Hackaday Belgrade Talks Will Live Stream Saturday

April 4, 2016 by 4 Comments

We have an amazing line-up of talks for Hackaday | Belgrade, Saturday April 9, in Belgrade, Serbia. The talks have been sold out for weeks. You can still get a ticket to the night’s concerts if you’re in the area. Either way, the big news this morning is that we will stream all of the talks live!

Live-stream links will be posted on the conference page as soon as we get them. You should also join the chat over on the Hackaday | Belgrade project page. Just click the “request to join this project” button in the upper right. Do that right now.

There are a ton of great speakers, check the poster below. I’m excited to hear Mike Harrison (mikeselectricstuff) speak about his journey down the rabbit hole of video projection tech, Phoenix Perry’s talk on Forward Futures, Voja Anotic’s talk about the hardware badge, Peter Philip’s talk about reinventing VHDL, and pretty much all of the rest too! From the Hackaday crew you can watch Sophi Kravitz give a talk on her shutter glass project, Chris Gammell will be talking Top Down Electronics, and I will end the 8-versus-32 argument once and for all (yeah right!).

While you’re listening to the talks, why not try your hand at badge hacking. You don’t need any hardware, you can use the emulator to try out your hacked code right now your own computer. We’ll be sending out prizes for the best entries and there are only a handful so far.

You do not want to miss these talks! If you don’t believe me, check out the talks from SuperCon last November and you’ll be convinced — Hackaday conferences provide the best collection of hardware talks anywhere.

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Full-size AT-ST Star Wars Build

April 4, 2016 by 30 Comments

Think you made a cool tree-house for your kids? Sorry to burst your bubble, but we don’t think anything can top this full-size 1:1 replica of a Star Wars AT-ST — complete with sound effects and moving turrets! Did we mention it seats two?

Built in his backyard, this AT-ST is constructed of wood, plastic, and sheet metal. On the inside it is decked out with joysticks, display panels, and other knobs and buttons for your imagination to go wild with. It even features solar panels on the roof to power two ventilation fans to keep you cool while daydreaming of blowing up Rebel scum on Hoth.

Stay tuned after the break to see a video of it in action.

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The Ultraviolet Catastrophe

April 4, 2016 by 63 Comments

As the light of the 20th century was peeking over the horizon, a young physicist by the name of Max Planck was taking to heart some career advice he had received while he attended Munich University in Germany. With the recent discovery of thermodynamics, there wasn’t much left in physics to know, or so his adviser thought. Hindsight is indeed 20/20.

It turns out that Planck was an expert at thermodynamics. Having mastered the subject gave him some leverage to use against a growing group of physicists known as atomists who were using statistical models along with so called ‘atoms’ to predict experimental outcomes. Atomists believed that matter was composed of discrete units. Planck believed the world was continuous and could not be divided into any type of discrete component. And he would draw the second law of thermodynamics from his holster and put this atom idea in the clay.

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Screw Drive Tractor Hasn’t Conquered Canada Yet

April 4, 2016 by 30 Comments

[REDNIC79] lives somewhere in Canada where key terrain features include mud and snow. Half pontoon boat, half auger, screw-propelled vehicles excel in this kind of terrain as long as you’re okay with going really slow.

In his 11-and-counting part video series, [REDNIC79] goes through the conversion of a lawn tractor into a slow, theoretically unstoppable, Canadian screw-propelled tractor. He welds a frame, plonks some beefy chains on it, and throws a few hefty looking bearing mounts on there to boot. Then he makes some screws out of gas tanks; which was an enormous amount of work.

It was time to fire up the tractor. On the first muddy incline encountered, the tractor ceased to move. The culprit? A cracked transmission housing. Ouch. The end of the shaft holding the chain for the right screw was unsupported. When the shaft turned, it imparted its rotational force, but there was also an unconsidered down force on the end of the shaft, which resulted in a moment the bell housing wasn’t designed for.

Undeterred, [REDNIC79] welded the housing back together and threw a bearing on the end of the offending shaft to balance the moments. He fired it up, engaged the transmission, and the right screw bearing pillow block completely shattered. Ouch again. We can safely begin to assume that screw-propelled vehicles see a lot of forces.

[REDNIC79] hasn’t shelved the project yet. His next plan is to beef up the supports and build a much larger set of screws with smaller blades out of some propane tanks. This should reduce the force the power house needs to put out. Video of the first fail after the break. Continue reading “Screw Drive Tractor Hasn’t Conquered Canada Yet” →

3D Printing A Fake Product Leak

April 4, 2016 by 6 Comments

A few days ago you might have seen images floating around the net of the next Nintendo console controller, The Nintendo NX. There were so many pictures, it just had to be real!

Wrong. It was just [Frank Sandqvist] messing with everyone on the Internet. While phony product leaks are usually just photoshopped or 3D modeled renders, [Frank] took it a step further and actually designed a whole controller, 3D printed it, and took pictures of it. You might be wondering why he would do this. As a Reddit user points out there could be an excellent motive behind it:

You could also use it to get a job as a prop maker. It would look awesome on a CV that you made a prop that fooled the world — [Critters]

But, according to [Frank] it was really just for fun.

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A 2,200 Pound Personal Computer

April 3, 2016 by 46 Comments

[Connor Krukosky] wanted to buy another computer. Even though he is only 18, he had his first computer at 18 months old. He’s had plenty since then and his interest in computers led him to pursue a career in electrical engineering. A few years ago, [Conner] started collecting vintage computers.

He’d bought up some Apple computers, terminals, and even a Data General minicomputer. Then he found a notice that Rutgers was auctioning off an IBM z890 mainframe computer. People warned [Conner] that this wasn’t a desktop workstation, it was a 2,200 pound case that probably wouldn’t fit through standard doors.

He was undeterred. He won the auction for under $240. The real expense, of course, would be moving it. He planned to make two trips: One to strip the machine to parts and bring some parts back and then a second trip to get the remaining parts.

You can see in the video below that he had a lot of adventure moving the beast. Things didn’t fit and even some excavation had to happen to get the computer in his basement.

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Think Globally, Build Locally With These Open-Source Recycling Machines

April 3, 2016 by 29 Comments

Walk on almost any beach or look on the side of most roads and you’ll see the bottles, bags, and cast-off scraps of a polymeric alphabet soup – HDPE, PET, ABS, PP, PS. Municipal recycling programs might help, but what would really solve the problem would be decentralized recycling, and these open-source plastics recycling machines might just jump-start that effort.

We looked at [Precious Plastic] two years back, and their open-source plans for small-scale plastic recycling machines have come a long way since then. They currently include a shredder, a compression molder, an injection molder, and a filament extruder. The plans specify some parts that need to be custom fabricated, like the shredder’s laser-cut stainless steel teeth, but most can be harvested from a scrapyard. As you can see from the videos after the break, metal and electrical fabrication skills are assumed, but the builds are well within the reach of most hackers. Plans for more machines are in the works, and there’s plenty of room to expand and improve upon the designs.

We think [Precious Plastic] is onto something here. Maybe a lot of small recyclers is a better approach than huge municipal efforts, which don’t seem to be doing much to help.  Decentralized recycling can create markets that large-scale manufacturing can’t be bothered to tap, especially in the developing world. After all, we’ve already seen a plastic recycling factory built from recycled parts making cool stuff in Brazil.

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