Windows 95 On An Apple Watch

April 30, 2016 by 26 Comments

What happens if the slick user interface and tight iOS integration of your Apple Watch leave you wanting more? A real operating system, from the days when men were men and computers were big grey boxes!

[Nick Lee] solved this unexpected problem with his Watch by getting a working copy of Windows 95 to run on it. On paper it shouldn’t be at all difficult, with a 520 MHz ARM, 512 MB of RAM, and 8GB of storage you might think that it would eclipse the quick 486s and low-end Pentiums we ran ’95 on back in the day with ease. But of course, the ability to run aged Redmond operating systems on a Watch was probably not at the top of the Apple dev team’s feature list, so [Nick] had to jump through quite a few hoops to achieve it.

As you might expect, the ’95 installation isn’t running directly on the Watch. In the absence of an x86 processor his complex dev process involved getting the Bochs x86 emulator to compile for the Watch, and then giving that a ’95 image to boot. The result is comically slow, with a 1-hour boot time and a little motor attached to the Watch to vibrate it and stop it going to sleep. It’s not in any way a useful exercise, after all who’d really want to use ’95 on a Watch? Internet Explorer 3 and The Microsoft Network, how handy! But it’s one of those “because you can” exercises, and we applaud [Nick] for making it happen. If you want to give it a try, his Bochs-forWatchOS code is on Github.

The video below the break shows the process of booting the ’95 Watch, opening the Start Menu, and running one of the card games. One can almost feel the lengthening shadows outside as it goes.

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Don’t Tempt The Demo Gods

April 30, 2016 by 9 Comments

Including a live technical demonstration as part of a presentation is a lot like walking a tightrope without a net. Which isn’t to say that we don’t do it — we just keep our fingers crossed and bring our lucky horseshoe. The demo gods have smote [Quinn] a mighty blow, in front of a class at Stanford, no less.

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[Quinn]’s scratch-built computer, Veronica, failed to boot in front of a hall of eager students. When the pressure was off, in the comfort of her own lab, [Quinn] got to debugging. You should read her blog post if you’re at all interested in retrocomputing or troubleshooting of low-level hardware bugs. But if you just can’t spare the five minutes for a pleasant read, here’s a spoiler: watch out for flaky card-edge connectors. All’s well that ends well, with a game of pong.

We’ve been following Veronica from her very first clock cycles, so we’re happy to see her back on her feet again. Good job, [Quinn]!

Line Following Robot Trains Runners

April 30, 2016 by 23 Comments

Can your line following robot move faster than [Usain Bolt] who has been described as “The World’s Fastest Timed Human”? Puma, the athletic footwear, apparel and accessories company, created such a robot to help train their company sponsored athletes.

The shoebox-sized robot exceeds [Bolt]’s top speed of 44-km/hour. At that speed, following a line gets tricky. It took the development team 8 prototypes to attain that capability. Inside the BeatBot an Arduino reads 9 infrared sensors for line detection at 100 samples a second. A digital servo controls the Ackerman steering mechanism to follow the line on the track or floor. Wheel encoders provide the data for speed and distance measurement.

The user can set the distance of the run and the time to beat. Run pacing can also be adjusted. LEDs on the robot provide the starting ‘gun’ and help the runner see the BeatBot using peripheral vision. Two GoPro cameras, front and rear, provide a visual record of the run.

Puma believes that actually running against a competitor, even a robot, improves performance more than just running against the clock. They’re betting a grown-up line follower will help Olympic class athletes improve their performance. Continue reading “Line Following Robot Trains Runners” →

1btn – An Open Source Dash

April 29, 2016 by 7 Comments

The availability of cheap radios, omni-present WiFi and powerful web services means the IoT wave is here to stay. Amazon got into the act with its “do only one thing” Dash button. But a more interesting solution would be an IoT “do it all” button.

[Anand] has been working on his 1btn Open Source WiFi connected IoT button for a while. It connects to the Internet over WiFi to trigger whatever action you have assigned to it using a simple, online interface. It’s reconfigurable and open source. Which means it can be used in pretty imaginative ways, and if needed, can be re-flashed with your own custom firmware should you decide to really get under its hood.

