The EAGLE Has Landed: At Autodesk!

June 29, 2016 by 82 Comments

The selloffs continue at Farnell! We’d previously reported that the UK distributor of electronics parts was being sold to a Swiss distributor of electronics parts. Now it looks like they’re getting rid of some of their non-core businesses, and in this case that means CadSoft EAGLE, a popular free-for-limited-use PCB layout suite.

But that’s not the interesting part: they sold EAGLE to Autodesk!

Autodesk had a great portfolio of professional 3D-modeling tools, and has free versions of a good number of their products. (Free as in beer. You don’t get to see the code or change it.) By all accounts, the professional versions of their tools are very professional if you can afford them, and the trial versions are still useful. This makes EAGLE slot very nicely into their business model, filling a hole (PCB design) in their toolchain.

What does this mean for those of you out there still using EAGLE instead of open-source alternatives? (We haven’t used EAGLE since KiCAD got good a couple years back.) Beats us! Care to speculate wildly? That’s why we have a comments section. Go! In the mean time we hope to have more info for you directly from Autodesk soon so stay tuned to the front page.

Reverse Engineering The OWON SDS7102 Oscilloscope

June 29, 2016 by 23 Comments

It is something of a rite of passage for an electronics enthusiast, the acquisition of a first oscilloscope. In decades past that usually meant a relatively modest instrument, maybe a 20MHz bandwidth and dual trace if you were lucky. Higher spec devices were eye-wateringly expensive monsters, not for the Common People.

We are fortunate that like most other areas of technology the world of test equipment has benefited in the last few years both from developments in digital technology and from the growth in Chinese manufacturing. If your first ‘scope is that second-hand 20MHz CRT you will probably secure it for pennies, and the first ‘scope you buy new will probably have a spec closer to those unattainable super-scopes of yesteryear. Gone is the CRT and timebase generator, in its place a TFT, system-on-chip, and super-fast A to D converter.

[Christer Weinigel] has just such an entry-level modern digital ‘scope, an OWON SDS7102. He comments that it’s got an impressive spec for its price, though the input is noisier than you’d expect on a more expensive device, and the software has one or two annoying bugs. Having owned it for a while, he’s now subjected it to a lengthy teardown and reverse engineer, and he’s posted his findings in a succession of blog posts.

[Christer]’s interest lay mainly in the OWON’s digital section, it seems there is already a substantial community paying attention to its analog front end. He’s deduced how its internals are connected, ported Linux to its Samsung SoC in the scope, succeeded in getting its peripherals working, and set to work programming the Xilinx FPGA that’s responsible for signal processing.

The series of posts is a fascinating read as a run through the process of reverse engineering , but he points out that it’s quite a lot of information. If you are just interested in how a cheap modern oscilloscope works, he says, he suggests reading his post in which he recaps on all its different components.

He also makes a plea for help, he’s no slouch on the ‘scope’s software but admits he’s a bit out of his depth on some aspects of the FPGA. If you’re an FPGA wizard with an interest in ‘scopes, he’d like to hear from you.

This isn’t the first time we’ve featured ‘scope reverse engineering here at Hackaday, though it may be more in-depth than others. In the past we’ve seen a Uni-T screen grab protocol laid bare, and an investigation of a Rigol 1054Z.

Taming The Beast: Pro-Tips For Designing A Safe Homebrew Laser Cutter

June 29, 2016 by 51 Comments

Homebrew laser cutters are nifty devices, but scorching your pals, burning the house down, or smelling up the neighborhood isn’t anyone’s idea of a great time. Lets face it. A 60-watt laser that can cut plastics offers far more trouble than even the crankiest 3D-printers (unless, of course, our 3D printed spaghetti comes to life and decides to terrorize the neighborhood). Sure, a laser’s focused beam is usually pointed in the right direction while cutting, but even an unfocused beam that reflects off a shiny material can start fires. What’s more, since most materials burn, rather than simply melt, a host of awful fumes spew from every cut.

Despite the danger, the temptation to build one is irresistible. With tubes, power supplies, and water coolers now in abundance from overseas re-sellers, the parts are just a PayPal-push away from landing on our doorsteps. We’ve also seen a host of exciting builds come together on the dining room table. Our table could be riddled with laser parts too! After combing through countless laser build logs, I’ve yet to encounter the definitive guide that tells us how to take the proper first steps forward in keeping ourselves safe while building our own laser cutter. Perhaps that knowledge is implicit to the community, scattered on forums; or perhaps it’s learned by each brave designer on their own from one-too-many close calls. Neither of these options seems fair to the laser newb, so I decided to lay down the law here.

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The Citadel Is The King Of K’nex Builds.

