RC Car Hacked Into Paintball Shooting Tank

March 14, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 17 Comments

What’s more fun, driving RC cars around on rugged terrain, or having a paintball battle? How about doing both at the same time by making an RC controlled, paintball firing tank? [Nate] from the King of Random YouTube channel did just that by mounting a modified paintball gun to a stripped-down RC car, adding an RC trigger to remotely fire the gun, and covering it all in EVA foam armor in the shape of a tank. And then he did it again so that he’d have someone to battle against.

He walks through the full build in the first video below, but here are some things that stood out for us. It took some fiddling to get a servo to pull the gun trigger but how could he remotely control the servo? For that, he took over the car’s RC receiver signal for controlling audio and made it turn on and off the servo instead. We also like his use of aluminum bar. This stuff is available in the hardware section at stores like Home Depot and is easy to cut and bend. You can see it used here for mounting Wimshurst machine parts to a bicycle, and in this hack, [Nate] used it to mount the paintball gun rigidly to the car frame. He did surprise us when he used rivets instead of nuts and bolts to hold the frame together. That’s not something you see often, and it worked great.

As we said, he made two of them. In the second video below, watch the tanks in action as [Nate] and fellow YouTuber [Stuart Edge] have a tank battle in the desert.

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Incremental Sheet Forming With A CNC Machine

March 14, 2018 by Al Williams 27 Comments

If you want to form a piece of sheet metal into a shape, you’ll probably think about using a die. That’s certainly a great way to do it, but it presupposes you can create or purchase the die, which may be a showstopper for small projects. [Dardy-7] has worked out how to use a lesser-used technique — incremental sheet forming — to get similar results with a CNC machine. The idea is to trace out the form on the sheet metal with a round blunt tool.

He got good results using an inexpensive dapping tool, although he’s seen other use heated titanium ball bearings. In addition, he’s worked out how to adapt existing tool paths, like the ones you might download from the Internet, to use with this technique. You can see a video of the workflow below.

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Teardown: The Oregon Trail Handheld

March 14, 2018 by Tom Nardi 80 Comments

If you were a school-age child in the 1980’s or 1990’s, you almost certainly played The Oregon Trail. Thanks to its vaguely educational nature, it was a staple of school computers until the early 2000’s, creating generations of fans. Now that those fans are old enough to have disposable incomes, we are naturally seeing a resurgence of The Oregon Trail merchandise to capitalize on one of humanity’s greatest weaknesses: nostalgia.

Enter the Target-exclusive The Oregon Trail handheld game. Priced at $24.99 USD and designed to look like the classic beige-box computers that everyone of a certain age remembers from “Computer Class”, it allows you to experience all the thrills of dying from dysentery on the go. Naturally there have been versions of the game for mobile devices in the past, but how is that going to help you when you want to make your peers at the coffee shop jealous?

But we’re not here to pass judgement on those who hold a special place for The Oregon Trail in their hearts. Surely, there’s worse things you could geek-out on than interactive early American history. No, you’re reading this post because somebody has put out a handheld PC-looking game system, complete with a simplified keyboard and you want to know what’s inside it. If there was ever a cheap game system that was begging to be infused with a Raspberry Pi and some retro PC games, this thing is it. Continue reading “Teardown: The Oregon Trail Handheld” →

Stephen Hawking’s Legacy Includes Making His Work Widely Approachable

March 14, 2018 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

We are saddened by the passing of physicist Stephen Hawking. One of the great minds of our time, Hawking’s work to apply quantum theory to black holes launched his career and led to his best known theoretical discovery that black holes emit radiation, aptly known as Hawking radiation.

Thinking back on Stephen Hawking’s contributions to humanity, it strikes us that one of his most important is his embrace of pop culture. While his scientific discoveries and writings are what will stand the test of time, in our own age it is remarkable that Stephen Hawking is a household name around the world.

Hawking’s first book, A Brief History of Time, has sold more than 10 million copies and for many readers was their introduction into the way physicists view space and time. It was written for general consumption and not reserved for those who were already bathed in the jargon of theoretical physics. It sent the message that contemplating science is something that is fun to do in your spare time. This work continued with his more recent mini-series Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking created for the Discovery Channel.

A fan of the series, Hawking appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1993 and made subsequent, often repeat, appearances on The Simpsons, Futurama, and The Big Bang Theory. This was great fun for all science geeks who knew of his work, but it has a far more profound effect of normalizing interaction with a world-class scientist. Appearing on these shows told the story that the pursuit of knowledge is cool.

