Fluorescence Microscope On A Hacker’s Budget

March 30, 2019 by 19 Comments

Some of biology’s most visually striking images come from fluorescence microscopes. Their brilliant colors on black look like a neon sign from an empty highway. A brand new fluorescence microscope is beyond a hacker’s budget and even beyond some labs’, but there are ways to upgrade an entry-level scope for the cost of a few cups of coffee. [Justin Atkin] of The Thought Emporium published a scope hacking video which can also be seen below. He is becoming a reputed scope modder.

This video assumes a couple of things for the $10 price tag. The first premise is that you already have a scope, a camera adapter, and a camera capable of shooting long exposures. The second premise is that you are willing to break the seals and open the scope to make some reversible mods. Since you are reading Hackaday, maybe that is a given.

The premise is simple compared to the build, which is not rocket surgery, the light source from below illuminates the subject like a raver, and the filter removes any light that isn’t spectacular before it gets to the camera.

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Teardown: AppLights Personalized Projection

February 27, 2019 by 22 Comments

Listen, it hurts to hear, but somebody needs to say it. It’s over, OK? You’ve got to admit it and move on. Sure, you could get away with it for a week or two in January, but now it’s just getting weird. No matter how hard you fight it, the facts are the facts: the holidays are over. It’s time to pack up all those lights and decorations before the neighbors really start talking.

Fun Fact: It can’t actually do this

But don’t worry, because there’s an upside. Retailers are now gearing up for their next big selling season, which means right now clearance racks the world over are likely to be playing home to holiday lights and decor. That wouldn’t have been very interesting to the average hacker or maker a few years ago, after all, there’s only so much you can do with a string of twinkle lights. But today, holiday decorations are dripping with the sort of high-tech features you’d expect from gadgets that are actively aiming to be obsolete within the next ten months or so.

Case in point, the “AppLights Personalized Projection” which I found sulking around the clearance section of the Home Depot a couple weeks back. This device advertises the ability to project multi-color custom messages and animations on your wall, and is configured over Bluetooth with a companion application on your Android or iOS device. At a minimum we can assume the device must contain a fairly powerful RGB LED, an LCD to shine the light through, and some sort of Bluetooth-compatible microcontroller. For $20 USD, I thought it was worth taking a shot on.

Around this time last year, the regular Hackaday reader may recall I did a teardown for a Christmas laser projector. Inside we found red, green, and blue lasers of considerable power, as well as all the optics and support hardware to get them running. It was a veritable laser playground for $14. Let’s see if the AppLights projector turns out to be a similar electronic cornucopia, and whether or not we’ve got a new Hackaday Holiday tradition on our hands.

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Dublin Knows How To Bring-a-Hack

April 9, 2018 by 11 Comments

When on the road, we love to stop by a local hackerspace and connect with the hacker community. On Friday, TOG Hackerspace in Dublin, Ireland opened their doors to host a Bring-a-Hack with Hackaday and Tindie.

The city center of Dublin is anything but a grid. The cobblestone roads meander every which way and are a puzzle of one-way and surprise construction, none of which seemed to faze Google’s navigation algorithms. I was happy to be operating the smartphone instead of the rental vehicle. A big thanks goes to Jenny List for taking on the stress of driving on our refreshments run without coming in contact with people or cars.

You’re likely wondering why the street layout of the city deserves such attention. I’m used to centrally-located Hackerspaces being tight on space, and indeed the members of TOG cautioned us that 50 people would feel cramped. Much the opposite, the pubs, restaurants, hotels, and performing arts centers are not small, nor winding, nor made of cobblestones. Dublin is a fantastic place to party, with plenty of space for us hardware geeks to congregate. TOG itself, which about 20 minutes walk from the central Temple Bar area (where this image was taken), even has a small parking lot which made our beer drop off and pizza delivery a breeze.

A Tour of TOG Hackerspace

TOG is a Gaelic word which loosely translates as “to make”. Declan met us for the beer drop and gave us a tour when we returned for the evening event. The building is divided into several different spaces, starting with an entry area that serves as a meeting space, gaming room, and showcase of projects.

Where you might see prayer flags strung up on an apartment building, we see floppy disks (both the hard and soft variety) strung around the meeting area. Declan has a shamrock of K’nex parts wired up with a microphone controlled RGB LED strip — it’s like a test your strength game to see who can shout the coolest colors.

3.5″ Floppies
5.25″ Floppies
Sound-activated shamrock
Shamrock is RGB
How would you do on fabric anatomy?

I also really enjoyed the fabric anatomy display that has snaps on each organ and only lights up the labels if you complete the circuits in the correct locations.

These are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s much more after the break so join me for the rest of the tour, and some of the notable hacks that showed up on Friday evening.

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Hackerspacing In Europe: ACKspace In Heerlen

October 23, 2013 by 11 Comments

ACKspace group photo

Welcome to the ACKspace in Heerlen. So far this has been one of the coolest hackerspaces we have visited — and super hospitable! What makes this space really neat is the location. It’s on the first floor of a mostly empty office building. They have three official rooms on the first floor. The Hackspace, the Slackspace, and the Stackspace — quite self-explanatory.

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Weekly Roundup 11/12/11

November 12, 2011 by 1 Comment

In case you missed them the first time around, here are our most popular posts from the past week:

In the #1 spot, we had a post about a tri-color laser projector that really is a well-done project. This projector sweeps the lasers around in vector mode using a pair or mirror galvanometers so would be perfect for playing asteroids in vivid full color!

In at #2 is a post about a PVC pipe gun that can shoot AA batteries at 600 batteries per minute!

Next up we have a post about the US military finding that due to Chinese counterfeit electronics, some of its weapon systems are defective. This has become a more serious issue in recent years. It has effected hackers too as shown in this Sparkfun post from last year.

After that, we had a post about a novel and somewhat scary way to post bulletins on a board without using tacks. How do they do that? By carefully using 20,000 Volts! Yikes. We’ll stick to tape next time we run out of tacks thank you very much.

Finally, we have one about a spot welder built out of some super capacitors and carbon rods. This one probably produces equally large sparks where it is welding and at the triggering mechanism!

Giant Robotic Giraffe Getting A Giant Robotic Facelift

April 13, 2010 by 10 Comments

If you’ve had the opportunity to attend the annual Bay Area Maker Faire, you’ve likely encountered Russell the Electric Giraffe. Modeled after a small Tamiya walking toy scaled up to the height of an actual giraffe, Russell was created by [Lindsay Lawlor] in 2005 originally as an “art car” providing a better vantage point from which to enjoy the Burning Man arts festival. In the intervening five years, the Electric Giraffe has enjoyed face time in dozens of parades, trade shows, magazines and television appearances.

Scattered about [Lawlor’s] living room floor at the moment are the giraffe’s dismantled steel skull and several massive Torxis servos (the red boxes in the photo above) — Russell is being upgraded. One of [Lawlor’s] goals in returning to Maker Faire each year is that he not simply present the same exhibit time and time again; the robot is continually evolving. Initially it was little more than a framework and drivetrain, and had to be steered by bodily shoving the entire 1,700 pound beast. Improvements to the steering and power train followed, along with a “skin” of hundreds of addressable LEDs, cosmetic improvements such as a new paint job, and technological upgrades like interactivity, radio control and speech. His goal this year is to bring expressive animatronic movement to the giraffe’s head and jaw, hence the servos, push rods and custom-machined bits currently strewn through his living space-cum-laboratory.

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