It’s Time The Software People And Mechanical People Sat Down And Had A Talk.

March 7, 2016 by 131 Comments

With the advances in rapid prototyping, there’s been a huge influx of people in the physical realm of hacking. While my overall view of this development is positive, I’ve noticed a schism forming in the community. I’m going to have to call a group out. I think it stems from a fundamental refusal of software folks to change their ways of thinking to some of the real aspects of working in the physical realm, so-to-speak. The problem, I think, comes down to three things: dismissal of cost, favoring modularity over understanding, and a resulting insistence that there’s nothing to learn.

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Hackaday At SXSW

March 7, 2016 by 1 Comment

It’s that time of year again. In March, Austin Texas transforms itself into a nexus of art and technology and holds a celebration of Music, Film, and something called Interactive. It turns out that we’re Interactive: Hackaday will once again be at SXSW and we want you to join us there — Austin is excellent at showing everyone a fun time (as long as you don’t need to drive anywhere).

We’ll be on site starting this Friday (3/11/16) and we want you to come party with us at the Hardware House starting at 6pm. This is the third year that Hardware House has hosted, and last year the party was packed with a ton of interesting people, including some Hackaday alums who were there by coincidence. This year you can expect the same, but the fun doesn’t stop on Friday. [Sophi Kravitz] will be hosting a panel on Sunday at 5pm about Technology and Social Change.

Our main event is on Monday (3/14) at noon: Lunch with Hackaday as we launch the world premier of the 2016 Hackaday Prize film. On hand for the SXSW events are [Sophi Kravitz], [Chris Gammell], [Aleksandar Bradic], [Amber Cunningham], [Michael Guilfoil], and [Ivan Lazarevic].

But even after SXSW, we’re not done with the Lone Star State. [Brandon Dunson] and [Mike Szczys] will be at Hackaday Prize Worldwide: Dallas the following weekend at the Dallas Makerspace. Get excited Texas, we certainly are!

Reviving The Best Keyboard Ever

March 7, 2016 by 71 Comments

For the last few decades, the computer keyboard has been seen as just another peripheral. There’s no need to buy a quality keyboard, conventional wisdom goes, because there’s no real difference between the fancy, ‘enthusiast’ keyboards and ubiquitous Dell keyboards that inhabit the IT closets of offices the world over.

Just like the mechanic who will only buy a specific brand of wrenches, the engineer who has a favorite pair of tweezers, or the amateur woodworker who uses a hand plane made 150 years ago, some people who use keyboards eight or twelve hours a day have realized the older tools of the trade are better. Old keyboards, or at least ones with mechanical switches, aren’t gummy, they’re precise, you don’t have to hammer on them to type, and they’re more ergonomic. They sound better. Even if it’s just a placebo effect, it doesn’t matter: there’s an effect.

This realization has led to the proliferation of high-end keyboards and keyboard aficionados hammering away on boards loaded up with Cherry MX, Alps, Gateron, Topre, and other purely ‘mechanical’ key switches. Today, there are more options available to typing enthusiasts than ever before, even though some holdouts are still pecking away at the keyboard that came with the same computer they bought in 1989.

The market is growing, popularity is up, and with that comes a herculean effort to revive what could be considered the greatest keyboard of all time. This is the revival of the IBM 4704 terminal keyboard. Originally sold to banks and other institutions, this 62-key IBM Model F keyboard is rare and coveted. Obtaining one today means finding one behind a shelf in an IT closet, or bidding $500 on an eBay auction and hoping for the best.

Now, this keyboard is coming back from the dead, and unlike the IBM Model M that has been manufactured continuously for 30 years, the 62-key IBM Model F ‘Kishsaver’ keyboard is being brought back to life by building new molds, designing new circuit boards, and remanufacturing everything IBM did in the late 1970s.
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Triple Threat RTL-SDR System Reads Trunked Radio

March 7, 2016 by 20 Comments

In the old days, if you wanted to listen to police, fire, or other two-way radio users, you didn’t need much more than a simple receiver. Today, you are more likely to need something a little more exotic thanks to the adoption of trunked radio systems. To pick up the control channels and all the threads of a talk group conversation, you might need a wide bandwidth receiver.

[Luke Berndt] found he needed 6 MHz to monitor the stations he wanted to hear. This is easily in the reach of dedicated software defined radios (SDR). However, [Luke] wanted to use cheap RTL-SDRs and their bandwidth is about 2 MHz. The obvious hacker solution? Use three of them!

