Applications For The Bitcoin Blockchain

October 27, 2015 by 34 Comments

Bitcoin, the libertarian’s dream currency, is far past the heady days of late 2013. When one Bitcoin was worth $1000 USD, there was no end to what could be done; new, gigantic mining rigs were being created, every online store jumped onto the bandwagon, and the price of Bitcoin inevitably crashed. Right now, the exchange rate sits at about $280 USD per coin, valuing all the Bitcoins ever mined somewhere around $4 Billion USD. That’s a lot of coins out there, and a lot of miners constantly verifying the integrity of the greatest thing to come from the Bitcoin community: the blockchain.

The bitcoin is just a record, or the ledger, of every transaction that has ever occurred on the Bitcoin network. It’s distributed, and the act of mining coins creates new blocks, or another set of data committed to the blockchain for eternity. While magical Internet money™ is by far the most visible product of the blockchain, developers, investors, and other people in the know are gushing about the possibilities of what can be done with a distributed record that can’t practically be altered and can’t be deleted.

[Jon Matonis], a figurehead for the entire cryptocurrency movement, recently said Bitcoin has become the strongest computer in the world, and stronger than all of the top 500 supercomputers combined. All of this computational power is effectively funneled in to verifying the integrity of the blockchain.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are not just a completely anonymous payment system; that’s only a side effect of the blockchain. The blockchain is the only inherently valuable part of a bitcoin; each transaction is logged in the blockchain, providing incredible security over how every coin is spent. No currency in the history of mankind has ever had a record of how every dollar or denarius is spent, and at the very least makes for very interesting economics research. Now, thousands of researchers across the globe are wondering what else the blockchain can do; tapping the power of the most powerful computer on the planet must have some interesting applications, and in the last few months, a few ideas have popped up.

Continue reading “Applications For The Bitcoin Blockchain” →

AROS: Run An Amiga OS Like It’s 1993

October 27, 2015 by 7 Comments

We read this article on oddball open-source operating systems by [Bryan Lunduke] of the “Linux Action Show” podcast, and it caused us to play around in an Amiga-like operating system (running as a VM) for an hour. We’re pretty sure that you’ll succumb to the same fate. But even worse, the article is just the first in a series. There goes your weekend hacking productivity for the foreseeable future.

AmigaOS_3_and_clonesAROS is an open-source, API-compatible rewrite of the Amiga OS. Now, AROS is no fancy-schmancy AmigaOS4. No sir, the AROS project started in 1995 and settled on Amiga OS API version 3.1, and it stays true to its roots.

But this doesn’t mean that you’re going to have to give up the creature comforts of life in the 21st century. Get yourself a full-fledged AROS distribution, like icaros desktop, and you’ll find a pretty beefy ecosystem of applications included. It’s mostly what you’d want out of an Amiga — games, audio, video, and graphics editing software, a WebKit-based browser, and even a super-minimal word processor.

It’s retro, it’s sexy, and it’s fun. Just the ticket for running on that unused craptop gathering dust in the corner. (It’s also reported to run on Raspberry Pi running Linux.) Still not convinced? Lemmings.

You’re Never Too Young To Be A Rocket Scientist

October 27, 2015 by 36 Comments

We’ve been keeping tabs on the progress SpaceX has made toward landing a rocket so that it can be reused for future orbital launches. As you would imagine, this is incredibly difficult despite having some of the world’s greatest minds working on the task. To become one of those minds you have to start somewhere. It turns out, high school students can also build guided rockets, as [ArsenioDev] demonstrates in his project on hackaday.io.

arseniodev-3d-printed-fin[Arsenio]’s design targets amateur rockets with a fuselage diameter of four inches or so. The main control module is just a cylinder with four servos mounted along the perimeter and some fancy 3D printed fins bolted onto the servo. These are controlled by an Arduino and a 6DOF IMU that’s able to keep the rocket pointing straight up. Staaaay on target.

We saw this project back at the Hackaday DC meetup a month ago, and [Arsenio] was kind enough to give a short lightning talk to the hundred or so people who turned up. You can catch a video of that below, along with one of the videos of his build.

Continue reading “You’re Never Too Young To Be A Rocket Scientist” →

El Cheapo Electric Screwdriver

October 26, 2015 by 28 Comments

If you have a few hobby servos lying around, here’s a hack that let’s you recycle them and put them to good use. [Kedar Nimbalkar] took a micro servo and converted it into an electric screwdriver. It is simple enough to deserve a short video showing how he did it.

