Too Good To Throw Away: Dealing With An Out-Of-Control Junk Hoard

October 13, 2016 by 193 Comments

There it was, after twenty minutes of turning the place over, looking through assorted storage boxes. A Thinwire Ethernet network. About the smallest possible Thinwire Ethernet network as it happens, a crimped BNC lead about 100mm long and capped at each end by a T-piece and a 50 ohm terminator. I’d been looking for a BNC T-piece on which to hook up another terminator to a piece of test equipment, and I’d found two of them.

As I hooked up the test I wanted to run I found myself considering the absurdity of the situation. I last worked somewhere with a Thinwire network in the mid 1990s, and fortunately I am likely to never see another one in my life. If you’ve never encountered Thinwire, be thankful. A single piece of co-ax connecting all computers on the network, on which the tiniest fault causes all to fail.

So why had I held on to all the parts to make one, albeit the smallest possible variant? Some kind of memento, to remind me of the Good Old Days of running round an office with a cable tester perhaps? Or was I just returning to my past as a hoarder, like a Tolkienic dragon perched atop a mountain of electronic junk, and not the good kind of junk?

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Blinking An LED – Extreme Edition

October 13, 2016 by 57 Comments

This hacker’s video on blinking LEDs never got the recognition it deserves. At the time of writing clocking in at just 61 views, but it is indeed a work of art. Just trust me, scroll to the bottom of the article and watch it, you wont be disappointed.

Not convinced? OK, let me tell you about it and the world it has opened up in the Japanese maker scene. We’ve all blinked an LED. Maybe it was just to test a microcontroller, like the simplest Arduino example.

blink555

Or we’ve been a tad more old school and used the classic 555 to do it. Or maybe like me, you went through a phase of hacking together Phase Shift and other oscillators because well… it’s fun!

But [Junichi AKITA] has more extreme tastes, deciding that a custom IC layout is the way to go. [Junichi] designed a ring oscillator composed of flip-flops, then hand laid out each MOSFET placing each layer exactly where it should be fabricated.

The resulting design was then fabricated by an academic shuttle service in Japan (a bit like the well known MOSIS service). The result is a tiny circuit in the top right corner of the IC. Which of course [Junichi] then had to wirebond (check the video for a cool 1980s style Westbond machine which are still hugely popular in Japan).

IC Layout… by hand!
Optical image of the fabricated circuit.

[Junichi] bonded the die directly to a PCB (COB). I assume, purely for irony, a 555, and ATtiny based oscillator were also laid out on the board.

makelsi_icI guess you might have a couple of lingering questions. First you’ll likely bemoan your lack of your own fabrication facility (I’m still eyeing those used 1 micron fab lines that crop up on eBay from time to time). And secondly you might be asking yourself… why?

Both these questions are somewhat answers by the MakeLSI project. This growing project in Japan seems to have opened up semiconductor fabrication to all kinds of projects.

While my Japanese isn’t good enough to fully understand what’s happening it’s clear there are many awesome projects going on. Including joys such as IC layouts designed in vector graphics packages (Inkscape) and die images packed with interesting layouts, anime characters and QR codes.

For more awesome images and information (unfortunately all in Japanese) you can check them out on Facebook or on their homepage.

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Hackathon Alert: Clean Tech At TVCoG

October 13, 2016 by 2 Comments

At Hackaday, we get notified of a lot of the cool events going on in hackerspaces all around the world. We’d like to keep you informed too, just in case there’s something going on in your neighborhood.

So we’re going to start running a weekly column on Saturdays that groups together all of the upcoming week’s exceptional events and noteworthy gatherings. If your hackerspace has something going on, tell us about your event on or around the preceding Wednesday. We’ll see your space in on Hackaday!
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Hackaday Prize Entry: An Open Bluetooth Switch Interface

October 12, 2016 by 3 Comments

The theme of the last Hackaday Prize challenge was Assistive Technologies, and there is perhaps no assistive technology as desperately needed as a device to help people who can’t use common input devices. Using a keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen can be hard, but this Hackaday Prize project turns all these problems into a simple Bluetooth-enabled switch.

