Retrotechtacular: Multi-Purpose Military Magazines Make Maintenance Memorable

February 10, 2015 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

Whether you’ve been following Retrotechtacular for a while or have firsthand experience with the U.S. Army, you know that when they want to teach something to a someone, they’ll get the job done in spades with a side of style. The era between WWII and the Vietnam War was a golden age of clear, simple instruction that saw the Army use memorable material to teach a wide array of topics. And speaking of golden ages, the Army found success with comic book-style instructional magazines drawn chiefly by [Will Eisner] of Spirit fame.

The first of these rags was called Army Motors, which premiered in 1940. It introduced several memorable characters such as a Beetle Bailey-esque bumbling soldier named Private Joe Dope, and no-nonsense gal mechanic Connie Rodd, a sharp cookie who’s as brainy as she is buxom. Educational and entertaining in equal parts, the magazine was pretty well received.

Its successor, known simply as P.S. started its run around the beginning of the Korean War in June 1951. These magazines were intended as a postscript to the various equipment maintenance manuals that soldiers used. They offered all kinds of preventive maintenance procedures as well as protips for Army life. The eye-catching depictions of Connie Rodd demanded soldiers’ attention while the anthropomorphic equipment illustrations encouraged them to listen to what their equipment told them.

Additional artists including [Joe Kubert] and [Dan Spiegle] were brought in to produce P.S. on a monthly basis. As the years marched on, the magazine’s character base expanded to include representatives of other military branches solving specialized problems. The bumbling idiot types were 86’d pretty early on, but cheesecake was served well into the 1970s.

Did we mention that they’re still making P.S.? Here’s the February 2015 issue and a friendly PDF warning.

Thanks for the tip, [Itay]!

Retrotechtacular is a weekly column featuring hacks, technology, and kitsch from ages of yore. Help keep it fresh by sending in your ideas for future installments.

A Tweeting Vending Machine

February 10, 2015 by Rick Osgood 12 Comments

[Sigurd] manage to obtain an old vending machine from his dorm. The only problem was that the micocontroller on the main board was broken. He and his friend decided they could most likely get the machine back into working order, but they also knew they could probably give it a few upgrades.

This system uses two Arduino Pro Minis and an Electric Imp to cram in all of the new features. One Arduino is connected to the machine’s original main board. The Arduino interfaces with some of the shift registers, relays, and voltage regulators. This microcontroller also lights up the buttons on the machine as long as that particular beverage is not empty. It controls the seven segment LED display, as well as reading the coin validator.

The team had to reverse engineer the original coin validator in order to figure out how the machine detected and counted the coins. Once they figured out how to read the state of the coins, they also built a custom driver board to drive the solenoids.

A second Arduino is used to read NFC and RFID cards using a Mifare RC522 reader. The system uses its own credit system, so a user can be issued a card with a certain amount of pre-paid credit. It will then deduct credit appropriately once a beverage is vended. The two Arduinos communicate via Serial.

The team also wanted this machine to have the ability to communicate with the outside world. In this case, that meant sending cheeky tweets. They originally used a Raspberry Pi for this, but found that the SD card kept getting corrupted. They eventually switched to an Electric Imp, which worked well. The Arduino sends a status update to the Imp every minute. If the status changes, for example if a beverage was dispensed, then the Imp will send a tweet to let the world know. It will also send a tweet to the maintenance person if there is a jam or if a particular slot becomes empty. Continue reading “A Tweeting Vending Machine” →

A Pocket-Sized Warp Core

February 9, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

Designed in the 2350s at the Utopia Planita shipyards, the warp core found in Galaxy class starships Yamoto, Odyssey, Challenger, and yes, Enterprise was a incomparable work of engineering, leading to more than one Daystrom Prize for its development. We’re still at least fifteen years away from the great [Zefram Cochrane]’s birth – and another 200 years until [Richard Daystrom] is born – but now, thanks to our advanced technology, a miniature warp core is within reach.

About a year ago, [Alex] found a warp core table lamp based on the one found on the Enterprise. it called out to him, but it’s a an extremely large build and only having a Solidoodle 2 as a 3D printer, [Alex] decided to scale it down to 25%.

