You Can Have My TIPs When You Pry Them From My Cold, Dead Hands

August 17, 2015 by Adam Fabio 154 Comments

We’ve seen a growing number of posts and recommendations around the net regarding components, specifically transistors. “Don’t use old parts” they cry, “Go with newer components.” You can often find these recommendations on Arduino forums. This all came to a head with a page called “Do Not TIP,” which was linked in the Arduino subreddit. This page belongs to [Tom Jennings], creator of Fidonet, and one of the early authors of what would become Phoenix BIOS. [Tom] and a few others have been calling for everyone to send their old parts to the landfill – not use them, nor gift them to new experimenters. Get them out of the food chain. No offense to [Tom], but we have to disagree. These parts are still perfectly usable for experienced designers, and have a lot to offer new hardware hackers.

TIP is the part number prefix for a series of power transistors created by Texas Instruments. In fact, “TIP” stands for Texas Instruments Power. The series was originally released in 1969. Yes, that’s right, 1969. Why are we still using parts designed when man first walked on the moon? The same reason people are still using the 555 timer: they’re simple, they’re easily available, they’re robust, and most of all, they get the job done. The TIP series has been used in thousands of classes, tutorials both online and off, and millions of projects over the years. Much of that documentation is already out there on the internet. The TIP series is also out in the distribution channel – they’ve been used for 40 years. Any retail shop that stocks a few electronics parts will have at least one of the TIP series.

The TIP series aren’t always the best transistors for the job. However, for most hobbyist-designed circuits, we don’t need the best performance, nor the best price – we’re going to use the parts we have on hand. There is always room to improve once you get the basic circuit working.

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Developed On Hackaday: Let’s Build An Electronic Hackaday Badge

August 17, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 44 Comments

We’re going to build an electronic Hackaday Badge, and by “we”, I mean Hackaday community members who are passionate about the project.

I’ll be leading the charge. I had a great learning experience the last time I helped design the e-paper badge for the 2013 Open Hardware Summit, and hope to learn a lot along the way this time too. Since then, Badges have come a long way – at cons like DEFCON, LayerONE, Shmoocon, The Next Hope, Open Hardware Summit, The EMF, SAINTCON, SXSW Create, The Last Hope, TROOPERS11, ZaCon V and of course the rad1o from this year’s CCCamp. Word is that this year’s Open Hardware Summit badge is going to be pretty kickass too. So, we have some very big shoes to fill. But this doesn’t have to be about “my badge is better than yours”. And this badge isn’t meant to be specific to any single con or event. So what does the Badge do, then? “It’s a physical extension of the hackaday.io community, made specifically for hacker gatherings of all types and sizes.”

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Mechanical Watch Hacker Gets An Apple Watch

August 17, 2015 by Gregory L. Charvat 68 Comments

Mechanical watch enthusiasts see the Apple watch as a threat to the traditional gear train. It does not tick, requires frequent re-charging, and it’s certainly not the most attractive of watches. But it can direct you to the local coffee shop, allow you to communicate with friends anywhere in the world, get you onto an airplane after the most awkward of arm gestures, and keep you apprised of the latest NCAA basketball scores. Is the advent of the smart watch the end to the mechanical watch?
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Beautiful Arduino Fireworks Controller

August 17, 2015 by Al Williams 9 Comments

A lot of designers have the luxury of creating things that aren’t supposed to explode. That’s usually easy. The trick is designing things that are supposed to explode and then making absolutely sure they explode at the right time (and only the right time). [JonBush] recently did a beautiful build of an Arduino-based fireworks controller. Seriously, it looks like a movie prop from a summer blockbuster where [Bruce Willis] is trying to decide what wire to cut.

[Jon] used a mega 2560 because he wanted to do the I/O directly from the device. His code only takes about 8K of the total program storage, so with some I/O expansion (like shift registers) a smaller chip would do the job. The device can control up to 8 sets of fireworks, uses a physical arm key, and has a handheld remote. It is even smart enough to sense igniter failures.

