Video Standards Are More Than Video Signals

November 19, 2015 by 78 Comments

The number of hours we spend staring at screens is probably best unknown, but how about the technology that makes up the video on the screen? We’ve all seen a reel-to-reel projector on TV or in a movie or maybe you’re old enough to have owned one, surely some of you still have one tucked away real nice. Whether you had the pleasure of operating a projector or just watched it happen in the movies the concept is pretty straight forward. A long piece of film which contains many individual frames pass in front of a high intensity lamp while the shutter hides the film movement from our eyes and our brain draws in the imaginary motion from frame to frame. Staring at a Blu-ray player won’t offer the same intuition, while we won’t get into what must the painful detail of decoding video from a Blu-ray Disc we will look into a few video standards, and how we hack them.

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Crowdsourcing Reference Designs From Github

November 19, 2015 by 24 Comments

A ton of open source hardware projects make their way onto Github, and Eagle is one of the most popular tools for these designs. [TomKeddie] came up with the idea of searching Github for Eagle files containing specific parts at Hacker Camp Shenzhen, and a method of scraping useful ones.

The folks over at Dangerous Prototypes used this to build the Github Hardware Search tool. Simply enter a part number, like “ATmega328P”, and you’ll receive a list of the designs using that part. You can then study the design and use it as a reference for your own project. You can also snag library files for the parts.

Of course, there are some limitations to this. The most obvious one is the lack of quality control. There’s no guarantee that the design you find works, or has even been built. Also, it only works for Eagle 6+ files, since prior versions were not XML. You can read more about the design of the tool over on Dangerous Prototypes.

ON Semiconductor Acquires Fairchild

November 19, 2015 by 24 Comments

In the continuing process of semiconductor companies buying each other up, ON Semiconductor has acquired Fairchild Semiconductor for $2.4 Billion.

ON Semi and Fairchild’s deal is only the latest in a long line of mergers and acquisitions. We’ve recently seen Dialog’s buyout of Atmel, Avago’s purchase of Broadcom,  NXP and Freescale’s merger, and soon might see TI buy Maxim. We’re currently in the great time of acquisition, with nearly $100 Billion flowing from company to company in just a few months.

Companies have cash to spend and costs to cut. This latest deal is expected to save $150 Million in annual costs.

Fairchild has a long and storied history in the semiconductor industry, with the first integrated circuit produced in a Fairchild lab in Palo Alto. [Bob Widlar] made Fairchild his home until famously leaving for National Semiconductor in 1965. Somewhat ironically, Fairchild Semiconductor was bought by National Semiconductor in 1987.

ON Semiconductor’s history is not nearly as interesting, being spun off of Motorola’s semiconductor business in 1999. Although ON’s main line of business was discrete components, ON also has a catalog of quite a few power management ICs.

Unfortunately, because ON Semi bought Fairchild and not the other way around, we’re stuck with what is probably the worst logo in the entire semiconductor industry: drop-shadowed balls are so mid-90s!

Motorized Picnic Table Terrorizes Perth Streets

November 19, 2015 by 26 Comments

There is a public menace on the streets of Perth, Australia: two motorized picnic tables. Police are looking for the drivers of the, erm, vehicles, which were seen cruising down the West Coast Highway, complete with passenger casually sitting on the tables having a drink. It looks like the two picnic tables are being driven by a centrally mounted lawnmower motor and are controlled from one of the seats. The police are interested because it is illegal to drive something on the public road in Australia that isn’t properly licensed. I’ll bet that his insurance probably doesn’t cover taking it out for a spin on the highway, either. The accompanying TV news report does not identify the person responsible, but they claim have spoken to the builder, who says that the two tables can manage up to 50 miles per hour. They claim that he is even working on an upgraded model that includes a built-in barbecue, which could bring a whole new meaning to the term drive-thru.

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A Networked Analog Clock

November 19, 2015 by 20 Comments

Even in the face of an Internet of Things grasping for a useful use case, an Internet-connected clock is actually a great idea. With a cheap WiFi module and a connection to an NTP server, any clock can become an atomic clock. [Jim] decided to experiment with the ESP8266 to turn a cheap analog clock into something that will display network time using a bunch of gears and motors.

The clock [Jim] chose for this build is an extremely cheap clock pulled right from the shelves of WalMart. This clock uses a standard quartz clock mechanism, powered by a single AA cell. The coils in these quartz movements can be easily controlled by pulsing current through them, and with a few a few transistors and diodes set up in an h-bridge, an ESP8266 is quite good at setting the time on this clock.

The software for this clock first connects to the WiFi network, then checks an NTP server for the true time. Once the ESP8266 gets the time, it starts hammering the coil in the clock movement until the hands are where they should be.

[Jim] says the project needs a bit of work – there is no feedback on the clock to determine the position of the hands. Instead, the time is just set assuming the clock hands started off at 12:00. Still, even with that small fault, it’s a great build and a great exploit of what can be done with a cheap quarts clock movement.

If you’d like to go to the opposite extreme of cost and complexity, how about a DIY retro atomic clock?  Or if you’re in need of a wakeup, we’ve seen a ton of alarm clock posts in the past few weeks.

Full Size Star Wars Holochess Build

November 19, 2015 by 5 Comments

The quality and attention to detail seen in [Ian Martin]’s build is impressive regardless of his choice to build a functioning holochess set. We’re not to take away from the nerd-gasm this build invokes, but we’d rather draw to attention the craftsmanship of the builder. Sadly [Ian] doesn’t have a proper blog or product page but you can view everything he posts about the project on his social networking page and get his take on the finished work in the video below.

This build is not just a well engineered mechanical design, the electronics that run the controls and indicators are [Ian]’s home brew Arduino Mega shields. A complete game requires two sets of electronics, one for each side of the table so rolling his own shield was probably a space saving decision.

Each of the figures used as game pieces were hand sculpted and painted (is that a Rancor to the right?). User controls are presented in true-to-form fashion with 54 buttons, 26 lights, 10 knobs, and an LCD screen with custom bezel to display custom monster status. Nope, the monsters aren’t animated holograms but to make up for that [Ian] built in ambient noises so you know which are still alive. This is our first time discovering that there is a name other than “Holochess” for the game: Dejarik. We’ll leave it up to the reader to figure out how it’s played.

This is an impressive build and we can’t wait to see what else [Ian] comes up with in the future. We have covered Star Wars builds before and some interesting board game builds but never where the two meet before this.

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Hacking Chinese State Media

November 18, 2015 by 54 Comments

A while ago, a few journalists from China visited the Metalab hackerspace in Vienna. They wanted to do a story on ‘fablabs’ and ‘makerspaces’, despite the objections to the residents of the Metalab hackerspace. Apparently, mentioning ‘hacking’ on China Central Television (yes, it’s called CCTV) is a big no-no.

hacking-chinese-state-mediaWanting to send a message to at least a few people in China, the members of the hackerspace had to think laterally. Metalab member [amir] came up with a way to encode data that could be printed on t-shirts. These bright, colorful squares featured in all of the interviews with Metalab members carried messages like, “free tibet!”, “remember tian’anmen 1989” and “question the government. dont trust the propaganda”

All the videos are available in this playlist, and [amir]’s code to generate the colorful rectangles of political activism can be found here.

In a related note, we’d like to say ‘hi’ to our one reader in North Korea. Yes, according to the stats and analytics, we have one reader in North Korea.

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