Two Saturdays Of Fun With Hackaday

May 8, 2015 by 5 Comments

Shake off the work week with Hackaday. Tomorrow we kick off Hackaday Prize Worldwide: LA. This is a Zero to Product workshop, a meetup, and a free build day. The workshop and build sessions are full-full-full but you can still get in on social hour Saturday night. Please send us your RSVP. Full details on the weekend’s festivities are on our event page on Hackaday.io.

2nd Annual Bay Area Maker Faire Meetup

There are a ton of cool people descending on the Bay Area for Maker Faire in about a week, are you one of them? If so, join us at O’Neil’s for our second annual meetup! We’ll belly up to the bar starting at 7pm on the 16th. There will be several of the Hackaday crew there and we’re bring swag along with us. But the real attraction is all of the great hackers who show up. To get on the guest list you simply need to tell us you’re coming.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

LEDs Strips Tell You The Trains Aren’t Running

May 8, 2015 by 15 Comments

[James] is a frequent user of the London Underground, a subway system that is not immune to breakdowns and delays. He wanted a way to easily tell if any of the trains were being disrupted, and thanks to some LEDs, he now has that information available at a glance without having to check a webpage first.

Inspired by the Blinky Tape project at FT Engineering, [James] thought he could use the same strip of addressable LEDs to display information about the tube. A Raspberry Pi B+ gathers data from the London Underground’s TfL API and does a few calculations on the data. If there is a delay, the LEDs in the corresponding section of the strip will pulse, alerting the user to a problem with just a passing glance.

The project is one of many that displays data about the conditions you’ll find when you step outside the house, without having to look at a computer or smartphone. We recently featured an artistic lamp which displays weather forecasts for 12 hours into the future, and there was an umbrella stand which did the same thing. A lot is possible with LEDs and a good API!

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Caption CERN Contest — Prize Upgrade This Week

May 8, 2015 by 8 Comments

Week 13 of the Caption CERN Contest might be gone, but our intrepid scientist is still rocking his caffeine rush. Thanks for the captions! We’re still trying to figure out if the faces in on the wall are anyone famous – and who exactly are in the cartoon postcards toward the top of the wall. A few readers picked up on what looks to be a compressed air hose in the background. Every office has their coffee station, but we’re betting this particular CERN lab had some seriously frothy milk!

The Funnies:

  • “Schroedinger’s fist-bump” – [Jarrett]
  • “Even though the other scientists had rejected John’s idea to control the accelerator with a six speed manual transmission, he would often close his eyes and imagine shifting through the gears of a machine with a few trillion electron volts under the hood.”- [MechaTweak]
  • “At CERN the coffee doesn’t have a lot of kick, but it does have some punch..” – [THX1082]

The winner for this week is [Matt] with ‘”this is going to make one gooood coffee rush selfie. All my friends are doing it. We post them on the wall.” – CERN staff really were ahead of their time.’ [Matt] won a sweet Robot Head T-Shirt From The Hackaday Store!

Week 14: Prize Upgrade!

cern-14-smWe’ve seen a lot of strange equipment here at Hackaday, but Week 14’s image left us at a loss for words, at least for a few minutes. What the heck is this thing? Pressure vessel? RF chamber? Looking at this image and another one depicting a strange device in CERN’s labs, we haven’t the foggiest idea. We do know it’s large, and these two CERN scientists are working hard to get it ready for… something. It also has fins. Fins make everything cooler. Beyond that – we’re leaving this one in the capable hands of our caption team on Hackaday.io.

buspirate2We’re sweetening the pot a bit this week. Up until now, our weekly prize has been a T-shirt. While clothing is important, we know that hackers love hacking tools, so this week’s prize will be a Bus Pirate from The Hackaday store. We’ll try to change it up each week with a different device.

Add your humorous caption as a comment to this project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the contest log, not on the contest itself. As always, if you actually have information about the image or the people in it, let CERN know on the original image discussion page.

Good Luck!

