Hackaday Prize Entry: MakerNet

May 27, 2017 by 18 Comments

One of the biggest trends in whatever market ‘Maker’ stuff belongs to is the Legofication of electronics. Building electronics is hard, if you haven’t noticed. Anything that turns transmission lines, current loops, and RF wizardry into something a five-year-old can use has obvious applications to education. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Jeremy Gilbert] is building a fast, intuitive, modular way to explore electronics. It’s easier to use than the 100-in-1 Radio Shack spring clip kits, and you can actually make useful projects with this system.

MakerNet is [Jeremy]’s solution to the problem of complicated electronics, Arduinos connected to breadboards with DuPont cables, and apparently, to actual electronic Lego sets. The core of this system is built around the Atmel SAM D21 microcontroller, an ARM Cortex-M0+ chip that has more than enough processing power for anything deserving of the ‘maker’ label. This mainboard connects to devices through what is basically an I2C bus. Each module in the system has an in and out header. A small SAM D11 (available for $1 USD) on each module handles all the communications.

Right now, [Jeremy] is experimenting with a dozen or so modules including a captouch board, an LED matrix, OLED display, rotary encoders, and lots of blinky LEDs. It’s just a prototype, but that’s exactly what we’re looking for at this stage of the Hackaday Prize. After looking at the video [Jeremy] produced (below), there’s a lot of promise here.

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Use The Force To Turn On This Lamp

May 27, 2017 by 8 Comments

Holocrons are holographic data storage devices used in the Star Wars universe by both Jedi and Sith as teaching devices or for storing valuable information. After the fall of the Jedi, they became rare and closely guarded artifacts. [DaveClarke] built one to light the room.

[DaveClarke] built the lamp around a Particle Photon – a STM32 ARM-M0 based microcontroller with a Cypress wifi chip. All [Dave] needed for the workings were an IR proximity sensor, a servo and a bunch of super-bright white LEDs. When the sensor detects something, it starts up the system. The servo rotates a gear which raises the lamp and fades in the LEDs. The next time the sensor detects something, the servo lowers the lamp and the lights begin to fade out. And since the Photon is connected to the cloud, the system can be accessed with a web interface as well.

Okay, so it’s just an IR sensor detecting reflected infrared light and not the Force that’s used to turn it on, but it’s still pretty cool. There are plenty of pictures and videos at [DaveClarke]’s site, along with a schematic, 3D printer designs, and the source code. The whole thing was designed using Autodesk Fusion 360 and 3D printed in about 30 hours and press-fits together. A very simple yet clever design. There have been some other great lamps on the site, like this blossoming flower lamp or this laser cut lamp with which also has a unique switch.

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The Internet Of Cigars

May 27, 2017 by 35 Comments

We know, we know. They are bad for you. You shouldn’t start, but some people do love a cigar. And a fine cigar is pretty particular about drying out. That’s why tobacconists and cigar aficionados store their smokes in a humidor. This is anything from a small box to a large closet that maintains a constant humidity. Of course, who could want such a thing these days without having it connected to the Internet?

This fine-looking humidor uses a Raspberry Pi. When the humidity is low, an ultrasonic humidifier adds moisture to the air. If it gets too high, a fan circulates the air until it balances out. Who knew cigar smoking could be so high-tech? The humidity sensor is an AM2302. There’s also a smart USB hub that can accept commands to turn the fan and humidifier on and off.

The wooden cabinet was an existing humidor, apparently. [Atticakes] says he spent about $100 total but that a commercial equivalent would have been at least $250. You can find his source code on GitHub.

If you are vehemently anti-cigar, we should point out that there are other uses for such a device. Because of Denver’s low humidity, for example, the Colorado Rockies baseball team store game balls in a large humidor.

For the record, a zip lock bag can do in a pinch. Without something, the experts say the cigar starts to change negatively in two or three days.

First networkable humidor we’ve seen? Hardly. If you need something to light that stogie, we suggest a laser.

Sense Hat Comes Alive

May 27, 2017 by 11 Comments

Remember the Raspberry Pi Sense Hat? Originally designed for a mission to the International Space Station, the board has quite a few sensors onboard as well as an 8×8 RGB LED matrix. What can you do with an 8×8 screen? You might be surprised if you use [Ethan’s] Python Sense Hat animation library. You can get the full visual effect in the video below.