He starts by opening up a 9G micro servo and removing the electronics. All that’s needed is the DC motor and the gears. The two motor wires go directly to the battery via a polarity reversal switch to allow the motor to turn in both directions. The servo horn is cut to size so that it is a tight fit inside the screwdriver socket. A liberal amount of glue is used to make sure it stays in place. The horn is then attached to the modified servo, ready to take interchangeable bits. One last mod before closing up the servo is to convert it to continuous rotation by cutting off the stopper in the drive gear.

He built the power supply from scratch, using a 18650 Li-Po battery, a 5V USB charger, a DPDT switch to allow direction control and a push button to actuate the screw driver. A pair of LED’s connected back to back serve as direction indicators as well as some local illumination.

There’s lot’s of scope to improvise and do everything differently, but the basic premise of using unused servos for a handy electric screwdriver is pretty neat.

Continue reading “El Cheapo Electric Screwdriver” →

Listen To The Rain, Raspberry Pi Style

October 26, 2015 by 8 Comments

There’s an old proverb algebra teachers often recite: You have to use what you know to find out what you don’t know. The same could be said about sensors. For example, analog to digital converters use something computers are good at finding (like time) and use it to determine something they aren’t good at finding (like voltage). So how do you detect rainfall? If you are [lowflyerUK], you use the microphone in your web camera and a Raspberry Pi.

The idea was to reduce irrigation usage based on rainfall, so an exact measurement isn’t necessary. The Python code that analyzes the audio input is calibrated with three configuration parameters and attempts to remove wind noise. Even so, it needs to be in a room that gets a lot of noise from rainfall and ambient noise can throw the reading off.

The weather service is never going to adopt this system. Still, it is a great example of taking something you know and using it to get something you don’t know. If you want a more complete weather station, we have a few options for you.

Pumpkin Deathstar

That’s No Moon Pumpkin, It’s A Space Station

October 26, 2015 by 5 Comments

Every year, Vitamin T holds a #ATXPumpkinChallenge for creative agencies in and around Austin. Each team was given a fake pumpkin and the challenge of making a 15-60 second video. As the reigning champions from last year, [SiteGoals] had to up the ante. So they launched a pumpkin into space.

Pumpkin DeathstarWhen first given the challenge, it only took the team 3 simple words to get started. Pumpkin. In. Space. What followed was a week-long frenzy of preparing the pumpkin for its maiden flight.

The pumpkin itself is pretty simple. A plastic jack-o-lantern painstakingly painted and detailed to look like the third Death Star. This is makes the title of the project a double-meaning: “Return of the Pumpkin”. They even included iconic spacecraft flying around the equator of the immensely powerful yet questionably vulnerable orb of destruction. Simply launching the pumpkin into space wasn’t enough. They built in a telemetry system and GoPro for recording the voyage. Stick around after the break to see the very entertaining making-of video, set the tune of the Cantina Band.

Continue reading “That’s No Moon Pumpkin, It’s A Space Station” →

Better, Smaller WiFi Throwies

October 26, 2015 by 47 Comments

Because the world doesn’t have enough electronic junk floating around, [Victor] has improved the WiFi Throwie.

A decade ago, when strong, cheap magnets, bright LEDs, and small coin cell batteries were materials fresh to hacking, someone had a great idea: tape all these items up and throw them on bridges and overpasses. The LED throwie was born, and while we’re sure the biggest installation of LED throwies looked cool, it’s really just a small-scale environmental disaster.

Since then, the ESP8266 was created, and the world now has a tiny WiFi-enabled computer that’s the size of a postage stamp. Yes, WiFi throwies already exist, but coin cells don’t work with the ESP. This means the compact and tiny ESPs are laden down with heavy lithium cells. [Victor] had a better solution: tiny lithium batteries for quadcopters exist, so why not use those?

[Victor] ended up using a small 100mAh 3.7V Lipo battery from a tiny quadcopter for this build. 100mAh isn’t a lot, but in sleep mode, the ESP only uses about 15mAh, or about 6 hours of run time. Sending a picture takes 30 seconds at 120ma, or about 120mAh, so even with a tiny battery no bigger than the ESP itself, this diminutive web server can handle 100 connections before the battery dies.

While not recommended unless you intend to retrieve your throwable web server, it is an interesting example of the latest and cheapest technology that made a throwable webserver possible; 10 years ago, both the ESP and a battery this small would have been unthinkable.