Beating DRM To Extend The Life Of An Anti-Aging Therapy Light Mask

It’s becoming more common to see DRM cropping up in an increasing number of hardware products nowadays. Quite often, its used to prevent the use of unauthorized consumables and some may argue that it helps prevent counterfeiting and help shore up revenues. But it’s a totally different matter when DRM is used to severely limit the operational life of a product. When [travis] wrote in about the run time limitation on an “Illumimask” light therapy device, we first had to look up what that device was. Apparently, these are anti-acne or anti-aging light therapy masks that use red and blue LEDs to kill skin bacteria, stimulate skin cells and reduce blemishes. While these claims most likely may not hold water, the device itself is cheap enough not to hurt you at $30 a pop.

The trouble is, it is limited to 30 daily uses of 15 minutes each, totaling just 7 1/2 hours, effectively lasting you a month. At the end of which, you just discard the device and get a new one. That seems like a ridiculous waste of a perfectly fine, functional device whose LED’s can last at least 30,000 to 40,000 hours. [travis]’s wife [Bebefuzz] was obviously pissed at this situation. So she did a simple hack to bypass the microcontroller that imposed the goofy restrictions. In [travis]’s own words “Not a crazy-technical hack…. but a very functional one to bypass a manufacturer’s ‘WTF'”. It involved soldering a slide switch across the circuit terminals that the micro-controller uses to monitor the LED current (likely). Unfortunately, this also breaks the 15 minute timer measurement, so she now has to manually switch off the device at the end of the 15 minute therapy cycle.

To check out more DRM hacks, check out these we covered earlier, from Coffee Makers to 3D printer filaments to Cat Litter boxes and even furniture.

Instrumentation Amplifiers with Bil Herd

Instrumentation Amplifiers And How To Measure Miniscule Change

These days there a large number of sensors and analog circuits that are “controller friendly” meaning that their output signal is easily interfaced to the built-in Analog to Digital Convertors (ADCs) often found in today’s micro-controllers. This means that the signals typically are already amplified, often filtered, and corrected for offset and linearity. But when faced with very low level signals, or signals buried in a larger signal an Instrumentation Amplifier may be what’s needed. The qualities of an Instrumentation Amplifier include:

  • A differential amplifier with high impedance and low bias current on both inputs.
  • Low noise and low drift when amplifying very small signals.
  • The ability to reject a voltage that is present on both inputs, referred to as Common Mode Rejection Ratio (CMRR)

Continue reading “Instrumentation Amplifiers And How To Measure Miniscule Change”

IoT Chameleon Lamp Does It With Python

If this Internet of Things thing is gonna leave the launchpad, it will need the help of practical and semi-practical project ideas for smartifying everyday items. Part of getting those projects off the ground is overcoming the language barrier between humans that want to easily prototype complex ideas and hardware that wants specific instructions. A company called Things on Internet [TOI] has created a system called VIPER to easily program any Spark Core, UDOO or Arduino Due with Python by creating a virtual machine on the board.

The suite includes a shield, an IDE, and the app. By modifying a simple goose neck IKEA lamp, [TOI] demonstrates VIPER (Viper Is Python Embedded in Realtime). They opened the lamp and added an 24-LED Adafruit NeoPixel ring, which can be controlled remotely by smartphone using the VIPER app. To demonstrate the capacitive sensing capabilities of the VIPER shield, they lined the head of the lamp with foil. This code example will change the NeoPixels to a random color each time the button is pressed in the app.

Check out the lamp demonstration after the break and stay for the RC car.

Continue reading “IoT Chameleon Lamp Does It With Python”

A Hacker-Friendly Blinky USB Stick

The availability of Smart RGB LED’s, either as individual units, as strips or even as panels, have made blinky light projects with all kinds of color control and transition effects easy to implement using even the simplest of controllers. Libraries that allow control of these smart LEDs (or Smart Pixels as they are sometimes called)  make software development relatively easy.

[overflo] at the Metalab hackerspace in Vienna, Austria recently completed development of usblinky – a hacker friendly blinky USB stick. It can control up to 150 WS2812B smart LED’s when powered via an external power supply, or up to 20 LED’s when powered via a computer USB port. The micro-controller is an ATTiny85 running the Micronucleus bootloader which implements software USB using vUSB. The hardware is based on the DigiSpark platform. The usblinky software sources are available on their Github repo. The section on pitfalls and lessons learned makes for interesting reading.

