Hackaday Podcast Ep 241: Circuit Bending, Resistor Filing, The Butterfly Keyboard, And The Badge Reveal

October 20, 2023 by 5 Comments

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi meet up virtually to talk about the week’s top stories and hacks, such as the fine art of resistor trimming and lessons learned from doing overseas injection molding. They’ll go over circuit bending, self-driving cars, and a solar camera that started as a pandemic project and turned into an obsession. You’ll also hear about Linux on the Arduino, classic ICs etched into slate, and an incredible restoration of one of the most interesting Thinkpads ever made. Stay tuned until the end to hear about a custom USB-C power supply and the long-awaited Hackaday Supercon 2023 Vectorscope badge.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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2023 Hackaday Supercon Badge: Welcome To The Vectorscope

October 18, 2023 by 48 Comments

This year, the Supercon badge goes analog! (Or at least fakes it pretty convincingly.) Taking inspiration from the phosphor scopes of yesteryear, the 2023 Vectorscope badge is part analog audio playground, part art project, and all about prototyping. Who doesn’t like the warm glow and lovely green fade of an old Tektronix tube scope? That’s what we’re after.

Conceptually, the badge is two separate devices in one. Most obvious is the vectorscope, which takes in voltages in the 0 V – 3 V range and plots them out in X-Y mode in glorious fake-phosphor effect on the lovely round IPS screen. We’ve also tied an audio amplifier to the Y input that plays whatever waveform you’re watching.

But you don’t have to bring your own waveforms with you – the other half of the badge is an arbitrary programmable waveform generator that drives two channels. Off the bat, it’s configurable with the front panel controls, so you’re obviously invited to make Lissajous figures and store them in the program memories.

Combining the two halves lets you draw in voltages and time, but not until you connect them together, naturally. You see, this isn’t an analog simulation – it’s the programmable equivalent of the real deal, courtesy of the AK4619 ADC/DAC. Voltages go out on one set of pins and come back in on the other.

And you get to play around with these voltages in through-hole space too, because we’ve included a very generous prototyping board for your analog explorations. Does this instantly suggest a curve tracer to you? Be our guest! Other forms of analog video-mangling? We want to see what you come up with. Make an audio filter and watch it work on the screen in front of your very eyes.

Of course we’re not leaving you code monkeys out in the cold. MicroPython puts the “programming” in the programmable waveform generator. If you’re not content with the four stock waveforms, you’re invited to write your own. And this is where it gets artsy.

You can upload your own repetitive waveforms to the onboard direct digital synth routine, but why stop there? We’ve left most of the processing power of the underlying RP2040 untouched, for you to use. And four buttons on the front panel let you store and play back your code, so you have space to stash your demos, and a sweet joystick with a custom keycap gives you control.

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Keeping Badgers At Bay With Tensorflow

October 15, 2023 by 9 Comments

Human-animal conflict is always a contentious issue, and finding ways to prevent damage without causing harm to the animals often requires creative solutions. [James Milward] needed a humane method to stop badgers and foxes from uprooting his garden, leading him to create the Furbinator 3000, a system that combines computer vision with audio deterrents..

[James] initially tried using scent repellents (which were ignored) and blocking access to his garden (resulting in more digging), but found some success with commercial ultrasonic audio repellent devices. However, these had to be manually turned off during the day to avoid annoying activation of the PIR motion sensors by [James] and his family, and the integrated solar panels couldn’t keep up with the load.

This presented a good opportunity to try his hand at practical machine vision. He already had a substantial number of sample images from the Ring cameras in his garden, which he turned into a functional TensorFlow Lite model with about 2.5 hours of training. He linked it with event-activated RTSP streams from his Ring cameras using the ring-mqtt library. To minimize false positives on stationary objects, he incorporated a motion filter into the processing pipeline. When it identifies a fox or badger with reasonable accuracy, it generates an MQTT event.

[James] modified the ultrasonic devices so they would react to these events using an ESP8266-based WeMos D1 Mini Pro development board and added an external 5 V power supply for sustained operation. All development was performed in a Docker container which simplified deployment on a Raspberry Pi 4.

After implementing the system, [James] woke up to the satisfying sight of his garden remaining untouched overnight, a victory that even earned him some coverage by the BBC.

Thanks for the tip [Laurent]!

RFID Emulator + E-paper Badge Can Be Programmed With Sound

July 22, 2023 by 9 Comments

In a way, an e-paper display makes an excellent foundation for a reprogrammable RFID card. The display only needs power during a refresh, and 125 kHz RFID tags are passive in the sense that the power for the RFID transaction comes from the reader itself. [Georgi Gerganov] has put those together in the GGtag, an open-source project for a 3.52″ e-paper badge with a trick or two up its sleeve.

One clever function is that it is programmable with sound, a feature built off another project of [Georgi]’s called ggwave, a data-to-sound (and vice-versa) framework that has been ported to just about every hardware platform one cares to imagine — including mobile phones — and can reliably send data through the air.

