Building A Smart Airsoft Gun With Open Source Hardware

July 10, 2017 by John Baichtal 10 Comments

[matt8588] designed a smartgun rig for his Airsoft shotgun (YouTube, embedded below). He has a Rasperry Pi 3 mounted inside a PEQ box connected to an infrared camera with an IR tac light helping with illumination. A series of buttons control a crosshair pattern superimposed on the camera image, which is displayed on a tablet. You can also reposition the crosshairs to shoot further away. One of the buttons triggers a signal on the transmitter, for setting off Airsoft claymores during battle. A second Pi, a Zero, connects to an BerryIMU sensor that controls a “traffic light” arrangement of 12mm LEDs that warn him when he’s moving the gun too much to be accurate.

If you want to check out [Matt’s] progress, he’s posted videos of him showing off the gun’s accuracy, including one after the break in which he shoots accurately from a standing position while looking down at the tablet. You can find code for both Pi’s on his GitHub repository.

We suppose it goes without saying that Hackaday has a plethora of Airsoft projects. We especially love the Airsoft sentry gun, the rover-mounted Airsoft gun, and the drone-mounted POV Airsoft turret we published.

Continue reading “Building A Smart Airsoft Gun With Open Source Hardware” →

Robot Solves Sudoku On Paper

July 10, 2017 by Al Williams 13 Comments

Sudoku is a great way to pass some time, especially on a long flight. However, we don’t think the airlines will let [Sanahm] board with his sudoku-solving robot. The basic machine looks like a 2D plotter made with aluminum extrusion, with the addition of a Raspberry Pi and a camera. The machine can read a sudoku puzzle, solve it, and then fill in the puzzle with a pen. Unlike humans, it should never need to erase its work.

The software uses OpenCV to process the camera data, find the grid, and the cells provided by the puzzle. TensorFlow recognizes the numbers. From there, it is all just math to solve the puzzle. Once solved, the plotter part of the robot takes over and fills in the blanks. After all that, this seems like the easy part.

Continue reading “Robot Solves Sudoku On Paper” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Stroke Rehabilitation Through Biofeedback

July 10, 2017 by John Baichtal 8 Comments

Students at Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering created ExoMIND, an Arduino-powered glove that helps a stroke victim recover by tracking the range of motion the patient experiences.

A set of 7 accelerometers in the fingers, wrist, and forearm track the range of movements the patient is experiencing with that hand. An accelerometer on the back of the hand serving as a reference. Meanwhile, an EMG sensor working with a conductive fabric sleeve to measure muscle activity. The user follows a series of instructions dished out by an interactive software program, allowing the system to test out the patient’s range of motion at the beginning of the regime as well as to record whether any improvement was noted at the end. The data is used by a physical therapist to personalize the treatment plan. The interactive program also raises the possibility of patients self-directing their exercises with the ExoMIND telling them how to adjust their motion to get the most out of the experience.

Produced as part of the university’s MIND Biomedical Engineering Club, the ExoMIND prototype was designed by three interdisciplinary teams focusing on electronics, materials, and programming, respectively.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: Stroke Rehabilitation Through Biofeedback” →

Horns Across America: The AT&T Long Lines Network

July 10, 2017 by Dan Maloney 84 Comments

A bewildering amount of engineering was thrown at the various challenges presented to the United States by the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. From the Interstate Highway System to the population shift from cities to suburbs, infrastructure of all types was being constructed at a rapid pace, fueled by reasonable assessments of extant and future threats seasoned with a dash of paranoia, and funded by bulging federal coffers due to post-war prosperity and booming populations. No project seemed too big, and each pushed the bleeding edge of technology at the time.

Some of these critical infrastructure projects have gone the way of the dodo, supplanted by newer technologies that rendered them obsolete. Relics of these projects still dot the American landscape today, and are easy to find if you know where to look. One that always fascinated me was the network of microwave radio relay stations that once stitched the country together. From mountaintop to mountaintop, they stand silent and largely unattended, but they once buzzed with the business of a nation. Here’s how they came to be, and how they eventually made themselves relics.

