The world is more used to software startups than hardware startups. Luke Iseman is here to help. He is the Director of Hardware at Y Combinator and discusses some details that need to be kept in mind when starting up your own hardware company. Take a look at the talk he presented at the 2015 Hackaday SuperConference and then join us after the break to cover a few key points of his discussion.
Continue reading “How Y Combinator Brings Hardware Startups To Life”
It’s no secret that we like 3D printing, but Artist and architect [Michael Hansmeyer] really likes 3D printing. So much so that he’s based his entire career around exploring the artistic possibilities of what he calls “computational architecture”.
We first fell in love with [Michael]’s work “Columns” because it was both daring and relatively low-budget at the same time. He made a series of architectural-sized columns out of cross-sections of laser-cut cardboard. Why cardboard? Because his goal was to make the columns as complex as possible and the current range of 3D printers couldn’t give him the resolution he wanted.
Fast-forward to “Digital Grotesque”. Now [Michael] has access to a large-scale sand printer, and the license to go entirely nuts. He makes a space reminiscent of a Rococo grotto, but full of so much detail that you can’t really take it all in: it’s nearly fractal. Some stats: 11 tons of printed sandstone, 260 million surfaces, 30 billion voxels. We’re stoked that we don’t have to dust it!
His latest piece, “Arabesque Wall” is partly organic and elegant, and part Aliens. If we can play art critic, we think it’s beautiful. Go click through the portfolio. (And although they never got printed, we really like some of the “Voxels” series of cellular-automata pieces.)
From new paint materials opening up new color possibilities to new instruments enabling entirely different types of music, art, and technology mutually inform each other much more than we often appreciate. In ten years time, we’ll be looking back on this work and saying “this piece looks good” and “that piece looks bad” instead of “wow, amazing tech!”. But for now, we’re also content to wallow in the “wow”.
We hope we’re not insulting you by suggesting this, but it’s possible that even the best among us may be faced with bugs in our embedded code from time to time. And while we’re great fans of printf debugging over the serial port, and its high-speed equivalent — flipping a GPIO pin — there’s a time when your bug is so deep that having a real debugger is the best way to dig it out.
[slaff] has been doing some great work documenting C/C++ programming on the ESP-8266, mostly using Eclipse and some of the Arduino libraries. In the fourth part of his series of posts, he walks through using a couple debugger options for the ESP. What makes this all work is the ESP-gdbstub code from Espressif themselves. gdbstub looks great — it works both with the standard SDK as well as with FreeRTOS, so you can debug your ESP-8266 code whether it’s in an OS or on the bare metal. And all this just using the standard serial connection that’s used for programming.
Now, this still may not help with timing-related bugs. ESP-gdbstub uses the serial port, after all. But having the ability to set breakpoints and interactively inspect what’s going on in the chip’s memory is priceless, and doing so with no extra hardware connections is brilliant.
Continue reading “Squash Your ESP-8266 Bugs With ESP-gdbstub”
Right up front, we’ll cop to the inevitable “not a hack” comments on this one. This video of the Steam Controller assembly plant is just two minutes of pure robotics porn, plain and simple.
From injection molding of the case parts through assembly, testing and final palletizing of packaged controllers for the trip to distributors, Valve’s video is amazingly detailed and very well made. We’d wager that the crane shots and the shots following product down conveyors were done with a drone. A grin was had with the Aperture Labs logo on the SCARA arms in the assembly and testing work cell, and that inexplicable puff of “steam” from the ceiling behind the pallet in the final shot was a nice touch too. We also enjoyed the all-too-brief time-lapse segment at around 00:16 that shows the empty space in Buffalo Grove, Illinois being fitted out.
This may seem like a frivolous video, but think about it: if you’re a hardware hacker, isn’t this where you want to see your idea end up? Think of it as inspiration to get your widget into production. You’ll want to get there in stages, of course, so make sure you check out [Zach Fredin]’s 2015 Hackaday Superconference talk on pilot-scale production.
Continue reading “Industrial Automation In Action: Steam Controller Assembly”
Hackaday.io user [Abderraouf] has written an implementation of the new(ish) Spritz cipher and hash for Arduino. While we’re not big enough crypto-nerds to assess the security of the code, it looks like it’s going to be pretty handy.
Spritz itself is a neat cipher. Instead of taking in fixed blocks of data and operating on them, it allows you to process it in (almost) whatever chunks it comes in naturally, and then extract out the encrypted results piecewise. It works both as a two-way cipher and as a one-way hash function. It looks like Spritz is a one-stop-shop for all of your encryption needs, and now you can run it on your Arduino.
In case you are afraid of new implementations of new ciphers (and you should be), Spritz’s pedigree should help to put you at ease: it was developed by [Ron Rivest] to be a successor to his RC4 algorithm, and it incorporates a lot of the lessons learned about that algorithm over the past. This doesn’t exclude subtle flaws in the implementation of the library (no offence, [Abderraouf]!) or your work downstream, but at least the underlying algorithm seems to be the real deal.
[Abderraouf] links it in his writeup, but just for completeness, here’s the Spritz paper (PDF). What crypto libraries do you currently use for Arduino or microcontroller projects? We’ve been fans of XXTEA for ages, but more because it’s simple and small than because it’s secure. Spritz may be simple enough to implement easily, and still more secure. Sweet.
Our favorite Russian mad scientists, [Kreosan], have shocked us yet again with another terribly ill-advised, super bad idea. Home made EL wire that runs off of mains voltage.
From the picture it looks a lot like EL wire, doesn’t it? Well, it’s actually just a nickel chromium wire hooked up to the main AC supply in their…. uh, testing house? Doesn’t look like they live there, so we have to wonder why it still has power. Anyway, yeah, they made a restive load using the wire, and connected it directly to the panel. So besides the fire hazard, you could also get electrocuted!
For house decorations it’s a great way to warm the place up, and it might even help start a fire if you’re lucky!
Continue reading “DIY Electroluminescent Wire, Russian Style”
Ceramic capacitors are pretty much the pixie dust of the electronics world. If you sprinkle enough of them on a circuit, everything will work. These ceramic capacitors aren’t the newest and latest technology, though: you can find them in radios from the 1930s, and they have one annoying property: their capacitance changes in relation to voltage.
This is a problem if you’re relying on ceramic caps in an RC filter or a power supply. What you need is a device that will graph capacitance against voltage, and [limpkin] is here to show you how to do it.
Of course capacitance is usually measured by timing how long it takes to charge and discharge a cap through an RC oscillator. This requires at least one known value – in this case a 0.1% resistor – by measuring the time it takes for this circuit to oscillate, an unknown capacitance can be calculated.
That’s all well and good, but how do you measure capacitance against a bias voltage? EDN comes to save the day with a simple circuit built around an op-amp. This op-amp is just a comparator, with the rest of the circuit providing a voltage directly proportional to the percentage of charge in the capacitor.
This little project is something [limpkin] has turned into a Kickstarter, and it’s something we’ve seen before. That said, measuring capacitance against a voltage isn’t something any ‘ol meter can do, and we’re glad [limpkin] could put together an easy to use tool that measures this phenomenon.