Transmitting data over sound is limited in throughput but has a number of advantages, not least of which is the huge range of compatible devices. There’s a web-based tool for programming the GGtag with sound available at ggtag.io that will give you a preview and let you hear how it works. The data encoding method gives transmissions a charming beep-boop quality that’s a bit reminiscent of an analog modem handshake. GGtag can also be programmed over USB serial, a faster (but somewhat less exciting) option.

The project’s GitHub repository contains GGtag’s code and technical details, and the CrowdSupply project is in the works for anyone who would prefer to buy one once they become available.

A black work mat holds a circular badge with 64 addressable LEDs in a spiraling shape akin to the center of a sunflower. The LEDs have a rotating rainbow spiraling around the circle with red touching violet on one end. The colors extend in bands from the center to the rim of the circle.

Math You Can Wear: Fibonacci Spiral LED Badge

June 14, 2023 by 8 Comments

Fibonacci numbers are seen in the natural structures of various plants, such as the florets in sunflower heads, areoles on cacti stems, and scales in pine cones. [HackerBox] has developed a Fibonacci Spiral LED Badge to bring this natural phenomenon to your electronics.

To position each of the 64 addressable LEDs within the PCB layout, [HackerBox] computed the polar (r,θ) coordinates in a spreadsheet according to the Vogel model and then converted them to rectangular (x,y) coordinates. A little more math translates the points “off origin” into the center of the PCB space and scale them out to keep the first two 5 mm LEDs from overlapping. Finally, the LED coordinates were pasted into the KiCad PCB design file.

An RP2040 microcontroller controls the show, and a switch on the badge selects power between USB and three AA batteries and a DC/DC boost converter. The PCB also features two capacitive touch pads. [HackerBox] has published the KiCad files for the badge, and the CircuitPython firmware is shared with the project. If C/C++ is more your preference, the RP2040 MCU can also be programmed using the Arduino IDE.

For more details on beautiful RGB lights, we’ve previously presented Everything You Might Have Missed About Addressable LEDs, and for more details on why they can be so fun to wear, check out our Hackaday Badgelife Documentary.

(Editor’s note: HackerBox makes and sells kits, is run by Hackaday Contributor [Joseph Long] IRL.)

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Hackaday Berlin: The Badge, Workshops, And Lightning Talks

March 14, 2023 by 10 Comments

Hackaday Berlin is just under two weeks away, and we’ve got news times three! If you don’t already have tickets, there are still a few left, so grab them while they’re hot. We’ll be rolling out the final full schedule soon, but definitely plan on attending a pre-party Friday night the 24th, followed by a solid 14-hour day of hacking, talks, and music on Saturday the 25th, and then a mellow Bring-a-Hack brunch with impromptu demos, workshops, and whatever else on Sunday from 10:30 until 14:00.

The Badge Round Two

Many Europeans weren’t able to make the flight to Supercon, so here’s your chance to get hands on Voja Antonic’s superb down-to-the-metal computer trainer-slash-retrocomputer on this side of the Atlantic. It’s been re-skinned for Berlin, with a couple hardware tweaks because nobody can leave a board revision alone, but it’s 100% compatible with the badge that took Supercon 2022 by storm.

If you want to read more about it, you should. We loved it, and so did the crowd. One of the coolest badge hardware hacks was a “punchcard” reader, but there was also a lot of work on the software side as well, and we got pull requests for most of the cool demos. If you’re coming, and if you’d like to start your badge hacking a bit early, you could start your research now.

We’ll have a Badge Hacking Ceremony Saturday night, so you can show off whatever you made. It’s lots of fun. Continue reading “Hackaday Berlin: The Badge, Workshops, And Lightning Talks” →

Hacker Hotel 2023 Had A Very Cool Badge

March 10, 2023 by 8 Comments

One effect of the global pandemic was that there were relatively few events in our sphere for a couple of years. This and that other by-product of COVID-19, the chip shortage, meant that over the past year we’ve been treated to several event badges that should have appeared in 2020 or 2021, but didn’t due to those cancelled events. We were lucky enough to receive probably the last of these delayed badges in mid February, as we made the journey to the central part of the Netherlands to Hacker Hotel 2023.

A Puzzle, A 4-Bit Computer, And An Artwork

The badge takes the form of a rectangular PCB with all parts on the top side. The brains of the operation is an RP2040, and it’s powered by a CR2032 coin cell in a holder.  It’s divided into two parts, the top third which carries the circuitry and the lower two thirds of which as a row of buttons and LEDs. It’s pretty obvious from the start that it has data and address lines of a 4-bit computer, and as well as these there is an evident serial port and a USB socket. The artwork comes form the same artist whose work graced both the previous Hacker Hotel badge and the MCH2022 badge, and the rear of the PCB makes full use of all layers to create a mystical puzzle. The sum is to create a puzzle game intended to entertain the visitor, take them round the venue, and find clues to an eventual solution. I love the design both from an artistic and technical viewpoint, but have to admit that the puzzle aspect isn’t really my thing. Thus here we’ll concentrate on the badge hardware and production, and mention the puzzles only in passing. Continue reading “Hacker Hotel 2023 Had A Very Cool Badge” →