How To Build Your Own Convertible (For Under $500)

June 19, 2017 by 44 Comments

It’s a common sight in the farming areas of the world — a group of enterprising automotive hackers take a humble economy car, and saw the roof off, building a convertible the cheapest way possible. Being the city dwelling type, I always looked on at these paddock bashing antics with awe, wishing that I too could engage in such automotive buffoonery. This year, my time would come — I was granted a hatchback for the princely sum of $100, and the private property on which to thrash it.

However, I wasn’t simply keen to recreate what had come before. I wanted to take this opportunity to build a solution for those who had suffered like me, growing up in the confines of suburbia. Surrounded by houses and with police on patrol, it simply isn’t possible to cut the roof off a car and drive it down to the beach without getting yourself in altogether too much trouble. But then again, maybe there’s a way.

The goal was to build the car in such a way that its roof could be cut off, but remain attached by removable brackets. This would allow the car to be driven around with the roof still attached, without raising too much suspicion from passing glances. For reasons of legality and safety, our build and test would be conducted entirely on private property, but it was about seeing what could be done that mattered.

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DIY Shortcut Keyboard

June 19, 2017 by 17 Comments

Working with CAD programs involves focusing on the task at hand and keyboard shortcuts can be very handy. Most software packages allow the user to customize these shortcuts but eventually, certain complex key combination can become a distraction.

[awende] over at Sparkfun has created a Cherry MX Keyboard which incorporates all of the Autodesk Eagle Shortcuts to a single 4×4 matrix. The project exploits the Arduino Pro Mini’s ability to mimic an HID device over USB thereby enabling the DIY keyboard. Pushbuttons connected to the GPIOs are read by the Arduino and corresponding shortcut key presses are sent to the host machine.

Additional functionality is implemented using two rotary encoders and the Teensy encoder library. The first knob functions as a volume control with the push-button working as a mute button. The encoder is used to control the grid spacing and the embedded button is used to switch between imperial and metric units. The entire code, as well as the schematic, is available on GitHub for your hacking pleasure. It’s a polished project just ready for you to adapt.

The project can be extended to be used with other computer software such as Gimp and the keys may be replaced by capacitive touch sensors making it more sturdy. Bluetooth can be added to make things wireless and you can check out the Double Action Keyboard to extend functionality further. Continue reading “DIY Shortcut Keyboard” →

The Arduino Foundation: What’s Up?

June 19, 2017 by 65 Comments

The Arduino Wars officially ended last October, and the new Arduino-manufacturing company was registered in January 2017.  At the time, we were promised an Arduino Foundation that would care for the open-source IDE and code infrastructure in an open and community-serving manner, but we don’t have one yet. Is it conspiracy? Or foul play? Our advice: don’t fret. These things take time.

But on the other hand, the Arduino community wants to know what’s going on, and there’s apparently some real confusion out there about the state of play in Arduino-land, so we interviewed the principals, Massimo Banzi and Federico Musto, and asked them for a progress report.

The short version is that there are still two “Arduinos”: Arduino AG, a for-profit corporation, and the soon-to-be Arduino Foundation, a non-profit in charge of guiding and funding software and IDE development. The former was incorporated in January 2017, and the latter is still in progress but looks likely to incorporate before the summer is over.

Banzi, who is a shareholder of Arduino AG, is going to be the president of the Foundation, and Musto, AG’s CEO, is going to be on the executive board and both principals told us similar visions of incredible transparency and community-driven development. Banzi is, in fact, looking to get a draft version of the Foundation’s charter early, for comment by the community, before it gets chiseled in stone.

It’s far too early to tell just how independent the Foundation is going to be, or should be, of the company that sells the boards under the same name. Setting up the Foundation correctly is extremely important for the future of Arduino, and Banzi said to us in an interview that he wouldn’t take on the job of president unless it is done right. What the Arduino community doesn’t need right now is a Foundation fork.  Instead, they need our help, encouragement, and participation once the Foundation is established. Things look like they’re on track.

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Intel Discontinues Joule, Galileo, And Edison Product Lines

June 19, 2017 by 195 Comments

Sometimes the end of a product’s production run is surrounded by publicity, a mix of a party atmosphere celebrating its impact either good or bad, and perhaps a tinge of regret at its passing. Think of the last rear-engined Volkswagens rolling off their South American production lines for an example.

Then again, there are the products that die with a whimper, their passing marked only by a barely visible press release in an obscure corner of the Internet. Such as this week’s discontinuances from Intel, in a series of PDFs lodged on a document management server announcing the end of their Galileo (PDF), Joule (PDF), and Edison (PDF) lines. The documents in turn set out a timetable for each of the boards, for now they are still available but the last will have shipped by the end of 2017.