The code uses an array to represent the screen, which isn’t a big deal since there are only 64 elements. Turning on a particular element to animate, say, a pong puck, isn’t hard with or without the library. Here’s some code to do it with the library:

for x in range(0,7):
 ect.cell(image,[0,x],[randint(0,255), randint(0,255), randint(0,255)],0.1)
 ect.cell(image,[0,x],e,0.1)
for x in range(7,0, -1):
 ect.cell(image,[0,x],[randint(0,255), randint(0,255), randint(0,255)],0.1)
 ect.cell(image,[0,x],e,0.1)

Each loop draws a box with a random color and then erases it before going to the next position. The second for loop makes the puck move in the opposite direction. You can probably deduce that the first argument is the screen array, the second is the position. The third argument sets the color, and the final argument sets an animation timer. Looking at the code, though, it does look like the timer blocks which is probably not going to work for some applications.

If that’s all there was, this wouldn’t be worth too much, but you can also draw triangles, circles, and squares. For example:

ect.circle(image,(4,4), 3, [randint(0,255), randint(0,255), randint(0,255)], 0.1)

We covered the Sense Hat awhile back. Of course, it does a lot more than just light up LEDs as you can see from this weather dashboard.

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ESP32 Hamster Wheel Tracker Tweets Workout Stats

May 27, 2017 by 21 Comments

Even with all the hamster wheel trackers out there (and on this site) there’s room for improvement. [Bogdan] upgraded his hamster wheel from an Arduino and datalogging shield to an ESP32, and unleashed some new capabilities one does not ordinarily associate with hamster wheels.

[Bogdan]’s project logs distance in feet, duration of current session in time, RPM, overall revolutions, speed in MPH, and overall number of sessions, as well as a couple of system monitoring stats. It also tracks multiple wheels, as [Piontek] (the hamster) has two. However, thanks to the ESP32, [Bogdan]’s wheel tracker tweets its stats and updates a ThingSpeak dashboard with [Piontek]’s workouts.

In addition to its functionality, [Bogdan] made a point to make the project look and feel FINISHED. He designed custom 3D parts including a front plate, hooks for attaching the control box to the cage, and mounts for attaching the sensor to the wheel.

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Energy Harvesting Wristwatch Uses A Versatile Photodiode

May 26, 2017 by 25 Comments

There’s some interesting technology bundled into this energy harvesting wristwatch. While energy harvesting timepieces (called automatic watches) have been around for nearly 240 years, [bobricius] has used parts and methods that are more easily transferable to other projects.

Unlike early mechanical systems, this design uses the versatile BPW34 PIN photodiode (PDF warning). PIN photodiodes differ from ordinary PN diodes in that there’s a layer of undoped ‘intrinsic’ silicon separating the P and N doped layers. This reduces the utility of the diode as a rectifier, while allowing for higher quantum efficiency and switching speed.

They are typically used in the telecommunications industry, but have a number of interesting ‘off label’ applications. For example, the BPW34 can be used as a solid-state particle detector (although for detecting alpha particles you’re better off with something in a TO-5 package such as the Hamamatsu S1223-01). The fast response speed means you can send data with lasers or ambient light at high frequencies – a fun use for an LED lighting system or scrap DVD-RW laser.

Some common solar panels are essentially large PIN photodiodes. These are the brownish panels that you’ll find in a solar-powered calculator, or one of those eternally waving golden plastic neko shrines. They specifically offer excellent low-light performance, which is the basis of the energy harvesting used in this project.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: LiFePO4wered/Pi+

May 26, 2017 by 21 Comments

For some of you the title might seem familiar, as [Patrick Van Oosterwijck] LiFePO4wered/Pi project is a quite successful Hackaday.io project. Now he’s designing from scratch the plus version to fill in some gaps and solve some of the challenges that affected the initial project. So what exactly is LiFePO4wered/Pi+ and what can it do?

In a nutshell, it’s a smart UPS for the Raspberry Pi. The standard version allows a Model A+ and Pi Zero to run on battery for over 2 hours, and the B+, B2 and B3 to run for at least an hour (it maybe less, depending on the system load, of course). It implements two-way communications between the power system and the Raspberry Pi (running the open-source daemon) over the I2C bus. This allows for continuous measurement of the battery voltage and load voltage, with user programmable thresholds for boot, clean shutdown and hard power down. There’s a touch pad that provides clean boot/shutdown capability even in a headless setup, a wake timer allowing the Raspberry Pi to be off for low duty cycle applications and an auto-boot feature to maximize uptime by making the Raspberry Pi run whenever there is sufficient battery power.

That’s the standard version, which we covered last year… what else could the plus version have?

Well, to start, it brings more current to run complete systems with LCD screen and hard drives, the previous version was limited when it came to current. It will provide the option for a wider range of input power sources, such as solar panels, which is pretty nice. The on/off button and the power led will no longer be soldered on the main board so they can ‘relocated’ elsewhere, for example, when making a custom enclosure. Detection of input power to trigger automatic boot and shutdown will be added and last, but not least, a real-time clock with absolute time wake up.

So there it is, the new LiFePO4wered/Pi+ version, with all bells and whistles for the Raspberry Pi enthusiast.

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