Having scientists in the public light is crucial to research and advancement. It lets the general public know what kind of frontiers are being pursued, and why that matters. This trickles both up and down, inspiring the next generation of scientists by introducing deep topics at an early age, and ensuring funding and opportunities for this upcoming wave of researchers has widespread support.

Stephen Hawking showed us some incredibly complicated secrets of the cosmos both through his discovery, and through his ambassadorship of scientific knowledge. He will be greatly missed but leaves behind an admirable legacy which we can all strive to live up to.

[Main image by Martin Pope via The Telegraph]

Friday Hack Chat: Everything Raspberry Pi

March 14, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

The Raspberry Pi is six years old now, and in that time it’s become the most popular single board computer. Over these last few years, the Pi has improved from a relatively anemic board based on a smartphone SoC to a surprisingly fast board that’s loaded up with some of the best software and the best community support we’ve ever seen. There’s an awful lot you can do with a Pi, and the continued support of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has enabled millions of people to get their hands on a cheap computer that runs Linux. It’s great.

Now it’s your turn to ask the engineers behind this tiny little computer what’s going on in the world of Pi. We’re having a Hack Chat this Friday, and you’re invited.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Roger Thornton], principal hardware engineer for the Raspberry Pi, where he oversees design, test, compliance, and production for Raspberry Pi products. Previously, [Roger]’s work for Broadcom included being part of the team that characterized and tested numerous SoCs including the BCM2835/6/7 found in various Pis. He also has experience in the smart home and IoT fields from working in a consultancy where be helped bring chips to market.

[Roger]’s most recent work was announced today; the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is the latest in a long line of Pis, and while it’s not the octocore ARM monster with SATA and PCIe and Gigabit networking and 4G that the power-hungry have been clamoring for, it is more capable than its predecessor and still only costs less than forty bucks.

This is also the second time [Roger] has been a guest on our Hack Chats. You can check out the transcript of the 2017 chat here.

During this chat, we’re going to be discussing the future of Raspberry Pi products, Pi events around the world, and a question on the minds of many: where you can buy Pi Zeros in quantity. You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the Hack Chat. You can do that by leaving the questions as a comment on this Hack Chat’s event page.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week it’s going down at the usual time, on noon, Pacific, Friday, March 16th Want to know what time this is happening in your neck of the woods? Have a countdown timer!

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Archimedes Would Have Known Better If He Could Count To A Million

March 14, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 78 Comments

Today is March 14th, or Pi Day because 3.14 is March 14th rendered in month.day date format. A very slightly better way to celebrate the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is July 22nd, or 22/7 written in day/month order, a fractional approximation of pi that’s been used for thousands of years and is a better fit than 3.14. Celebrating Pi Day on July 22nd also has the advantage of eschewing middle-endian date formatting.

But Pi Day is completely wrong. We should be celebrating Tau Day, to celebrate the ratio of the circumference to the radius instead of the diameter. That’s June 28th, or 6.283185…. Nonetheless, today is Pi Day and in the absence of something truly new and insightful — we’re still waiting for someone to implement a spigot algorithm in 6502 assembly, by the way — this is a fantastic opportunity to discuss something tangentially related to pi, the history of mathematics, and the idea that human knowledge builds upon itself in an immense genealogy stretching back to the beginning of history.

This is our Pi Day article, but instead of complaining about date formats, or Tau, we’re going to do something different. This is how you approximate pi with the Monte Carlo method, and how anyone who can count to a million can get a better approximation of one the fundamental constants of the Universe than Archimedes.

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RC Transmitter Hacked Into Music Player

March 14, 2018 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Packed with an incredible amount of hardware, and increasingly likely to be running an open source firmware, the modern RC transmitter is effectively a little multi-purpose computer in its own right. Accordingly there is a small, but growing, community of developers coming out with software applications targeting these switch-festooned wonders. It’s only a matter of time until they are running DOOM.

One such piece of software is TaraniTunes, developed by [GilDev]. This program allows you to load your OpenTX 2.2+ equipped Taranis Q X7 or Taranis X9D with music files which can be played on the transmitter’s built-in speaker. While it likely won’t win any awards for interface design, the large LCD display coupled with the radio’s numerous physical buttons and switches makes it relatively easy to navigate your music collection.

While the software [GilDev] has written for OpenTX looks straightforward enough, getting the songs on the radio is another story. For each track you need to merge the stereo channels into mono (as the transmitter only has a single speaker), and then convert it to a 32 kHz WAV. But don’t worry about the lack of ID3 tag information, TaraniTunes allows you to create a text file containing not only the filename of each track, but its name and artist.

We’ll admit this one should be filed away in the “Because I Can” category, but it’s still an impressive hack and a clever demonstration of the current state of RC transmitter technology.

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