It’s important to remember that this does not mark the end of the semiconductor giant’s forray into the world of IoT development boards, there is no announcement of the demise of their Curie chip, as found in the Arduino 101. But it does mark an ignominious end to their efforts over the past few years in bringing the full power of their x86 platforms to this particular market, the Curie is an extremely limited device in comparison to those being discontinued.

Will the departure of these products affect our community, other than those who have already invested in them? It’s true to say that they haven’t made the impression Intel might have hoped, over the years only a sprinkling of projects featuring them have come our way compared to the flood featuring an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi. They do seem to have found a niche though where there is a necessity for raw computing power rather than a simple microcontroller, so perhaps some of the legion of similarly powerful ARM boards will plug that gap.

So where did Intel get it wrong, how did what were on the face of it such promising products fizzle out in such a disappointing manner? Was the software support not up to scratch, were they too difficult to code for, or were they simply not competitively priced in a world of dirt-cheap boards from China? As always, the comments are open.

Header image: Mwilde2 [CC BY-SA 4.0].

Better LEDs Through DMA

June 19, 2017 by 15 Comments

While regular Hackaday readers already know how to blink a LED with a microcontroller and have moved onto slightly more challenging projects such as solving the Navier-Stokes equations in 6502 assembly, that doesn’t mean there’s not space for newbies. [Rik] has published a great tutorial on abusing DMA for blinkier glowy things. Why would anyone want to learn about DMA techniques? For blinkier glowy things, of course.

This tutorial assumes knowledge of LED multiplexing and LED matrices, or basically a bunch of LEDs connected together on an XY grid. The naive way to drive an 8×8 grid of LEDs is attaching eight cathodes to GPIO pins on a microcontroller, attaching the eight anodes to another set of GPIO pins, and sourcing and sinking current as required. The pin count can be reduced with shift registers, and LED dimming can be implemented with PWM. This concludes our intensive eight-week Arduino course.

Thanks to microcontrollers that aren’t trapped in the 1980s, new techniques can be used to drive these LED matrices. Most of the more powerful ARM microcontrollers come with DMA, a peripheral for direct memory access. Instead of having the CPU do all the work, the DMA controller can simply shuffle around bits between memory and pins. This means blinker projects and glowier LEDs.

[Rik]’s method for DMAing LEDs includes setting up a big ‘ol array in the code, correctly initializing the DMA peripheral, and wiring up the LED matrix to a few of the pins. This technique can be expanded to animations with 64 levels of brightness, something that would take an incredible amount of processing power (for a microcontroller, at least) if it weren’t for the DMA controller.

The setup used in these experiments is an STM32F103 Nucleo board along with the OpenSTM32 IDE. [Rik] has released all the code over on GitHub, and you are, of course, encouraged to play around.

Voice Shifting With A Cyclone V FPGA

June 18, 2017 by 9 Comments

Cornell Students [Sean Carroll], [Gulnar Mirza], and [James Talmage] designed a realtime pitch shifter to run on their DE1-SoC and controlled by its ARM core.

The team’s goals were to pitch-shift the left and right outputs independently, to produce chords using the original voices as well as the pitch-shifted ones, and time-delayed pitch shifting. All of it is controlled on a VGA monitor through a simple GUI, allowing users to create lots of different effects by layering the different options.

Under the hood they made use of dual circular buffers to do the pitch shifting, reading in the sample and then using simple fixed-point arithmetic to modify it, then running the signal through a Butterworth filter to clean up artifacts.

The project was built as part of [Bruce Land]’s ECE5760 class. If you’re looking for more DE1 goodness, you’ll find excellent projects aplenty on Hackaday, including the LED Matrix Audio Visualizer from last year and Synthesizing Strings on a Cyclone V, among many others.

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Btrfs For The Pi

June 18, 2017 by 19 Comments

File systems are one of those things that typical end users don’t think much about. Apparently, [seaQueue] isn’t a typical end user. He’s posted some instructions on how to run an alternate file system–btrfs–on the Raspberry Pi.

The right file system can make a big difference when it comes to performance and maintainability of any system that deals with storage. Linux, including most OSs for the Raspberry Pi, uses one of the EXT file systems. These are battle-hardened and well understood. However, there are other file systems, many of which have advanced features superior to the default file system for some applications.

Btrfs, often pronounced “butter eff ess”, begin life at Oracle and was born from an idea in an IBM paper. It offers advanced features like pooling, snapshots, and the ability to fuse multiple devices into one logical device. One notable feature the file system offers is copy-on-write. That means file copies can share common blocks as long as they stay common.  Compression is available, as is seeding a file system with read-only storage, which could be very useful in some embedded systems. You can also configure several types of RAID using nothing but btrfs. You can see a video presentation about features of btrfs below.

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