Caption CERN Contest – I’ve Got My Eye On You

June 25, 2015 by 22 Comments

As week 20 of the Caption CERN Contest comes to a close, we can say that this scientist may have been a bit sleepy from all his hard work, but all our caption writers certainly were not! Thank’s to everyone who stayed up late and entered.

Whiteboards and their associated dry erase markers have become a staple in every office, school, and home. It’s getting hard to remember that everyone used blackboards not so long ago. High energy physics,and flammable dust probably are not a good mix. Let’s hope our sleeping scientist cleaned the erasers outdoors after he woke up.

The Funnies:

  • “A weekend at CERNies”- [Rob]
  • “After bitten by the Schrödinger’s cat, Doc Brown acquired the most useful power of a cat – being able to sleep anywhere, any time.” – [K.C. Lee]
  • “CERN’s infamous “wind tunnel” experiments” – [Rollyn01]

This week’s winner is [MechaTweak] with “During the great blackboard shortage of ’66, scientists went to great lengths to protect their unfinished work from premature erasure”. [MechaTweak] describes himself as a “Mild mannered design engineer by day, father of four crazy kids by night.” With all those kids running around, he’s going to enjoy having a Stickvise from The Hackaday Store. You can bet he’ll be using the Stickvise to solder up some boards for Shower water saver, his entry in the 2015 Hackaday Prize.

Week 21

cern-21-smThese two CERN scientists are looking through some kind of optical apparatus. There is a plano-convex lens mounted on an adjustable arm. The scientists appear to be looking through a window while adjusting some controls.

Is this some kind of physics experiment? Could it be research into psychomotor acuity? Maybe the dark-haired scientist is just getting her yearly CERN eye exam? You tell us!

This week’s prize is the ever poular Teensy 3.1 from The Hackaday Store.  Add your humorous caption as a comment to this project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the contest log, not on the contest itself.

As always, if you actually have information about the image or the people in it, let CERN know on theoriginal image discussion page.

Good Luck!

Talking Big Changes At SparkFun With Nathan Seidle

June 25, 2015 by 31 Comments

SparkFun, you know them, you love them. They list themselves as “an online retail store” but I remember them for well-designed breakout boards, free-day, videos about building electronics, and the Autonomous Vehicle Competition. This week SparkFun turned my head for a different reason with the announcement that [Nathan Siedle], founder and CEO will be stepping down. He’s not leaving, but returning to the Engineering department while someone else takes the reigns. I spoke with him yesterday about what this means for him, the company, and what SparkFun has planned for the future.

Stepping Down Without Saying Goodbye

[Nate] founded Sparkfun in 2003 while still working on his Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Colorado Boulder. He cites wanting to return to his engineering roots as the reason for his title shift, which won’t happen for at least 9 or 10 months. It’s the concept of leaving the CEO position without leaving the company that raises many questions in my mind.

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Embed With Elliot: I2C Bus Scanning

June 25, 2015 by 15 Comments

A lot of great ICs use I2C to communicate, but debugging a non-working I2C setup can be opaque, especially if you’re just getting started with the protocol/bus. An I2C bus scanner can be a helpful first step in debugging an I2C system. Are all the devices that I think should be present actually there and responding? Do they all work at the bus speed that I’m trying to run? If you’ve got an Arduino or Bus Pirate sitting around, you’re only seconds away from scanning your I2C bus, and answering these questions.

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Blinking LEDs For A Timeless Fountain

June 25, 2015 by 15 Comments

We’ve seen a few of these builds before, but the build quality of [Mathieu]’s timeless fountain makes for an excellent display of mechanical skill showing off the wonder of blinking LEDs.

This timeless fountain is something we’ve seen before, and the idea is actually pretty simple: put some LEDs next to a dripping faucet, time the LEDs to the rate at which the droplets fall, and you get a stroboscopic effect that makes tiny droplets of water appear to hover in mid-air.

Like earlier builds, [Mathieu] is using UV LEDs and is coloring the water with fluorescein, a UV reactive dye. The LEDs are mounted on two towers, and at the top of the tower is a tiny, low power IR laser and photodiode. With the right code running on an ATxmega16A4, the lights blink in time with the falling water droplet, making it appear the drop is hovering in midair.

