The Most Powerful Bitcoin Mining Rig Yet

May 29, 2015 by 18 Comments

In days of yore, one could mine Bitcoin without much more than an AMD graphics card. Now, without specialized hardware it’s unlikely that you’ll make any appreciable headway in the bitcoin world. This latest project, however, goes completely in the other direction: [Ken] programmed a 55-year-old IBM mainframe to mine Bitcoin. Note that this is technically the most powerful rig ever made… if you consider the power usage per hash.

Engineering wordplay aside, the project is really quite fascinating. [Ken] goes into great detail about how Bitcoin mining actually works, how to program an assembly program for an IBM 1401 via punch cards, and even a section about networking a computer from this era. (Bonus points if he can get retro.hackaday.com to load!) The IBM boasts some impressive stats for the era as well: It can store up to 16,000 characters in memory and uses binary-coded decimal. All great things if you are running financial software in the early ’60s or demonstrating Bitcoin in the mid-2010s!

If it wasn’t immediately obvious, this rig will probably never mine a block. At 80 seconds per hash, it would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to do, but it is quite a feat of computer science to demonstrate that it is technically possible. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen one of [Ken]’s mainframe projects, and hopefully there are more gems to come!

Hackerspace Happenings: Santa Barbara Hackerspace Moving

May 29, 2015 by 4 Comments

Occasionally we get a few tips on our hotline telling us of hackerspace happenings. Either a space is moving, they need some help to install a moat around the space, or there’s a mini-conference of weird and esoteric technology happening sometime soon. The latest such tip is from the Santa Barbara Hackerspace. They’re moving, the new space doesn’t have a leaky roof, and they’re looking for some people to help out.

The new space features necessary hackerspace upgrades like no carpet, 120, 220, and 440 Volt outlets, actual parking, and a non-leaky roof. You can get by with a leaky roof in Santa Barbara, but having a roof that doesn’t have holes in it is always a bonus.

Add this to the space’s existing battery of equipment – everything from laser cutters, bandsaws, and welders to oscilloscopes, an amateur radio station, and a forge and anvil, there’s a lot anyone can do in this space.

Pump Up The Volume With The 3D Printed Syringe Pump Rack

May 29, 2015 by 22 Comments

Syringe pumps are valuable tools when specific amounts of fluid must be dispensed at certain rates and volumes. They are used in many ways, for administering IV medications to liquid chromatography (LC/HPLC). Unfortunately, a commercial pump can cost a pretty penny. Not particularly thrilled with the hefty price tag, [Aldric Negrier] rolled up his sleeves and made a 3D-printed version for 300 USD.

[Aldric] has been featured on Hackaday before, so we knew his latest project would not disappoint. His 3D Printed Syringe Pump Rack contains five individual pumps that can operate independently of each other. Five pieces are 3D-printed to form the housing for each pump. In addition, each pump is composed of a Teflon-coated lead screw, an Arduino Nano V3, a Pololu Micro stepper motor driver, and a NEMA-17 stepper motor. The 3D Printed Syringe Pump Rack runs on a 12V power supply using a maximum of 2 amps per motor.

While the standard Arduino IDE contains the Stepper library, [Aldric] wanted a library that allowed for more precise control and went with the Accelstepper library. The 3D Printed Syringe Pump Rack has a measured accuracy of 0.5µl in a 10ml syringe, which is nothing to laugh at.

Syringe pump racks like [Aldric’s] are another great example of using open source resources and the spirit of DIY to make typically expensive technologies more affordable to the smaller lab bench. If you are interested in other open source syringe pump designs, you can check out this entry for the 2014 Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Worldwide: San Francisco

May 29, 2015 by 4 Comments

Summer is heating up and so is the Hackaday Prize. In two weeks we’ll put down stakes in San Francisco for a day-long workshop followed by a meetup in the hippest of bars.

The Zero to Product workshop will be held on June 13th at Highway1 — the well-known hardware startup accelerator in San Francisco. This workshop is created and led by [Matt Berggren] who is an expert in electronic design and PCB layout.

RSVP Before Tickets are Gone!

