DIY Plant LED Light Prototype Lights Up The Winter

October 8, 2016 by 25 Comments

With winter on the way, our thoughts turn to indoor hacks. And what could be better in the cold winter than fresh veggies? This can be done by replacing the sun with an LED light, and [Margaret Johnson], aka [Bitknitting] has been working on building her own LED plant light.

She’s using a combination of red and blue LEDs that produce the ratio of light frequencies that plants thrive on, and has been experimenting with how bright to make them and how long to run them. This combination of factors determines how much light the plants get every day, called the Daily Light Integral, or DLI, and has a huge effect on how well the plants grow.

Her latest prototype uses nine red and two blue 3 Watt LEDs which run for about twenty hours a day. These lights shine onto the growing area, a bucket filled with nutrient solution. [Margaret] has done an excellent job of outlining why and how she made the choices she did and providing lots of links to more information for the home grower. It’s a great place to start for anyone looking to get something growing indoors in the depths of winter.

Minimal Computer And Operating System: One Button, One LED

October 8, 2016 by 15 Comments

DUO BINARY is a very, very small computer system in every possible sense. It runs on an ATtiny84, which has even got “tiny” in its name. The user interface is a single button for data entry and a single LED for feedback, making this binary keyboard look frivolously over-complicated. It uses a devilish chimera of Morse code and a truncated ASCII to enter data, and the LED blinks the same back at you.

We’re guessing that [Jack Eisenmann] is the only person in the world who can control this thing, and you can watch him doing so in the video embedded below. Continue reading “Minimal Computer And Operating System: One Button, One LED” →

The Haunting Last Day Of Hot Metal Typesetting At The New York Times

October 8, 2016 by 47 Comments

The short film, Farewell — ETAOIN SHRDLU, produced in 1978 covers the very last day the New York Times was set for printing in the old way, using hot metal typesetting.

We’ve covered the magic of linotype machines before, but to see them used as they were in their prime is something else. They saw nearly a hundred years of complete industry dominance. Linotype machines had entire guilds dedicated to their use. Tradesmen built their lives around them. For some of us we see the rise and fall of technology as an expected thing. Something that happens normally, sometimes within spans that cover only a few short years. Yet it’s still a strange thing to see a technology so widely used shut down so completely and relatively rapidly.

To make it even stranger, the computer that replaced the linotype machines is so alien to the technology used today that even it is an oddity. In the end only the shadow of the ‘new’ technologies — showcased as state of the art in this video — are still in use. Nonetheless it’s important to see where we came from and to understand what it means to innovate. Plus, you never know when you see an old idea that’s ready for a bit of refurbishment. Who knows, maybe part of the linotype’s spirit is ready to be reborn, and all it takes is a clever hacker to see it.

Oh, and that title — ‘etaoin shrdlu‘ — is the linotype equivalent of ‘qwerty’. The first two columns of keys on the linotype machine make up those two words.

Continue reading “The Haunting Last Day Of Hot Metal Typesetting At The New York Times” →

NASA Knows Where The Meteors Are

October 8, 2016 by 30 Comments

NASA has been tracking bright meteoroids (“fireballs”) using a distributed network of video cameras pointed upwards. And while we usually think of NASA in the context of multi-bazillion dollar rocket ships, but this operation is clearly shoe-string. This is a hack worthy of Hackaday.

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The basic idea is that with many wide-angle video cameras capturing the night sky, and a little bit of image processing, identifying meteoroids in the night sky should be fairly easy. When enough cameras capture the same meteoroid, one can use triangulation to back out the path of the meteoroid in 3D, estimate its mass, and more. It’s surprising how many there are to see on any given night.

You can watch the videos of a meteoroid event from any camera, watch the cameras live, and even download the meteoroid’s orbital parameters. We’re bookmarking this website for the next big meteor shower.

cameraThe work is apparently based on [Rob Weryk]’s ASGARD system, for which the code is unfortunately unavailable. But it shouldn’t be all that hard to hack something together with a single-board computer, camera, and OpenCV. NASA’s project is limited to the US so far, but we wonder how much more data could be collected with a network of cameras all over the globe. So which ones of you are going to take up our challenge? Build your own version and let us know about it!

