Another IoT Platform In The (Blue)Mix

July 23, 2015 by Al Williams 19 Comments

Many major companies (Intel, Oracle, Atmel, and IBM, for example) are competing to be the standard interconnect fabric for the Internet of Things. As a developer, it is hard to cut through the marketing hype and decide which platform is the best for you and your application. Luckily, there’s a plethora of projects on the web that showcase these frameworks. These project sites are an easy way to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of IoT frameworks in practical applications without having to develop prototypes yourself.

[diyhacking], for example, posted a demo of using IBM’s Bluemix along with a Raspberry Pi, to do some simple home automation tasks. The project hardware is modest, using a PIR motion sensor and a relay to control an AC load. However, that’s good because it lets you focus on the Bluemix tools. The example client and server software is less than 200 lines of Python.

Bluemix looks like it has good integration with the Raspberry Pi and features a simulator so you can work without real hardware for development. Bluemix does offer a free plan (with limits), but the fee options may be a turn off to some IoT hackers.

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Caption CERN Contest – What’s In The Box?

July 23, 2015 by Adam Fabio 15 Comments

Week 24 of the Caption CERN Contest was one for the books. There were so many good captions that we had a hard time picking a winner! Thank you to everyone who wrote up a caption and entered the contest. We still don’t know quite what this device was. Our best guess is a coil from a beam line. Some creative positioning and camera focus sure turned it into a conversation piece though!

The Funnies:

“I am the Face of Boe. Has anyone seen the Doctor?.” – [jonsmirl]
“CERN’s brief attempt into the consumer “Pro” audio market. They lost out to the competitions because they didn’t use unidirectional oxygen free copper wires that are blessed by the Tibetan monks. They might be the expert with super conductor magnets, but one hard lesson they have learnt is that you can’t spell consumer without the “con” part.” – [K.C. Lee]
“Go ahead pick up the operating tool!! For your first task remove the patient’s tooth for 10 points. But beware!!! there’s the 10,000K volt charge if you touch the sides!! Enjoy!!!” – [EngineerAfterLunchTime]

This week’s winner is [surubarescu] with “Prototype of the sextuple face electric razor was a complete technical success, but it never went into full production due to some raised (then lost) eyebrows.” Enjoy your new Teensy 3.1 from The Hackaday Store, [surubarescu]!

Week 25

We’re not kidding when we say CERN scientists and engineers really get into their work. Check out this CERN scientist looking down at his… uh, experiment. We’re not sure exactly what this device is. There is a sealed chamber, but is it a vacuum, or some sort of specialized atmosphere for the research this scientist is working on? Either way, he seems very interested in whatever is happening inside this box!

So what’s happening here? High energy physics, or some new coffee maker? You tell us!

This week’s prize is once again a Teensy 3.1 from The Hackaday Store. Add your humorous caption as a comment to this project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the contest log, not on the contest itself.

As always, if you actually have information about the image or the people in it, let CERN know on the original image discussion page.

Dropping By The MIT Electronics Research Society

July 23, 2015 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

We’re in Boston this week and my first stop was at MITERS last night. This is the MIT Electronics Research Society, which started as a way to provide free access to computers for all students. Since those humble beginnings the organization has grown to include a slew of fabrication and test hardware, as well as a vibrant community that makes the group a great place to hang out.

Doors leading to MITERS

Ah, the comfort of a hackerspace

Batteries on the bench

High-five bot

Funds are generated by Swapfest

Walking into the building you’re greeted with double doors strewn with interesting electronics and many examples of fabrication in the form of the word MITERS. The group, which is pushing 60-years of existence, feels immediately like a hackerspace where creativity and anarchy duke it out in a wild dance of experimentation. On this particular Wednesday evening we encountered a room of about 10 people working feverishly to fabricate electric racers for the PRS racing circuit in Detroit this Saturday.

Like a hackerspace, MITERS is completely member (read: student) run. There is a board that helps keep things on the rails. There is no membership fee; funding for the organization is sourced from Swapfest, a weekly flea market during the summer.

Machinist’s tool kit

Machine shop

CNC machine tools

Argh-argh-argh-argh

There is a strong slant toward machine shop at this hackerspace. In addition to a respectable Bridgeport CNC Mill, the machine tools and hand tools provide for almost all your fabrication needs.

Uni-balancer and it’s creator

Unibalancer

Black strip is the deadman switch

What can be built in this space? How about a unibalancer? This is a single-wheeled, human-ridable vehicle that has a 7-mile cruise radius between charges. For me the most interesting feature is the deadman’s switch. You know those black rubber strips on public buses that you press for the next stop? This unibalancer has one that you need to stand on to make it go.

Impressive PRS Build

Twin Ryobi electric chainsaw motors

Chainsaw using chain drives

Original Chainsaw batteries not used in racer

Wireless statistics on tablet

Another PRS build

Motorized shopping cart hangs from ceiling

Tiny electric racer

The hackers at MITERS excel when it comes to electric vehicles and this time of year that means the Power (Wheels) Racing Series. There are restrictions on size, and power output so the teams squeeze every bit that they can. For me, the most interesting build is based off of a pair of Ryobi electric chainsaws. The 40V batteries for these are themselves quite formidable but not used at all in the build. The team has reverse-engineered the driver circuits and written their own firmware for the STM8 microcontrollers on the boards. The chainsaws use chains to drive the two rear wheels. The entire system is monitored with XBEE-based wireless data which is displayed on a tablet.