Blinking LEDs very, very quickly isn’t exactly hard. The biggest problem with this build was the mechanics. The frame of the machine was machined out of polycarbonate sheets and went together very easily. Getting a consistent drip from a faucet was a bit harder. It took about fifteen tries to get the design of the faucet nozzle right, but [Mathieu] eventually settled on a small output hole (about 0.5 mm) and a sharp nozzle angle of about 70 degrees.

[Mathieu] created a video of a few hovering balls of fluorescence. You can check that out below. It’s assuredly a lot cooler in real life without frame rate issues.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Ultimate Circuitbending

June 24, 2015 by 13 Comments

Circuit bending is the process of taking a small electronic toy or musical instrument, soldering wires to pads on the PCB, and hoping the sounds it produces will be cool. It’s not a science by any means, and any good, weird sounds you’ll get out of a Speak ‘N Spell or old MIDI keyboard are made entirely by accident or hours and hours of experimentation.

[Alpha Charlie]’s entry for the Hackaday Prize is the most technologically advanced circuit bending you’ll ever see. He’s using an old digital beat box, the Roland TR-626, with computer-controlled wires between random pads on the PCB.

Until now, you could tell how technically adept a circuit bender was simply by how many switches were on the circuit-bent instrument. [Alpha Charlie] doesn’t need switches. Instead, he’s using a few crosspoint switch ICs to connect different pins and pads on the TR-626’s PCB with an Arduino. All of this is controlled by a touchscreen display, and experimenting with the circuit is as simple as pushing a few buttons. Each ‘bend’ is computer controlled, and can be saved and recalled at will.

Of course, circuit bending doesn’t do anyone any good if it sounds like crap. [Alpha Charlie] doesn’t have to worry there. In the video below, he’s getting some very unique sounds that sound like a choir of angels to dorks like myself that listen to Nintendo music.

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Autonomous Drones Now Carry People

June 24, 2015 by 85 Comments

There are a handful of companies trying to build the first autonomous car, but this project makes us think that they all might be heading in the wrong direction. [Thorstin] wanted to use a quadcopter to transport people, and built a working prototype of an autonomous quadcopter-esque vehicle that is actually capable of lifting a person.

The device isn’t actually a quadcopter anymore; that wouldn’t be able to generate enough lift. It has sixteen rotors in total, making it a sexdecacopter (we suppose). This setup generates 282 pounds of static thrust, which as the video below shows, is enough to lift an average person off of the ground along with the aluminum alloy frame and all of the lithium ion batteries used to provide power to all of those motors.

With the PID control system in place, the device is ready for takeoff! We like hobby projects that suddenly become life-sized and rideable, and we hope to see this one fully autonomous at some point too. Maybe soon we’ll see people ferried from waypoint to waypoint instead of being driven around in their ground-bound autonomous cars.

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Brass Clock Face Etched With PCB Techniques

June 24, 2015 by 17 Comments

Over the last few months, [Chris] has been machining a timepiece out of brass and documenting the entire process on his YouTube channel. This week, he completed the clock face. The clock he’s replicating comes from a time before CNC, and according to [Chris], the work of engraving roman numerals on a piece of brass would have been sent out to an engraver. Instead of doing things the traditional way, he’s etching brass with ferric chloride. It’s truly artisan work, and also provides a great tutorial for etching PCBs.

[Chris] is using a photoresist process for engraving his clock dial, and just like making PCBs, this task begins by thoroughly scrubbing and cleaning some brass with acetone. The photoresist is placed on the brass, a transparency sheet printed off, and the entire thing exposed to four blacklights. After that, the unexposed photoresist is dissolved with a sodium carbonate solution, and it’s time for etching.

The clock face was etched in ferric chloride far longer than any PCB would; [Chris] is filling these etchings with shellac wax for a nice contrast between the silvered brass and needs deep, well-defined voids.

You can check out the video below, but that would do [Chris]’ channel a disservice. When we first noticed his work, the comments were actually more positive than not. That’s high praise around here.

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