New Part Day: Nordic’s New Bluetooth SoC

June 21, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

You don’t need to look very hard to find Nordic’s nRF51 wireless module; it’s found in hundreds of products and dozens of projects over on hackaday.io. The nRF51 is a SoC that includes an ARM Cortex M0 processor and a variety of radios for Bluetooth and other protocols. Useful, if a bit limited in processing power.

Now, Nordic has a new SoC. It’s the nRF52, a Cortex M4F processor, a Bluetooth radio, NFC, and a bunch of Flash and RAM to make just about anything you can think of possible. Yes, it’s an upgrade to the nRF51 – a better processor and NFC, and all the possibilities that come with that. Currently there’s only one part and two package options: a 6x6mm QFN48, or a wafer chip that will be covered with impregnable goo.

Already there are SDKs for IAR Workbench, Keil4 and 5, and gcc. The SDKs won’t help you quite yet; it’s not available through the usual distributors yet, but the nRF52 Preview develoment kit is. That’s a single board development kit for the nRF52, with Arduino pinouts and Mbed support.

Thanks [Alvin] for sending this in from Trondheim.

Hand Drill To Band Saw Conversion

June 21, 2015 by Rich Bremer 23 Comments

Need a band saw but only have a drill kicking around? That may not be a common problem but if you ever run into it, [Izzy] has got you covered. He’s on a mission to make a drill-powered workshop and in his YouTube video, he shows a small bench top band saw he made that is powered by a corded hand drill.

The main frame is made from doubled up 3/4″ plywood. The saw blade is strung between two wooden wheels. Those wheels have tape applied to their outer diameter to create a crowned roller. That crown keeps the saw blade tracking in the middle of the wheel. The bottom wheel is mounted to an axle that is supported by bearings in the main frame. That axle pokes out the back and is connected to the drill. The top wheel has integrated bearings and ride on a stud mounted to the frame. The blade seems to be pretty tight although there is no noticeable tensioning system.

The video shows that this DIY band saw can cut through 1.5 inch wood fairly easily. Even so, there are clearly some needed features, like guide bearings for the blade and an overall cover to prevent accidental lacerations. But we suppose, even professional saws can be dangerous if not treated with respect.

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Reagent Robot

June 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

If you’re testing the amount of ammonia, nitrates, or just the pH of a pond, pool, or aquaculture setup, there’s two ways to do it. The first is with test tubes and chemicals: put some water in the test tube, add some chemicals, and match it to a color card. The second option is with expensive sensors.

[James] has a better idea. Since pumps, RGB LEDs, and light sensors exist, he’s building a reagent robot that will be able to measure ammonia, chlorine, nitrates, and pH without purely electronic sensors. The idea is to fill a clear container with water, add those fancy chemicals that come from aquarium supply stores, and measure the color of the water.

Right now, [James] has a bunch of stepper motors, valves, and solenoids all working together to pump water into his clear container. The next step will be to mount some RGB LEDs, a light sensor, and calibrate everything so colors can be measured.

It’s a great idea for electronic monitoring of aquaponics, ponds, and aquariums; those indicator chemicals are pretty inexpensive compared to electronic sensors, and once [James] has one measurement/reagent working, adding another is just a matter of putting in a few more tubes and pumps. You can check out a video of the progress so far below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Castrol Virtual Drift: Hacking Code At 80MPH With A Driver In A VR Helmet

June 20, 2015 by Adam Fabio 29 Comments

Driving a brand new 670 horsepower Roucsh stage 3 Mustang while wearing virtual reality goggles. Sounds nuts right? That’s exactly what Castrol Oil’s advertising agency came up with though. They didn’t want to just make a commercial though – they wanted to do the real thing. Enter [Adam and Glenn], the engineers who were tasked with getting data from the car into a high end gaming PC. The computer was running a custom simulation under the Unreal Engine. El Toro field provided a vast expanse of empty tarmac to drive the car without worry of hitting any real world obstacles.

The Oculus Rift was never designed to be operated inside a moving vehicle, so it presented a unique challenge for [Adam and Glenn]. Every time the car turned or spun, the Oculus’ on-board Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) would think driver [Matt Powers] was turning his head. At one point [Matt] was trying to drive while the game engine had him sitting in the passenger seat turned sideways. The solution was to install a 9 degree of freedom IMU in the car, then subtract the movements of that IMU from the one in the Rift.

