Cheap character LCD displays are more versatile than we give them credit for. Most of the cheapies have a 5×8 character display, which looks blocky but legible when you have an appropriate font. Where it gets fun is that most of the LCD displays also let you upload custom characters.
Taking this to the extreme, [numeric] abused the user-defined characters to write a tiny game of Tetris that would run in the 10×16 frame that you get when you combine four characters together. It’s tiny, it’s monochrome, and doesn’t play the Troika theme (which may be a good thing), but it’s playable. Check out the video below.
Imagine if the Snap-on tool truck wasn’t filled with hand tools. Imagine if that Snap-on truck was a mobile electronics surplus shop. That’s the idea behind the Travelling Hacker Box. It’s a box, shipped from hacker to hacker, filled with weird and esoteric components, enough parts to build a 3D printer, and enough capacitors to stop an elephant’s heart.
If this is the first time you’ve heard about the Travelling Hacker Box, here’s the quick FAQ to get you up to speed. Has this been done before? Yes, yes it has. The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronics Junk was a ‘thing’ done by Evil Mad Scientist back in the ‘aughts. Hackaday (or rather the old commander in chief Eliot) received one of these boxes, and sent it off to [Bre Pettis]. Keep in mind, this was in 2008. Is there more than one Travelling Hacker Box actively travelling? No. Because I don’t want to organize a second. Either way, the Travelling Hacker Box has two goals: distance travelled and number of people visited. With just one box, we can maximize both objectives. What are the current travel plans? That’s the next paragraph.
The travels of the Travelling Hacker Box Mk. 2
As of right now, the second version of the Travelling Hacker Box – the first box was stolen by some waste of oxygen in Georgia – has travelled at least 21,838 miles around the United States, visiting 11 prolific hackaday.io contributors in Wyoming, New York, Alaska, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Florida, Wisconsin, Maine, and California. The goal for the first dozen or so trips across the United States was to put miles on the box. 25,000 miles would be equivalent to a trip around the world using only US Postal Service flat rate boxes. Thanks to [Lloyd T Cannon]’s reinforcement of a medium flat rate box with canvas, foam, Kevlar, and custard, this iteration of the Travelling Hacker Box has held up spectacularly.
The goal for the next two months is to make a trip around the United States to maximize the number of US hackers who contributed to the box. This trip will start in Pasadena, CA, go up the west coast to Seattle, loop around the Canadian border to New England, go down the Eastern seaboard, across to Texas, over the desert, and land back at Home Base in Pasadena. From there, the Travelling Hacker Box is off to England, the EU, Asia, India, maybe Africa, and Australia.
While there are already a few people scheduled for this last trip around the US, more are needed. If you’re interested, check out the project on hackaday.io, request to join the project, send a message on the team chat, and generally bug me on the hackaday.io chat. There are plenty of spaces to fill in this last trip around the US and the current inventory is quite a haul. Not bad for a project that will eventually be stolen.
The time has arrived, the greatest hardware conference on earth has landed in Belgrade, Serbia. All of the talks are live streaming now! The lineup of speakers is incredible and you can bask in every minute of it.
Don’t settle for a one-way media experience. Take part in the conversation with the live chat. Click the “request to join this project” button in the upper right of the Hackaday Belgrade Project page.
There’s always one more thing, right? Hack the badge! Try your hand at writing code for the badge using the software emulator, then submit it to the competition. We’ll be starting the Badge demo party at 23:45 (UTC+1). Want someone to try your code out on a badge ahead of time? Just jump on the chat (mentioned above) and ask!
Want to feel the pulse of the hardware community in Europe… this is it.
Some presentations get a bit technical, which isn’t bad, but what is so interesting about this one is the clear explanation of what the market was like, and what it was like for the user during this time. For example, one bit we found really interesting was the mention of later games not supporting some of the neat color hacks for CGA because they couldn’t emulate it fully on the VGA cards they were developing on. Likewise, It was interesting to see why a standard like RGBI even existed in the first place with his comparison of text in composite, and much clearer text in RGBI.
We learned a lot, and some mysteries about the bizarre color choices in old games make a lot more sense now. Video after the break.
With a welder and a bunch of scrap, you can build just about anything that moves. Want a dune buggy? That’s just some tube and a pipe bender. Need a water pump? You might need a grinder. A small tractor? Just find some big knobby tires in a junkyard. Of course, the one thing left out of all these builds is a small motor, preferably one that can run on everything from kerosene to used cooking oil. This is the problem [Shane] is tackling for his entry to the 2016 Hackaday Prize. It’s an Open Source Two-Stroke Diesel Engine that’s easy for anyone to build and has minimal moving parts.
[Shane]’s engine is based on the Junkers Jumo 205 motor, a highly successful aircraft engine first produced in the early 1930s and continued production through World War II. This is a weird engine, with two opposed pistons in one cylinder that come very close to slamming together. It’s a great design for aircraft engines due to it’s lightweight construction. And the simplicity of the system lends itself easily to wartime field maintenance.
The Jumo 205 was a monstrous 12-piston, 6-cylinder engine, but for [Shane]’s first attempt, he’s scaling the design down to a 50cc motor with the intent of scaling the design up to 125cc and 250cc. So far, [Shane] has about 30 hours of simple CAD work behind him and a ton of high-level FEA work ahead of him. Then [Shane] will actually need to build a prototype.
This is actually [Shane]’s second entry to the Hackaday Prize with this idea. Last year, he threw his hat into the ring with the same idea, but building a working diesel power plant is a lot of work. Too much for one man-year, certainly, so we can’t wait to see the progress [Shane] makes this year.
What’s more seductive than a claw machine? After all, how hard can it be to snag that $2 teddy bear that is practically poking out of the pile of merchandise? But after 20 quarters, you realize you’ve spent $5, and you still don’t have anything to show for it.
[CreativeGuy88] decided to build his own claw machine (that way, he gets to keep the quarters). This sizable build is as much woodworking project as anything. However, the motors and control joysticks require electrical wiring and [CreativeGuy88] used Lego bricks to make much of the carriage.
Fictiv runs a 3D printing shop. They have a nice interface and an easy to understand pricing scheme. As community service, or just for fun, they decided to tear-down two robot vacuums and critique their construction while taking really nice pictures.
The first to go is the iRobot 650 model. For anyone who’s ever taken apart an iRobot product, you’ll be happy to know that it’s the same thousand-screws-and-bits-of-plastic ordeal that it always was. However, rather than continue their plague of the worst wire routing imaginable, they’ve switched to a hybrid of awfulness and a clever card edge system to connect the bits and pieces.
The other bot is the Neato XV-11. It has way fewer screws and plastic parts, and they even tear down the laser rangefinder module that’s captured many a hacker’s attention. The wire routing inside the Neato is very well done and nicely terminated in hard-to-confuse JST connectors. Every key failure point on the Neato, aside from the rangefinder, can be replaced without disassembling the whole robot. Interestingly, the wheels on both appear to be nearly identical.
In the end they rate the Neato a better robot, but the iRobot better engineered. Though this prize was given mostly for the cleverness of the card edge connectors.
