Kids And Hacking: The One Hour Egg Drop

In the last Hacking and Kids post, I talked about an activity you can do with kids when you don’t have a lot of time or resources. The key idea was to have fun and learn a little bit about open and closed loop control. One of the things I usually briefly mention when I do that is the idea of a design trade: Why, for example, a robot might use wheels instead of legs, or treads instead of wheels.

Engineers and makers perform trades like this all the time. Suppose you are building a data logging system. You want precise samples, large storage capacity, and many channels. But you also want a low cost and low power drain. You might also want high reliability. All of these requirements will lead to different trades. A hard drive would provide a lot of space, but is more expensive, less reliable, larger, and more power hungry than, say, an SD card. So there isn’t a right choice. It depends on which of the factors are most important for this particular design. A data logger in a well-powered rack might be well served to have a terrabyte hard drive, while a battery powered logger in a matchbox that will be up on the side of a mountain might be better off with an SD card.

We can all relate to that example, but it is pretty boring to a kid. You probably can’t get them to design a data logger, anyway. But if I have about an hour and a little prep time, I have a different way to get the same point across. It is a modified version of the classic “egg drop”, but it is simple enough to do in an hour with very little preparation time.

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Why Should You Get A Ham Radio License?

Several of the authors you read on Hackaday are ham radio operators and we’ve often kicked around having a Hacker Chat about “Why be a ham today?” After all, you can talk to anyone in the world over the Internet or via phone, right? What’s the draw?

The Radio Society of Great Britain had the same thought, apparently, and produced a great video to answer the question. They mention the usual things: learning about technology, learning about people in other parts of the world, disaster communications, and radiosport (which seems to be more popular outside the United States; people compete to find hidden transmitters).

In addition, they talked a lot about how hams get involved with space communications, ranging from talking via satellites, to talking to people on the space station, to actually building small satellites. As the narrator says, there are “hundreds of ways to have techie fun” with ham radio.

One thing we noticed they showed but didn’t say a lot about, though, is the educational opportunities. You can learn a lot, and working with kids to help them learn is often very rewarding (and you usually learn something, too). Just to forestall the comments that this post isn’t hack related, we’ll note two things: there is a Raspberry Pi shown and just past the two-minute mark, there is a very clever hacked together Morse code key.

We talk a lot about ham radio, ranging from Arduino-based digital modes to putting together portable stations (you can see a similar one in the video, too). One other thing we noticed they don’t mention: it is generally much easier to get a license today than ever before. Most countries (including the United States) have abolished the Morse code requirements, so while some hams still enjoy CW (hamspeak for operating Morse code), it isn’t a requirement.

Video below.

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Amino Wants To Bring Bioengineering To Your Workbench

As the maker movement has exploded in popularity in recent years, there has been a strong push to put industrial tools into the hands of amateur tinkerers and hackers. CNC mills, 3D Printers, and laser cutters were all extremely expensive machines that were far too costly for most people until makers demanded them and hackers found ways to make them affordable. But, aside from the home brewing scene, those advancements haven’t really touched on anything organic. Which is a deficiency that Amino, a desktop bioengineering system, is seeking to address.

Amino, created by [Julie Legault], is currently seeking crowd-funding via Indiegogo. Hackaday readers are more suspicious than most when it comes to crowd-funding campaigns, and with good reason. But, [Julie Legault] has some very impressive credentials that lend her a great deal of credibility. She has four degrees in the arts and sciences, including a Masters of Science at the MIT Media Lab.

It was for that degree at MIT that [Julie] started Amino as her thesis. Her plan is to bring the tools necessary for bioengineering to the masses – tools which are traditionally only available in research labs. Those tools are packaged into a small desktop-sized unit called Amino. Backers will receive this desktop system, along with the supplies for their first project. Those projects are predefined, but the tools are versatile enough to allow users to move on to their own projects in the future. [Julie] thinks that the future is in bioengineering, and that the best way to feed innovation is to make the necessary tools both affordable and accessible.

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A Small, 1000W Induction Heater

[Proto G] built a small, desktop induction heater that is capable of making small castings, melting small amounts of metal, and functioning as one of the best solder pots we’ve ever seen.

The induction heater is built from a custom Zero Voltage Switching (ZVS) driver and powered by a small 48V, 1000W power supply. While this makes for an exceptionally small induction heater, it’s still very capable. In the video below, it only takes a few seconds to heat a screwdriver up to a temperature that will melt solder.

While an induction heating machine is essentially useless for irons unless you have a few antique, unpowered, blowtorch-powered soldering irons, it does make for a great solder pot. [Proto G] replaced the working coil in his induction heater with litz wire. The actual solder pot is made out of steel conduit wrapped with aerogel-infused fiberglass insulation. Compared to his old solder pot, this machine heats up instantly, and is more than capable of wetting a few wire connections.

The future plan for this inductive heater is to make a few more attachments for different metals, and a [Proto G] has a few aerogel blankets he could use to make some small metal castings.

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Curb Office Productivity With Expensive LED Wall

Hero-Design wants you to make art at work with this mesmerizing contraption and as far as we’re concerned they hit the nail right on the head with the inclusion of LEDs, we’re whores for LEDs. The team over at Hero have come up with an interactive wall of 464 pixels that can be individually controlled to display any of the available colors simply by turning the circular pixel in either direction.

The design is quite elegant with a luxurious color scheme of black on black on black. Until you touch a knob or play an animation, that is. The large wall unit comes with a custom designed animation of your choice along with three other animations (and hopefully instructions to create your own animation from scratch). They have taken some precautions that we’re pleased to see: each pixel has redundant LEDs in the case that one goes out and if the worst happens and the redundant goes up in smoke not to worry, each pixel is easily replaceable due to its modular design.

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Dragon Doors Round Off Hobbit Themed Restaurant

[Abhimanyu Kumar] is renovating a hotel in Nainital, near the India-Nepal border, and like any self-respecting Lord of the Rings fan, he wanted to give the restaurant a Hobbit theme. He built circular windows and to top it off a gorgeous round door complete with dragon hinges.

I asked him how well the doors work, as the 50kg (over 110lbs) weight of each of the doors must put a lot of strain on the hinges. [Abhimanyu] told me, “The door opens quite smoothly.While building the hinges even I was concerned about needing support as all other commercially available hinges we tried broke down or got bent.”

However, once the dragon hinge was installed it worked better that we expected and the door stays about 0.5″ over the ground at all times. The dragon hinges (made from 1/4-inch iron) integrate the hinge pins to the wings of the dragon, making it look like they are taking off when the doors open.

He has posted plenty of pictures of the build and the final product looks incredible.  The tail of the dragon is quite long and provides a lot of support for the entire door. Each hinge itself weighs about 30kg, so it should be strong enough to hold up a door for a long time without any sagging. Kudos to him for some serious engineering!

Leap Motion Arduino Control

Leap Motion Wirelessly Controlling A Prosthetic Hand With An Arduino

The Leap Motion controller is a rather impressive little sensor bar that is capable of generating a massive 3D point cloud and recognizing hands and fingers to allow for gesture control based computing. It’s been out for a few years now but we haven’t seen many hackers playing with it. [Anwaarullah] has messed around with it before, but when it came time to submit something for India’s first Maker Faire, he decided to try doing an actual project with it.

Checking out the latest Leap Motion SDK, [Anwaarullah] realized many improvements had been made and he’d have to rewrite some of his original code to reflect the changes. This time around he’s opted to use the ESP8266 WiFi module instead of a Bluetooth one. He printed off a Raptor hand (from the wonderful folks at e-NABLE) and hooked it up with some RC servos to give him a nice robotic hand to control.

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