Use Your Mouse Pointer To Send Data

August 30, 2015 by 11 Comments

[Ido Gendel] was thinking about new and interesting ways to send data between devices, when he realized that the answer was right in his hand. Literally: he decided to try sending data using the mouse pointer. What he came up with was an interesting hack that uses small movements of the mouse pointer to send data at up to 1200bps, or about 150 bytes per second.

The way he did this was very, very clever. He used an Arduino Leonardo that is set to emulate a mouse, working alongside his existing mouse. This setup means that he can use his existing mouse: the system just sees the Arduino as a second mouse, and the pointer just looks a little jerky when you zoom in. That is because the Arduino is just sending tiny movements, each of which is a code that represents a nybble (4 binary bits) of data. By using both a combination of three left-right or up-down movements, he was able to create 16 movements, each of which can encode 4 bits of data. Each of these encoding movements also returns the mouse to its origin point, so the mouse doesn’t mysteriously scroll off the screen when data is being sent.

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Go Forth On A Breadboard

August 30, 2015 by 30 Comments

Forth isn’t a shiny new programming language, but it has a staunch following because it is lightweight and elegant. The brainchild of [Chuck Moore], the language is deceptively simple. Words are character sequences delimited by spaces. In its simplest form, Forth knows a few basic words including–and this is the key–a word to define other words.

[Jean-Claude Wippler] likes to experiment with physical computing and he found a Forth image ready-made for the LPC1114. Why is that interesting? The LPC1114 is one of the few (or maybe the only) modern ARM processor in a breadboard-friendly DIP package. Since [Jean-Claude] had a chip sitting around, he had a Forth system up in no time. All he needed was a breadboard and a 3.3V serial connector. The chip has its own bootloader and the The Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth he used has over 300 words as well as the ability, of course, to add more.

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Stuffing Everything On A DIP32 Package

August 30, 2015 by 9 Comments

Putting an full microcontroller platform in a DIP format is nothing new – the Teensy does it, the Arduino nano does it, and a dozen other boards do it. [Alex] and [Alexey] aren’t content with just a simple microcontroller breakout board so they’re adding a radio, an OLED, an SD card reader, and even more RAM to the basic Arduino platform, all in a small, easy to use package.

The DIPDuino, as [Alex] and [Alexy] are calling it features an ATmega1284 processor. To this, they’re adding a 128×32 pixel OLED, a micro SD slot, and 1Mbit of SRAM. The microcontroller is a variant that includes a 2.4 GHz Zigbee radio that allows for wireless connections to other DIPDuinos.

What are [Alex] and [Alexey] going to do with their cool little board? They’re planning on using the OLED for a watch, improve their software so the firmware can be updated from the SD card, and one of [Alex]’s friends wants to build a RepRap controller with one of these. There’s a lot of potential with this board, and we’re interested in seeing where the guys take the project from here.

Voice Command With No Echo

August 30, 2015 by 7 Comments

[Naran] was intrigued with the Amazon Echo’s ability to control home electronics, but decided to roll his own. By using a Raspberry Pi with the beta Prota OS, he managed to control some Phillips Hue bulbs and a homebrew smart outlet.

Prota has a speech application, which made the job simpler. He does point out though, that his project doesn’t replace the Echo’s ability to answer questions by searching the Internet. The advantage, though, is it is easily tailored to your specific application. Also, if you have a Raspberry Pi hanging around, you can’t beat the price. Continue reading “Voice Command With No Echo” →

Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: A Better Smart Plug

August 29, 2015 by 12 Comments

Walk into any home improvement store, and you’ll find dozens of smart accessories, home automation equipment, and WiFi-connected ephemera. The Belkin WeMo Insight is one of these devices, giving anyone with $60 and a WiFi network the ability to switch lights and appliances on and off over a network. [John] picked up one of these WiFi plugs, but it didn’t work exactly as he would like. Instead of building a smart plug from scratch, [John] replaced the controller board for a WeMo Insight for his Hackaday Prize entry, making it far more useful and a replacement for devices like the Kill-a-Watt.

In its stock form, the WeMo can only be used though the smartphone app provided by Belkin or through a few third-party services like IFFT. All of these solutions have a limited API, and don’t provide advanced power metrics. To solve this problem, [John] replaced the smart controller board inside the Belkin WeMo with one of their own design.

By volume, most of the electronics inside the WeMo are a transformer, caps, and a relay; the smarts of this smart plug are just a daughterboard. By re-engineering this daughterboard with a new microcontroller, an ESP8266, and a microSD card connector, [John] can replicate the functionality of the WeMo while adding some new features. SD card datalogging for up to four years is now possible, a RTC now provides precise time stamps on all data collected, and a few simple calculations on the microcontroller enable power factor, line frequency, and total energy metering. With the ESP, all this data can be sent up to the cloud with a vastly improved API.

It’s a great project, and something that Belkin should seriously consider for their next revision of the WeMo. For anyone stuck with a stock WeMo, [John] has made all his design files and code available, allowing anyone to replicate this build

You can check out [John]’s Hackaday Prize entry video below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Wii MotionPlus Gyro To Microchip PIC

August 29, 2015 by 3 Comments

Sometimes the most mundane products have surprisingly sophisticated internals. What’s in a game controller? If it is a Wii remote, you’ll find a lot inside–an IR sensor, Bluetooth, an accelerometer, and EEPROM. It also has a six pin expansion port that allows I2C peripherals connect to the controller.

[DotMusclera] wanted to experiment with a gyroscope and decided to hook up to the Wii MotionPlus to a Microchip PIC. Using information from the WiiBrew wiki, [DotMusclera] connected a PIC18F4550, an LCD, and a handful of components (mostly to do 3.3V level conversion), he set up the hardware on a breadboard. The only odd part you might have to work around is a Wii breakout board that converts from the breadboard to the Wii interface.

The software is easy to follow since it is written in Hi-TECH C and well-commented. The hardware lacks a schematic, but from the parts list and the video, you can probably figure it out. The setup works well and shows roll, pitch, and yaw on the LCD screen.

The project log is very detailed, with a lot of information about gyroscopes and the communication format the gyro uses. The video demo is worth watching as well.

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Shift Register Powered Realistic Candle Flicker

August 29, 2015 by 54 Comments

[Kevin Darrah] recently went out to dinner at a restaurant that was using some cheap LED candles (yuck) instead of the real thing. And in the true spirit of a hacker, he started to notice the patterns programmed into the fake flame repeat over and over again. And like any hacker might, his mind started to devise a better way.

Now’s the time where some of us lazy hackers might grab a microcontroller, and copy and paste in some pseudo-random number generating code you found on the Internet, but not [Kevin]. The basics of his hack uses two shift registers tied together that are fed a single clock signal, and also a latch signal that is slightly delayed version of the same signal made by a RC-time circuit.

The randomness of the output is created is by feeding back the outputs of the shift registers to an XOR gate. If you want to learn more about this, the technique it’s called a “linear feedback shift register“. It’s commonly used as a poor-man’s random number generator, although it’s not technically truly random, statistically it does a very good job. You can see the results in the video after the break where [Kevin] describes the circuit.  He wraps up the hack with a battery and solar charging circuit as well to make a completed project.

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