Swimming Pool Dance Floor Enlightened With Leds

October 24, 2015 by Rud Merriam 11 Comments

In a well documented blog entry, [Loren Bufanu] presents a project that lit up a glass dance floor covering a swimming pool with RGB strips. We mentioned a video of his project in a Hackaday links but didn’t have any background information. Now we do.

The project took around 450 meters of RGB strips controlled by two Rainbowduinos and driven by sixty-four power Mosfets, sixty-four bipolar transistors, and a few other components. Producing white light from the LEDs draws 8 amps from the power supply.

The Rainbowduino is an ATmega328 Arduino compatible board with two MY9221 controllers. Each controller handles 12 channels of Adaptive Pulse Density Modulation. In other words, it makes the LEDs flash nicely. [Loren] used the Rainbowduino instead of some alternatives because multiple R’duinos can coordinate their activities over I2C.

The software part of the project did not work as well as the hardware. The light patterns were supposed to follow the music being played. A PC software package intended to drive the R’duinos produced just a muddy mess. Some kludges, including screen captures (!), driven by a batch file tamed the unruliness.

It’s been awhile, but a similar disco dance floor, built by [Chris Williamson] but not over a pool, previously caught our attention. [Chris] is a principle in Terror Tech that recently got a mention on Sparkfun.

The video after the break fortunately does not make a big splash, but is still electrifying.

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3D Printed Turbofan Features Reverse Thrust

October 24, 2015 by Adam Fabio 23 Comments

[Harcoreta] has created a 3D printed model of the GE GEnx-1B Turbofan. This is the engine that powers Boeing’s 787 dreamliner. What sets this model apart is that it has a complete working reverse thrust system. A real jet engine would be asking a bit much of 3D printed ABS plastic. This model is more of an Electric Ducted Fan (EDF). An NTM 1400kv 35mm brushless motor hides in the core, cooled by a small impeller.

What sets this apart from other jet models is the working reverse thrust system. [Harcoreta] painstakingly modeled the cascade reverse thrust setup on the 787/GEnx-1B combo. He then engineered a way to make it actually work using radio controlled plane components. Two servos drive threaded rods. The rods move the rear engine cowling, exposing the reverse thrust ducts. The servos also drive a complex series of linkages. These linkages actuate cascade vanes which close off the fan exhaust. The air driven by the fan has nowhere to go but out the reverse thrust ducts. [Harcoreta’s] videos do a much better job of explaining how all the parts work together.

The model was printed on an Reprap Prusa I3 at 0.1mm layer height. [Harcoreta] smoothed his prints using acrylic thinner, similar to the acetone vapor method. Unfortunately, [Harcoreta] has only released a few of the design files on rcgroups, but we’re hoping he will drop the whole model. We can’t wait to see a model dreamliner landing just like the big boys!

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Stuffing Macs Into FPGAs

October 24, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

A few years ago, [Steve] of Big Mess ‘O Wires fame stuffed one of the first Macintosh computers into an FPGA. While the project worked and was able to run System 6 on a virtual CPU, there were a few problems: it wasn’t exactly stable, and there was no support for a keyboard, sound, SCSI, or serial ports.

Now, there’s a new tiny FPGA board around, and this one is perfectly designed to fit the original Macintosh on it. It’s much more stable, and there is a floppy disk emulator on the horizon, just so you won’t have to deal with all those 400k 3.5″ disks anymore.

[Steve]’s brand new Mac Plus is based on the MiST board, an FPGA board that was originally designed to emulate the first Amigas and the Atari SE on an FPGA and a separate ARM CPU. There’s already been a lot of classic computers ported to the MiST, and the classic all-in-one Macs are the last project that’s left.

In the video below, you can see the MiST board running the classic System 6 at SVGA resolution. That means MacPaint and Shufflepuck in one compact board using modern hardware.

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Radio Jamming Rifle Claimed To Disable Drones

October 24, 2015 by James Hobson 77 Comments

[Battelle], an Ohio-based non-profit R&D firm has just unveiled a device they call the DroneDefender — a long-range anti-drone defense weapon. It almost sounds like they’ve brought the fictional drone hunter’s RF cannon to life. But does it really work?

According to the site, it uses radio frequency disruption to blast unwanted drones out of the sky. Cool concept, but does it actually work? Unlike the hackable MAVLink protocol used by Parrot AR, ArduPilot and a handful of other consumer drones, this weapon uses brute radio signal force to disable any(?) consumer drone.