Metalab plans to run workshops around this little device to get kids into programming, as it is easy enough and gives quick visual feedback to get you started. To round off the whole project, [overflo] used OpenSCAD to design a customizable, 3D printable “parametric orb” which can house the LED strip and make a nice enclosure or psychedelic night light. Check out the mesmerizing video of the usblinky Orb after the break.

Thanks to [papst] for sending in this tip.

Continue reading “A Hacker-Friendly Blinky USB Stick”

chess robot

Lonely? Build Yourself A Chess Robot!

[Oriol Galceran] has constructed an interesting robotic chess player for his end of school project. It’s called the ChessM8, and is an impressive feat considering [Oriol] is only 17!  He’s using an Arduino Mega that connects to the host PC via a Python script.

The AI can be any chess engine that uses the Universal Chess Interface protocol, which [Oriol] points out that most of them do.  We’ve seen other chess robots here before, along with others that you can play on your wall and uses Nixie Tubes. But [Oriol’s] build is the largest of them all.

He says there’s a network of REED switches under the chess board to detect when a piece is present or not. It would be interesting to know how he dealt with debouncing issues, and if Hall Effect sensors might have been a better choice. Let us know in the comments how you would detect the chess piece.

And be sure to check out the video below to see the chess robot in action.

Continue reading “Lonely? Build Yourself A Chess Robot!”

Hard Drive Becomes Hard Drive Activity Light; Stores No Data

A while ago [Frank Zhao] built a computer in an aquarium. It’s exactly what you would expect – a bunch of parts stuffed into a container filled with mineral oil. Yes, there’s an i7 and a GTX970 in there, but there’s also a bunch of neopixels and a neat little bubbling treasure chest. That wasn’t enough for [Frank], and he wanted to add a HDD activity monitor. What’s the most absurd activity monitor for an SSD? An old platter-based drive, of course.

The build is relatively simple and something [Frank] put together from spare parts in a day. After cracking open an old PATA hard drive, the voice coil for the hard drive arm was connected to the motherboard’s HDD activity signal through a few MOSFETs. The platter motor is controlled by an MTD6501 motor driver, set to spin up when the circuit is on.

It’s a kludge as far as controlling the components of a hard drive go, but that’s not really the point. It’s just a neat project to show when the SSD in the aquarium computer is being accessed. That said, the activity monitor is currently disconnected because the old HDD is so freakin’ loud. It looks really cool, though.

Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: March 15, 2015

[Fran] and [Bil] are back again for the first Dinosaur Den of 2015. Highlights of this edition include a surprisingly young tri-power supply and Nixie display cards from 1965.

The game of Go has been turned into a sequencer. That’s a project from [Kristian Gohlke] and [Michael Hlatky]. It’s an industrial camera placed above a Go board, and some computer vision algorithms to detect stones on the board. There’s a 16×16 section to create drum patterns (black stones) or synth notes (white stones). Below that there’s a 16×3 grid for the bass notes, two 3×8 grids to control filters and effects, and a 3×3 grid to play percussive loops.

HOW TO REMOVE A GPS ANKLE MONITOR. We had to get the SEO right on this one. Here’s how you can ditch your probation officer for a weekend. Great news: his parents used their house for bail, now an entire family is homeless. Lesson learned: use a burner phone and call forwarding until you’re out of the country.

The Computer History Museum is doing a great series of interviews, and this one is with [Bob Dobkin], former director at National Semiconductor, and co-founder of Linear. Analog design isn’t wizardry, you just need a decade of experience.

[Simon] over at the Hack42 hackerspace finally found the time to repair their old Holborn 9120 terminal – the most space-age terminal ever built. The keyboard is an old Keytronic unit, and the foam underneath the keys had turned to dust. This was replaced with an Ikea mousepad, foam tape, and the foil from a discarded bag of chips. It worked, and they got their terminal to load our retro edition:

terminal

If you have some old hardware, try to point it at our retro site, take a picture (or post a writeup) and send it on in.