If you haven’t looked at a trunked system before, it essentially allows a large number of users to share a relatively small number of channels. When someone wants to talk, they move to an unused channel just for that transmission. Suppose Alice asks Bob a question that happens to be on channel 12. Bob’s reply might be on channel 4. A follow up from Alice could be on channel 3.

In practice, this means that receiving the signal isn’t difficult to decode. It is just difficult to find (and follow as it jumps around). This is an excellent job for multiple SDRs and the approach even reduces the burden on the CPU, which doesn’t have to decode signals that aren’t essential to the conversation.

[Luke] includes source code and also notes how to change the serial numbers of the dongles since each has to be unique. We have seen so many great projects with the RTL-SDR that it is hard to choose our favorite. It is especially great knowing that the dongle was only meant to receive television, and all these projects are hacks in the best sense of the word.

Thanks [WA5RRior] for the tip.

Bullet-time Video Effect By Throwing Your Phone Around

March 7, 2016 by 43 Comments

Ski areas are setting formal policies for drones left and right, but what happens when your drone isn’t a drone but is instead a tethered iPhone with wings swinging around you like a ball-and-chain flail as you careen down a mountain? [nicvuignier] decided to explore the possibility of capturing bullet-time video of his ski runs by essentially swinging his phone around him on a tether. The phone is attached to a winged carrier of his own design, 3D printed in PLA.

One would think this would likely result in all kinds of disaster, but we haven’t seen the outtakes yet, and the making-of video has an interesting perspective on each of the challenges he encountered in perfecting the carrier, ranging from keeping it stable and upright, to reducing the motion sickness with the spinning perspective, and keeping it durable enough to withstand the harsh environment and protect the phone.

He has open sourced the design, which works for either iPhone or GoPro models, or it is available for preorder if you are worried about catastrophic delamination of your 3D printed model resulting in much more bullet-like projectile motion.

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Google Contest Builds More Efficient Inverters

March 6, 2016 by 110 Comments

A few summers ago, Google and IEEE announced a one million dollar prize to build the most efficient and compact DC to AC inverter. It was called the Little Box Challenge, with the goal of a 2kW inverter with a power density greater than 50 Watts per cubic inch.

To put this goal into perspective, the DC inverter that would plug into a cigarette lighter in your car has a power density of about 1 or 2 Watts per cubic inch. Very expensive inverters meant for solar installations have a power density of about 5 Watts per cubic inch. This competition aimed to build an inverter with ten times the power density of what is available today.

Now, the results are in, and the results are extremely surprising. The best entry didn’t just meet the goal of 50 W/in³, it blew the goal out of the water.

The winning entry (PDF) comes from CE+T Power, and comes in a package with a volume of 13.77 in³. That’s a power density of 143 W/in³ for a unit you can hold in the palm of your hand. The biggest innovations come from the use of GaN transistors and an incredible thermal management solution.

Other finalists for this competition include Schneider Electric Team from France that managed a 100 W/in³ and a Virginia Tech team that managed a power density of 61.2 W/in³.

Thanks [wvdv2002] for the tip.

Wood Stove Runs On Arduino Power

March 6, 2016 by 15 Comments

Ahh, sweet scope creep! Usually it’s the death of a nice, simple little hack. But once in a hundred times, a small hack doesn’t get buried under the extra features, but instead absorbs them in stride and blossoms into a beautiful system. [rockfishon]’s Arduino-powered wood stove controller is one of these beautiful exceptions. (OK, we’d admit that it could use a fancier faceplate.)

He started off simply enough, wanting to connect a thermocouple to an Arduino, read out the value, and issue an alarm when the temperature got too high. But who could stop there? Just one air-baffle servo away from a closed-loop heating control system? So [rockfishon] added a display and a few more buttons and has a system that will keep his wood-burning stove running at exactly the right temperature, even overnight when nobody’s around to tend it. As a bonus, everything is logged for later analysis.

The code is relatively straightforward, and can be found in this Gist. If you’d like to build your own, you’ll need an Arduino Mega and can then get the control board made for you at OSHPark. Judging from the comments on the Hackaday.io project page, a couple people have already tried this out. We’ve seen other wood-stove monitoring hacks before, but this is the first we’ve seen that closes the control loop. Very cool.