Hackaday’s 48-Hour Tokyo Speedrun

November 3, 2014 by 29 Comments

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed,” goes the clichéd [William Gibson] quote. Growing up on all the Cyberpunk literature and spending a more-than-healthy amount of time obsessing over [Fred Gallagher’s] Megatokyo series, I always imagined Japan to be at the very tail of this distribution. The place where the Future lives. Though it has been decades since the Bubble burst, and there’s no way this could still be the case, there was something romantic about believing it just might be. Thus, I opted for keeping the dream alive and never actually visited the place.

Not until a few weeks ago — [Bilke], one of our crazy sysadmin guys that keeps Hackaday.io alive, made me do it. He found these cheap tickets from LA, and the next thing you know – we were flying out for a 48-hours-in-Tokyo weekend. With no time to prepare, we reached out to [Akiba] from Freaklabs and [Emery] from Tokyo Hackerspace for some tips. By the time we landed, emails were waiting for us, with our full schedule completely worked out. It’s great to know that no matter where you are, there’s always a friendly local hacker willing to help.

Past the immigration, we took the JR Narita Express line into to the City that Friday evening. From there we grabbed a taxi because we couldn’t understand a word in katakana but then we hopped the JR Yamanote Metro line once we had figured things out. We checked out all the major places we had ever heard of (Shinjuku, Shibuya, Roppongi, Ginza…) because the jet lag was not letting us sleep anyway.

Sometime way past midnight, it hit me – Future Shock. But this was the kind I never expected…

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The Tale Of Two Wearable Game Boys

November 3, 2014 by 9 Comments

We’re well past the time when Halloween costume submissions stop hitting the tip line, but like ever year we’re expecting a few to trickle in until at least Thanksgiving. Remember, kids: documentation is the worst part of any project.

[Troy] sent us a link to his wearable Game Boy costume. It’s exactly what you think it is: an old-school brick Game Boy that [Troy] wore around to a few parties last weekend. This one has a twist, though. There’s a laptop in there, making this Game Boy playable.

The build started off as a large cardboard box [Troy] covered with a scaled-up image of everyone’s favorite use of AA batteries. The D-pad and buttons were printed out at a local hackerspace, secured to a piece of plywood, and connected to an Arduino Due. The screen, in all its green and black glory, was taken from an old netbook. It was a widescreen display, but with a bezel around the display the only way to tell it’s not original is from the backlight.

Loaded up with Pokemon Blue, the large-scale Game Boy works like it should, enthralling guests at wherever [Troy] ended up last Friday. It also looks like a rather quick build, and something we could easily put together when we remember it next October 30th.

[Troy] wasn’t the only person with this idea. A few hours before he sent in a link to his wearable Game Boy costume, [Shawn] sent in his completely unrelated but extremely similar project. It’s a wearable brick Game Boy, a bit bigger, playing Tetris instead of Pokemon.

[Shawn]’s build uses a cardboard box overlaid with a printout of a scaled-up Game Boy. Again, a laptop serves as the emulator and screen, input is handled by a ‘duino clone, and the buttons are slightly similar, but made out of cardboard.

Both are brilliant builds, adding a huge Game Boy to next year’s list of possible Halloween costume ideas. Videos of both below.

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The Hackaday Prize: The Hacker Behind The First Tricorder

November 3, 2014 by 38 Comments

Smartphones are the most common expression of [Gene Roddneberry]’s dream of a small device packed with sensors, but so far, the suite of sensors in the latest and greatest smartphone are only used to tell Uber where to pick you up, or upload pics to an Instagram account. It’s not an ideal situation, but keep in mind the Federation of the 24th century was still transitioning to a post-scarcity economy; we still have about 400 years until angel investors, startups, and accelerators are rendered obsolete.

Until then, [Peter Jansen] has dedicated a few years of his life to making the Tricorder of the Star Trek universe a reality. It’s his entry for The Hackaday Prize, and made it to the finals selection, giving [Peter] a one in five chance of winning a trip to space.

[Peter]’s entry, the Open Source Science Tricorder or the Arducorder Mini, is loaded down with sensors. With the right software, it’s able to tell [Peter] the health of leaves, how good the shielding is on [Peter]’s CT scanner, push all the data to the web, and provide a way to sense just about anything happening in the environment. You can check out [Peter]’s video for The Hackaday Prize finals below, and an interview after that.

