Shoot-And-Forget Digital Photo Frame

March 5, 2018 by 28 Comments

Digital photo frames these days require you to manage the photos stored on it or the cloud-based service tied to the frame’s manufacturer. [Henric Andersson] realized that he and his wife take a lot of photos but find little time to go through them — like photo albums of days past — and add them to any photo frame-like appliance or service. Since Google photos can do a lot of the sorting for them, he decided to incorporate that into a digital photo frame.

Using his wife’s old Viewsonic 24” 1080p monitor, he cracked it open and incorporated the screen into a 24×16 distressed wood frame — reinforcing it to account for the bulky, built-in power supply with pieces of HDF and a lot of glue. The brains behind this digital photo frame is a Raspberry Pi 3 he received from a friend. To turn the whole on/off, he built a small circuit but it turned out it wasn’t strictly necessary since everything started just fine without it.

While functionally complete, it needed one more addition. A little thing called ‘color temperature calibration’ — aka white balance.

Finding the TCS34725 RGB color sensor by Adafruit — and readily available code for easy integration — [Andersson] puzzled over how to add it to the frame. To disguise it while retaining its effectiveness, he had to glue it to the rear of the frame after drilling a hole in the top piece and sticking a plastic stick through the hole to let light through to the sensor.

To get the photos to display, [Henric Andersson] says all he did was add a few queries to Google Photos and it will display all your relevant photos that have been synced to the service. For a breakdown of that side of this hack, check out his other post with the details.

While Google Photos deftly displays photos of various orientations, sizes, and aspect ratios, we’ve featured a digital photo frame that handles the task a little differently.

FPGA Makes ASCII Video

March 5, 2018 by 28 Comments

Human beings like pictures which is probably why there’s the old adage “A picture’s worth a thousand words.” We take computer graphic output for granted now, but even in the earliest days for Teletypes and line printers, there was artwork made from characters ranging from Snoopy to Spock. [Wenting Z] continues the tradition by creating an FPGA that converts VGA video to ASCII art and outputs it via DVI.

The device uses a Xilinx Virtex device and uses about 500 LUT (look up tables) which is not much at all. You can see a video (that includes an overlay of the source video) of the device in action below.

In fact, we think of art like this as a computer phenomenon, but [Flora Stacey] created a butterfly on a typewriter in 1898 and ham radio operators were doing art using paper tape for the last half of the twentieth century. Even before that, In 1865, Alice in Wonderland had a certain passage that was typeset to suggest a mouse’s tail. Perhaps the pinnacle is the famous ASCII version of Star Wars.

This is decidedly less mechanical than some of the other ASCII art projects we’ve seen. If you have a taste for more text art, have a look at some other examples, including a very old advertisement that uses character art.

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Graphing Calculator Dual Boots With Pi Zero

March 4, 2018 by 41 Comments

The nearly limitless array of consumer gadgets hackers have shoved the Raspberry Pi into should really come as no surprise. The Pi is cheap, well documented, and in the case of the Pi Zero, incredibly compact. It’s like the thing is begging to get grafted into toys, game systems, or anything else that could use a penguin-flavored infusion.

But this particular project takes it to the next level. Rather than just cramming the Pi and a cheap LCD into his Numworks graphing calculator, [Zardam] integrated it into the device so well that you’d swear it was a feature from the factory. By exploiting the fact that the calculator has some convenient solder pads connected to its SPI bus, he was able to create an application which switches the display between the Pi and the calculator at will. With just a press of a button, he’s able to switch between using the stock calculator software and having full access to the internal Pi Zero.

In a very detailed write-up on his site, [Zardam] explains the process of getting the Pi Zero to output video over SPI. The first part of the battle was re-configuring the GPIO pins and DMA controller. After that, there was the small issue of writing a Linux SPI framebuffer driver. Luckily he was able to find some work done previously by [Sprite_TM] which helped him get on the right track. His final driver is able to push 320×240 video at 50 FPS via GPIO, more than enough to kick back with some DOOM.

With video sorted out, he still needed a way to interface the calculator’s keyboard with the Pi. For this, he added a function in his calculator application that echoed the keys pressed to the calculator’s UART port. This is connected to the Pi, where a daemon is listening for key presses. The daemon then generates the appropriate keycodes for the kernel via uinput. [Zardam] acknowledges this part of the system could do with some refinement, but judging by the video after the break, it works well enough for a first version.

We’ve seen the Pi Zero get transplanted into everything from a 56K modem to the venerated Game Boy, and figured nothing would surprise us at this point. But we’ve got to say, this is one of the cleanest and most practical builds we’ve seen yet.

[Thanks to EdS for the tip]

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Behold The Giant Eye’s Orrery-Like Iris And Pupil Mechanism

March 4, 2018 by 13 Comments

This is an older project, but the electromechanical solution used to create this giant, staring eyeball is worth a peek. [Richard] and [Anton] needed a big, unblinking eyeball that could look in any direction and their solution even provides an adjustable pupil and iris size. Making the pupil dilate or contract on demand is a really nice feature, as well.

