Threat Meter Gauges Risk Of Creeper-Assisted Suicide

February 18, 2018 by 21 Comments

If you’ve played even just a few minutes of Minecraft, you know what a creeper is. For those not familiar with the wildly popular sandbox game, a creeper is a monster that creeps along silently until it’s close to a player, whereupon it self-destructs by exploding. Sometimes it kills the player outright, and other times the explosion blows them into lava or off a cliff, or off a cliff and then into lava. Creepers have no friends.

But now there’s a way to avoid creeper attacks, or at least get a little heads up that these green nasties are lurking about. With [John Allwine]’s creeper detector, Minecraft players can get a real-world indicator of the current in-game creeper threat. The hardware end is simple enough — it’s just a SparkFun RedBoard and a small strip of Neopixels in a laser-cut plywood case. The LEDs lie behind a piece of etched acrylic to diffuse their glow — extra points for the creeper pattern in the lens. The detector talks over USB to a Minecraft mod that [John] wrote to interface the game with the real world. The closer a creeper gets to the player, the brighter the light. — and when it flashes, watch out. See it in action in the video below, if you can stomach watching someone dig straight down. Never dig straight down.

If interfacing the Minecraft world and the real world sounds familiar, maybe it’s because we featured [John]’s SerialCraft mod a while back and admired the potential for using Minecraft as a gateway for getting kids into hardware hacking. We agree that this is a great project to work on with kids, but we may just order the parts to do it for our own Minecraft world. Creeper hate isn’t just for kids.

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TrackRobot Sports Welded Steel, Not Plastic

February 18, 2018 by 15 Comments

Don’t let the knee-high size of [Hrastovc]’s creation fool you. TrackRobot weighs in at a monstrous 60 kg (130 lbs) of steel, motors, and battery. It sports two 48V motors in a body and frame made from pieces of finger-jointed sheet steel, and can reach speeds of up to four meters per second with a runtime of up to an hour. The project’s link has more pictures as well as DXF files of the pieces used for the body.

Currently TrackRobot is remote-controlled, but one goal is to turn it into a semi-autonomous snow plow. You can see TrackRobot going through its first steps as well as testing out a plow prototype in the videos embedded below.

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Mini Lathe Makes Tiny Hydraulic Cylinders For RC Snow Plow

February 18, 2018 by 20 Comments

You can get pretty much any part you need online these days, but some specialty parts are a little hard to come by. So if your needs are esoteric, like tiny hydraulic cylinders for RC snow plows, you might just have to roll your own.

To be honest, we never really knew that realistic working hydraulics on such a small scale were a thing, but [tintek33]’s video below opened our eyes to a new world of miniature mechanicals. You’d think a linear actuator would be a fine stand-in for the hydraulic ram on a tiny snow plow for an RC truck, but apparently no detail is too small to address in painstaking detail. And as with many things in life, the lathe is the way to get there. Every part is scratch-built from raw brass, aluminum and steel on a mini lathe, with the exception of a few operations that were sent over to the mill that could have been done with hand tools in a pinch. The video is longish, so if you’re not into machining you can skip to 16:40 or so and pick the action up at final assembly. The finely finished cylinder is impressively powerful when hooked up to [tintek33]’s hydraulic power pack, and looks great on the plow. He’s got some other videos on his site of the RC snow plow in action that are worth a look, too.

Ready to take the plunge with a lathe but don’t know where to start? We’ve covered the basics of adopting a new lathe before.

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Nintendo DS Lite battery upgrage

Repairs You Can Print: Nintendo DS Lite With New Battery And Case

February 17, 2018 by 5 Comments

The problem with hanging on to old consumer products is that the original batteries no longer hold a charge. To make matters worse, replacement batteries ordered online have likely been sitting on a warehouse shelf for years and are no better. [Larry G] faced this issue with his old Nintendo DS Lite. Luckily he remembered a hack from his youth where a friend’s Dad had duct-taped a massive alkaline D-cell battery pack to the back of a Gameboy to give it a longer life. And so [Larry] gave new life to his Nintendo DS Lite by designing and 3D printing a case for a battery with an even larger capacity than the original.

He first obtained a 2400 mAh 18650 lithium-ion cell, one with over voltage and under voltage protection. With that as a guide, he designed and 3D printed a case for it made up of four printed parts. The case was needed because the 18650 doesn’t fit in the NDS Lite’s battery compartment. Instead, one of the parts, which he calls the fake battery, fits in the compartment and has copper strips glued to it for connecting to the NDS Lite. From there, wires go to another part wherein sits the 18650. The remaining parts secure it all in place.  Charging is done using the NDS Lite’s built-in charger. Even though the new case adds significant bulk, it actually fits well in the hand.

