Behind The Scenes At A Professional Fireworks Show

July 14, 2017 by 18 Comments

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at a big fireworks show? Last year [Kenneth] was asked to help manually ignite a fireworks show, and this consisted of him running down a row of shells with a road flare, lighting each one in turn. He apparently did so well that this year worked another show, this one with a more complicated setup.

The show [Kenneth] helped run consisted of 950 three-inch shells, wired in series into small groups, plus another 150 in 25-shell clusters used for the finale. The fireworks were organized in racks consisting of five three-inch diameter tubes of HDPE secured together by 2x4s. Each tube held a shell, and each shell came pre-wired with both a match fuse and electrically-triggered squib. Each squib or series of squibs connects to 45-channel breakouts, which connect to a control board.

Even after the show was completed, [Kenneth] had work to do, walking around and looking in each tube to see if there are any unfired shells. The dual wiring is so the shell can be fired with a flare if the squib is a dud. In this show they found six shells, and [Kenneth] was tasked with setting off those last shells with a road flare—otherwise they’d have to use a licensed and placarded vehicle just to transport a few shells.

For more fireworks goodness checkout this beautiful Arduino fireworks controller and this network-controlled fireworks launcher.

Continue reading “Behind The Scenes At A Professional Fireworks Show” →

Badge From Diamond Age Comes To DEF CON

July 14, 2017 by 12 Comments

We’re huge fans of [Neal Stephenson’s] work and are usually looking to assign some of his vision to the gear that pops up in the real world. But there’s no stretching or squinting necessary with this one. [Kerry Scharfglass] has built a functioning Drummer’s Badge from the foundational Sci-Fi novel The Diamond Age.

The badge is called Sympetrum, which is a genus of dragonfly. In explaining what the badge is and does, [Kerry] instructs you to go and read the book first and we couldn’t agree more. This isn’t recommended reading; if you’re a geek you need to read this book.

The dragonfly badges are from a portion of the book that gets pretty weird, but the gist is that rod-logic (machines build from microscopic carbon nanotubes) is so pervasive that at all times you’re covered in mites that are actually machines. At a party, one of the characters notices everyone is wearing dragonfly pins that begin to pulse with the music and synchronize with each other. They’re actually indicators of what the mites within the wearers’ bodies are doing — synchronizing people with other people.

This badge is a working recreation of that, presumably without the billions of mites controlling people (but who knows, it is DEF CON). At the center of the badge is an STM32 driving ten APA102 modules. Interactivity is based on IR signaling. The badge will cycle random color animations when alone. But each badge also projects clock sync and metadata over infrared, so put some of them in the same room and they’ll tend to synchronize.

Simple, beautiful, and a great geeky backstory. This example of Badgelife proves that hardware badges don’t need to be packed with features, or have a huge BOM cost. If done well, you can do an awful lot with just a little hardware and strong dose of inspiration. It also makes hand-assembly a lot more approachable, which is what you can see in the images above. Thanks [Kerry] for giving us an early look at this badge, can’t wait to see them at the CON.

We’ll be looking for this and all other #Badgelife offerings at DEF CON 25. Join us for a Hackaday meetup on Sunday morning as we once again do Breakfast at DEF CON

Fidget Spinners Put The ‘S’ In STEAM Education

July 14, 2017 by 55 Comments

Centrifuges are vital to the study of medicine, chemistry, and biology. They’re vital tools to separate the wheat from the chaff figuratively, and DNA from saliva literally. Now, they’re fidget spinners. [Matlek] designed a fidget spinner that also functions as a simple lab centrifuge.

The centrifuge was designed in Fusion 360, and was apparently as easy as drawing a few circles and hitting copy and paste. Interestingly, this fidget spinner was designed to be completely 3D printable, including the bearings. The bearing is a standard 608 though, so if you want to get some real performance out of this centrispinner, off-the-shelf bearings are always an option. The design of this fidget spinner holds 2 mL and 1.5 mL vials, but if your lab has 500 μL tubes on hand, there are handy 3D printable adapters.

Still think using a toy to do Real Science™ is dumb? Contain your rage, because a few months ago a few folks at Stanford devised a way to build a centrifuge out of paper. This paperfuge can — at least theoretically — save lives where real commercial centrifuges or even electricity aren’t available. Fidget spinners save humanity once again.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Narrowband RF Transceiver

July 14, 2017 by 5 Comments

We have so many options when we wish to add wireless control to our devices, as technology has delivered a stream of inexpensive devices and breakout boards for our experimentation. A few dollars will secure you all your wireless needs, it seems almost whatever your chosen frequency or protocol. There is a problem with this boundless availability though, they can often be rather opaque and leave their users only with what their onboard firmware chooses to present.

The Open Narrowband RF Transceiver from [Samuel Žák] promises deliver something more useful to the experimenter: an RF transceiver for the 868 or 915MHz allocations with full control over all transmission parameters. Transmission characteristics such as frequency, bandwidth, and deviation can be adjusted, and the modulation and encoding schemes can also be brought under full control. Where a conventional module might simply offer on-off keying or frequency shift keying, this module can be programmed to deliver any modulation scheme its chipset is capable of. Spread-spectrum? No problem!

Onboard, the device uses the TI CC1120 transceiver chip, paired with the CC1190 front end and range extender. Overseeing it all is an ST Microelectronics STM32F051 microcontroller, which as you might expect is fully accessible to programmers. Interfaces are either USB, through an FTDI serial chip, or directly via a serial port.

There are a host of transceiver chips on the market which just beg to be exploited, so it is very good indeed to see a board like this one. It’s worth noting though that the CC1120 has a much wider frequency band than that of the CC1190, and with a different front end and PA circuitry, this could cover other allocations including some amateur bands.