Zero to Product workshop in Pasadena a few weeks ago
Zero to Product workshop in Pasadena a few weeks ago

RSVP for the workshop and you’ll be well on your way to knowing what goes into professional-level PCB design. Basic knowledge of electronics is all you need, prior layout experience isn’t required. Bring along a computer with the newest version of Eagle on it if you want to follow along, but this is not a requirement. It will certainly jumpstart any PCB design you are working on for your 2015 Hackaday Prize entry. If you haven’t started your entry yet, this is a great crowd to help with brainstorming!

Whether or not you are at the workshop, we’re planning to head out for a bit of fun afterward. This casual meet up is at Lucky Strike starting around 7:30pm. It’s up to you if you want to bowl, imbibe, or both. Please RSVP; since we haven’t rented the place out we’d like to have an idea of how many hackers are coming. And don’t forget, it’s a tradition at Hackaday bar meetups to bring a small bit of hardware to show off as you meet new people. See you in June!

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Water measurement

Itemizing Water Consumption At Home

May 29, 2015 by 79 Comments

For a while now [Florian] has wanted to itemize his water usage at home to keep better track of where his water bill is coming from — and to help him develop water conscious habits. He’s not done yet, but has had a pretty good start.

Faucet Sensor

The problem with measuring the water usage of everything in your house is that the plumbing involved to install sensors is a rather big job — so instead he assumed constant flow in some places and just used sensors on the valves to determine how long the valve was open for, which gives him a fairly accurate number for water usage.

On the right is his kitchen faucet which features a super quick arcade button hack to keep track of it being on or off.

The toilet was a bit trickier. He ended up designing a 3D printed mount attached to the lever on the inside of the tank — it’s pretty universal so he’s included the .STL files on his website if anyone wants to try implementing this system.

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An Open Source Toolchain For ICE40 FPGAs

May 29, 2015 by 65 Comments

FPGAs are great, but open source they are not. All the players in FPGA land have their own proprietary tools for creating bitstream files, and synthesizing the HDL of your choice for any FPGA usually means agreeing to terms and conditions that nobody reads.

After months of work, and based on the previous work of [Clifford Wolf] and [Mathias Lasser], [Cotton Seed] has released a fully open source Verilog to bitstream development tool chain for the Lattice iCE40LP with support for more devices in the works.

Last March, we saw the reverse engineering of the Lattice ICE40 bitstream, but this is a far cry from a robust, mature development platform. Along with Yosys, also written by [Clifford Wolf] it’s relatively simple to go from Verilog to an FPGA that runs your own code.

Video demo below, and there’s a ton of documentation over on the Project IceStorm project page. You can pick up the relevant dev board for about $22 as well.

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Otherworldy CAD Software Hails From A Parallel Universe

May 29, 2015 by 124 Comments

The world of free 3D-modeling software tends to be grim when compared to the expensive professional packages. Furthermore, 3D CAD modeling software suggestions seem to throw an uproar when new users seek open-source or inexpensive alternatives. Taking a step apart from the rest, [Matt] has developed his own open-source CAD package with a spin that inverts the typical way we do CAD.

Antimony is a fresh perspective on 3D modeling. In contrast to Blender’s “free-form sculpting” and Solidworks’ sequential extrudes and cuts, Antimony invites you to break down your model into a network of both primitive geometry and operations that interact with that geometry.

Functionally, Antimony represents objects as a graphical collection of nodes that encode both primitives and operations. Want a cylinder? Start with a circle node and pipe it into an extrude node. Need to cut out some part geometry? Try defining it with one or more primitives, and then perform a boolean intersection operation. Users can even write their own nodes with custom scripts written in Python. Overall, Antimony boasts the power of parametric design similar to OpenSCAD while it also boosts readability with a graphical, rather than text-based, part description. Finally, because part geometry is essentially stored as a series of instructions, the process of modeling the part does not limit the resolution of the output .STL mesh. (Think: vector-based images, versus pixel-based images).

Current versions of the software are available for both Mac and Linux, and the entire project is open-source and available on the Githubs. (For the shrewd-eyed software developers, most of the project is written with Python that interacts with lower-level routines handled in C++ and exposed through Boost.Python.) Take a video tour of an Antimony workflow with [Matt] after the break. All-in-all, despite that the software is still in its alpha stages, it’s highly functional and (for the block-diagram fans) intuitive. We’re thrilled to put our programming hats on and try CAD from, as [Matt] coins it “a parallel universe.”

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