Jenkins And Slack Report Build Failure! Light The Beacons!

November 19, 2016 by 10 Comments

When you have a large software development team working on a project, monitoring the build server is an important part of the process. When a message comes in from your build servers, you need to take time away from what you’re doing to make sure the build’s not broken and, if it’s broken because of something you did, you have to stop what you’re doing, start fixing it and let people know that you’re on it.

[ridingintraffic]’s team uses Jenkins to automatically build their project and if there’s a problem, it sends a message to a Slack channel. This means the team needs to be monitoring the Slack channel, which can lead to some delays. [ridingintraffic] wanted immediate knowledge of a build problem, so with some software, IoT hardware, and a rotating hazard warning light, the team now gets a visible message that there’s a build problem.

An Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 board is used as the controller, connected to some RF controlled power outlets via a 434MHz radio module. To prototype the system, [ridingintraffic] used an Arduino hooked up to one of the RF modules to sniff out the codes for turning the power outlets on and off from their remotes. With the codes in hand, work on the Huzzah board began.

An MQTT broker is used to let the Huzzah know when there’s been a build failure. If there is, the Huzzah turns the light beacon on via the power outlets. A bot running on the Slack channel listens for a message from one of the developers saying that problem is being worked on, and when it gets it, it sends the MQTT broker a message to turn the beacon off.

There’s also some separation between the internal network, the Huzzahs, and the Slack server on the internet, and [ridingintraffic] goes over the methods used to communicate between the layers in a more detailed blog post. Now, the developers in [ridingintraffic]’s office don’t need to be glued to the Slack channel, they will not miss the beacon when it signals to start panicking!

Stairwell Lights Keep Toddler With Night-Blindness Safe

November 19, 2016 by 25 Comments

A devastating diagnosis for a young child is every parent’s worst nightmare. All too often there’s nothing that can be done, but occasionally there’s a window of opportunity to make things better for the child, even if we can’t offer a cure. In that case even a simple hack, like a rapid response stairwell light to help deal with night-blindness, can make a real difference.

[Becca] isn’t yet a year old, but she and her parents carry a heavy burden. She was born with Usher Syndrome, an extremely rare genetic disease that affects hearing and vision to different degrees. In [Becca]’s case, she was born profoundly deaf and will likely lose her sight by the time she’s 10 or so. Her dad [Jake] realized that the soon-to-be-toddler was at risk due to a dark stairwell and the night-blindness that accompanies Usher, so he came up with a simple tech solution to the problem.

He chose Philips Hue LED light strips to run up the stringer of the stairs controlled by a Raspberry Pi. Originally he planned to use IFTTT for the job but the latency resulted in the light not switching on fast enough. He ended up using a simple PIR motion sensor which the Pi monitors and then uses the Hue API to control the light. This will no doubt give him a platform for future capabilities to help [Becca].

We’ve covered a few builds where parents have hacked solutions for their kids, like this custom media center for the builder’s autistic son. We suspect [Jake] has a few more tricks up his sleeve to help [Becca], and we’re looking forward to seeing how she does.

Ruggedizing A Cheap Camera For Spacecraft Testing

November 19, 2016 by 13 Comments

Name the countries that house a manned space program. In order of arrival in space, USSR/Russian Federation, United States of America, People’s Republic of China. And maybe one day, Denmark. OK, not the Danish government. But that doesn’t stop the country having a manned space program, in the form of Copenhagen Suborbitals. As the tagline on their website has it: “We’re 50 geeks building and flying our own rockets. One of us will fly into space“. If that doesn’t catch the attention of Hackaday readers, nothing will.

For their rocket testing they need a lot of video feeds, and for that they use cheap Chinese GoPro clones. The problem with these (and we suspect many other cameras) is that when subjected to the temperature and vibration of being strapped to a rocket, they cease to work. And since even nonprofit spaceflight engineers are experts at solving problems, they’ve ruggedized the cameras to protect them from vibration and provide adequate heatsinking.

The heat issue is addressed by removing the camera case and attaching its metal chassis directly to a heatsink that forms the end of an extruded aluminium case. Vibration was causing the camera SD cards to come loose, so these are soldered into their sockets. Power is provided by a pair of 18650 cells with a switching regulator to provide internal power, and another to allow the unit to be charged from a wide range of input voltages. A PCB houses both the regulators and sockets for cable distribution. There is even a socket on top of the case to allow a small monitor to be mounted as a viewfinder. Along the way they’ve created a ruggedized camera that we think could have many applications far beyond rocket testing. Maybe they should sell kits!