The front panel is a work of art and includes a seven-segment display made from Neopixel LEDs. The whole thing is in a waterproof case and uses optical isolation in several key areas.

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The Machine That Japed: Microsoft’s Humor-Emulating AI

August 17, 2015 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

Ten years ago, highbrow culture magazine The New Yorker started a contest. Each week, a cartoon with no caption is published in the back of the magazine. Readers are encouraged to submit an apt and hilarious caption that captures the magazine’s infamous wit. Editors select the top three entries to vie for reader votes and the prestige of having captioned a New Yorker cartoon.

The magazine receives about 5,000 submissions each week, which are scrutinized by cartoon editor [Bob Mankoff] and a parade of assistants that burn out after a year or two. But soon, [Mankoff]’s assistants may have their own assistant thanks to Microsoft researcher [Dafna Shahaf].

[Dafna Shahaf] heard [Mankoff] give a speech about the New Yorker cartoon archive a year or so ago, and it got her thinking about the possibilities of the vast collection with regard to artificial intelligence. The intricate nuances of humor and wordplay have long presented a special challenge to creators. [Shahaf] wondered, could computers begin to learn what makes a caption funny, given a big enough canon?

[Shahaf] threw ninety years worth of wry, one-panel humor at the system. Given this knowledge base, she trained it to choose funny captions for cartoons based on the jokes of similar cartoons. But in order to help [Mankoff] and his assistants choose among the entries, the AI must be able to rank the comedic value of jokes. And since computer vision software is made to decipher photos and not drawings, [Shahaf] and her team faced another task: assigning keywords to each cartoon. The team described each one in terms of its contextual anchors and subsequently its situational anomalies. For example, in the image above, the context keywords could be car dealership, car, customer, and salesman. Anomalies might include claws, fangs, and zoomorphic automobile.

The result is about the best that could be hoped for, if one was being realistic. All of the cartoon editors’ chosen winners showed up among the AI’s top 55.8%, which means the AI could ultimately help [Mankoff and Co.] weed out just under half of the truly bad entries. While [Mankoff] sees the study’s results as a positive thing, he’ll continue to hire assistants for the foreseeable future.

Humor-enabled AI may still be in its infancy, but the implications of the advancement are already great. To give personal assistants like Siri and Cortana a funny bone is to make them that much more human. But is that necessarily a good thing?

[via /.]

Chaos Communication Camp 2015: Badges, Talks, And Culture

August 16, 2015 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

The Rad1o Badge

The rad1o badge is this great standalone HackRF clone, and great hardware hacking platform. On Day Two and most of Day Three, people were divided largely into two camps: those simply having fun with GNURadio and the software-defined radio (SDR) side of things, and those modifying and adding to the rad1o firmware to get the various peripherals up and working or simply make sweet animations.

On the evening on Day Three, this all changed. [iggy] managed to get the HackRF PortaPack library ported over to the rad1o badge. We’re excited about this code because it lets the radio and microcontroller sides of the badge work together, and that means things like a standalone SDR radio sniffer with waterfall plot (pictured here picking up WiFi and Bluetooth signals) is feasible. Using the badge as a standalone transmit and receive platform can’t be far away. Things are starting to get really cool with the rad1o, and there’s still two days of camp left.

Meanwhile, on the SDR front, there was a packed house at the GNURadio workshop last night, and there’s going to be a repeat on Sunday since it was so popular. The Munich CCC has a great SDR scavenger hunt going on currently, and [Sec] and [Schneider] from Munich gave their talk on eavesdropping on the Iridium satellite pager system with a twist at the end: a live demo of decoding the pager’s beacon signals inside the tent, run on custom software and the rad1o badge.

Talks

We attended Internet Archive’s talk on how they’re getting along. If you don’t know the IA, they run the Wayback Machine, have preserved a bunch of old-school video games, and are currently running a large-scale book-scanning project. High points of the talk include the story of their legal self-defense against an intrusive National Security Letter, and the background of their workaround that lets them loan out books even when they’re still under copyright.