Between this project and the Radio Meteor Zoo, we’re surprised at how much public information there is out there about the rocky balls of fire that rain down on us every night, and will eventually be responsible for our extinction. At least we can be sure we’ll get it on film.

Hackerspace Takes Fume Extraction Seriously

October 8, 2016 by 23 Comments

At first we laughed at the ridiculously over-the-top fume extraction system this hackerspace built for itself. Then we thought about seriously questionable donation rolls of solder some of the members managed to find and bring in. The kind of roll where the local greybeard assures you that a Californian State Trooper has permission to shoot you if you try to take it into the state, but damn does it solder well. They may be onto something is all we’re saying. But on a serious note, for a communal space like this one, a great air quality plan makes the place a lot more pleasant, if not safer at the same time.

The build uses a regular boost fan for its main suction and pulls the fumes out to a place the members aren’t. Knowing hackerspaces that could be anything from an empty alley to vents on the building’s roof. It’s actually an interesting challenge to solve in a rented space (please share your own solutions for “daylighting” to the outside in the comments).

The frame is made from ducting and dryer hose. Since there aren’t really fittings for this. Most of the joints were designed in OpenSCAD and 3D printed. At each end of the tube a computer fan provides another little boost of airflow. We like the stands to position each end of the hose at the fume source. All of it is powered by a distribution box of their own making with the juice being fed with repurposed Ethernet cables to the fans at the ends of the hose.

It’s a nice build and likely extended the life of a few of the more electronically active members in the space. Especially if the retired radio enthusiasts decide to do their fifty year anniversary garage cleaning and gift upon the space their findings.

Wireless Trivia Game Buzzers Using HopeRF RFM69

October 8, 2016 by 2 Comments

TV game shows follow a formula that hasn’t changed much in sixty years. The celebrity presenter, the glamorous assistant, the catch phrases, the gaudy plywood sets, the nervous contestants, and of course the buzzers.

If you want to do a trivia quiz of your own it’s easy enough to dispense with presenter, assistant, set, and catch phrase, but as well as the contestants you’ll still need the buzzers. You can make a mess of wires that the TV technicians of old would have concealed within that set, but in your home or at the pub that could rapidly become inconvenient.

[Larry] solved his trivia game buzzer problems by building a wireless buzzer set. It features 3D printed enclosures containing Adafruit Feather microcontrollers, and instead of wires it uses RFM69 900MHz radio modules. The master unit displays the quickest contestant on an OLED screen, it features a low power standby mode between button presses to save battery power, and care has been taken to add a random timing to button presses to try to avoid collisions.

The buttons themselves started with a 3D printed button working a single tactile switch, but moved to a set of three switches in a triangle after edge presses failed to activate the single switch.

We’ve featured a wired game show buzzer before, but for the complete game show experience how about this countdown timer?

Design And Testing Of The Form 2

October 8, 2016 by 1 Comment

Formlabs makes a pretty dang good SLA printer by all accounts. Though a bit premium in the pricing when compared to the more humble impact of FDM printers on the wallet, there’s a bit more to an SLA printer. The reasoning becomes a bit more obvious when reading through this two part series on the design and testing of the Form 2.

It was interesting to see what tests they thought were necessary to ensure the reliable operation of the machine. For example the beam profile of every single laser that goes into a printer is tested to have the correctly shaped spot. We also thought the Talcum powder test was pretty crazy. They left a printer inside a sandblast cabinet and blasted it with Talcum powder to see if dust ingress could cause the printer to fail; it didn’t.

The prototyping section was a good read. Formlabs was praised early on for the professional appearance of their printers. It was interesting to see how they went from a sort of hacky looking monstrosity to the final look. They started by giving each engineer a Form 1 and telling them to modify it in whatever way they thought would produce a better layer separation mechanism. Once they settled on one they liked they figured out how much space they’d need to hold all the new mechanics and electronics. After that it was up to the industrial designer to come up with a look that worked.

They’re promising a third part of the series covering how the feedback from beta testing was directed back into the engineering process. All in all the Form 2 ended up being quite a good printer and the reviews have been positive. The resin from Formlab is a little expensive, but unlike others they still allow users to put the printer in open mode and use other resin if they’d like. It was cool to see their engineering process.