Amazon Dash: Hack It To Run Your Own Code

August 12, 2015 by 50 Comments

The Amazon Dash is a $5 push-to-buy-cat-litter button which has excellent potential for repurposing, but you need to know what is going on inside first. [Tony Dicola] has the details in this excellent bare metal guide to the Dash. In this, he covers how to get inside the Dash and reprogram it to do something more interesting than buying cat litter.

He first cracks the device open, connecting a programmer, then building a toolchain to compile programs to run on. This isn’t for the faint-hearted because you are programming directly for a device that wasn’t really built for it, but [Tony] has posted examples and there are few tools to hold your hand on the way. There is a safety net, [Tony] provided details on how to reset the Amazon Dash Button if you manage to brick it.

We have seen some interesting hacks that repurpose the Dash to capture your child’s bowel movements by intercepting the device connecting to WiFi, but this guide takes it a step further. It allows you to run your own code, which turns this into a really low-cost and well-engineered all-in-one WiFi device. The missing piece is proof-of-concept code to run the WiFi module inside. If you’re working on that we’d love to hear about it!

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Tonight Is Hacker Chat With The Hackaday Writing Crew

August 12, 2015 by No comments

Tonight at 6pm PDT (UTC-7) is that last Hacker Chat before the entry deadline for the 2015 Hackaday Prize. Join us to talk about all things hardware. Those who need last-minute advice, or are looking for team members for an epic weekend hackathon to bootstrap your winning entry, this is the place to find it. It’s worth entering something… we’re giving everyone with an entry a limited-edition shirt.. and a well executed idea just might get you to the next round!

Joining [Brian Benchoff], [Adam Fabio], and me for tonight’s festivities are [Richard Baguley], [Kevin Dady] (aka [Osgeld]), [Bil Herd], [Kristina Panos], and [Al Williams]. We run these things a bit like the wild-west. There is just a bit of structure, but mostly anything goes. As far as the structure, add your project to this sheet if you want it to be one of the discussion topics. Other than that, share your knowledge and opinions while being excellent to each other. See you this evening!

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hebocons And Why They Matter

August 12, 2015 by 28 Comments

Everyone remembers Battlebots, and those of us feeling the pains of nostalgia have tuned into the recent reboot on ABC. As with the golden age of Battlebots, all robot fighting competitions eventually become a war between machines perfectly designed for the task. In the original run of Battlebots, this meant a bracket full of wedge bots, with the very cool robots eliminated year after year.

You don’t watch NASCAR for the race, you watch it for the crashes, and professional robot fighting competitions will always devolve into a few hundred laps of left turns. Fire and sparks are great, but there is a better robot fighting competition, and this time anyone can get in the game without spending years working on a robot.

It’s called Hebocon, and it’s billed as, ‘a sumo wrestling tournament for those who don’t have the technical skills to actually make robots’. The best translation I’ve seen is, ‘shitty robot battles’, and it’s exactly what robot battles should be: technical mastery overcome by guile, and massive upsets through ingenious strategy. You won’t get fire and sparks, but one thing is certain: no robot will make it out of Hebocon fully functional, but that’s only because they weren’t fully functional to begin with.

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3D printed Bubble Blowing Machine

Blow 14,000 Bubbles Per Minute With This 3D Printed Contraption

August 12, 2015 by 34 Comments

Like bubbles? Then you’ll love this 3D printed bubble blowing machine. It’s capable of blowing approximately 14,000 bubbles… per minute.

Designed and released on Thingiverse, the array of bubble orifices are 3D printed, as well as the gears and chain that rotate the belt of bubbles. The only thing not 3D printed is the 5 gallon bucket, some aluminum extrusion for mounting it rigidly, and the 50RPM motor that spins it around.

Place the bucket in your driveway, hook up a big fan behind it, and Bob’s your uncle — you’ve got 14,000 bubbles a minute to play with. Is it bad we want to see someone set this up inside a house?

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Cheap Projector Tells Time, Invades Space

August 12, 2015 by 14 Comments

Building a video projector isn’t something that most people do casually, but [Dominic Buchstaller] isn’t most people. As part of an ongoing street art  project, he built a rather neat scrap video projector/bedside lamp/clock device he calls Great Balls of Fire. It is made from a Nokia cell phone screen and a small projector mechanism, mounted inside a frosted glass light sphere.

One of the most interesting parts of the build is the projector mechanism. Rather than build one from scratch or tear apart an expensive Pico projector, [Dominic] found another source: a cheap car logo projector from eBay. These are designed to show a car manufacturer logo on the ground when you open your car door. It came with all of the parts he needed, including an LED light source and optics. He tore that apart and replaced the car logo with the phone screen, creating a very cheap projector. It isn’t that bright, but it is bright enough that when he mounted it inside the glass sphere, it could project the time and the odd space invader. It’s a great example of how sometimes it makes sense to look for a cheap solution rather than a free one: buying the car logo projector saved him a lot of hassle in building the optics. [Dominic] was also responsible for this awesome old-school tube radio hack, where he replaced the guts of an old radio with an internet radio player.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Civilization Starter Kit

August 11, 2015 by 43 Comments

Over the last few years, [Marcin] has been working on the building blocks of civilization. He’s busy creating the Global Village Construction Set, the fifty most useful machines ever created. Everything from bread ovens to combine harvesters is part of this Global Village Construction Set, and everything is open source, free for all to use and improve upon.

For this year’s Hackaday Prize, [Marcin] is working on an Open Source Bulldozer. The ability to create earthworks and move dirt around is actually one of humanity’s greatest achievements, and enables the creation of everything from foundations for homes to trans-oceanic canals.

This Open Source bulldozer is astonishingly modular, scaleable from a one-ton microtractor to a 13,000lb dozer, with attachment points for blades, drawbars, and everything else you can attach to a Bobcat earthmover. It’s 168 horses of opensource earthmoving capability, and a perfect addition to this year’s Hackaday Prize.

[Marcin] and his group Open Source Ecology posted a video of this micro bulldozer rolling around on their shop floor recently; you can check that out below. You can also see our coverage of the GLVCS from several years ago.

 

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Emulating A Hard Drive With The Raspberry Pi

August 11, 2015 by 35 Comments

[Chris] recently moved a vintage IBM 5150 – the original PC – into his living room. While this might sound odd to people who are not part of the Hackaday readership, it actually makes a lot of sense; this PC is a great distraction-free writing workstation, vintage gaming machine, and looks really, really cool. It sat unused for a while, simply because [Chris] didn’t want to swap out piles of floppies, and he doesn’t have a hard drive or controller card for this machine. After reviewing what other retrocomputer fans have done in this situation, he emulated a hard drive with a Raspberry Pi.

The traditional solution to the ‘old PC without a hard drive’ problem is the XTIDE project. XTIDE is a controller card that translates relatively new IDE cards (or an emulated drive on another computer) as a hard drive on the vintage PC, just like a controller card would. Since a drive can be emulated by another computer, [Chris] grabbed the closest single board computer he had on hand, in this case a Raspberry Pi.

After burning an EPROM with XTIDE to drive an old network card, [Chris] set to work making the XTIDE software function on the Raspberry Pi side of things. The hardware on the modern side of the is just a Pi and a USB to RS232 adapter, set to a very low bitrate. Although the emulated drive is slow, it is relatively huge for computer of this era: 500 Megabytes of free space. It makes your head spin to think of how many vintage games and apps you can fit on that thing!