Continue reading “Horns Across America: The AT&T Long Lines Network” →

A Live ECU Simulator For OBD2 Projects

July 10, 2017 by Jenny List 12 Comments

If you are working with OBD2 hardware or software, it’s easy enough to access test data, simply plug into a motor vehicle with an OBD2 socket. If, however, you wish to test OBD2 software under all possible fault conditions likely to be experienced by an engine, you are faced with a problem in that it becomes difficult to simulate all faults on a running engine without breaking it. This led [Fixkick] to create an OBD2 simulator using a secondhand Ford ECU supplied with fake sensor data from an Arduino to persuade it that a real engine was connected.

The write-up is quite a dense block of text to wade through, but if you are new to the world of ECU hacking it offers up some interesting nuggets of information. In it there is described how the crankshaft and camshaft sensors were simulated, as well as the mass airflow sensor, throttle position, and speedometer sensors. Some ECU inputs require a zero-crossing signal, something achieved with the use of small isolating transformers. The result is a boxed up unit containing ECU and Arduino, with potentiometers on its front panel to vary the respective sensor inputs.

We’ve brought you quite a few OBD2 projects over the years, for example, there was this LED tachometer, and a way into GM’s OnStar.

Thanks [darkspr1te] for the tip.

Hackaday Superconference: Tickets And Proposals

July 10, 2017 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

We’re thrilled to announce Supercon tickets are now available. The 2017 Hackaday Superconference is November 11th and 12th in Pasadena, California.

This is the ultimate hardware conference. Hackers, designers, and engineers from all over the world converge — from the greenest beginners to those who have made history with their designs. This is the Hackaday community, and the Supercon is your chance to experience all things involved in hardware creation for one great weekend. There will be unparalleled talks and workshops, but the experience of Supercon transcends the organized event. We call it a conference but it’s truly a hacker village.

Call for Proposals

Want to present a talk (or a workshop) at this year’s Supercon? Great, please submit your proposal using this form.

The number one question we get about CFP is “I’m excited about X, should I submit a proposal?” The answer is yes. Don’t self-eliminate — if you have an idea for a talk we want to hear from you. Supercon is a flat conference, your proposal will be judged on the idea and how you plan to present it, not on how many other amazing speaking slots you’ve secured.

To help get your mind moving about topics, we suggest that you consider this list of themes your talk might fit into: Engineering Heroics, Prototyping, Research, Product Development, Full-Stack Fabrication, and of course Wildcard.

Tickets! Get Your Tickets Here!

Are you a true believer? We’ve just opened up the Call for Proposal today, so we can’t tell you who’s speaking or what workshops will take place. However, we suspect there are many of you ready to take the plunge right now. Those first 96 true believers get an incredibly low ticket price of $128. This covers admission for both days of the con, admission to the Hackaday Prize party on Saturday night and food on both days.

This is the third year we’ve hosted the Hackaday Superconference. You can check out all of the talk videos from last year, there’s a slew of articles on the event, and of course it was really fun seeing the geeky and unique shirts on exhibit throughout.

Get your ticket and book your travel. We look forward to hanging out with a huge chunk of the Hackaday community at Supercon!

Your Puzzle’s Done When The Electronics Says So

July 10, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 7 Comments

We can race against the clock when assembling jigsaw puzzles online but what about competing against each other in the real world? [HomeMadeGarbage] came up with the simplest of solutions with his jigsaw puzzle timer that stops only when the puzzle’s completely assembled.

His simple solution was to attach copper foil tape to the back of the pieces, with overlap. He did this in a serpentine pattern to ensure that all pieces had a strip of the tape. The puzzle he used comes with a special container to assemble it in. At two corners of that container, he put two more pieces of copper foil, to which he soldered wires. Those two act as a switch. Only when the puzzle is completed will those two pieces be connected through the serpentine strip on the back of the puzzle.

Next, he needed a timer. The two wires from the puzzle container go to an Arduino UNO which uses an ILI9325 touch panel TFT display for both the start, stop, and reset buttons, and to show the time elapsed. Press the touch screen when it says START and begin assembling the puzzle. When the last piece is inserted, the serpentine strip of copper tape completes the circuit and only then does the Arduino program stop the timer. As you can see from the video below, the result makes doing the puzzle lots of fun.

Continue reading “Your Puzzle’s Done When The Electronics Says So” →