The huge fabric sphere is lit from the inside with a light bulb at the center, and the iris and pupil mechanism orbit the bulb like parts of an orrery. By keeping the bulb in the center and orbiting the blue gel (for the iris) and the opaque disk (for the pupil) around the bulb, the eye can appear to gaze in different directions. By adjusting the distance of the disks from the bulb, the size of the iris and pupil can be changed.

A camera system picks out objects (like people) and directs the eye to gaze at them. The system is clever, but the implementation is not perfect. As you can see in the short video embedded below, detection of a person walking by lags badly. Also, there are oscillations present in the motion of the iris and pupil. Still, as a mechanism it’s a beauty.

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Hackaday Links: March 4, 2018

March 4, 2018 by 7 Comments

Guess what’s happening next weekend? The SoCal Linux Expo. SCALE is in its 16th year, and is the second greatest convention happening this year at the Pasadena Convention Center. The first, of course, is AlienCon this summer, with a special guest appearance by the guy with the hair on Ancient Aliens. What’s cool at SCALE? Tons of stuff! Tindie and Hackaday will have a booth, you’ll be able to check out the new stuff from System 76, and this is where I first picked up my most cherished possession, a Microsoft (heart) Linux sticker. NEED A TICKET? Cool, use the code ‘HACK’ to get 50% off!

[Muth] over on hackaday.io has been working on a very, very, very cool high voltage display. It’s a ИГГ1-64x64M, or a Gazotron, or something. What is it? It’s a two-color (green and red) 64×64 pixel VFD bitmap display. You want the king of all vacuum-based displays? Here you go. Progress on driving this display is slow, but it’s happening, and it will result in the coolest clock ever created.

Need a pick and place machine? Don’t want to shell out thousands for a Neoden? Here’s an Indiegogo campaign for the Open Placer, a machine that works with OpenPNP software. It’s got vision and a 295x195mm working area.

A few months ago, news came from Havana that the US embassy was under attack. Staffers at the US embassy in Cuba were feeling sick and apparently suffered neurological damage. Explanations ranged from poisoning to some sort of non-lethal weapon. Now, there might be a banal explanation. Researchers at the University of Michigan think it could simply be two ultrasonic sensors placed just the right distance apart. Acoustic interference happens, and that inaudible 35kHz signal becomes a maddening audible signal.

Last week, we had a great talk with OSH Park about PCBs. These Hack Chats are getting out of control, but at least we have a transcript. The biggest takeaway? They’re out of jellybeans, but OSH Park is working on new stickers.

Open Hardware Summit is the greatest con for all things Open Hardware. This year, it’s going to be in Boston. The Summit will be held on September 27th, 2018 at MIT Stratton Student Center. If you’d like to get there a week and a half early, the MIT ham flea market is the third Sunday of the month.

A Tabletop Star Wars Themed Lego Racer Game

March 4, 2018 by 13 Comments

When it comes to the title of undisputed king of the toy construction kit world, the Danes have it. Lego are ubiquitous in the toybox, and parents worldwide know the joy of stepping barefoot on a stray brick. Aside from the themed sets for youngsters and collectors, we see a lot of Lego in projects that make it to these pages. Sometimes they are from hardware hackers who’ve chosen Lego because they had some to hand or because of its utility, but at other times they come from the Lego community rather than the wider one.

Take the Star Racer from [Alexis Dos Santos] as an example of the former. It’s a table top racing game made entirely from Lego, and with control courtesy of Lego Mindstorms. It’s a real rolling road game, with a track made from five continuous belts of grey Lego sections, with obstacles attached to them. The Podracer slides from side to side at the front under user control, and the object is to avoid them as they come towards you at varying speed.

It’s a beautiful piece of work, and as well as the linked Flickr photographs it can be seen in the YouTube video below the break. The sticker says it’s a highly addictive game, and we’d be inclined not to disagree.

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No, Cat, This Is Not The Litter Box

March 4, 2018 by 39 Comments

Hackaday.io user [peterquinn] has encountered a problem with his recently unruly cat peeing under the dining table. Recognizing that the household cat’s natural enemy is the spray bottle, he built an automatic cat sprayer to deter her antics.

The build is clear-cut: an Arduino Uno clone for a brain, an MG995 servo, PIR sensor, spray bottle, and assorted electronics components. [peterquinn] attached the servo to the spray bottle with a hose clamp — ensuring that the zero position is pointing at the trigger — and running a piece of cabling around the trigger that the servo will tug on. Adding a capacitor proved necessary after frying the first Uno clone, as the servo powering up would cause the Uno to reset.

The code is set up to trigger the servo — spraying the cat twice — once the PIR detects the cat for more than ten seconds. After toying with a few options, [peterquinn] is using a 9V, 2A power supply that works just fine. For now, he hopes the auto-sprayer should do the trick. If it somehow doesn’t work, [peterquinn] has mused that a drastic upgrade to the vacuum may be necessary.