This isn’t the only PRS build. The MITERS plan to take three different vehicles with them this weekend. The one they can’t bring is the huge electric shopping cart (with mandatory wheelie bar) which hangs from the ceiling of the space.

Best sounding musical Tesla I’ve seen

Top coil of massive tesla coil

Huge subwoofer

In addition to the formidable fabrication projects, there are a multitude of electronic projects to be seen. There is a musical tesla coil which is the best I’ve ever heard. It could easily be mistaken as a proper speaker. If you need more bass there’s a massive ceiling-mounted sub-woofer for that. And if you want a more formidable tesla coil, the parts are there.

Battle-bot

Underbot

Look hard enough and you’ll even find battle robots. This one had diamond plate that spins with a variety of nasty accoutrements intended for maximum damage of its foe. On the underside you’ll see a brushless motor used the opposite of how you might think. The shaft is attached to the locomotion frame of the bot. The underside of the spinning diamond plate has a ring of antistatic mat against which this brushless motor body spins.

Thanks to the MITERS for welcoming us in. It was a blast seeing all of the projects they’re working on!

Meetup at Artisan’s Asylum Tonight

If you’re in the Boston area, head on over to Artisan’s Asylum tonight starting at 6. They were gracious enough to open their doors for a Hackaday Meetup. Bring some hardware to show off if you can, if you can’t that’s fine as well. We’ll have a few lightning talks, some social time, and maybe an afterbar!

To wrap things up, we have covered a few projects from MITERS already, like this Power Wheels Racing build, and an electric go kart done the right way. Now that we’ve met them in person we’ll be on the lookout for a lot more awesome hacks from them.

[Thanks John for suggesting we stop by!]

[Federico Musto] Of Arduino SRL Discusses Arduino Legal Situation

July 23, 2015 by Elliot Williams 107 Comments

Recently we had the opportunity to sit down and interview Arduino SRL’s CEO, [Federico Musto], over a nice dinner. His company is one half of the Arduino vs Arduino debacle which has pitted Arduino.cc against Arduino.org in a battle over the trademark on “Arduino”.

Given the tremendous amount of press coverage of [Massimo Banzi] and the Arduino LLC side of the story (Arduino.cc), we were very interested in hearing how the whole situation looks where [Frederico Musto] sit (Arduino.org). In the end, we came away with what we feel is a more balanced and complete picture of the situation, as well as interesting news about future products from the Arduino SRL camp. [Musto’s] take on the legal proceedings, both past and present, is nothing short of fascinating.

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Hacking A Telecoms Frequency Standard For Your Lab

July 23, 2015 by Nava Whiteford 18 Comments

[Shane Burrell] came across a Nortel GPSTM and re-purposed it as a 10MHz reference for his lab. The GPSTM is designed to slot into a backplane, most likely for telecoms applications. So [Shane] needed to hack the board to run from a 48v PSU. Once powered up, it was relatively easy to interface as the card appears to contain the well known Trimble Thunderbolt module and is compatible with its software.

We’ve covered frequency references before and they can be a valuable addition to a lab. On the back of most scopes, spectrum analyzers and function generators you’ll find a 10MHz reference input allowing the user to supply a reference more accurate than that generated internally. Not only is an external reference often more accurate, it also allows you to keep all your equipment in sync with a common reference, which can be particularly important in some measurements. While some hackers opt for Rubidium sources, the GPS disciplined temperature-controlled oscillator in the Nortel unit should provide a nice stable reference.

A word of warning to [Shane] though, get sucked into hacking frequency references and you may become a time nut finding yourself climbing mountains to test the theory of relativity.

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Repackaging A Webcam In A 3D Printed Enclosure

July 23, 2015 by James Hobson 6 Comments

One of the beauties of having a 3D printer is the ability to print accessories for it to make it better. [Sky] had been using a Logitech C920 webcam to record some of his prints, but it wasn’t really designed to mount off a 3D printers frame. So he designed his own enclosure for it.

He started by taking the webcam apart, getting down to the bare PCB level and taking some measurements. It turned out to be pretty compact! He modeled a rough outline of it in SketchUp, and then started designing his new enclosure around it. After a few failed prints — thanks to the 3D printer company that shall not be named — he put it altogether and did some test fits. It worked!

The new enclosure is designed to mount off the frame of his 3D printer, allowing for a wide angle view of the print bed. If you print something that makes use of the entire z-axis, you might run into some visibility issues, but [Sky] isn’t too worried about this.

For the full explanation and design, he gives a great walk through on all the details in the video below.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Synthetic Aperture Multispectral Imaging

July 22, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

[Conrad] was tasked with building a synthetic aperture multispectral imaging device by his professor. It’s an interesting challenge that touches on programming, graphics, and just a bit of electrical engineering.

Tucked inside a garish yellow box that looks like a dumb robot are five Raspberry Pis, a TP-Link Ethernet switch, three Raspberry Pi NOIR cameras, and a Flir Lepton thermal camera. With three cameras, different techniques can be used to change the focal length of whatever is being recorded – that’s the synthetic aperture part of the build. By adding different filters – IR pass, UV, visual, and thermal, this camera can record images in a huge range of wavelengths.

[Conrad] has come up with a completely modular toolbox that allows for a lot of imaging experiments. By removing the filters, he can track objects in 3D. With all the filters in place, he can narrow down what spectra he can record. It’s a mobile lab that’s completely modular, and we can’t wait to see what this little box can really do.