Tiny Headless Servers Everywhere

September 17, 2015 by 30 Comments

Quick, what do “cloud compute engines” and goofy Raspberry Pi Internet of Things hacks have in common? Aside from all being parody-worthy buzzword-fests, they all involve administering remote headless (Linux) installations. It’s for exactly that reason that a new Ubuntu distribution flavor, Ubuntu (Snappy) Core, targets both the multi-bazillion-dollar Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and the $55 BeagleBone Black.

If that combination seems unlikely to you, you’re not alone. But read on as we hope to make a little more sense of it all.
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Retro Games On ArduinoCade Just Shouldn’t Be Possible

September 17, 2015 by 26 Comments

Making retro video games on today’s micro controllers brings many challenges, especially when using only the micro controller itself to handle the entire experience. Complex graphics, sound, game logic and input is taxing enough on the small chips, toss in NTSC color graphics and you have a whole different bear on your hands.

[rossum] set out making the Arduinocade retro game system using an overclocked Arduino Uno, and not much more. Supporting 4 voice sound and IR game controllers, the system also boasts 27 simultaneous colors all in software. These colors and the resolution feel like they’re impossible without a graphics chip to offload some of the work. While doing all of this the ATmega328p is also playing some faithful reproductions of classic arcade games.

The uses a couple of interesting tricks. Color is generated with NTSC color artifacts, where the screen is really black and white, but thanks to a delay or two in the signal generation the bits are out of phase from the reference “color burst” signal and appear on-screen as unique colors. This approach was used in the 8 bit Apple II personal computers to generate its colors, and also on the early IBM PC’s with CGA cards to drastically increase color depth. In this case, the chip is overclocked with a 28.6363 MHz crystal (a multiple of NTSC timing) and the SPI hardware leveraged to shift out all the necessary pixels. Check out how great it looks and sounds after the break.

It’s good to see an old trick on a new project and we are off to play some games!

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The Ubiquitous Atari Punk Console

September 17, 2015 by 11 Comments

The Atari Punk Console (APC) is a dual 555 (or single 556) based synth. Designed by the famous (and somewhat infamous) Forrest Mims in 1980 and originally simply named “Sound Synthesizer”, the circuit gained it’s more recent popularity when re-dubbed the “Atari Punk Console” by Kaustic Machines. The circuit however doesn’t bear much relation to the Atari 2600 which didn’t contain a 555 timer chip. However we assume the 2600 produced a similarly glitchy square wave audio output.

a2The circuits operation is easy to grasp and uses only 9 components. This ease of design and construction has allowed builders to focus more on the aesthetics of its construction, hacking it into interesting, and often unlikely enclosures and systems. One such hack is the “Atari Punk Bucket” (shown here) where the APC along with a simple amp was hacked into an old rusted bucket. The APC was built up on strip-board along with a simple amp and reclaimed speakers. [Farmer glitch] has used this as a prop in live sets and it both looks and sounds awesome. Continue reading “The Ubiquitous Atari Punk Console” →

Visualizing The Fourier Transform

September 17, 2015 by 56 Comments

If you do any electronics work–especially digital signal processing–you probably know that any signal can be decomposed into a bunch of sine waves. Conversely, you can generate any signal by adding up a bunch of sine waves. For example, consider a square wave. A square wave of frequency F can be made with a sine wave of frequency F along with all of its odd harmonics (that is, 3F, 5F, 7F, etc.). Of course, to get a perfect square wave, you need an infinite number of odd harmonics, but in practice only a few will do the job.

Like a lot of abstract concepts, it is easy to understand the basic premise and you could look up any of the mathematical algorithms that can take a signal and perform a Fourier transform on it. But can you visualize why the transform works the way it does? If you can’t (or even if you can), you should check out [Mehmet’s] MATLAB visualization of harmonic circles. If you don’t have MATLAB yourself, you can always check out the video (see below).

