Droning On: Resources And First Steps

March 31, 2014 by Adam Fabio 20 Comments

It’s been quiet these last few weeks in drone news. Some members of the commercial community are performing missions, while others are waiting on the results of the FAA’s appeal to the NTSB. There is no denying that drones are getting larger as an industry though. Even Facebook has jumped into the fray, not for drones to deliver real world pokes, but to provide internet access in remote areas.

One of the high points in the news was an octocopter operator’s discovery of 2500 year old rock drawings, or petroglyphs in the Utah desert. While exploring a known archeological site, Bill Clary of GotAerial LLC flew his octocopter up to a cliff face. The rock formation would have made rappelling down the face difficult at best. He found an amazing collection of petroglyphs which he documented in this video. While the authenticity of the petroglyphs hasn’t been proven yet, they appear to date back to the Basketmaker people who lived in the area from approximately 500 BC through 860AD.

Maybe you’re asking yourself how you can get in on some of these sweet drone adventures? Whether you’re considering your very first flight, or already own multiple aircraft, you’ll want to read our discussion of getting started (specifically: acquiring your first drone) and discovering drone-related communities. Hit that “read more” link to stay with us.

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Dr. Frankenstein’s Wireless Xbox One Steering Wheel

March 31, 2014 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

Buy an Xbox One controller and hack it immediately? That’s exactly what [tEEonE] did so he could merge it with a Simraceway SRW-S1 steering wheel. He loves racing games and was psyched to play Forza 5. He already had the steering wheel, but it’s strictly a PC peripheral. [tEEonE] wanted the wheel to control the steering, gas, and brakes and found both the XB1 controller and the SRW-S1 well-suited to the hack.

For steering, [tEEonE] substituted the SRW-S1’s accelerometer for the XB1’s left joystick pot. He connected the X and Y to analog pins on an Arduino Pro. Then he mapped the rotation angles to voltage levels using a DAC and wired that to the XB1 joystick output. The XB1 controller uses Hall effect sensors and magnets on the triggers to control the gas and brake. He removed these and wired the SRW-S1 paddles to their outputs and the XB1 controller is none the wiser.

He also rigged up a 3-point control system to control the sensitivity and calibrate the angles: a button to toggle through menu items and two touch modules to increment and decrement the value. These he wired up to a feedback interface made by reusing a 15-LED strip from the SRW-S1. Finally, he had space left inside the housing for the XB1’s big rumble motors and was able to attach the small motors to the gas and brake paddles with the help of some 3-D printed attachments. Check out this awesome hack in action after the break.

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Sniffing PH Sensor RF Signals For Feedback Re: Your Esophagus

March 31, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 8 Comments

For about a week [Justin] had a wireless acidity level sensor in his esophagus and a pager-looking RF receiver in his pocket. So he naturally decided to use an RTL-SDR dongle to sniff the signals coming out of him. As most of our Hackaday readers know, these cheap RTL2382U-based DVB-T receivers are very handy when it comes to listening to anything between 50MHz and 1800MHz. [Justin] actually did a great job at listing all the things these receivers can be used for (aircraft traffic monitoring, weather images download, electric meter reading, pacemaker monitoring…).

After some Googling he managed to find his Bravo pH sensor user’s guide and therefore discovered its main frequency and modulation scheme (433.92MHz / ASK). [Justin] then used gqrx and Audacity to manually decode the packets before writing a browser-based tool which uses an audio file. Finally, a few additional hours of thinking allowed him to extract his dear esophagus’ pH value.

Magic Screwdriver Decides If You Watch TV Or Not

March 31, 2014 by Rich Bremer 8 Comments

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Video projectors are great. They can easily produce a very large image to watch. With that large image comes a large screen, and who wants to look at a large screen when not watching TV? Well, [Steve] didn’t either so he set out to make a powered retractable screen for his projector. The best part about this one is that it is done in true DIY/hacker fashion. The parts used are definitely not intended to be used as anything close to a projector screen and the overall cost is kept to an absolute minimum.

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Using A Door Handle Conductivity To Detect Intruders

March 30, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 26 Comments

Sometimes the simplest projects can be quite interesting, provided they’re well documented. We hope that the Hackaday readers also think that the door sensor that [Alexander] developed falls into this category. Instead of using common methods such as a magnet + reed switch, he decided to use the strike plate and door conductivity to detect someone walking in. The setup he put together includes an Arduino, a PowerSwitch Tail (a power cord that switches 120vac with a dc control voltage of 3-12vdc), a battery pack made of 8 AA batteries and two crocodile clips for door connections.

Most new hobbyists would have stopped there, but [Alexander] checked his platform’s power consumption and continued his work to decrease it. He therefore put the microcontroller in power-down mode by default and uses an AVR external interrupt to wake it up. In case beginners can’t understand [Alexander]’s code, he actually put a nice flow diagram on his website. Embedded after the break is a video of the system working.

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Controlling The Garmin HUD With Bluetooth

March 30, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

HUD

The Garmin HUD is a very neat device, putting all your navigational info, from ETA, what lane you should be in, and distance to your next turn right on your windscreen in a heads-up display. The only problem with the Garmin HUD is that it only works with the official Garmin app, despite being a Bluetooth device. Now, someone is finally digging in to the Garmin HUD protocol, allowing anyone to control this HUD from a cell phone, tablet, or computer.

Being completely unable to disassemble the Navigon app for the HUD, [gabonator] decided the only thing to do would be to open up the device and take a peek at some of the packets travelling between the microcontroller and bluetooth module.

[gabonator] expected human readable ASCII characters, but after looking at the nonsense decoded from his oscilloscope and decoding them manually, he tried simply looking at the display in operation to understand how the protocol worked. He got it all decoded, and managed to get a Sygic Navigation program working with this Garmin HUD. You can check out a video of that below.

Thanks [Kevin] for the tip.

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Hackaday Links: March 31, 2014

March 30, 2014 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Wanting to display his Google calendars [Chris Champion] decided to mount an old monitor on the wall. The hack is his installation method which recesses both the bracket and the outlet while still following electrical code (we think).

Since we’re already on the topic. Here’s a hack-tacular project which hangs a laptop LCD as if it were a picture frame. We do really enjoy seeing the wire, which connects to the top corners and hangs from a single hook a few inches above the screen bezel. There’s something very “whatever works” about it that pleases us.

[Jaspreet] build a datalogger in an FPGA. He put together a short video demo of the project but you can find a bit more info from his repo. He’s using a DE0-Nano board which is a relatively low-cost dev board from Terasic.

Want to see what’s under the hood in the processor running a Nintendo 3DS? Who wouldn’t? [Markus] didn’t just post the die images taken through his microscope. He documented the entire disassembly and decapping process. Maybe we should have given this one its own feature?

If you’re streaming on your Ouya you definitely want a clean WiFi signal. [Michael Thompson] managed to improve his reception by adding an external antenna.

We always like to hear about the free exchange of information, especially when it comes to high-quality educational material. [Capt Todd Branchflower] teaches at the United States Air Force Academy. He wrote in to say that his ECE383 Embedded Systems II class is now available online. All the info can also be found at his Github repo.

And finally, do you remember all the noise that was made about 3D printed guns a while back? Well [Mikeasaurus] put together the .iStab. It’s a 3D printed iPhone case with an integrated folding blade…. for personal protection? Who knows. We think it should be a multitasking solution that functions as a fold-down antenna.