Buying, Selling, And Bartering Hacking Hardware

June 1, 2011 by 5 Comments

Regular reader [Grenadier] wrote in to let us know about his newly published hacking hardware trading post called The Junkbox. Apparently when he’s not blowing up capacitors or building his own high voltage ones, he makes time to code up a website where you can buy, sell, and barter leftover components.

We have something like this right here at Hackaday. The dollar sign icon along the right column, just underneath the featured posts banner will take you to our classifieds section which at the time of writing had a whopping nine items posts. But these things to ebb and flow. Check in on the newly posted link from time to time to see that number grow.

Whether it’s over at The Junkbox or in our classifieds section, we think the biggest problem is finding what you need when you need it. This is nothing new. If you missed it before, we’ve embedded an older episode of the EEVblog after the break where [Dave Jones] tours Apex Surplus. It’s as if a hacker who has hoarding tendencies bought a store forty years ago and just kept piling more and more merchandise to the sky.

Continue reading “Buying, Selling, And Bartering Hacking Hardware” →

Crushtoberfest – Can You Pwn Tom Selleck?

December 3, 2009 by 11 Comments

[flickr video=http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmillerid/4055251585/]

On rare occasion, the celestial bodies that control engineering and design awesomeness move into alignment and cast their blessed star dust upon a hacker. Today, we can witness the glorious outcome of such an alignment. Although almost unheard of, it’s a good omen that such a blessed hacker also be adorned with a wickedly furry face.

[Joel] wanted to up the ante for a yearly work gathering. He set out with the concept of Crushtoberfest, a test-your-strength game where a stake is hit with a mallet and the resulting force rings a bell. But bell ringing is for normal projects, [Joel’s] muse required LEDs and fire as a reward for success. In fact, Tom Selleck (god of all things mustache) becomes angry at successful contestants to the point that his eyes will flash red and flames shoot out of his ears.

The mechanical input is a clever design. The stake used as the target is a 6×6 block with some old tire tread affixed to the top of them. The stake rests on a piece of radiator hose that is sealed on one end and connected to a pressure sensor on the other. Radiator hose is resilient, so it takes quite a blow to cause much compression, which is then translated into a value by an Arduino via the pressure sensor. [Joel’s] gone to the effort of building gravitational deceleration into the progress tracker of the vertical string of LEDS. Too bad he didn’t have access to an addressable LED rope to make this easier, but he did pull it off nicely. He also goes into detail about prototyping and building some fireball modules.

Go now and read his blog (oldest at the top, newest at the bottom). We can call the experience nothing short of delightful.

Just a pile of strawberries.

Can You Freeze-Dry Strawberries Without A Machine?

June 20, 2024 by 37 Comments

Summer has settled upon the northern hemisphere, which means that it’s time for sweet, sweet strawberries to be cheap and plentiful. But would you believe they taste even better in freeze-dried format? I wouldn’t have ever known until I happened to get on a health kick and was looking for new things to eat. I’m not sure I could have picked a more expensive snack, but that’s why we’re here — I wanted to start freeze-drying my own strawberries.

While I could have just dropped a couple grand and bought some kind of freeze-drying contraption, I just don’t have that kind of money. And besides, no good Hackaday article would have come out of that. So I started looking for alternative ways of getting the job done.

Dry Ice Is Nice

Dry ice, sublimating away in a metal measuring cup.
Image via Air Products

Early on in my web crawling on the topic, I came across this Valley Food Storage blog entry that seems to have just about all the information I could possibly want about the various methods of freeze-drying food. The one that caught my eye was the dry ice method, mostly because it’s only supposed to take 24 hours.

Here’s what you do, in a nutshell: wash, hull, and slice the strawberries, then put them in a resealable bag. Leave the bag open so the moisture can evaporate. Put these bags in the bottom of a large Styrofoam cooler, and lay the dry ice on top. Loosely affix the lid and wait 24 hours for the magic to happen.

I still had some questions. Does all the moisture simply evaporate? Or will there be a puddle at the bottom of the cooler that could threaten my tangy, crispy strawberries? One important question: should I break up the dry ice? My local grocer sells it in five-pound blocks, according to their site. The freeze-drying blog suggests doing a pound-for-pound match-up of fruit and dry ice, so I guess I’m freeze-drying five entire pounds of strawberries. Hopefully, this works out and I have tasty treats for a couple of weeks or months. Continue reading “Can You Freeze-Dry Strawberries Without A Machine?” →

McDonald’s Terminates Its Drive-Through Ordering AI Assistant

June 18, 2024 by 72 Comments

McDonald’s recently announced that it will be scrapping the voice-assistant which it has installed at over 100 of its drive-throughs after a two-year trial run. In the email that was sent to franchises, McDonald’s did say that they are still looking at voice ordering solutions for automated order taking (AOT), but it appears that for now the test was a disappointment. Judging by the many viral videos of customers struggling to place an order through the AOT system, it’s not hard to see why.