There’s a video after the break demonstrating a simulated use of the technology, which leaves us a bit confused. They show the drone slowly landing all nicely after being “guided” down by the rifle. If the system is jamming both GPS and the 2.4 GHz control link, the behavior will all depend on the software loaded on the drone. Some will go to a fail-safe mode, which is low throttle or motor power off, assuming the pilot has set fail-safe. Others may attempt to loiter on IMU sensors only.

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Low-Cost, Arduino-Compatible Drawing Robot

October 24, 2015 by Rud Merriam 9 Comments

Bringing women into technical education at times seems to be an insurmountable challenge. As a counter, a small drawing robot created by [MakersBox] might help. The robot was used in a ChickTech workshop for teen girls.

640px-Turtle_draw — “Turtle draw” by Valiant Technology Ltd..

The goals for the robot were to have an easy to build, easy to program robot that did something interesting, and was also low-cost so the workshop participants could take it home and continue to learn. These requirements led [MakersBox] to the Adafruit Pro Trinket 3V, stepper motors for accuracy, and a 3d printed chassis to allow for customization.

Another version of the Arduino should work without any problems and even possibly a Raspberry Pi, suggests [MakersBox]. With the latter’s more diverse programming environment opening up a lot of possibilities

Drawing robots like this for education are not new. [Seymour Papert] created one of the first turtle robots, seen at the left, in the 1980s. He even created the Logo programming language and adapted it for use with the turtle. An interesting similarity between [MakersBox’s] and the original turtle is the drawing pen is in the center of both.

Hat tip to our friends at Adafruit.

A rose, is a rose, is a rose, even if drawn by a robot, after the break.

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An Internet Connected Earth

October 24, 2015 by Brandon Dunson 28 Comments

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that more than half of the world’s population doesn’t have an Internet connection. It’s tricky to get an exact figure on this, however the number of people without connection is commonly agreed to be somewhere around 2/3rds of the population of the planet. There are some heavy hitters working on this problem with some pretty interesting solutions.

OneWeb is an outfit with [Richard Branson] as the front-man who plan to launch low orbit satellites to communicate with ground terminals. The ground terminals would rebroadcast the communication signals from the satellites resulting in 2G, 3G, LTE, and WiFi signals for those near a ground terminal.

SpaceX is throwing its hat in the ring with a little helpful funding from Google and Fidelity to the tune of $1 Billion.

Perhaps the most surprising is [Zuckerberg’s] solar-powered internet laser beaming drones. The idea is that these laser birds will circle over an Internet dead-zone like buzzard over a dying buffalo (reaching?) and provide connectivity to those below. The solar drones will fly at an altitude of 20km which is a pretty good ways up there, and they are believed to be able to stay in flight for months at a time. There’s a Facebook PhD explaining this in a video after the break, thanks Dr. Facebook.

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Boeing’s New Microlattice, Now The Lightest “Metal” Ever

October 23, 2015 by George Graves 55 Comments

Mr McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr McGuire: Plastics.

You may recognize the above dialog from the movie “The Graduate” starring a young [Dustin Hoffman], whose character is getting advice about what line of work he should get into after university. Maybe Mr McGuire’s advice should have been “Microlattice.”

If you take a step back for a moment and survey the state of materials, you’ll see that not much has changed in the last 50 years. We’re still building homes out of dead trees, and most cars are still made out of iron(although that is starting to change.) It’s only been just recently has there been advances in batteries technology – and that only came about with the force of a trillion-dollar mobile phone industry behind it. So we’re excited by any new advance we see, and Boeing’s new “Microlattice” tickles our fancy.

Boeing isn’t giving away the recipe just yet, but here is what we know: it’s 99.99% empty space, making it extremely light. It’s so light, that if you drop it, it floats to the ground. It’s also compressible, giving it the ability to absorb energy and spring back (you can see it in action in the after the break.) It’s made by creating a sacrificial skeletal structure the shape of the final lattice, then coating that template with nickel-phosphorus alloy. The temporary inner structure is then etched away, leaving a “microlattice” of tiny interconnected hollow rods with wall thickness of about 100 nanometers. Of course it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out why Boeing is interested in such materials, they are eye it as an extremely lightweight building material for planes and spacecraft.

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