At the same time, [Will Scott] gave a talk on open proxies. Thanks to the saved talks, we watched both. A lot of computers out there (accidentally or otherwise) allow people to proxy their data

[Lieven Standaert]’s talk on prototyping is a great summary of a bunch of tricks and tips that he’s learned by shepherding students through some fairly ambitious design projects. He’s got a complete lab with CNC mill, laser cutter, and 3D printer and the focus of the talk is on how to use these various tools together most efficiently, playing to each of their various strong suits.

[Tarek Loubani] gave an inspirational talk “3D Printing High-Quality Low-Cost Free Medical Hardware“. Basically, he looked into stethoscope designs, and re-engineered a 3D printable version. All of the tech in stethoscopes is in the housing design and its shape, and they’re relatively expensive, so it’s a fantastic low-hanging fruit. Watch the talk if you’re thinking about doing some good with your 3D printer. (Not that printing out owls with top hats isn’t important for the world…)

If you’re looking to upgrade your DIY electronics manufacturing capabilities, [hunz]’s talk on “Pushing the Limits of DIY Electronics” is worth a look. As the cool parts get smaller, the DIYer faces a number of new challenges, from thin traces to reflow soldering of BGA parts. A great tip: some board houses offer free SMD solder stencils, and it can be easily worth it to order up a single-sided PCB from them just to get the stencil. He also got into the design side of DIY manufacture, including a discussion of transmission lines that we found helpful.

Here are two more talks that we probably don’t need to tell you are cool: space hacking and combat robots. Need we say more? Both talks are introductory and general, and if what you need is a little encouragement to get involved, you’ll find it here.

Life in Camp: Kids and the Lake

OK, we’re not going to lie: it got hot over the last two days. Like, really hot. One of the nicest features of camp life, then, is the lake (or the lakes, because there’s another one just outside the camp that’s larger and a bit less popular). If you’ve already caught up on your sleep, and your hacking projects are in a good place, or if it’s just too hot to work, nothing beats a dip in the cool water. Heck, even if you’ve got hacking to do, take a swim break for an hour. After all, that’s what makes Camp special.

Finally, we were surprised how kid-friendly Camp has become this time around. The accommodations for the still-too-young-to-hack are pretty amazing. From a petting zoo to a gigantic Lego-filled tent, to the nearly full schedule of finger painting and kiddie arts-and-crafts, you’d have almost as much to do at Camp if you were five as if you were twenty-five. Time passes, and even hackers don’t stay young forever, and it’s fantastic to see the community taking care of the next generation. Plus, the kids seem to love it.

Going On

Again, with so many things going on at Camp, it’s hard to keep up with everything. Look through the archived talks and see what strikes your fancy. If you find something you like, post up in the comments.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Nuclear Powered Random Number Generator

August 16, 2015 by Will Sweatman 42 Comments

Random number generators come in all shapes and sizes. Some are software based while others, known as true random number generators, are hardware based. These can be created from thermal noise, the photoelectric effect and other methods. But none of these were good enough for [M.daSilva]. He would base his off of the radioactive decay of Uranium 238, and construct a working nuclear powered random number generator.

Because radioactive decay is unpredictable by nature, it makes for an excellent source for truly random data. The process is fairly simple. A piece of old fiestaware plate is used for the radioactive source. Put it in a lead enclosure along with a Geiger tube. Then wire in some pulse shaping circuitry and a microcontroller to count the alpha particles. And that’s about it. [M.daSilva] still has to do some statistical analysis to ensure the numbers are truly random, along with making a nice case for his project. But all in all, it seems to be working quite well.

Be sure to check out the video for quick rundown of [M.daSilva’s] project. If randomness is your thing, make sure you check out entropy harvested from uninitialized RAM, and the story behind the NIST randomness beacon.

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