The BOSI – the Bluetooth Open Source Switch Interface – is, at its heart, just a big Bluetooth button inside a 3D-printed enclosure designed in Solidworks. These enclosures house a button connected to an Adafruit Bluefruit EZ-Key. Add a battery and a charging circuit, and you have a button that can be pressed by anyone, that connects to any device, and can do anything.

The real trick to a system like this is the software stack, and for this, BOSI can be used with iOS and OS X using the Switch Control interface. Android works, too, and the entire device is exceptionally usable for anyone that can’t use a normal input device. A great entry for the Hackaday Prize.

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Bike Saddle As Workshop Stool

October 12, 2016 by 37 Comments

It is not uncommon for parts from a particular hobby or pursuit to be repurposed by enthusiasts as furniture. Car nuts will make sofas from the rear bodywork of a saloon car, for example, or coffee tables from engine blocks as you might have seen in the Top Gear studio.

A cycling enthusiast asked [Quinn Dunki] to produce a workshop stool using a bicycle seat, and the resulting piece of furniture is both elegant and functional, if probably comfortable only to those used to a racing saddle.

The stool itself rests on a vertical tube with a tripod at the bottom, each leg of which is fitted with a caster. We are taken through the steps to make the metalwork, in particular the rather tricky 45 degree tubular joint required for each leg. We see the unexpectedly high forces above the casters cracking the initial tack welds, and the resulting more substantial joint. And finally we’re treated to the stool being elegantly modelled by Sprocket the cat, as you can see below the break.

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Fridge Parts Make Air Compressor That’s Easy On The Ears

October 12, 2016 by 46 Comments

Compressed air is great to have around the shop. The trouble is, most affordable compressors are somewhere between “wake the dead” and “the reason Pete Townshend is deaf” on the decibel scale. But with a little ingenuity and a willingness to compromise on performance, you might find this ultra-quiet, ultra-cheap air compressor a welcome way to keep the peace in your shop.

Yes, this compressor under-performs even a Harbor Freight pancake compressor which can be had for $60 and is ready to work right out of the box. In fact, [Eric Strebel]’s design sort of requires you to buy an air tank, and the easiest way to do that might be just to buy the compressor in the first place. But the off the shelf unit won’t run as quietly as this one does, what with a refrigerator compressor swapped in for the original motor and pump. There’s also a silencer on the input side, fashioned from a shaving cream can and some metal wool. The video below shows the build, and the results are impressive, at least from a noise perspective. Whether it suits your shop depends on your application – it certainly won’t run an impact wrench, but it’ll blow chips off your mill or dust out of your computer.

Fridge compressors are a natural starting point for air compressor builds, like this fire extinguisher based design, or this high-pressure tandem compressor. But if you need high flow and don’t care about the racket, try ganging four HF compressors in parallel.

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Become Very Unpopular Very Fast With This DIY EMP Generator

October 12, 2016 by 144 Comments

Taking a break from his book, “How to Gain Enemies and Encourage Hostility,” [FPS Weapons] shows us how to build our own handheld EMP generator which can be used to generate immediate dislike from anyone working on something electronic at the hackerspace.

The device is pretty simple. A DC source, in this case an 18650 lithium battery cell, sends power to an “Ultra High Voltage 1000kV Ignition Coil” (as the eBay listing calls it), when a button is pressed. A spark gap is used to dump a large amount of magic pixies into the coil all at once, which generates a strong enough magnetic pulse to induce an unexpected voltage inside of a piece of digital electronics. This usually manages to fire a reset pin or something equivalent, disrupting the device’s normal operation.

While you’re not likely to actually damage anything in a dramatic way with this little EMP, it can still interrupt an important memory write or radio signal and damage it that way. It’s a great way to get the absolute shock of your life if you’re not careful. Either from the HVDC converter or the FCC fines. Video after the break.

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