Collabatorium On Wednesday

July 7, 2015 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Our next Collabatorium is just around the corner. On Wednesday we’ll open up the Hacker Channel for another action-packed discussion on what you’re building. Show your work, see what others are doing, ask for help, offer your skills, and more. It all begins at 19:00 CET (UTC+2).

All are welcome but you need to be added as a collaborator on the Hackaday Prize Hacker Channel. Go there now and click the “Request to join this project” link on the bottom of the left sidebar.

We had a blast last week with a huge mass of hackers hanging out in our virtual hackerspace. This week we’re changing up the time zones so that hackers in different parts of the world may take part. If you’re in Europe, this should be late enough that the work day done. Make sure to drop in and represent the hacker community in your part of the world. See you on Wednesday!

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

On-Demand Paper Clips

July 7, 2015 by Rich Bremer 19 Comments

3D Printers are great for printing out parts or items you need, but can they really help if you run out of paper clips? Yes, the all important and extremely overlooked bent metal fastener can put a serious damper on your day if not readily available. There is a solution to this problem, it’s called the Paper Clip Maximizer 1.0. The only consequence of using such a machine may be the destruction of mankind.

The machine takes a spool of wire and methodically bends it into a paper clip shape. Just like an extruder on a 3D Printer, there is a knurled drive wheel with a spring-loaded bearing pinching the wire. This drive wheel is powered by an RC servo that has been modified for continuous rotation. After the drive mechanism, the wire passes through a sturdy guide block. Upon exit, the wire finds the bending head, also powered by a servo. There is a bearing on the end of the bending head that is used to bend the wire around the guide block. After making several bends to form the paper clip, the bending head swings around to cut off the newly manufactured clip with an abrasive wheel. Unfortunately, this part of the process doesn’t work well. The cutoff wheel motor is powered directly by the Arduino that controls the entire machine, the power output of which is not enough to easily cut the wire. It can also leave a sharp burr on the cut wire which is not a great feature for paper clips to have. But we just see these as future fodder for hacking sessions!

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Hackaday Prize Entry: It’s Like Apple Pay, But For Receipts

July 6, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

There’s Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Wallet, and a host of other ways to pay for stuff with your phone. What about receipts, though? Do you really need to carry around little bits of paper to prove to incredulous friends you have, indeed, bought a donut? The proof is back home, in the file. Under D, for donut.

[Hisham] is working on a very interesting system for the Hackaday Prize. It’s effectively the the opposite side of every point of sale transaction that Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Wallet are working on. Instead of handling payment, [Hisham]’s Aelph handles receipts.

[Hisham]’s project is hardware, with a small device that plugs into a point of sale terminal. This device transmits a receipt to the Aleph app (or a third party app), and uploads a PDF copy of the receipt to a server. Other than a small hardware box, there’s no additional software required for a POS terminal. For retailers, it’s as easy as plugging in a box, and for consumers, it’s as easy as downloading an app.

The hardware was prototyped on a TI LaunchPad featuring a TIVA C microcontroller. This, along with the NFC eval kit give Aleph more than enough power to connect to a company LAN and spit out a few PDFs. You can check out one of [Hisham]’s demo videos below.

There are a lot of benefits to a electronic receipts; if you ever need a receipt, odds are you’ll scan it anyway – a dead tree receipt is just inefficient. There’s also some nasty chemicals in thermal receipt paper. You only need to Google ‘BPA receipt’ for that evidence. Either way, it’s a great idea, and we long for the day that our wallets aren’t stuffed to Costanzaesque proportions, and a time where we won’t need a scanner to complete an expense report.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Writing Doom For The Raspberry Pi

July 6, 2015 by James Hobson 35 Comments

We’ve all seen Doom played on the Raspberry Pi before… but this isn’t a port of the game. No, this was a school project at the Imperial College of London — writing the game in bare assembly. They wrote it from scratch.

bare metal doom thumbnail — Complete with a custom home made controller connected directly to the GPIO pins!

Yep. There’s not even an operating system on the Pi. It’s 9800 lines of bare metal ARM assembly. If that doesn’t hurt your brain we dunno what does!

They are using the official textures from the game, and it’s not quite a perfect replica — but it’s pretty darn close.

Part of the project was to build an emulator to make it easier to test the game, but it didn’t work out the greatest — so most of the actual game development was performed on the actual hardware. Yikes!

Stick around after the break to see Doom in all its former glory. Top notch work guys!

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UController Code Profiler Debugs Your Microcontroller

July 6, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

When working on digital circuits that operate at high frequencies it helps to have some special tools on hand. Things like oscilloscopes and logic analyzers are priceless when something isn’t working right. Another great tool would be this hardware-based profiler that [Mike] came up with while he was working on another project.

The profiler connects to USB and shows up as a serial port. Normally [Mike] used a set of LEDs to get information about how his microcontrollers work, but for this project that wasn’t enough. The uController Code Profiler can provide the main loop running time, time functions and sections of code, keep track of variables, and a few other tasks as well, all with nanosecond resolution.

The source code isn’t provided but a hex file is available, along with a schematic and an include file, if you want to try this one out on your next project. Like this homemade logic analyzer, this could be a powerful tool in your microcontroller arsenal. Simply include the file with various pieces of your code to get it up and running!

Restoring An Espresso Machine To The 21st Century

July 6, 2015 by James Hobson 10 Comments

[Rhys Goodwin] has a wonderful Italian espresso machine, a Brasilia ‘Lady’. But the electronics in it are a bit outdated. So he decided to give the entire thing an overhaul, while keeping it as original as possible!

As far as espresso machines go, this model is pretty simple. It uses a 300mL brass boiler with a 3-position solenoid valve. The thermostat is one of those simple bimetallic button thermostats which sadly, aren’t even that accurate — you couldn’t build a simpler machine, there’s not even a microcontroller in it. [Rhys] had his work cut out for him.

Arduino. PID controller. LCD display. New custom machined components, including a polished aluminum face plate for the LCD! He didn’t skimp out on this restoration. He even designed his own custom PCB to house the Arduino and provide the outputs for his new electronics, impressive!

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Stenography (Yes, With Arduinos)

July 6, 2015 by Elliot Williams 40 Comments

What’s the fastest keyboard? Few subjects are as divisive in the geek community. Clicky or squishy? QWERTY or Dvorak? Old-school IBM or Microsoft Natural? The answer: none of the above.

The fastest normal-keyboard typists (Dvorak or Qwerty) can get around 220 words per minute (wpm) in bursts. That sounds fast, and it’s a lot faster than we type, but that’s still below the minimum speed allowable for certified court reporters or closed captioners. The fastest court reporters clock in around 350 to 375 wpm for testimony. But they do this by cheating — using a stenotype machine. We’ll talk more about stenography in a minute, but first a hack.

The Hack

[Kevin Nygaard] bought a used Stentura 200 stenotype machine off Ebay and it wasn’t working right, so naturally he opened it up to see if he could fix it. A normal stenotype operates stand-alone and prints out on paper tape, but many can also be connected to an external computer. [Kevin]’s machine had a serial output board installed, but it wasn’t outputting serial, so naturally he opened it up to see if he could fix it. In the end, he bypassed the serial output by soldering on an Arduino and writing a few lines of code.

The serial interface board in [Kevin]’s machine was basically a set of switches that made contact with the keys as they get pressed, and a few shift registers to read the state of these switches out over a serial connection. [Kevin] tapped into this line, read the switch state out into his Arduino, and then transmitted the correct characters to his computer via the Arduino’s serial over USB. (Video demo) As hardware types like to say, the rest is a simple matter of software.