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Over-the-top Hackerspace Donation Box Brings Out The Brony In You

September 17, 2015 by 19 Comments

“You’ll never believe how this happened, doc.” [Source: CRASH Space]
If you’re going to pass the hat for donations to your hackerspace, you might as well add to the value proposition and give potential donors a little something for their generosity. And what better way to cash in than to channel the inner Brony in your donors with a My Little Pony themed dollar-bill vortex box?

Sick of the boring cheezy-poof jug her hackerspace was using as a donation jar, not-a-Brony [Michelle] was inspired by the CRASH Space mascot Sparkles, pictured left, to build a new box that will maximize donations by providing donors with a multimedia extravaganza. The Plexiglas box, resplendent with laser-cut acrylic hearts and spangled with My Little Pony stickers, is fitted with a sensor so that donations trigger an MP3 of the MLP theme song. A scrolling LED marquee flashes a gracious message of thanks, and to complete the experience, a pair of fans creates a tornado of the fat stacks of cash in the bin.

Putting a little [Twilight Sparkle] into your donation box makes good financial sense, as does providing incentive to deposit bills rather than coins. This project reminds us of our recent post about a custom claw machine which could be leveraged as a value-added donation box – just add a coin slot. And rainbows.

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Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: Artificial Muscles And Supercapacitors

September 16, 2015 by 29 Comments

For [Lloyd T Cannon III]’s entry to the Hackaday Prize, he’s doing nothing less than changing the way everything moves. For the last 100 years, internal combustion engines have powered planes, trains, and automobiles, and only recently have people started looking at batteries and electric motors. With his supercapacitors and artificial muscles, [Lloyd] is a few decades ahead of everyone else.

There are two parts to [Lloyd]’s project, the first being the energy storage device. He’s building a Lithium Sulfur Silicon hybrid battery. Li-S-Si batteries have the promise to deliver up to 2000 Watt hours per kilogram of battery. For comparison, even advanced Lithium batteries top out around 2-300 Wh/kg. That’s nearly an order of magnitude difference, and while it’s a far way off from fossil fuels, it would vastly increase the range of electric vehicles and make many more technologies possible.

The other part of [Lloyd]’s project is artificial muscles. Engines aren’t terribly efficient, and electric motors are only good if you want to spin things. For robotics, muscles are needed, and [Lloyd] is building them out of fishing line. These muscles contract because of the resistive heating of a carbon fiber filament embedded in the muscle. It’s been done before, but this is the first project we’ve seen that replicates the technique in a garage lab.

Both parts of [Lloyd]’s project are worthy of a Hackaday Prize entry alone, but putting them together as one project more than meets the goal: to build something that matters.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

AvE Builds DRINKO (not Affiliated With PLINKO)

September 16, 2015 by 4 Comments

[SuperUnknown] aka [AvE], one of our favorite Canadian hackers is back at it with DRINKO, an adult beverage themed take on the classic PLINKO game from The Price Is Right. He’s built the game as a mancave warming gift for a friend. This isn’t a particularly complex build, but it’s always great to see all the little steps that go into a project, leading up to the finished job. [SuperUnknown] said that wood would be a great material for this project, but he is opposed to the senseless killing of peaceful trees, so he built the base from 1/8″ plate steel. The glasses were plain shot glasses masked and etched to spell out DRINKO.

The most tedious part of a fabricating a game like this is cutting and installing the tines. [SuperUnknown] used old welding rods, cut with a slitting saw on his Bridgeport. The rods were TIG welded into the metal plate forming the back panel of the game.  To spice things up, [SuperUnknown] added an Arduino and some through hole WS2812 LEDs. While he didn’t have the flat surface mount WS2812’s on hand, that didn’t stop him. A quick trip through the bridgeport trimmed those frosted LED lenses down to size. The Arduino drives the LEDs through several patterns – much like the attract mode on a video game, or a Las Vegas sign. If you build your own DRINKO, we’d suggest adding some microswitches below each slot, so the drink to be consumed lights up.

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