June 29, 2016 by 18 Comments

Following one’s passion can lead to amazing results. Sometimes this results in technological marvels; other times, one marvels at the use of the technology. An exemplary display of the latter is The Citadel.

Over the course of three years, redditor [Shadowman39] pieced together this monstrous K’nex structure. With over 17 different paths(!), 45 different elements, and over 40,000 parts, you would expect some meticulous planning to go into its construction — but that’s not the case! [Shadowman39] assembled it largely on the fly with only a few elements needing to be sketched out and only the main elevator proving to be troublesome. Three motors power the structure — one for the main elevator, one for the smaller lifts on the bottom, and one for the release gates.

This is an absolute leviathan hobby project. To satiate the obvious curiosity of anyone who stumbles across this picture, its intricacies can be seen in the video:

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Automating A Microscope For CNC Micrographs

June 29, 2016 by 2 Comments

[Maurice] is a photographer specializing in micrographs. These very large images of very small things are beautiful, but late last year he’s been limited by his equipment. He needed a new microscope, one designed for photography, that had a scanning stage, and ideally one that was cheap. He ended up choosing a microscope from the 80s. Did it meet all his qualifications? No, but it was good enough, and like all good tools, capable of being modified to make a better tool.

This was a Nikon microscope, and [Maurice] shoots a Canon. This, of course, meant the camera mount was incompatible with a Canon 5D MK III, but with a little bit of milling and drilling, this problem could be overcome.

That left [Maurice] with a rather large project on his hands. He had a microscope that met all his qualifications save for one: he wanted a scanning stage, or a bunch of motors and a camera controller that could scan over a specimen and shoot gigapixel images. This was easily accomplished with a few 3D printed parts, stepper motors, and a Makeblock Orion, an Arduino-based board designed for robotics that also has two stepper motor drivers.

With a microscope that could automatically scan over a specimen and snap a picture, the only thing left to build was a piece of software that automated the entire process. This software was built with Processing. While this sketch is very minimal, it does allow [Maurice] to set the step size and how many pictures to take in the X and Y axis. The result is easy automated micrographs. You can see a video of the process below.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Universal Glucose Meter

June 28, 2016 by 77 Comments

If you need an example of Gillette’s razor blade business plan, don’t look at razors; a five pack of the latest multi-blade, aloe-coated wonder shaver is still only about $20. Look a glucose meters. Glucose meters all do the same thing – test blood glucose levels – but are imminently proprietary, FDA regulated, and subsidized by health insurance. It’s a perfect storm of vendor lock-in that would make King Gillette blush.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Tom] is building what was, until now, only a dream. It’s a universal glucometer that uses any test strip. The idea, of course, is to buy the cheapest test strip while giving the one-fingered salute to the companies who release more models of glucometers in a year than Apple does phones.

As with any piece of consumer electronics, there are plenty of application guides published by the biggest semiconductor companies explaining to engineers how to use their part to build a device. After reviewing the literature from TI, Maxim, Freescale, and Microchip, and a few research articles on the same subject, [Tom] has a pretty good idea how to build a glucometer.

The trick now is figuring out how to build an adapter for every make and model of test strip. This is more difficult than it sounds, because some test strips have two contacts, some have three, some have five, and all of them are proprietary. Calibration will be an issue, but if you’re building a glucometer from scratch, that’s not a very big problem.

This is one of the most impressive projects we’ve seen in this year’s Hackaday Prize. No, it shouldn’t be the only way a diabetic tracks their sugar levels, but diabetics shouldn’t rely only on test strips anyway. If you’re looking for a Hackaday Prize project that has the potential to upend an industry, this is the one.

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Analog Guts Display GPS Velocity In This Hybrid Speedometer

June 28, 2016 by 21 Comments

A digital dash is cool and all, but analog gauges have lasting appeal. There’s something about the simplicity of a purely mechanical gauge connected directly to a vehicle’s transmission. Of course that’s not what’s hapenning here. Instead, this build is an analog display for GPS-acquired speed data.

The video below does a good job at explaining the basics of [Grant Stephens]’ build. The display itself is a gutted marine speedometer fitted with the movement from a motorcycle tachometer. The tach was designed to take a 4-volt peak-to-peak square wave input signal, the frequency of which is proportional to engine speed. To display road speed, [Grant] stuffed an ATTiny85 with a GPS module into the gauge and cooked up a script to convert the GPS velocity data into a square wave. There’s obviously some latency, and the gauge doesn’t appear to register low speeds very well, but all in all it seems to match up well to the stock speedo once you convert to metric.

There’s plenty of room for improvement, but we can see other applications where an analog representation of GPS data could be useful. And analog gauges are just plain fun to digitize – like these old meters and gauges used to display web-scraped weather data.

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