555 Plasma Speaker

March 27, 2016 by 46 Comments

The 555 can do anything. OK, that’s become a bit of a trope in our community, but there is quite a lot of truth behind it: this little timer chip is an astonishingly versatile component.

[Alexander Lang] has added another achievement to the 555’s repertoire, he’s used one in the creation of a plasma speaker. Working at Hackspace Manchester, he’s used the 555 as a pulse-width modulator that drives a flyback transformer through a MOSFET, which feeds a spark gap mounted in a lasercut enclosure. The results maybe aren’t yet hi-fi, but it works, and is very audible.

We’ve been following this project for a while, as he’s updated his progress through several iterations. From initial design idea through PCB and enclosure design, to a first working prototype and some audio refinements, and finally this latest post with the spark gap in its enclosure. He is still refining his speaker, so there is more to come

In the video below the break he demonstrates his pulse width modulator, and tests the device using a keyboard as an input.

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What’s Tiny, Has Eight Legs, And Acts Like An Arduino?

March 27, 2016 by 29 Comments

Back in the late 1970s, comedian Steve Martin had a bit about “Let’s get small!” Over on Hackaday.io, [Daniel Grießhaber], has taken that call to heart. He’s been working on DIL-Duino, a minuscule form factor Arduino in an 8-pin DIP format.

Built with an ATtiny85, the board has an area of just under 75 square millimeters (less than 8 mm x 10 mm). If you add the USB port, it still comes in at just over 144 square millimeters. [Daniel] found other small Arduino boards like the Olimexino-85s and the Nanite are not as small as his design.

The module has a QFN CPU and castellated holes around the perimeter for mounting. With pin headers, this would easily fit into a breadboard (as [Daniel] shows) or you could mount it directly to another board like a surface mount device. In fact, that’s the reason for using castellated holes: you can inspect that the solder joint at the mating SMD pad is good. You sometimes hear the technique called half-vias or leadless chip carrier.

If you note, [Daniel] used an oversized board with full holes around the perimeter and then had the board maker score the board, so the holes are cut in half. This is a better technique than trying to drill half holes on the board edge, which is difficult to do.

Naturally, this isn’t the first tiny Arduino we’ve seen. If you are an ARM fan, there’s some little bitty cards for it, too, although not quite as small as DIL-Duino.

Bootstrapped Tools, Live Stopped Motion, And A Dekatron Computer

March 27, 2016 by 7 Comments

Dallas Texas played host to an epic Hackaday meetup last weekend. The Dallas Makerspace was kind enough to open their doors, and we sure used them. Attendance was over capacity, with a line all night to screen-print your own T-shirt, a set of lightning talks that lasted nearly two hours, and plenty of hardware show-and-tell.

We’ll start off with three of the most impressive builds displayed. First is a set of simple designs that can be used to make tools in parts of the world where even a hammer is a luxury. Then it’s on to a clever entertainment device that uses discrete stopped-motion figurines to make live animations. We’ll take a look at the Witch-E project which is building a replica of the famous Dekatron-based computer. And finish up with the surprise hit of the meetup.

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Beautiful Weather Station Uses Acrylic, RGB LED, And And ESP8266

March 27, 2016 by 19 Comments

Everyone knows there’s form and there’s function. It isn’t fair, but people do judge on appearance, sometimes even overriding all other concerns. So while your Makerspace buddies might be impressed by your weather station built on a breadboard, your significant other probably isn’t. [Dennisv15] took an ordinary looking weather station design with a 0.96″ display and turned into an attractive desk piece with a much larger display and an artistic–and functional–enclosure.

The acrylic cloud lights up thanks to an RGB LED Neopixel strip and can indicate weather trends at a glance: red for warmer, blue for colder, flashing for inclement weather. The project was truly multidisciplinary, using a laser cutter to produce the body and the stand, a 3D-printed display bezel, and a PCB to make it easy to build.

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Turning A Keyboard Into A Pedal Board

March 27, 2016 by 24 Comments

Dedicated pedal switches for your computer can be really expensive. Keyboards on the other hand, despite having way more buttons, are dirt cheap! What if you could use a keyboard to build a pedal board? This hack is so simple, it’s almost ingenious.

[Shrodingers_Cat] took one of his spare keyboards, xTupuuoa rather nice Logitech G510 gaming keyboard, and pulled all the keys out except for four. You can do this with a flat head screwdriver quite easily — it’s also rather satisfying sending keys flying with each flick of the blade.

He then cut up some spare DVD cases he had, and turned them into pedal covers. They’re actually just nested inside the keyboard — he added some electrical tape to make sure they stayed in place and put it under his desk for the first test — it works great!

Of course you could always make something like this with an Arduino and some scrap wood instead…

[via r/DIY]

RF Biscuit Is A Versatile Filter Prototyping Board

March 26, 2016 by 5 Comments

As anyone who is a veteran of many RF projects will tell you, long component leads can be your undoing. Extra stray capacitances, inductances, and couplings can change the properties of your design to the point at which it becomes unfit for purpose, and something of a black art has evolved in the skill of reducing these effects.

RF Biscuit is [Georg Ottinger]’s attempt to simplify some of the challenges facing the RF hacker. It’s a small PCB with a set of footprints that can be used to make a wide range of surface-mount filters, attenuators, dummy loads, and other RF networks with a minimum of stray effects. Provision has been made for a screening can, and the board uses edge-launched SMA connectors. So far he’s demonstrated it with a bandpass filter and a dummy load, but he suggests it should also be suitable for amplifiers using RF gain blocks.

Best of all, the board is open source hardware, and as well as his project blog he’s made the KiCad files available on GitHub for everyone.

It’s a tough challenge, to produce a universal board for multiple projects with very demanding layout requirements such as those you’d find in the RF field. We’re anxious to see whether the results back up the promise, and whether the idea catches on.

This appears to be the first RF network prototyping board we’ve featured here at Hackaday. We’ve featured crystal filters before, and dummy loads though, but nothing that brings them all together. What would you build on your RF Biscuit?

Handy Power Supply With 3D Printed Case

March 26, 2016 by 12 Comments

You can never have too many power supplies around your workbench. It is easy to buy them or cobble something together for most purposes. But once in a while you see one that is simple and also looks good, like this one from [RegisHsu].

The project is simple since it uses off-the-shelf DC-to-DC converter modules, and good-looking LED meters to measure voltage and current. The dual supply can accept 5 to 16 V in (presumably from a wall transformer) and deliver 1.3 V to 15.5 V out at 2 amps. [RegisHsu] removed an adjustment pot from the converter board and replaced it with a 10-turn pot to allow voltage adjustment.

Given the parts, you probably don’t even need a wiring diagram. However, the part that brings it together is the 3D-printed case, which [RegisHsu] has on Thingiverse. We’ve looked at muti-turn pot replacements before, and this is hardly the first power supply project we’ve posted.