The Wisest Wizard Doesn’t Drink From Cans

March 2, 2015 by 18 Comments

“Wizard Staff” or “Wisest Wizard” is a drinking game played at parties where the attendees participate by taping the empty cans of the drinks they’ve consumed on top of one another to form a staff of inebriated power. A person with a longer staff is considered to be at a higher level and can therefore command lesser wizards to pound their current beverage to a point they see fit. Not everyone at a party necessarily drinks their tasty libation of choice from a can however. So, [Ahmed] and his group came up with a solution for those of us who might alternately prefer to wield a pint glass of power instead.

In their hardware project for Hack Illinois 2015, [Brady Salz], [Ahmed Suhyl], [Dario Aranguiz], and [Kashev Dalmia] decided to add a zest of tech to the game. For their updated rendition, glasses are equipped with battery packs for mobility, a Spark micro-controller, and different colored LEDs as indicators. A couple of wires reach into the bottom of each glass to measure conductivity and keep track of the number of times it is filled and then emptied. In leu of towers of aluminum husks and duct-tape, the group developed a simple Android app for participants to log into which will track and visualize the standings of each player registered to one of the glasses. They even created a pebble version of the app that will display all the same information in case you don’t want to risk handling your phone while drinking… heh.

For an added level of fun, once a player reaches a certain level above someone else, they unlock the option to “challenge” the lesser adversary. By selecting that person’s user name in the app, the LED and buzzer on their glass will spring to life, letting them know they’ve been chosen to chug the rest of their drink. If you’re curious how they made it work, you can check out the team’s code on Github and maybe take a stab at giving the game a makeover of your own.

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NXP & Freescale Merge

March 2, 2015 by 50 Comments

Buyouts, acquisitions, and mergers of semiconductor companies are not unfamiliar territory for anyone who deals with chips and components for a living. Remember Mostek? That’s STMicroelectronics now. The switches used to type this post – Cherry blues – were made by ON Semiconductor. Remember Motorola? Freescale.

Today marks another merger, this time between NXP and Freescale. The merger will result in a $40 Billion dollar company, putting it in the top ten largest semiconductor companies.

Hackaday readers should know NXP for being the only company ever to produce an ARM microcontroller in a DIP package along with thousands of other cool components. Freescale is perhaps best known for their i.MX6 series of ARM processors, but of course both companies have a portfolio that stretches back decades and is filled with tens of thousands of parts.

Sodium Pickle Lights

March 2, 2015 by 35 Comments

A few weeks ago, the folks at the 23b hackerspace held Sparklecon, an event filled with the usual infosec stuff, locks and lockpicking, and hardware. A con, of course, requires some cool demonstrations. They chose to put a pickle in an arc welder, with impressive results.

This build began several years ago when the father of one of 23B’s members pulled off a neat trick for Halloween. With a cut and stripped extension cord, the two leads were plugged into a pickle and connected to mains power. The sodium in the pickle began to glow with a brilliant orange-yellow light, and everyone was suitably impressed. Fast forward a few years, and 23b found itself with a bunch of useless carbon gouging rods, a 200 Amp welder, a pickle, and a bunch of people wanting to see something cool.

The trick to making a pickle brighter than the sun was to set the arc just right; a quarter of an inch between the electrodes seemed optimal, but even then pickle lighting seems very resilient against failing jigs made from a milk crate, duct tape, and PVC. Video (from the first Sparklecon, at least) below.

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Using Vacuum Tubes As Immersion Heaters

March 2, 2015 by 22 Comments

Fellow Hackaday writer [Ethan Zonca] was doing a little bit of woodworking recently and decided to test ammonia fuming on a small piece of oak. Yes, this means discoloring wood with ammonia vapor, and it’s a real technique. [Ethan] wanted to increase the rate of evaporation of his ammonia solution and decided to make an immersion heater. Out of a vacuum tube.

This is a non-optimal solution to the problem of heating a solution of ammonia – already a bad idea unless you have a fume hood – but it gets better. The vacuum tube was slightly cracked, something easily fixed with a bit of silicone sealant. This was then immersed in an ammonia solution, wired up to a driver board and controlled by a homebrew PID controller. If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.

After getting the ammonia solution up to 30° C, a noxious cloud of ammonia seeped into a piece of oak. This was left overnight, and the result is something that looks like old barn wood, and looks great after some linseed oil is rubbed into it. This is only a test run for fuming an entire desktop this spring, and while that’s a project that will require a real heater (and doing it outside), it’s still a great demonstration of lateral thinking and great woodworking techniques.

Laser-Cut Clock Uses Planetary Gear

March 1, 2015 by 6 Comments

[wyojustin] was trying to think of projects he could do that would take advantage of some of the fabrication tech that’s become available to the average hobbyist. Even though he doesn’t have any particular interest in clocks, [wyojustin] discovered that he could learn a lot about the tools he has access to by building a clock.

[wyojustin] first made a clock based off of a design by [Brian Wagner] that we featured a while back. The clock uses an idler wheel to move the hour ring so it doesn’t need a separate hour hand. After he built his first design, [wyojustin] realized he could add a planetary gear that could move an hour hand as well. After a bit of trial and error with gear ratios, he landed on a design that worked.

The clock’s movement is a stepper motor that’s driven by an Arduino. Although [wyojustin] isn’t too happy with the appearance of his electronics, the drive setup seems to work pretty well. Check out [wyojustin]’s site to see the other clock builds he’s done (including a version with a second hand), and you can peruse all of his design files on GitHub.

Looking for more clock-building inspiration? Check out some other awesome clock builds we’ve featured before.

An Upgrade To A Raspberry Pi Media Server

March 1, 2015 by 23 Comments

For the last few years, [Luke] has been running a music server with a Raspberry Pi. With the new Raspberry Pi 2 and its quad core processor, he thought it was time for an upgrade.

The build consists of a Raspi 2, a HiFiBerry Dac to address the complaints of terrible audio on the Pi, an aluminum enclosure, and some electronics for IO and a real software shutdown for the Pi. The Arduino also handles an IR remote and a rotary encoder on the front of the enclosure.

The software is the Logitech Media Server along with Squeezeslave. The front end is custom, though, with functions for shutdown and receiving IR remote codes. Everything is served up by Flask, with a 32GB microSD card stuffed into the Pi to store MP3s. All in all, a great build.

Low-Voltage Tesla Coil Uses A Relay Instead Of A Spark Gap

March 1, 2015 by 27 Comments

[Teodor] writes in with a unique Tesla coil he designed and built. Unlike most Tesla coils, [Teodor]’s design is able to run with a fairly low input voltage because it doesn’t use a static spark gap like most Tesla coils. Instead, his coil uses a relay in place of a spark gap.

[Teodor] built his coil using leftover components from his old school, making good use of some parts that might have otherwise been thrown away. The most critical component of his circuit, the relay, is just a standard normally-closed relay that is rated at 20A. [Teodor] wired the relay so that it energizes its own coil whenever it is shut. This causes the relay to briefly open every time the coil is energized, creating a resonant circuit. The resonant circuit charges a tank capacitor and places it in series with the primary coil inductor every time the relay closes, forming the tank circuit of his design.

With [Teodor]’s design, the resonant frequency of the secondary is nearly identical to that of the primary. This creates a significant voltage boost, helping produce very high voltages from such a low input voltage. The only downside to this design that [Teodor] recently discovered is that the relay contacts get red-hot after a few minutes of operation. Not optimal, but it still works! Check out [Teodor]’s writeup for more details and instructions on how to build your own.