This AOT attempt began when in 2019 McDonald’s acquired AI company Apprente to create its McD Tech Labs, only to sell it again to IBM who then got contracted to create the technology for McDonald’s fast-food joints. When launched in 2021, it was expected that McDonald’s drive-through ordering lanes would eventually all be serviced by AOT, with an experience akin to the Alexa and Siri voice assistants that everyone knows and loves (to yell at).

With the demise of this test at McDonald’s, it would seem that the biggest change is likely to be in the wider automation of preparing fast-food instead, with robots doing the burger flipping and freedom frying rather than a human. That said, would you prefer the McD voice assistant when going through a Drive-Thru® over a human voice?

A closeup of the ring, inner electronics including a lit green LED seen through the inner transparent epoxy, next to the official app used to light up the LED for a demo.

New Part Day: A Hackable Smart Ring

June 16, 2024 by 26 Comments

We’ve seen prolific firmware hacker [Aaron Christophel] tackle smart devices of all sorts, and he never fails to deliver. This time, he’s exploring a device that seems like it could have come from the pages of a Cyberpunk RPG manual — a shiny chrome Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) smart ring that’s packed with sensors, is reasonably hacker friendly, and is currently selling for as little as $20.

The ring’s structure is simple — the outside is polished anodized metal, with the electronics and battery carefully laid out along the inside surface, complete with a magnetic charging port. It has a BLE-enabled MCU, a heartrate sensor, and an accelerometer. It’s not much, but you can do a lot with it, from the usual exercise and sleep tracking, to a tap-sensitive interface for anything you want to control from the palm of your hand. In the video’s comments, someone noted how a custom firmware for the ring could be used to detect seizures; a perfect example of how hacking such gadgets can bring someone a brighter future.

The ring manufacturer’s website provides firmware update images, and it turns out, you can upload your own firmware onto it over-the-air through BLE. There’s no signing, no encryption — this is a dream device for your purposes. Even better, the MCU is somewhat well-known. There’s an SDK, for a start, and a datasheet which describes all you would want to know, save for perhaps the tastiest features. It’s got 200 K of RAM, 512 K of flash, BLE library already in ROM, this ring gives you a lot to wield for how little space it all takes up. You can even get access to the chip’s Serial Wire Debug (SWD) pads, though you’ve got to scrape away some epoxy first.

As we’ve seen in the past, once [Aaron] starts hacking on these sort of devices, their popularity tends to skyrocket. We’d recommend ordering a couple now before sellers get wise and start raising prices. While we’ve seen hackers build their own smart rings before, it’s tricky business, and the end results usually have very limited capability. The potential for creating our own firmware for such an affordable and capable device is very exciting — watch this space!

Continue reading “New Part Day: A Hackable Smart Ring” →

A clipping of the "3D Printing & Modelling" skill tree. An arrow pointing up says "Advanced" and there are several hexagons for various skills on the page including blanks for writing in your own options and some of the more advanced skills like "Print in Nylon or ASA material"

Maker Skill Trees Help You Level Up Your Craft

June 11, 2024 by 12 Comments

Hacking and making are great fun due to their open ended nature, but being able to try anything can make the task of selecting your next project daunting. [Steph Piper] is here with her Maker Skill Trees to give you a map to leveling up your skills.

Featuring a grid of 73 hexagonal tiles per discipline, there’s plenty of inspiration for what to tackle next in your journey. The trees start with the basics at the bottom and progressively move up in difficulty as you move up the page. With over 50 trees to select from (so far), you can probably find something to help you become better at anything from 3D printing and modeling to entrepreneurship or woodworking.

Despite being spoiled for choice, if you’re disappointed there’s no tree for your particular interest (underwater basket weaving?), you can roll your own with the provided template and submit it for inclusion in the repository.

Want to get a jump on an AI Skill Tree? Try out these AI courses. Maybe you could use these to market yourself to potential employers or feel confident enough to strike out on your own?

[Thanks to Courtney for the tip!]

Continue reading “Maker Skill Trees Help You Level Up Your Craft” →

Raspberry Pi Goes Public

June 11, 2024 by 57 Comments

We’ve heard rumors for the last few months, and now it looks like they’ve come true: the business side of Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Holdings has become a publicly listed company on the London Stock Exchange.

We heard rumblings about this a while back, and our own [Jenny List] asked the question of what this means for the hobbyist and hacker projects that use their products. After all, they’ve been spending a lot of money making new silicon, and issuing stock helps them continue. Jenny worried that they’d forget that what sells their hardware is the software, but ends up concluding that they’ll probably continue doing more of the same thing, just with better funding.

Raspberry Pi CEO [Eben Upton] said basically the same when we asked him what a floatation would mean for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which is the non-profit arm of the Raspberry Empire, and which is responsible for a lot of the educational material and outreach that they do. (Fast-forward to minute 40.) Before the share issue, the Foundation wholly owned Holdings, and received donations to fund its work. Now that there has been a floatation, it looks like the Foundation will owns 70% of Holdings, and will use this endowment to finance its educational mission.

We don’t have a crystal ball, but we suspect this changes not much at all. Raspberry Pi Holdings Ltd is doing great business by producing niche single-board computers that appeal both to the hacker and industrial markets, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation now has a more concrete source of funding to continue its educational goals. But the future will tell!