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Fabricate Your Own Tabletop Gaming Props

July 14, 2017 by 13 Comments

Delve into the mysterious world of tabletop roleplaying games. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Shadowrun, Pathfinder, Ars Magica, Vampire, whatever gets your dice rollin’ — metaphorically in the case of a diceless system. This might very well be your daddy’s D&D. If you’re not a gamer, you’re certainly familiar with the concept. People sit around a table pretending to have an epic adventure, often adding a random element with the help of dice. A map is often displayed on the table, sized for figures that show the various heroes and villains.

As a person with access to a variety of CNC machines I find myself wanting to create things to make gameplay more fun. I want to build a scale castle and have a siege. I want to conduct a ship-to-ship battle with wooden ships built to scale. But I also think smaller. What is something I could make that would help us every day? Say, a box for dice. Not every project needs to be the dragon’s lair.

It turns out a lot of other folks have been thinking about the same thing.

Continue reading “Fabricate Your Own Tabletop Gaming Props” →

A 3D Scanner That Archimedes Could Get Behind

July 14, 2017 by 48 Comments

3D-scanning seems like a straightforward process — put the subject inside a motion control gantry, bounce light off the surface, measure the reflections, and do some math to reconstruct the shape in three dimensions. But traditional 3D-scanning isn’t good for subjects with complex topologies and lots of nooks and crannies that light can’t get to. Which is why volumetric 3D-scanning could become an important tool someday.

As the name implies, volumetric scanning relies on measuring the change in volume of a medium as an object is moved through it. In the case of [Kfir Aberman] and [Oren Katzir]’s “dip scanning” method, the medium is a tank of water whose level is measured to a high precision with a float sensor. The object to be scanned is dipped slowly into the water by a robot as data is gathered. The robot removes the object, changes the orientation, and dips again. Dipping is repeated until enough data has been collected to run through a transformation algorithm that can reconstruct the shape of the object. Anywhere the water can reach can be scanned, and the video below shows how good the results can be with enough data. Full details are available in the PDF of their paper.

While optical 3D-scanning with the standard turntable and laser configuration will probably be around for a while, dip scanning seems like a powerful method for getting topological data using really simple equipment.

[wpvideo xx88I1SN]

Thanks to [bmsleight] for the tip.

Books You Should Read: The Bridge

July 14, 2017 by 97 Comments

A few weeks ago, Amazon’s crack marketing AI decided to recommend a few books for me. That AI must be getting better because instead of the latest special-edition Twilight books, I was greeted with this:

“The asteroid was called the Hand of God when it hit.”

That’s the first sentence of The Bridge, a new Sci-Fi book by Leonard Petracci. If you think that line sucks you in, wait until you read the whole first chapter.

The Bridge is solidly in the generation ship trope. A voyage hundreds or even thousands of years long, with no sleep or stasis pods. The original crew knows they have no hope of seeing their destination, nor will their children and grandchildren. Heinlein delved into it with Orphans of the Sky. Even Robert Goddard himself discussed generation ships in The Last Migration.

I wouldn’t call The Bridge hard Sci-Fi — and that’s perfectly fine. Leonard isn’t going for scientific accuracy. It’s a great character driven story. If you enjoyed a book like Ready Player One, you’ll probably enjoy this.

The Bridge Is the story of Dandelion 14, a ship carrying people of Earth to a new planet. At some point during the journey, Dandelion 14 was struck by an asteroid, which split the ship in two. Only a few wires and cables keep the halves of the ship together. The crew on both sides of the ship survived, but they had no way to communicate. They do catch glimpses of each other in the windows though.

Much of the story is told in the first person by Horatius, a young man born hundreds of years after the asteroid strike. Horatius’ side of the ship has a population of one thousand, carefully measured at each census. They’ve lost knowledge of how to operate the ship’s systems, but they are surviving. Most of the population are gardeners, but there are doctors, cooks, porters, and a few historians. At four years old, Horatius is selected to become a gardener, like his father was before him. But Horatius has higher aspirations. He longs to become a historian to learn the secrets of the generations that came before him and to write his own story down for those who will come after.

Horatius sees the faces of the people on the other side of the ship as well. Gaunt, hungry, often fighting with knives or other weapons. A stark contrast to the well-fed people on his side of the vessel. The exception is one red-haired girl about his age. He often finds her staring back at him, watching him.

Horatius might have been chosen as a gardener, but he’s clever — a fact that sometimes gets him in trouble. His life takes an abrupt turn when the sleeping ship awakens with an announcement blaring “Systems Rebooting, Ship damage assessed. Reuniting the two halves of the ship and restoring airlock, approximately twenty-four hours until complete.”

The hardest part of writing a book review is not giving too much away. While I won’t tell you much more about the plot for The Bridge, I can tell a bit about how the book came about. You might call this book a hack of the publishing system. Leonard Petracci is also known as leoduhvinci on Reddit. The Bridge started life as Leonard’s response to a post on /r/writingprompts. The prompt went like this:

After almost 1,000 years the population of a generation ship has lost the ability to understand most technology and now lives at a pre-industrial level. Today the ship reaches its destination and the automated systems come back online.

Leonard ’s response to the prompt shot straight to the top, and became the first chapter of The Bridge. Chapter 2 followed soon after. In only a few months, the book was complete. Available on Reddit, and on Leonard’s website. The Bridge is also available on Amazon for Kindle, and on paper from Amazon’s CreateSpace.

The only real criticism I have about The Bridge is the ending. The book’s resolution felt a bit rushed. It would have been nice to have a few more pages telling us what happened to the characters after the major events of the book. Leonard is planning a sequel though, and he teases this in the final pages.

You can start reading The Bridge right now on Leonard’s website. He has the entire book online for free for a few more weeks. If you’ve missed the free period, the Kindle edition is currently $2.99.