Astronaut Or Astronot: Win $1000 For Clicking A Button

July 3, 2015 by 25 Comments

Over the last few weeks, we’ve had a lot of fun running the Community Voting for The Hackaday Prize. We’ve been offering up a $1000 gift card for The Hackaday Store to a random person on Hackaday.io if they have voted in the latest round of community voting. Unfortunately all of our weekly random drawings for someone on Hackaday.io has come up empty-handed.

Now we’re changing it. Due to popular demand, someone who has voted in the latest round of Community Voting will win a $1000 gift card. We will draw a winner this week! We’re giving away a thousand dollar gift card to a random person who has voted in the latest round of community. It’s the change you’ve asked for.

Next Wednesday, July 8th at around 22:00 UTC, I’m going to find a random person on Hackaday.io. If that person has voted, they get $1000. If not, I’m going to choose someone who has voted and give them a $1000 gift card. It’s really that simple. If you vote in the current round of Community Voting, you have a good chance at winning a thousand dollar gift card for the Hackaday Store.

What do you need to do to get in on the action? Go here and choose the most Amazingly Engineered project. You will be presented with two projects. Pick the project that is the more ‘amazingly engineered’ project. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. Show up and vote!

Arduinos (and Other AVRs) Write To Own Flash

July 3, 2015 by 52 Comments

In this post on the Arduino.cc forums and this blog post, [Majek] announced that he had fooled the AVR microcontroller inside and Arduino into writing user data into its own flash memory during runtime. Wow!

[Majek] has pulled off a very neat hack here. Normally, an AVR microcontroller can’t write to its own flash memory except when it’s in bootloader mode, and you’re stuck using EEPROM when you want to save non-volatile data. But EEPROM is scarce, relative to flash.

Now, under normal circumstances, writing into the flash program memory can get you into trouble. Indeed, the AVR has protections to prevent code that’s not hosted in the bootloader memory block from writing to flash. But of course, the bootloader has to be able to program the chip, so there’s got to be a way in.

The trick is that [Majek] has carefully modified the Arduino’s Optiboot bootloader so that it exposes a flash-write (SPM) command at a known location, so that he can then use this function from outside the bootloader. The AVR doesn’t prevent the SPM from proceeding, because it’s being called from within the bootloader memory, and all is well.

The modified version of the Optiboot bootloader is available on [Majek]’s Github.  If you want to see how he did it, here are the diffs. A particularly nice touch is that this is all wrapped up in easy-to-write code with a working demo. So next time you’ve filled up the EEPROM, you can reach for this hack and log your data into flash program memory.

Thanks [Koepel] for the tip!

Getting Mixed Up With Home Stir Welding

July 3, 2015 by 16 Comments

Most processes designed to join two pieces of what-have-you together are consumptive of something, whether it’s some material acting as a third party to work piece and the tool, or the tool itself. In the wonderful world of friction stir welding, the material of the two pieces under union gets swirled together through friction as the tool traverses the join path. There are, of course, professional machines that perform this with relative ease, but with a large amount of beer on the line, [skookum_choocher] was determined to make his own.

In the first video, he machines a friction welding tool by shaping a tungsten carbide button from a drill bit using a diamond grinder. Once he has a rough shoulder and protuberance going, it’s time to let her rip.  Despite issues with clamping and the geometry of his tool, the weld is ultimately successful at the tail end.

Undeterred, he has another go at it after making some adjustments to the tool shoulder, changing the belt on his poor old Bridgeport, and increasing the clamping strength by a factor of four. You clamp sixteen tons, and whaddya get? A slightly better butt weld than the first time, it turns out. Fearing this weld is insufficient to win the bet, he goes for the lap weld with the work pieces stacked together in a sandwich. We prefer pizza with beer, but nevertheless congratulate him.

Continue reading “Getting Mixed Up With Home Stir Welding” →

Tiny X86 Systems With Graphics Cards

July 3, 2015 by 25 Comments

The Intel Edison is out, and that means there’s someone out there trying to get a postage-stamp sized x86 machine running all those classic mid-90s games that just won’t work with modern hardware. The Edison isn’t the only tiny single board computer with an x86 processor out there; the legends told of another, and you can connect a graphics card to this one.