The 1btn’s ESP8266 module is usually in sleep mode, waking up when the button is pressed, making the connection, performing the task and then going back to sleep once confirmation is received. A Red/Green LED indicates if the action was successful or not. You can set it up to send e-mails, messages, tweets or perform actions via a custom script, API or the IFTTT – maker channel. To make it hacker friendly, all of the ESP8266 GPIO pins are accessible via headers. This makes it convenient to add external sensors, for example. There’s also a (unpopulated) QFN footprint to allow adding an ATmega device (168P/328P) whose GPIO pins are also accessible via headers. This opens up a large number of additional applications for the device such as home automation.

On the software side, the 1btn connects to a web console, where you can set up an account, configure the device, register its MAC ID, assign it an alias and set up its actions. All of the source files for the 1btn – firmware, enclosure, schematic, BOM, PCB layout and example use cases – are posted on his Github repository.

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Soda Fridge Hack To Fix A Lazy People Problem

April 29, 2016 by 13 Comments

[Paul] participated in a hackathon at work and created a hack to help solve what was ultimately a people problem. A soda fridge at work wasn’t getting refilled when empty. Instead of trying to make people less lazy, [Paul] went with making the fridge more needy.

The first thing [Paul] did was make a soda fridge refill sensor from a scale. As the fridge got emptier, it got lighter. The scale senses that and can decide it’s time for a refill. The only part missing was how to read the output from the scale. To do that, he took an unusual approach.
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ESP8266 Or MKR1000?

April 29, 2016 by 40 Comments

If you are a regular Hackaday reader, you’ve probably seen plenty of ESP8266 projects. After all, the inexpensive device is a workhorse for putting a project on WiFi, and it works well. There is a processor onboard, but, most often, the onboard CPU runs a stock firmware that exposes an AT command set or Lua or even BASIC. That means most projects have a separate CPU and that CPU is often–surprise–an Arduino.

It isn’t a big leap of logic to imagine an Arduino with an integrated WiFi subsystem. That’s the idea behind the MKR1000. But the real question you have to ask is: is it better to use an integrated component or just put an Arduino and ESP8266 together?

[Andreas Spiess] not only asked the question, but he answered it in a YouTube video (see below). He examines several factors on the MKR1000, the Arduino Due and Uno, and several other common boards. The examination covers performance, features, and power consumption.

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Six Years Of Work And Rationale In A DIY Book Scanner Documented

April 29, 2016 by 6 Comments

[Daniel Reetz] spent six years working as a Disney engineer during the day and on his book scanner, the archivist at night. Some time last year, [Daniel] decided enough is enough, got married, and retired from the book scanner business. There’s a bit more to it than that, but before leaving he decided to dump, not just the design, but the entire rationale behind the design into a twenty-two thousand word document.

One of his big theses in this document, is his perceived failure of the open hardware movement. The licenses aren’t adequate, as they are based on copyright law that only applies to software. This makes it impossible to enforce in practice, which is why he released the entire design as public domain. He also feels that open hardware shares design, but not rationale. In his mind this is useless when encouraging improvement, and we tend to agree. In the end rationale is the useful thing, or the source code, behind a design that truly matters. So, putting his money time where his mouth is, he wrote down the rationale behind his scanner.

The rationale contains a lot of interesting things. At a first glance the book scanner almost seems a simple design, not the culmination of so much work. Though, once we began to read through his document, we began to understand why he made the choices he did. There’s so much to getting a good scan without destroying the book. For example, one needs a light that doesn’t lose any color information. It doesn’t have to be perfect, as the software can correct the white balance. However, it can’t lean too far away from the natural spectrum, it can’t be too bright, and it can’t be uneven, and it can’t be prohibitively expensive. A lot of thought went into the tent light design.

[Daniel]’s book scanners are immensely popular, and are being used all over the world. He’s certainly made an impact, and the community that formed around his project continues to grow without him. He made some interesting points, and if anything wrote a really good build and design log for the rest of us to learn from.