This Is How You Run A Hackathon: Tech Valley Center Of Gravity

February 4, 2016 by 5 Comments

What’s not to love about a hackathon? The junk food and caffeine that fuel the weekend; the highs that come with success and the lows that come when the blue smoke is released; the desperate search for inspiration as the clock ticks away; nerve-wracking pitches to the judges, hoping against hope that everything works in the demo. Hackathons are the contact sport of the hacker world, bringing in top competitors and eager upstarts, and when done well you just might attract interested “civilians” and other newbies that will catch the hacking bug from what they witness.

Such was the scene at the Tech Valley Center of Gravity in Troy, NY over the last weekend of January. New for 2016, the CoG is hosting a series of four hardware hackathons this year, each with a different theme. This event’s theme was “Internet of Things”, and the call went out to any and all to come compete for bragging rights and over $1,000 in prizes. Incentives to compete included some big name corporate sponsors, like AT&T, and judging and mentoring provided by the likes of SparkFun’s [Jeff Branson]. There was also a steady stream of food and drink, saturation coverage by local media outlets, and your humble Hackaday writer and his son, who made the trip up to Troy with a small passel of Hackaday swag and a curiosity to see how the CoG has fared since our last visit at the grand opening of their glorious new home. We were not disappointed.

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Pimp My Scope: Touchscreen Edition

February 4, 2016 by 11 Comments

Do you have a touch-screen oscilloscope? Neither do we. But how cool would that be to pan left and right or expand either axis just like you do on your cellphone screen? [Igor] did just that, and the results (in the video below the break) look fantastic.

We’ve covered [Igor]’s previous round of hacking on his Siglent scope, where he bricked it by flashing the wrong firmware, and then fixed it by Frankensteining the screen into the box that the firmware wanted. But once he’d gotten the scope-hacking bug, he couldn’t quit.

A brief overview: an Arduino Nano reads the touchscreen and sends the commands to the scope to act accordingly. [Igor] initially wanted to simply use the COM port on the back to control, but his previous mis-flashing of the firmware had rendered that moot. Instead, he went after the data bus that interfaces with the keyboard unit, reverse engineered its protocol, and spoofed keypresses with custom code in the AVR.

As a side effect of all this, [Igor] could also write a script that controls the scope from his computer, and he ended up re-housing it all in the nice wooden front panel that you see now. It’s more than a step up from the previous covered-in-electrical-tape look, and the new functionality is very very cool. Kudos.

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A Better Way To Plug A CPLD Into A Breadboard

February 4, 2016 by 63 Comments

If you read my first post about a simple CPLD do-it-yourself project you may remember that I seriously wiffed when I made the footprint 1” wide, which was a bit too wide for common solderless breadboards. Since then I started over, having fixed the width problem, and ended up with a module that looks decidedly… cuter.

To back up a little bit, a Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) is a cool piece of hardware to have in your repertoire and it can be used to learn logic or a high level design language or replace obsolete functions or chips. But a CPLD needs a little bit of support infrastructure to become usable, and that’s what I’ll be walking you through here. So if you’re interested in learning CPLDs, or just designing boards for them, read on!

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Handheld Nintendo 64 Only Plays Ocarina Of Time

February 4, 2016 by 22 Comments

Introducing the SG-N64 — the Single Game Nintendo 64 Portable Console. You can play any game you want, as long as it’s the Ocarina of Time.

You might be wondering, why would you go to the effort of making a totally awesome portable N64 player, and then limit it to but a single game? Well, the answer is actually quite simple. ocarina-of-time-handheld[Chris] wanted to immortalize his favorite game — the Ocarina of Time. As he puts it, making a SG-N64 “takes the greatness of a timeless classic and preserves it in a body designed solely for the purpose of playing it”.

Inside you’re going to find the motherboard from an original N64, as well as the game cartridge PCB which shed its enclosure and is now hardwired in place. Of course that’s just the start. The real challenge of the build is to add all of the peripherals that are needed: screen, audio, control, and power. He did it, and in a very respectable size considering this was meant to sit in your living room.

Now that is how you show your kids or grand-kids a classic video game. Heck, maybe you can even convince them that’s how all games were sold and played! What’s the fun in being a parent without a bit of trolling?

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This File Will Self-Destruct In 24 Hours

February 4, 2016 by 75 Comments

[menkveldj] built a service that encrypts files which self destruct in 24 hours. The download link can only be used once. If the wrong people were to get the link and download the file, they’d need many years on a pretty powerful computer to crack the 256AES encryption.

The sender shares a file that is encrypted client side using a password generated Pbkdf2 key to encrypt the data before uploading it to the s3 storage service. The sender is then provided the one-time-use link to share with the recipient. After the first download, or 24 hours, the link and the encrypted file are both deleted. The receiver must enter the same password to decrypt and recover the file. No one but the sharer and receiver know what the actual file is.

It’s still work in progress, so chime in with your comments and suggestions. To dig into the code, check out his repository on Github, which also has instructions to build and run it if you’d like to do your own version.

Oh, and you’ll like this. If want to thumb your nose at the powers that be, the site has a redirect for the whimsical domain: NSAfu.com.

Drone Racing Might Just Be The Next Big Thing

February 3, 2016 by 49 Comments

Arguably, drones are one of the next big things that will revolutionize many industries. We’ve already seen them portrayed in many movies and TV shows in not-so-distant futures, and what with Amazon planning drone deliveries, we can’t imagine it’ll be long before they are a common sight flying around cities.

While drone racing remains underground in many places, the Drone Racing League is hoping to change that — and turn it into a real sport. In the recent article by The New Stack, they compare drone racing to the beginning of skateboarding back in the 90’s;

With a small group of people pushing the envelope and inventing every day.

Not for long though. DRL is making a huge push to turn this into a mainstream sport, and we gotta admit — we don’t mind. After all, this is like pod-racing on crack. Just take a look at the following promo video for their course the Gates of Hell: the Dream Takes Form.

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Hard Drive Disassembly Is Easy And Rewarding

February 3, 2016 by 61 Comments

Have any dead hard drives kicking around? Hackaday alum [Jeremy Cook] shows how easy it is to disassemble a hard drive to scavenge its goodies. The hardest part is having the patience and the tools to get past all those screws that stand between you and the treasure inside.

The case screws are frequently of the Torx variety. Any self-respecting hacker probably has one or two of these already, but if you’re in the market, [Jeremy] recommends a nice set that looks way better than ours. Once the case is open, you can find rare earth magnets, bearings, and one or more platters.

Those terrifically strong magnets are good for all kinds of projects. Glue a couple of them to the back of an attractive piece of wood, mount it on the kitchen wall, and you have yourself a knife block. Keep a couple on the bench to temporarily magnetize tools. Use them to build a pickup to amplify a cigar box guitar or thumb piano. Or run the pickup into a small amplified speaker and wave it like a stethoscope near your electronics to hear them hum. As far as liberating the magnets goes, [Jeremy] resorted to clamping his in a vise and using a hammer and chisel to pry it away from the actuator hardware.

You’ve no doubt seen clocks made from old hard drives that were kept mostly intact. Many makers including [Jeremy] will extract the shiny platters to use as bases for clock faces and engrave the numbers, etch them, or glue them on. Those platters also make excellent chimes. Even if you just hang one platter off of a finger and tap it with a fingernail, it sounds really nice.

If simple chimes don’t really butter your muffin, there are all kinds of sonic projects for dead hard drives. How about making a microphone or speakers? Maybe an HDD MIDI controller or a synthesizer is more your speed. Speaking of synths, watch [Jeremy] take a hard drive apart to some sweet sounds after the break.

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