This build uses the 86Duino Zero, a single board computer stuffed into an Arduino form factor with a CPU that’s just about as capable as a Pentium II or III, loaded up with 128 MB of RAM, a PCI-e bus, and USB. It’s been a while since we’ve seen the 86Duino. We first saw it way back at the beginning of 2013, and since then, barring this build, nothing else has come up.

The 86Duino Zero only has a PCI-e x1 connector, but with an x16 adapter, this tiny board can drive an old nVidia GT230. A patch to the Coreboot image and a resistor for the Reset signal to the VGA was required, but other than that, it’s not terribly difficult to run old games on something the size of an Arduino and a significantly larger graphics card.

Thanks [Rasz] for sending this one in.

Continue reading “Tiny X86 Systems With Graphics Cards” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: What To Do With A Bunch Of Old Computer Adapters

July 2, 2015 by 12 Comments

Back in the old days of 2014 when Radio Shack still existed, you could drive up to any strip mall in America and buy D-sub connectors that were made all the way back in 1972. Yes, connectors for all those SCSI, serial, parallel, and other weird ports you’d find on old computers could be bought for less than five dollars. For some reason or another, [yesnoio] has a ton of these connectors. Not just the connectors, but also those little plastic shells that clip onto the connectors. What to do with them? Retro Modules! It’s basically littleBits if littleBits were invented in 1987.

The goal of Retro Modules is to be able to put prototypes into your backpack without tearing a wire or two out of a breadboard. The basic foundation is to have a specification that outlines the pinout of DB-25 and DE-9 connectors, using these signals for power, an I²C bus,. analog lines, and SPI lines. Put a microcontroller in one of these plastic shells, a sensor in another, and a display in a third; you have an electronics prototyping platform that was designed in the backroom of a Radio Shack.

[yesnoio] has a Getting Started guide that takes you through the creation of the first three Retro Modules. The first is an Arduino nano or micro stuffed into a plastic shell with one female DA-15 connector. The second module is just a LED and resistor, and the third is just a servo. These can be connected together, and controlled because of the specification lined out. It’s brilliant, a little bit crazy, and something that has the potential to be much, much cooler than any electronics prototyping platform you’ll find at Maker Faire.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Optics Laboratory Made From LEGO

July 2, 2015 by 10 Comments

16A lot of engineers, scientists, builders, makers, and hackers got their start as children with LEGO. Putting those bricks together, whether following the instructions or not, really brings out the imagination. It’s not surprising that some people grow up and still use LEGO in their projects, like [Steve] who has used LEGO to build an optics lab with a laser beam splitter.

[Steve] started this project by salvaging parts from a broken computer projector. Some of the parts were scorched beyond repair, but he did find some lenses and mirrors and a mystery glass cube. It turns out that this cube is a dichroic prism which is used for combining images from the different LCD screens in the projector, but with the right LEGO bricks it can also be used for splitting a laser beam.

The cube was set on a LEGO rotating piece to demonstrate how it can split the laser at certain angles. LEGO purists might be upset at the Erector set that was snuck into this project, but this was necessary to hold up the laser pointer. This is a great use of these building blocks though, and [Steve] finally has his optics lab that he’s wanted to build for a while. If that doesn’t scratch your LEGO itch, we’ve also featured this LEGO lab which was built to measure the Planck constant.

15 Quadcopters Up For Grabs In Wings, Wheels, And Propellers Contest

July 2, 2015 by 12 Comments

Have a project that moves? Then get it entered this week for your chance at one of 15 quadcopters. We’ll award a Crazyflie 2.0 to each of 15 fantastic examples of projects that move with wings, wheels, or propellers (the kind on boats or on flying things). Here’s what you need to do before Thursday, 7/9/15:

That’s all you need to do to be considered. But there’s a lot you can do to help improve your chances of winning. We love to see images, so make sure you have a least one picture in the main gallery. Start your project documentation with a clear and concise description of what you’re doing with the project and how you plan to accomplish that. And a components lists is always helpful!

We had a great time judging the manufacturer sponsor contests this week. We’ll be announcing the 200 winners of those contests over the next few days.

Oh yeah, one last time… you’re going to want to make sure you VOTE right away, because someone’s going to win big this week. [Brian] will tell you more about that tomorrow ;-)

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by: