Announcing Hackaday Belgrade’s Talks And Speakers

February 29, 2016 by 2 Comments

Hackaday is hosting a hardware conference in Belgrade on April 9th. This is arguably our first-ever European conference, and for the last few months we’ve been putting together a hackable conference badge, a list of speakers, and a set of hands-on workshops. Now, we’re finally ready to announce the workshops and talks for Hackaday | Belgrade. You can check out the scheduled talks and workshops below.

Tickets for Hackaday | Belgrade are still available, and tickets for the workshops will open up today. Tickets are also cheap – $35 for a regular ticket, and about $10 and $30 for the robot and DIY musical toy workshops, respectively. The workshop tickets are only to cover material cost, and you’ll get to take your project home with you.

The conference will be a blast. There will be bands and DJs, badge hacking competitions, and ten hours of talks and workshops. If you’re going, or are still on the fence, hang out on the event page to get the inside info on a few Hackaday events that will happen the night before and the day after.

The Workshops

Radomir Dopieralski – Tote, A Walking Quadruped Robot. Build your own spider-like robot and make it walk.

Anastasios Stamou – Hardware Hacking Musical Toys & DIY Electronic Musical Interfaces. Introductory circuit bending workshop teaching all the necessary techniques for designing and making experimental electronic musical interfaces out of recycled material.

The Talks

Voja Antonic – Hacking the Hackaday Belgrade Badge. The Belgrade conference features its own badge designed by Voja Antonic. Voja will introduce the Belgrade badge and the theory of operation behind the LED matrix, keyboard, power management, infrared transceiver, and accelerometer.

Navid Gornall – How To Eat Your Own Face. The story of hacking a 3D printer to print burger selfies with mayo. Printing with a non-Newtonian condiment presents a unique set of challenges which will be explored in this presentation.

Tsvetan Usunov – Hacker Friendly OSHW DIY Modular Laptop. Tsvetan is the mind behind Olimex, manufacturer of various embedded development platforms and tools. He will talk about the creation of a modular, hacker friendly laptop based on a 64-bit ARM processor.

Chris Gammell – Top Down Electronics

Dejan Ristanovic – Serbia: Long Road To The Internet. During the 1980s and 1990s, we had to hack the system in many ways just to stay connected, and to reinvent the wheel three times before breakfast. We also had some results, including Sezam, the biggest BBS in this part of Europe

Kristina Kapanova – Designing A High Performance Parallel Personal Cluster. This talk introduces an open source, homebrew mini cluster consisting of a Radxa Pro single board computer based on the quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU. In particular, this talk demonstrates it is possible to achieve very advanced simulations in the field of quantum computing.

Sophi Kravitz – Creation, fabrication, and application by experimentation of the synchronization of a grid configuration of a light radiation orientation polarization illumination.

Seb Lee-Delisle – Making The Laser Light Synths. The Laser Light Synths are LED emblazoned musical instruments that anyone can play. Along with high power lasers, they form part of a large outdoor installation that switch the traditional roles of audience and performer.

Mike Harrison – Retrotechular : 1950s Video Projection Technology. A talk on the history and technology of the Eidophor, a little known, absurdly complicated, and very expensive product that dominated the large-screen projection market from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Peter Isza – Open Source Clinical Grade Electrocardiography. This talk covers the development of a true clinical grade, open source Holter ECG which will be sold for close to its manufacturing cost.

Paulina Stefanovic – Interactive Digital Storytelling Systems: Generative Interfaces, Authors and the Role of the Audience. This talk will cover the development and design of interactive content and interactive performance that shifts the focus from the creator of the system to the creative involvement of the audience.

BelgradeSpeakers-02-01

Introducing The Raspberry Pi 3

February 28, 2016 by 250 Comments

TL;DR: The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is out now. This latest model includes 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 running at 1.2 GHz. It’s a usable desktop computer. Available now at the usual Pi retailers for $35.

News of the latest Raspberry Pi swept around the Internet like wildfire this last weekend, thanks to a published FCC docs showing a Pi with on-board WiFi and Bluetooth. While we thank the dozens of Hackaday readers that wrote in to tell us about the leaked FCC documents, our lips have been sealed until now. We’ve been doing a few hands-on tests with the Pi 3 for about two weeks now, and the reality of the Pi 3 is much cooler than a few leaked FCC docs will tell you.