GPS data came from a Real Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS unit. Unfortunately, the GPS had a 5Hz update rate – not nearly fast enough for a car moving close to 100 MPH. The GPS was relegated to aligning the virtual and real worlds at the start of the simulation. The rest of the data came from the IMUs and the car’s own CAN bus. [Adam and Glenn] used an Arduino with a Microchip mcp2515 can bus interface to read values such as steering angle, throttle position, brake pressure, and wheel spin. The data was then passed on to the Unreal engine. The Arduino code is up on Github, though the team had to sanitize some of Ford’s proprietary CAN message data to avoid a lawsuit. It’s worth noting that [Adam and Glenn] didn’t have any support from Ford on this, they just sniffed the CAN network to determine each message ID.

The final video has the Hollywood treatment. “In game” footage has been replaced with pre-rendered sequences, which look so good we’d think the whole thing was fake, that is if we didn’t know better.

Click past the break for the final commercial and some behind the scenes footage.

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Imaging And Emulating An HP-IB Disk Drive

June 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

If you look on the back of old, old test equipment, you’ll find a weird-looking connector that’s either labeled IEEE-488, GPIB, or HP-IB. It’s a very old interface designed by HP for their test equipment, and it was licensed to other manufacturers for everything from power supplies to logic analyzers. Hewlett-Packard also made computers and workstations once upon a time, and it’s no surprise this interface also made it into these boxes. They even had external hard drives that operated over the HP-IB interface.

[Chris] has a few of these old computers, and wanted to see if he could emulate one of these HP-IB hard drives. There is a project to emulate these hard drives, but the electrical connection is a bit tricky; you need an IEEE-488 card, and those really aren’t made anymore.

Nevertheless, [Chris] found an old ISA IEEE-488 last year, and installed it in the PC system he’s using for all his retro explorations. After getting the card and cable to fit in the case of his PC, [Chris] connected a real HP-IB disk to his modern computer running HPDrive, made an image, and connected an old HP 150 computer. The image was read by the HP 150, and [Chris] had a vintage computer running off an emulated drive.

An Electronic Woodwind With An Onboard Synthesizer

June 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

About a year ago, we saw a project on Hackaday.io for a MIDI wind controller. Keyboard MIDI controllers are a dime a dozen, but if you want something that actually sounds like a brass or woodwind instrument, you need something that’s controlled by a breath sensor. Since then, this project has been updated with an onboard synthesizer. It sounds great, and thanks to some interesting components, the part count is actually really low.

The synthesizer used for this project is just a single chip – the DSP-G1 from [Jan Ostman]. This isn’t a custom ASIC or anything fancy; it’s just an 8-pin ARM microcontroller in DIP format, the LPC810.

The rest of the instrument is just a series of pressure sensors along the body, and a breath sensor. The plan is to stuff all the electronics – a microcontroller to read the touch and breath sensors, the DSP-G1 chip, and the battery – inside the body of the instrument. That’s something that would be incredibly cool, and much more capable than the wind controllers that are available today.

You can see a few videos of the wind controller below.

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Making A Bobblehead Of You

June 20, 2015 by Rich Bremer 9 Comments

Bobbleheads, you remember them, small figures with a spring-mounted comically large head. They brought joy to millions of car drivers every day as at least 97.5% of all registered cars in the 1960’s had bobbleheads mounted to the dash. Years later bobblehead popularity has waned but [Luis] is trying to bring them back, this time not as your iconic sports hero but as YOU!

[Luis] uses software called Skanect along with his Kinect to scan a persons geometry. There is a free version of Skanect but it is limited to exporting STL files no larger than 5,000 faces. That means that scans of large objects (including people) come out looking noticeably faceted. [Luis] came up with a work-around that results in a much finer detailed scan. Instead of scanning an entire person with one scan, he would do 4 separate scans. Since each individual scan can support 5,000 faces, the resulting merged model can be up to 20,000 faces. Check out the comparison, the difference between the two scanning methods is quite noticeable. MeshMixer is the software used to merge the STL files of the 4 separate scans.

Once the full body is assembled in MeshMixer, it is time to separate the head from the body. A cylindrical hole is then made in the bottom of the head and the top of the body. This hole is just slightly larger than the spring used to support the head. The parts are then printed, painted and assembled. We have to say that the end result looks pretty darn good.