LED display controlled by Bluetooth speaker

How Many Hacks In An LED Display?

June 6, 2017 by 10 Comments

There are so many nice hacks in [Joekutz]’s retro LED display project that it’s hard to know where to start. There’s his DIY LED display controlled by an Arduino UNO. To have some text or picture for the display, he’s wired the output of a Bluetooth speaker directly to the Arduino, and sends it speaker tones that encode the text to draw. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’s hacked a quartz driver board from an analog clock to use the display as a clock as well.

Let’s start with the LED matrix display, perhaps the best excuse for trying your hand at shift registers. This display uses two such 8-bit shift registers daisy chained together feeding two 8-bit Darlington arrays. The display has ten rows of sixteen columns, and you guessed it, the columns are controlled by the sixteen shift registers. Two Arduino pins tell the shift registers which column to turn on. The rows are turned on and off using ten transistors controlled by ten more Arduino pins. Scanning at 80 frames per second he gets a nice, flickerless display.

To make both the LED matrix circuit board and the control board, [Joekutz] carved out isolation paths in copper clad boards using his homemade CNC mill. Be sure to check out the first video below to see his misadventures with it that ultimately led to his gorgeous boards.

Continue reading “How Many Hacks In An LED Display?” →

The Other Kind Of Phone Hacking

June 6, 2017 by 5 Comments

While it’s true that your parts bin might have a few parts harvested from outdated devices of recent vintage, there’s not much to glean anymore aside from wall warts. But the 3×48-character LCD from [Kerry Wong]’s old Uniden cordless landline phone was tempting enough for him to attempt a teardown and reverse engineering, and the results were instructive.

No data sheet? No problem. [Kerry] couldn’t find anything out about the nicely backlit display, so onto the logic analyzer it went. With only eight leads from the main board to the display module, it wasn’t likely to be a parallel protocol, and the video below shows that to be the case. A little fiddling with the parameters showed the protocol was Serial Peripheral Interface, but as with other standards that aren’t exactly standardized, [Kerry] was left with enough ambiguity to make the analysis interesting. Despite a mysterious header of 39 characters, he was able in the end to drive the LCD with an Arduino, and given that these phones were usually sold as a bundle with a base and several handsets, he ought to have a nice collection of displays for the parts bin.

With how prevalent this protocol has gotten, [Kerry]’s post makes us want to get up to speed on the basics of SPI. And to buy a logic analyzer too.

Continue reading “The Other Kind Of Phone Hacking” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: The FPGA Commodore

June 6, 2017 by 30 Comments

The history of Commodore 8-bit computers ends with a fantastically powerful, revolutionary, and extraordinarily collectible device. The Commodore 65 was the chicken lip’ last-ditch effort to squeeze every last bit out of the legacy of the Commodore 64. Basically, it was a rework of a 10-year-old design, adding advanced features from the Amiga, but still retaining backwards compatibility. Only 200 prototypes were produced, and when these things hit the auction block, they can fetch as much as an original Apple I.

For their Hackaday Prize entry, resident hackaday.io FPGA wizard [Antti Lukats] and a team of retrocomputing enthusiasts are remaking the Commodore 65. Finally, the ultimate Commodore 8-bit will be available to all. Not only is this going to be a perfect replica of what is arguably the most desirable 8-bit computer of all time, it’s going to have new features like HDMI, Ethernet, and connections for a lot of FPGA I/O pins.

The PCB for this project is designed to fit inside the original case and includes an Artix A200T FPGA right in the middle of the board. HDMI and VGA connectors fill the edges of the board, there’s a connector for a floppy disk, and the serial port, cartridge slot, and DE9 joystick connectors are still present.

You can check out an interview from the Mega65 team below. It’s in German, but Google auto-generated and auto-translated captions actually work really, really well.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: The FPGA Commodore” →

Automate The Freight: Maritime Drone Deliveries

June 6, 2017 by 50 Comments

Ships at sea are literally islands unto themselves. If what you need isn’t on board, good luck getting it in the middle of the Pacific. As such, most ships are really well equipped with spare parts and even with raw materials and the tools needed to fabricate most of what they can’t store, and mariners are famed for their ability to make do with what they’ve got.

But as self-sufficient as a ship at sea might be, the unexpected can always happen. A vital system could fail for lack of a simple spare part, at best resulting in a delay for the shipping company and at worst putting the crew in mortal danger. Another vessel can be dispatched to assist, or if the ship is close enough ashore a helicopter rendezvous might be arranged. Expensive options both, which is why some shipping companies are experimenting with drone deliveries to and from ships at sea. Continue reading “Automate The Freight: Maritime Drone Deliveries” →

The IP Of The Infinite Build Volume 3D Printer

June 6, 2017 by 55 Comments

Last week, the Blackbelt 3D printer launched on Kickstarter. What makes the Blackbelt 3D printer different than any other 3D printer on Kickstarter? This printer has an infinite build volume. It’s built for continuous production. As long as you have a large enough spool of filament, this printer will keep producing plastic parts with no downtime in between. The Blackbelt is a truly remarkable and innovative machine. Yes, it’s a bit expensive, but it’s designed for production and manufacturing, not some guy tinkering in his garage.

However, the Blackbelt 3D website includes two words that have sent the 3D printer community into an uproar. ‘Patent Pending’ is something no one in the community wants to see given the history of the industry and a few poor decisions from the first movers during the great 3D printer awakening of 2010. The idea of an infinite build volume printer that allows for continuous production is not new; we saw one last March at the Midwest RepRap Festival. The question, therefore, is what is covered by the upcoming Blackbelt patents, what is the prior art, and is it still possible to build an Open Source printer that uses these innovative techniques?

Continue reading “The IP Of The Infinite Build Volume 3D Printer” →

“You Had One Job”, Bot

June 6, 2017 by 29 Comments

Only a Human would understand the pithy sarcasm in “You had one job”. When [tterev3]’s RopeBot the Robot became sentient and asked “What is my purpose?”, [tterev3] had to lay it out for him quite bluntly – “You cut the rope”. He designed RopeBot (YouTube video embedded below) for one job only – single mission, single use.

A couple of years back, [tterev3] had put up some thick ropes for a low ropes course in his backyard. Over time, the trees grew up, and the ropes became embedded in the tree trunks. Instead of risking his own life and limbs to try cutting them down, he designed RopeBot to do the job for him. It’s built from scavenged electronics and custom 3D printed parts. A geared motor driving a large cogged pulley helped by two smaller, idler wheels helps the bot to scurry up and down the rope. A second geared motor drives a cam reciprocating mechanism, similar to industrial metal cutting saws. A common utility knife is the business end of the bot, helping slice through the rope. A radio receiver and controller is the brains of the bot which drives the two motors through a motor driver board. The remote controller, assembled on a piece of foam, has three switches for Up, Down and Cut. Everything is held together on the 3D printed frame and tied down with a generous use of zip ties, with rubber bands providing spring tension where needed. When the rope has been cut, the RopeBot comes down for a smashing end. It might not look fancy, but it gets the job done. We spy some real ball bearings on the three pulleys meaning [tterev3] didn’t skimp on good design just because it’s a disposable robot. Obviously, he spent a fair amount of time and effort in designing RopeBot.

Once the job is done, most of the electronics and hardware can be recovered and used again while the 3D printed parts could be recycled, making this a really cost-effective way of handling the problem. Like the Disposable Drones we covered earlier, these kind of “use and discard” robots not only make life easier for Humans, but also ensure low economic and ecological impact.

Continue reading ““You Had One Job”, Bot” →