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B features a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 clocked at 1.2 GHz. This puts the Pi 3 roughly 50% faster than the Pi 2. Compared to the Pi 2, the RAM remains the same – 1GB of LPDDR2-900 SDRAM, and the graphics capabilities, provided by the VideoCore IV GPU, are the same as they ever were. As the leaked FCC docs will tell you, the Pi 3 now includes on-board 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0. WiFi, wireless keyboards, and wireless mice now work out of the box.

Continue reading “Introducing The Raspberry Pi 3” →

$79 Smart Mirror Uses Raspberry Pi

February 28, 2016 by 17 Comments

[Nathan] wanted a smart mirror that cost less than the last one he built, which was about $500. He decided that you don’t see more smart mirrors because of the high cost. His latest build came in at only $79 (you’ll have to visit the blog’s home page to find the entire series).

The most expensive piece of the build is a 7-inch monitor ($45). Any Raspberry Pi will work, although [Nathan] uses a Pi B+. Although he managed to score a free one-way mirror from a local glass shop, you can buy one for about $13.

This is the kind of project that isn’t a big technical challenge. After all, it is a one-way mirror with an LCD screen behind it. However, getting the screen blacked out and set to provide the best possible effect is the trick and [Nathan’s] techniques will give you a head start.

You can see the mirror in the video below. We’ve seen smart mirrors that sense your presence as well as wireless mirrors before.

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Hackaday Links: Leap Eve, 2016

February 28, 2016 by 3 Comments

The current Mac Pro is a masterpiece of design that looks like a trash can. We’ve been waiting for someone to take one of these computers and stuff a MiniITX board in there, but seeing as how the Mac Pro costs $3000, that probably won’t happen anytime soon. Here’s the solution. It’s a trash can computer case that is also too expensive for what it is. Now all we need is someone to put a big fan inside one and turn this computer into a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man.

[Mike Harrison] recently got his hands on a $20,000 SPARC CPU module. This is an enormously thick board that must be dozens of layers thick. How many layers was an open question until he put the board in a CNC milling machine. The setup is pretty much what you would expect with a few lines of g-code repeated over and over. The real trick comes from using one of the outputs for lubricant to trigger the shutter release on a camera. How many layers were in the CPU module? About 30, or something like that.

Almost a year ago, we saw the latest advances in perfboard. It was a perfboard with each hole connected to rows and columns on a selectively solderable orthogonal busses. Something like that. Actually, we still can’t wrap our head around it. Now, it’s a crowdfunding campaign with a few new and useful features. There’s also a layout tool that will show you where to place your components and where to make solder bridges.

[Ray Wilson] started Music From Outer Space, the place to learn about DIY analog synthesizers. Ray now has cancer, and as you can imagine, being a self-employed engineer specializing in analog synthesizers doesn’t provide great health coverage. [Ray]’s family set up a GoFundMe page to pay for the medical expenses.

We haven’t seen much in the land of 3D scanners, and we’re betting most of that is because they’re so expensive. The guys from CowTech have a kickstarter up for a 3D scanner that’s just $99. It’s based on the Ciclop scanner but designed around a custom Arduino shield and remains fully open source.

Remember the screen printed electroluminescent displays that were printed directly onto t-shirts from a few months ago? Now that company is working on a much cooler design: the Hackaday Jolly Wrencher. It works, but there are still a few problems: they’re setting the shirt on fire a little. Don’t worry, if these are ever reasonably safe and somewhat affordable, an EL Jolly Wrencher shirt will be in the Hackaday Store.

Need a rechargeable multimeter? It’s actually pretty easy. With an 18650 Lithium Ion cell and a 9V boost converter, this circuit will fit in most devices that need a 9V battery. To do this right, you’ll also need a USB charging port, to be used once every couple of years when the battery needs charging.

A Wooden Performance Is Fine WIth This Sequencer

February 28, 2016 by 11 Comments

You could sometimes be forgiven for thinking that making popular music has become too easy. With a laptop and suitable software almost anybody can now assemble something that had they secured the services of a canny promoter would be in with a shot at stardom. So many performances have been reduced to tightly choreographed dance acts to mask the absence of musicians or indeed musical talent, and our culture is poorer for it. It’s not that music made with modern technology or outside the performance is an indicator of lack of talent, indeed when a truly talented musician makes something with the resources of a modern technology the results are astounding. Instead it perhaps seems as though the technology is cheapened by an association with mediocrity when it should be a tool of greatness.