No doubt many of you have your own old NDS Lite sitting around that can benefit from this repair. The project details and STL files can be found on his Hackaday.io page using the above link.

This is also [Larry]’s entry for our Repairs You Can Print contest which puts him in the running for one of two Prusa i3 Mk3s plus the multi-material upgrade.

AI Listens To Radio

February 17, 2018 by 5 Comments

We’ve seen plenty of examples of neural networks listening to speech, reading characters, or identifying images. KickView had a different idea. They wanted to learn to recognize radio signals. Not just any radio signals, but Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) waveforms.

OFDM is a modulation method used by WiFi, cable systems, and many other systems. In particular, they look at an 802.11g signal with a bandwidth of 20 MHz. The question is given a receiver for 802.11g, how can you reliably detect that an 802.11ac signal — up to 160 MHz — is using your channel? To demonstrate the technique they decided to detect 20 MHz signals using a 5 MHz bandwidth.

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Help Keep The Bombe At Bletchley

February 17, 2018 by 36 Comments

Fans of vintage codebreaking machinery might be interested to hear that the only working reconstruction of a Turing-Welchman Bombe is likely to soon be on the move. The electromechanical device, a replica of those used on the Second World War Enigma codes, is housed at Bletchley Park, the former codebreaking center established before the outbreak of war to house British and Polish codebreakers.

Bletchley Park itself is now a tourist attraction. The news is that a display reorganization has caused the Turing Welchman Bombe Rebuild Trust that owns the Bombe to approach the neighboring National Museum Of Computing with a view to housing it alongside their reconstruction of the Colossus electronic computer. The Colossus was famously used on the Lorenz cipher. This is an exciting development for the museum, but as an organization reliant on donations they face the task of finding the resources to create a new gallery for the arrival. To that end, they have launched a crowdfunding campaign with a target of £50000 ($69358.50), and they need your donations to it for the project to succeed. They have raised over £4500 in the few days it has already been open and there is most of a month still to go, so we hope they achieve their goal.

The Bletchley Park site is now surrounded by the post-war new town of Milton Keynes, and is easy enough to get to should you find yourself in the UK. We visited The National Museum Of Computing a couple of years ago and spent a very happy day touring its extensive and fascinating collection. If you want to read more about the Bombe you might like to read our review, and also our impression of Colossus.

As part of their campaign, the museum has produced a promotional video, which we have placed after the break.

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Repairs You Can Print: A Turn Signal Switch For A Chevy Corvair

February 17, 2018 by 14 Comments

Running a classic car is often an easier prospect than a more recent model, as the mechanical parts have a tendency towards commonality between models, simplicity, and maintenance using basic tools. However assuming some level of parts availability for your model it is not usually the running gear that causes headaches. Instead, it is the smaller and less durable parts, the little plastic pieces that formed vital components but have not been manufactured for decades. These are the parts for which the advent of accessible 3D printing has been a revelation, suddenly the owner of a wreck need only to have basic CAD skills to deliver the goods.

A Chevy Corvair (not [Ken]'s one). Greg Gjerdingen [CC BY 2.0].
A Chevy Corvair like [Ken’s]. Greg Gjerdingen [CC BY 2.0].
[Ken] has a ’63 Chevy Corvair, an attractively-styled motor notable for its rear-engined layout and air-cooled engine. And it seems his car is plagued by the same issue as all other early models, a failure of its turn signal mechanism. The version fitted to later cars is a vastly superior replacement, but required some modification to fit his ’63 model. Even after modifcation, the updated part had a plastic component that was too long for his steering wheel. Would he grind down the later part to fit, or go with a later wheel? No, he turned to Google Sketchup, and 3D printed a replacement of the correct size. He does admit that it’s not perfect as the signals cancel at a slightly different point from where they should, but since he’s been using it for four years it appears to have done the job.

We wish [Ken] every success with his Corvair, and indeed can’t help envying him a little for owning it. Some of us have been known to dabble in older metal, too.

This is an entry in Hackaday’s

Repairs You Can Print contest

The twenty best projects will receive $100 in Tindie credit, and for the best projects by a Student or Organization, we’ve got two brand-new Prusa i3 MK3 printers. With a printer like that, you’ll be breaking stuff around the house just to have an excuse to make replacement parts.