Digital Clock + IPhone Dock

January 21, 2016 by 7 Comments

[Pinky_chi] was looking for a project to make for his girlfriend, and settled on a rather fantastic piece of woodworking — a digital clock, with an iPhone dock for her phone.

LED ClockHe built the enclosure completely out of walnut, which gives it a very refined and polished look; we’re quite impressed with his woodworking skills. The cool thing about this digital clock is that he used individual LEDs to create both the digital 7-segment displays, and a ring of LEDs around it to denote the hour.

On the back are three buttons. One to change the hour, the minute, and a temperature button. By holding down the temperature button, the display will display the current room temperature — he added this because the RTC device (a DS3231) has a built-in thermometer — so why not?

Choosing a favorite LED clock on Hackaday is like picking a favorite child — we love them all — but this Star Gate themed clock from a few years ago is great — check it out!

[via r/DIY]

Drawn In By The Siren’s Song

January 21, 2016 by 31 Comments

When I say “siren” what do you think of? Ambulances? Air raids? Sigh. I was afraid you were going to say that. We’ve got work to do.

You see, the siren played an important role in physics and mathematics about 150 years ago. Through the first half of the 1900s, this fine apparatus was trivialized, used for its pure noise-making abilities. During the World Wars, the siren became associated with air raids and bomb shelters: a far cry from its romantic origins. In this article, we’re going to take the siren back for the Muses. I want you to see the siren in a new light: as a fundamental scientific experiment, a musical instrument, and in the end, as a great DIY project — this is Hackaday after all.

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Hackaday Europe: Call For Proposals

January 21, 2016 by 38 Comments

Hackaday is coming to Europe in April. The world’s most superb conference on hardware creation starts with you. Please submit your proposal to present a talk or workshop at 2016 Hackaday | Belgrade, Hackaday’s first-ever European conference.

Put it on your calendar: Saturday, April 9th in Belgrade, Serbia. We have a lineup spanning from 10am to 2am, and we’re building on the best of the inaugural SuperConference we held last November: a single track of hardware talks which will run concurrently with a set of hands-on workshops. The surprise hit from that conference was badge hacking, which will be expanded and extended into the wee hours of the morning. While that is in progress, a party with two stages will spin up with performances by Infinite Jest, Grupa TI, and DJ sets.

Tickets go on sale the first week of February. Voja Antonic, who does amazing work with PCBs and badge designs, is building the conference badge. The cost of the admission will be just enough to cover the cost of the badge. We’re keeping the admission cost so low to help offset your travel costs. Belgrade is gorgeous in April, and getting there from other parts of Europe is very affordable. This event will sell out so get organized and make sure you and your fellow hardware hackers get tickets early.

Many of the Hackaday crew will be on hand. We’re likely to have a less-formal meetup (hangover brunch?) on Sunday. Check out the Hackaday | Belgrade planning page to discuss this and learn more about the conference as it comes together. See you in Belgrade!

Misleading Tech: Kickstarter, Bomb Sights, And Medical Rejuvinators

January 21, 2016 by 67 Comments

Every generation thinks it has unique problems and, I suppose, sometimes it is true. My great-grandfather didn’t have to pick a cell phone plan. However, a lot of things you think are modern problems go back much further than you might think. Consider Kickstarter. Sure, there have been plenty of successful products on Kickstarter. There have also been some misleading duds. I don’t mean the stupid ones like the guy who wants to make a cake or potato salad. I mean the ones that are almost certainly vaporware like the induced dream headgear or the Bluetooth tag with no batteries.

Overpromising and underdelivering is hardly a new problem. In the 30’s The McGregor Rejuvenator promised to reverse aging with magnetism, radio waves, infrared and ultraviolet light. Presumably, this didn’t work. Sometimes products do work, but they don’t live up to their marketing hype. The Segway comes to mind. Despite the hype that it would revolutionize transportation, the scooter is now a vehicle for tourists and mall cops.

One of my favorite examples of an overhyped product comes from World War II: The Norden Bomb Sight. What makes the Norden especially interesting is that even today it has a reputation for being highly accurate. However, if you look into it, the Norden–although a marvel for its day–didn’t always live up to its press.

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Giant Mersenne Prime Found

January 21, 2016 by 33 Comments

Ever hear of a Mersenne prime? These are prime numbers that are one less than a power of two. Named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17th century, there is a distributed computing project on the Internet to find Mersenne primes called GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search). The project recently announced they have found the largest known prime.

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Steampunk USB Cryptex Keeps Your Data Secure

January 21, 2016 by 10 Comments

Worried about people snooping around your USB drive? Digital encryption not good enough for you? What you need is a USB Cryptex to secure the drive from even being accessed!

Made completely out of copper and brass, [Scots72] really put a lot of effort into this beautiful piece of metalworking. The USB drive itself is encased in epoxy inside of a copper tube — the rest is built around it. Built almost entirely using hand tools, and we can only imagine how long the process took to complete. But patience is often rewarded with results like these!

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Web Connected Breathalyser With Phone Display

January 20, 2016 by 7 Comments

[spillsman] is working on a IoT startup and wanted to work and play while he tested their hardware. His company, WifiThing, is bundling the Texas Instruments toolchain and mesh networking with a sort of plug-and-play web interface. The board uses a MSP430 and two other TI Networking chips to make setting up, logging data, and controlling outputs simpler. The web interface looks interesting, but in our experience this sort of approach only saves time up to a point. Then it’s time to pull out the chip’s various bibles, ‘nomicons, spell manuals, and supporting religious documents to get the thing to work.

Though, there are some projects where you would like a simple way to log data from multiple sensors, if this can do that easily (and more importantly, cheaply) it might be very cool. We are interested to see if the open source software is easy to integrate without buying their hardware. Either way, after setting up a simple circuit to heat the coil in the breathalyzer, and translate the data into a signal usable for the chip, [spillsman] was able to record alcohol levels and even keep a, perhaps unwise to record, high-score from his phone.

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