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IPhone-Controlled Daft Punk Helmet

November 3, 2014 by 4 Comments

A few years ago, [Marc] had access to a really big, very expensive 3D printer. Daft Punk helmets were – and still are – extremely cool builds, so with a bit of modeling, [Marc] and his friend [Alex] put together a model and printed out a Daft Punk [Thomas] helmet with the intention of turning it into the keystone of a great costume. A few things got in the way, and the [Thomas] helmet was left on a shelf for a few years. Fast forward to a few months ago and [Marc] took up the project again. The result is a 3D printed Daft Punk helmet loaded up with 320 WS2811 LEDs.

The 3D printed helmet was modeled well and printed in polycarbonate, but with any extrusion-based printer, there will be ridges and layers to sand, fill, prime and paint. This task was delegated to another friend, [Shaggy], while [Marc] got busy on the electronics.

The LEDs for the visor and ‘earmuffs’ are WS2811 LEDs, but not the SMD versions we’re so used to seeing. These are 8mm through-hole LEDs mounted in a lasercut piece of acrylic. Control of the LEDs is done with a Teensy 3.1 with [Paul Stoffregen]’s OctoWS2811 library. With the matrix wired up, batteries installed, WiFi capability added, and the helmet painted (not chromed; that will probably happen later, though), [Marc] had a copy of the [Thomas] helmet controllable through an iPhone.

If you’d like to check out more of [Marc]’s work, we posted something on his RGB LED suit and pneumatic Star Trek doors a few years ago.

Video below.

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A Full IP Webcam With A Raspberry Pi

November 3, 2014 by 32 Comments

A Dropcam will run you about $150. Price out a Raspberry Pi, camera sensor, and a CCTV camera housing found on eBay, and it starts to look like there may be a cheaper replacement for a Dropcam sitting around on workbenches, if only someone can figure out the software. [Antoine] did just that, giving any Raspberry Pi the ability to stream H.264 video over a network.

[Antoine]’s software is based on the raspivid tool distributed from the foundation, but that only takes care of capturing and encoding H.264 video from the camera sensor. To add IP camera support, the Live555 RTSP library was mixed in and combined to stream video over the Raspi’s network connection.

With a camera dome enclosure from the usual outlets, [Antoine]’s project really starts to look professional. The specs are respectable, too: it can output a 1080 stream, and with a small modification to an Ethernet cord, this webcam has PoE. Future updates include the ability to record videos based on a trigger and possibly a webserver on the Pi for configuration. [Antoine] says he really isn’t up to speed with Javascript, so any help would be appreciated.

Discovering The Protocol In A USB VoIP Phone

November 2, 2014 by 3 Comments

[Daniel] picked up a cheap USB handset to use with his VoIP provider, and included in the box was a CD with all the software that would make this handset work with Windows. [Daniel] is running Linux on his main battlestation, rendering the included CD worthless. Using the handset under Linux would be a problem; although the speaker and mic worked, the buttons and screen did not. No problem, then: [Daniel] just played around with the command line until he figured it out.

The handset presented itself to the Linux box as a soundcard and HID device. The soundcard was obviously the speaker and mic, leaving the buttons and display as the HID device. [Daniel] checked this out by running a hexdump on the HID device and pressed a few buttons. His suspicions were confirmed, and he could easily read the button with a little bit of Python.

With the speaker, mic, and buttons on the handset figured out, [Daniel] turned his attention to the one bit of electronics on the phone he hadn’t yet conquered: the display. After firing some random data at the phone, the display blinked and showed a messy block of pixels, confirming the display was controlled through the HID driver. Loading up usbsnoop to see what the original software does to update the screed showed [Daniel] the data format the display accepts, allowing him to control everything in this VoIP phone.

A Watercooled Headlamp, Because Why Not?

November 2, 2014 by 29 Comments

There are extremely high powered LEDs out there, and most of the ‘creative’ uses of these are extremely high-powered flashlights, complete with heatsinks, forced air cooling, and beefy power supplies. [Christian] wanted to play around with one of these LEDs, but he wanted something a little more unique. He chose a headlamp, a build that is made even more impressive by the fact it is watercooled.

The body of the headlamp was milled out of aluminum, with a space for the LED in the front and channels in the back for coolant. Also in this enclosure are two buttons, a temperature sensor, and a port for the hose that carries the tubes and wires.

This hose connects to a large battery pack that houses four large lithium phosphate batteries and a boost converter built around an Arduino. The pack also houses a pump and reservoir that is able to keep the LED cool even at 130W.