Portable Workbench Is Solid And Space Saving

May 8, 2015 by 28 Comments

Last week we covered the topic of electronic work benches. But we know that there’s more to life than soldering irons and tiny components. Sometimes to pull off a hack, you need to get your hands dirty, and get some sawdust in your hair. If you’re limited on space, or need to be able to move to different locations quickly, this shop workbench may just be what you’re looking for.

First, let us preface that this project is not open source. Now before you “boo!” too loudly, the designer [Ron Paulk] only charges $10 for the plans. We think that is a small price to pay for how much though has gone into the design. But hey, if you’re a bit crafty, we bet you could easily reverse engineer the build just from the pictures alone. Personally, we think there are times when it’s a good thing to support a project like this.

The basic design allows the workbench to be very rigid, but light weight. And if you don’t have room for it to be permanently set up, it tears down and stores away nicely. It seems like the plans are well done, but if you need a bit more guidance, there is also a 15 part video series that will guide you along the way (here is the youtube playlist.) Also, there is an overview video after the break.  So what are you waiting for?  Go out and make something!

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Hackaday Prize Entry : Subterranean Positioning System

May 7, 2015 by 48 Comments

There are numerous instances where we need to know our location, but cannot do so due to GPS / GSM signals being unavailable and/or unreachable on our Smart Phones. [Blecky] is working on SubPos to solve this problem. It’s a WiFi-based positioning system that can be used where GPS can’t.

SubPos does not need expensive licensing, specialized hardware, laborious area profiling or reliance on data connectivity (connection to database/cellphone coverage). It works independently of, or alongside, GPS/Wi-Fi Positioning Systems (WPS)/Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) as an additional positioning data source by exploiting hardware commonly available.

As long as SubPos nodes are populated, all a user wishing to determine their location underground or indoors needs to do is use a Wi-Fi receiver.  This can be useful in places such as metro lines, shopping malls, car parks, art galleries or conference centers – essentially anyplace GPS doesn’t penetrate. SubPos defines an accurate method for subterranean positioning in different environments by exploiting all the capabilities of Wi-Fi. SubPos Nodes or existing Wi-Fi access points are used to transmit encoded information in a standard Wi-Fi beacon frame which is then used for position triangulation.

The SubPos Nodes operate much like GPS satellites, except that instead of using precise timing to calculate distance between a transmitter and receiver, SubPos uses coded transmitter information as well as the client’s received signal strength. Watch a demo video after the break.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Learning Logic Gates With Dominos

May 7, 2015 by 14 Comments

Even though most of us know logic gates like the back of our hands, we just found this awesome explanation video you can use to teach kids in a very fun way — Using nothing but dominoes.

Produced by [Numberphile], our host sets up various “circuits” using dominoes to explain all the various logic gates. Some of the patterns are a bit tricky to setup since you actually have to set up timing based on the spacing of the dominoes — makes us wonder how many bloopers there were!

But don’t take our word for it, it’s well worth a watch after the break.

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SPARC: A Voice Controlled Robot Sings Sweetly In DTMF

May 7, 2015 by 9 Comments

One of the recurring themes of science fiction is the robot. From such icons as C-3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars to WALL-E and Eve, robots have always had a certain appeal. Inexpensive microcontrollers like the Arduino have opened up the world of robotics to more people. [JohnFin] has done just this. By linking two Arduinos as the brain, he has created a voice controlled robot he calls S.P.A.R.C. (Sentry/Project Assistant/Robot Companion).

It began when he received a robotic arm for Christmas and was disappointed by it. Instead of simply building a better arm, he got “carried away” and built an entire robot instead. The entire project took three months, most of which he spent learning programming.

SPARC has three sonar sensors for detecting obstacles and movement, an arm and a couple of interchangeable hands for holding objects, and an EasyVR Arduino Shield for the voice control. The robot’s “eyes” are an LED ‘KITT’ scanner and an AN6884 VU meter chip that flashes the “eyes” when the robot speaks. It carries an onboard smartphone to look up weather, play music from the phone’s SD card, and GPS functions.

SPARC can respond to a range of commands and games including “follow me” and “singing.” [JohnFin] has also added a “sequencer” function to record and playback a series of commands. A video of this feature can be found after the break.

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