We’ve covered Copenhagen Suborbitals before quite a few times, from their earliest news back in 2010, through a look at their liquid-fueled engine, to a recent successful rocket launch. We want to eventually report on this project achieving its aim.

Thanks [Morten] for the tip.

Under The (Linux) Hood

November 19, 2016 by 53 Comments

We’ve often heard that you don’t need to know how an engine works to drive a car, but you can bet that professional race car drivers know. By analogy, you can build lots of systems with off-the-shelf boards like Raspberry Pis and program that using Python or some other high-level abstraction. The most competent hackers, though, know what’s going on inside that Pi and what Python is doing under the hood down to some low level.

If you’ve been using Linux “under the hood” often means understanding what happens inside the kernel–the heart of the Linux OS that manages and controls everything. It can be a bit daunting; the kernel is simple in concept, but has grown over the years and is now a big chunk of software to approach.

Your first embedded system project probably shouldn’t be a real time 3D gamma ray scanner. A blinking LED is a better start. If you are approaching the kernel, you need a similar entry level project. [Stephen Brennan] has just the project for you: add your own system call to a custom Linux kernel.

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Hackenings: Technologica Incognita Parties After SHA2017 Plans

November 19, 2016 by 6 Comments

Welcome to [Hackenings], our weekly calendar of what’s going on in the global hackerspace community this week. As ever, if you have any upcoming events that you’d like us to cover, email us at tips@hackaday.com and put [Hackenings] in the subject so that we don’t miss it.

TechInc Turns Five!

Technologia Incognita is a five-year-old hackerspace in Amsterdam, and they’re having a party on the 26th. How do you celebrate five years of social hacking, creative cooking, and general geekery? With more of the same, plus drinks. If you’ve never been to TechInc, you’ll find directions here.

The TechInc crew is not all play and no work, however. Their party coincides with the end of the second organizational planning meeting for SHA2017, a summer outdoor camping hacker camp/festival/conference that’s going to take place next summer, not coincidentally just outside of Amsterdam.

The European hacker scene is a little bit like international soccer / football — every four years there’s a World Cup, and in the off years there are equally important regional tournaments. The German Chaos Communication Camp and the Dutch series-of-camps-that-changes-name-every-time are like this, but for us. If you missed the CCC last summer, or ToorCamp this summer, then start making plans for SHA2017 next summer.

Don’t Forget Dublin

We mentioned this last week, but TOG Hackerspace in Dublin is having a 36 hour hackathon starting today (the 19th). This looks like a great time to get together with other nerds and make something crazy in a shortish amount of time. If you’re anywhere nearby, you should head on over. After all, it’s for science!

New Record For Balloon: Duration Aloft

November 19, 2016 by 14 Comments

High-altitude balloon flights have become somewhat of a known quantity these days. Although it’s still a fun project that’ll bring your hackerspace together on a complex challenge, after the first balloon or two, everyone starts to wonder”what next?”. Higher? Faster? Further? Cheaper? More science? There are a variety of different challenges out there.

A group of Stanford students just bagged a new record, longest time in flight, with their SSI-41 mission. In addition to flying from coast to coast, on a track that went waaaay up into Canadian airspace, they logged 79 hours of flight time.

altvstimeThe secret? Val-Bal. A “valve ballast” gas venting valve and ballast dispenser system that kept the balloon from going too high (and popping) or dropping back down to earth. The balance seems to have worked nearly perfectly — check the altitude profile graph. We’d love to see more details about this system. If anyone out there on the team does a writeup, let us know?

There are as many interesting ways to get into high-altitude ballooning as there are hackers. We love the extreme economy of the Pico Space Balloon project, which has gone around the world (twice!) on a solar-powered party balloon. And we’ll give both the best-name and ridiculous-concept awards to the Tetroon. But for now, most time aloft goes to the Stanford team. Congrats!

[via the Bangor Daily News, if you can believe that]

EM Drive Paper Published By Eagleworks Team

November 19, 2016 by 131 Comments

There are one or two perennial scientific stories that sound just too good to be true, but if they delivered on their promise would represent a huge breakthrough and instantly obsolete entire fields. One example is so-called “cold fusion”, the idea that nuclear fusion could be sustained with a net energy release at room temperature rather than super-high temperature akin to that of the sun. We all wish it could work, but so far it has obstinately refused. As a TV actor portraying a space engineer of the future once said, one “cannae change the Laws of Physics“.
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