So it was with pleasure that we noticed a fresh project on Hackaday.io this morning which provides a marriage of accessible music technology and a requirement for performance. [Ernest Warzocha] has made a wooden sequencer.

It’s true, audio sequencers are old hat, so a new one will have to work hard to enthuse a seasoned Hackaday reader who’s seen it all. What makes [Ernest’s] sequencer different is that he’s made one with a very physical interface of wooden pucks placed in circular recesses on a wooden surface. Each recess has an infra-red reflective sensor that detects the surface texture of the puck placed in it and varies the sample it plays accordingly. It’s all held together underneath by an Arduino, and MP3 samples are played by a Sparkfun MP3 shield. At a stroke, he has turned the humble sequencer from a workaday studio tool into a performance art form that you can see in the video below, and we like that.

Home made sequencers have a special place in maker culture, and as you might expect over the years we’ve featured quite a few of them. Shift registers, CMOS analogue switches or even turntables as the sequencer elements, Lego as a human interface, a sequencer made from a cash register, and a rather lovely steampunk sequencer, to name but a few. So this one joins a rich tradition, and we look forward to more in the future.

Continue reading “A Wooden Performance Is Fine WIth This Sequencer” →

Password Extraction Via Front Doorbell

February 28, 2016 by 52 Comments

Not a day goes by without another IoT security hack. If you’re wondering why you don’t want your front doorbell connected to the Internet, this hack should convince you.

The hack is unfathomably stupid. You press the button on the back of the unit that pairs the doorbell with your home WiFi network, and it transmits the password in the clear. Sigh. It’s since been fixed, and we suppose that’s a good thing, but we can’t resist thinking for a moment about an alternative implementation.

Imagine, like all previous non-IoT wireless doorbells, that the doorbell transmitted a not-very coded signal over an open frequency like 433 MHz to a receiver inside your home. Do the same with the video stream. Now the receiver can be connected to the Internet, and can be significantly more secure because it’s behind your locked front door. The attack surface presented to the outside world by the doorbell itself is small, and limited to faking a doorbell press or showing you pictures you don’t want to see. Yawn.

But because the outside doorbell unit could be connected to a network, it was. Now the attack surface extends into your home’s network, and if you’re like most people, the WiFi router was your only real defense.

Now we love the IoT, in principle. There are tons of interesting applications that need the sort of bandwidth or remote availability that the Internet provides. We’re just not convinced yet that a doorbell, or a fridge for that matter, meet the criteria. But it does add a hundred bucks to the price tag, so that’s good, right? What do you think? When does the risk of IoT justify the reward?

Thanks [Dielectric] for the tip!

Rasberry Pi Analog Input Using Only Passive Components

February 28, 2016 by 18 Comments

The Raspberry Pi is a very capable device whose hardware has been pushed to the limit in all sorts of interesting ways. But even the most ingenious of experimenters have to agree on one point; it doesn’t possess an analog-to-digital converter. If you want analog inputs you will have to buy or build them.

[Mincepi] has done just that, but not as you might expect by adding an integrated circuit on one of the Pi’s interfaces. Instead the circuit [Mincepi] is using consists only of passive components, measuring the time taken to discharge the parasitic capacitance of one of the Pi’s inputs from logic 1 voltage to logic 0 voltage through a resistor into the voltage to be measured. This is a long-established approach to A to D conversion, one that was achieved back in the day with purpose-designed timers as microprocessor ancillaries.

The problem is that the Pi does not have a timer peripheral, so [Mincepi] has used the shift registers that form part of the Pi’s SPI and PCM inputs to perform this task on two channels. A sample rate of 100kHz and 6-bit resolution is claimed, with enough voltage range for a 1V peak-to-peak audio signal to be sampled.

Of course, simplicity does not guarantee a good ADC, and this circuit does not perform very well. It is noisy, non-linear, and as [Mincepi] puts it, probably sensitive to temperature. And though [Mincepi] talks in detail about the software to drive it, none is forthcoming. To quote: “It doesn’t include code since I’m in the process of writing a proper sound device module. My previous code was a simple character device, but it worked just fine, and served to prove the concept.”

We really want this to work, even if it’s not the best ADC ever. So we eagerly await the sound device module, and look forward to more news from the project.

This may be the simplest of simple ADCs we’ve yet featured here on Hackaday, but it’s not the first we’ve seen. There is this one using a comparator for example, or this one using a flip-flop. It is the essence of creative electronics to eke a function from a component that was never meant to be, please keep them coming!