprits, but probing the board in those areas once power was removed revealed no obviously damaged components.

[Bald Engineer] hasn’t yet gotten to the bottom of this, but his current thinking is that the NCP1117 regulator might be bad, since it rapidly spikes to 115°C. Still, we think this is a nifty diagnostic technique to add to our toolkit, and a great excuse to buy an IR camera. Or, we could go with an open-source thermal camera instead.

[via Dangerous Prototypes]

Hacking A 30-year-old Russian VFD

March 3, 2018 by 8 Comments

Reddit user [InThePartsBin] found some VFDs (Vacuum Fluorescent Displays) on an old PCB on eBay. The Russian boards date from 1987 and have a bunch of through-hole resistors, transistors and a some mystery ICs, plastic wraps around the legs and the top of the tube is held steady by a rubber grommet (the tip itself goes through a hole in a board mounted perpendicular to the main board.) Being the curious kind of person we like, and seeing the boards weren’t too expensive, he bought some in order to play around with to see if he could bring them back to life.

After getting the VFDs lighting up and figuring out the circuitry on the back, [InThePartsBin] decided that a clock was the best thing to build out of it. It was decided that a specialized VFD driver chip was the easiest way to make the thing work, so a MAX6934 was ordered. To give the clock some brains, an ATmega328 was recruited and to keep time, [InThePartsBin] had some DS3231 real-time clock modules left over from a previous project, so they were recruited as well. A daughterboard was designed to sit on the back of the vintage board and hold the ‘328 and the VFD driver chip.

Once [InThePartsBin] soldered on the components it was time to fire it up and send 1’s to the driver to turn on all the segments on all the tubes. Success! The only thing that [InThePartsBin] has left to do is write the code for the clock, but all the segments and tubes are controllable now, so the hardware part is done. There are other VFD clock projects on the site: Check out this one, or this one, and bask in the beautiful steel-blue glow.

Via Reddit.

Fire Extinguisher Ball Mill Destined To Grind Kitty Litter

March 2, 2018 by 15 Comments

Nothing says hack like a tool quickly assembled from a few scrap-heap parts. For [Turbo Conquering Mega Eagle], his junkyard finds were a fire extinguisher, an old office fan, and a few scraps of plywood; the result was a quick and easy ball mill.

There’s very little mention of what said ball mill will be for — [TCME] said something about milling bentonite clay, AKA kitty litter — but that’s hardly the point. Having previously fabricated a much smaller version of this ball mill that could chuck up in his lathe, he scaled this one up considerably. The spent fire extinguisher was relieved of the valve and some external bits to create the mill’s drum. Plywood was used for a quick frame to support rollers and to turn a couple of pulleys for the running gear. The fan motor proved barely capable of performing, though, even with the mechanical advantage of the pulleys and an improvised drive belt. The motor just didn’t have the oomph to turn the drum when loaded with ceramic balls, but a quick adjustment to the drive train did the trick. The video below shows the whole build process, which couldn’t have taken much more than a couple of hours.

It looks like a sand casting project may be on deck for [TCME]’s milled bentonite, so we’ll look forward to that. Perhaps his other recent fire extinguisher build will make an appearance in that video too.

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What Is Twitter Without The Numbers?

March 2, 2018 by 12 Comments

How many people liked your last tweet? Oh yeah? Didja get any retweets? Was it enough to satisfy your need for acceptance, or were you disappointed by the Twitterverse’s reaction?

If you couldn’t see the number of likes, retweets, or followers you had, would you still even use Twitter?

[Ben Grosser] wants to know. He’s trying to see if people will look their relationship with social media squarely in the eye and think honestly about how it affects them. After all, social media itself isn’t the bad guy here—we are all responsible for our own actions and reactions. He’s created a browser extension that demetricates Twitter by removing any bluebird-generated quantifier on the page. It works for tweets, retweets, and the number of tweets playing the trending tag game. Numbers inside of tweets and on user profiles aren’t hidden, however, so you’ll still be able to see, for example, tweets containing Prince lyrics.

The Twitter Demetricator is available as a Chrome extension, and as a userscript for Tampermonkey for the other browsers people actually use (read: no IE support). Here’s what we want to know: Can he gamify it? Can he make a game out of weaning ourselves off of these meaningless metrics and inflated sense of self and FOMO and whatever marketing guff they come up with next to describe the modern human condition? We’re getting low on dopamine over here.

This isn’t [Ben]’s first foray into the social aspects of social media. We covered his Facebook demetricator way back in ’12.

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Tiny Function Generator On The ATtiny85, Complete With OLED

March 2, 2018 by 4 Comments

It’s easy to have a soft spot for “mini” yet perfectly functional versions of electronic workbench tools, like [David Johnson-Davies]’s Tiny Function Generator which uses an ATtiny85 to generate different waveforms at up to 5 kHz. It’s complete with a small OLED display to show the waveform and frequency selected. One of the reasons projects like this are great is not only because they tend to show off some software, but because they are great examples of the kind of fantastic possibilities that are open to anyone who wants to develop an idea. For example, it wasn’t all that long ago that OLEDs were exotic beasts. Today, they’re available off the shelf with simple interfaces and sample code.

The Tiny Function Generator uses a method called DDS (Direct Digital Synthesis) on an ATtiny85 microcontroller, which [David] wrote up in an earlier post of his about waveform generation on an ATtiny85. With a few extra components like a rotary encoder and OLED display, the Tiny Function Generator fits on a small breadboard. He goes into detail regarding the waveform generation as well as making big text on the small OLED and reading the rotary encoder reliably. His schematic and source code are both available from his site.

Small but functional microcontroller-based electronic equipment are nifty projects, and other examples include the xprotolab and the AVR-based Transistor Tester (which as a project has evolved into a general purpose part identifier.)