Inside the warp core are a few Neopixel strips driven by a 5V Trinket. It’s not the ideal solution – if all the LEDs are turned on at the same time, the Trinket will brown out. It’s enough for an accurate pulsating effect, though, and was a nice enough gift to appease even the most discerning Trek fans he gave these mini models to.

Video below.

Continue reading “A Pocket-Sized Warp Core” →

Castellated Breakout Is Pitchin’ Brilliant!

February 9, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 31 Comments

Radio, WiFi and similar modules are getting smaller by the day. Trouble is, they end up having non-DIY-friendly, odd pitch, mounting pads. Sometimes, though, simple hacks come around to help save the day.

[Hemal] over at Black Electronics came up with a hack to convert odd-pitch modules to standard 2.54mm / 0.1″. The process looks simple once you see the detailed pictures on his blog. He’s using the technique to add 2mm pitch modules like the ESP8266 and XBee by soldering them to standard perf board. Once they are hooked to the board, just add a row of male header pins, trim the perf board and you’re done. Couldn’t get simpler.

Another technique that we’ve seen is to solder straight across the legs and cut the wire afterward. That technique is also for protoyping board, but custom-sized breakout boards are one good reason to still keep those etchants hanging around. If you have other techniques or hacks for doing this, let us know in the comments.

Hackaday.io Reaches 50,000 Registered Users

February 9, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

Hackaday.io, our neat project hosting site, has been around for a little more than a year. It’s been public for juuussst over 11 months, and today we’ve hit a milestone: we have over 50,000 hackers on board, documenting their builds and giving skulls for the cool projects they find. The lucky 50,000th hacker? This guy.

Over the past year, we’ve seen a ton of cool projects that have included a $300 pick and place machine, a very inexpensive machine vision camera system that’s also a very successful Kickstarter, the closest Hackaday ever get to a MOOC from a Cornell professor, and something that would be called the decapitron if it weren’t built by a NASA engineer.

All of this wouldn’t be possible without those 50,000 people on Hackaday.io. This one is for everybody out there who’s already registered. We have to give a shoutout to [Dave Darko], by far the most helpful guy on the entire site. He has been a thorn in the side of the devs, giving us an amazing amount of feedback.

Speaking of devs, we’re going to be giving out a t-shirt and a few goodies for the 65,536th hacker to sign on (yes, an off-by-one error), for being the person who forced us to refactor everything. Considering the backroom planning, that shouldn’t be long. If you’re one of the nearly 200,000 unregistered users who visited over the last 30 days, there’s a tiny incentive to sign up.

PortableSDR Needs A Cinderella Story To Finish Its Kickstarter

February 9, 2015 by Mike Szczys 37 Comments

If you haven’t backed PortableSDR on Kickstarter, now’s the time to do it. [Michael Colton’s] project which frees a Software Defined Radio from being shackled to a computer is in the final three days and needs about $17,500 to make it.

We’d really like to see this one succeed, and not just because PortableSDR took 3rd place in the 2014 Hackaday Prize. Many a time we’ve heard people forecast the death of amateur radio (ham if you will). The ham community is special, it’s a great way to get mentorship in electronics, and deals in more than just digital circuitry. Plus, as [Greg] has pointed out, having a license and some know-how lets you build and operate really powerful stuff!

We see the PortableSDR as one way to renew interest in the hobby. We especially like it that you don’t need a license to operate the basic model — the transmitting circuits aren’t enabled when it arrives. This means you can learn about SDR, explore what’s going on over the airwaves, and only then take the leap by applying for your license and hack the unit to transmit. To be fair, the transmitter portion of the project hasn’t been published yet, which is about the only real concern we read in the Kickstarter comments. But we have faith that [Michael] will come through with that part of it. And if he needs help we’re sure he’ll have no problem finding it.

Now’s the time… let’s pull this one out in the final days!

An ATTiny Bluetooth Board

February 9, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

Since just about everyone who would be interested in electronics has a decent cellphone now, there’s an idea that we don’t need USB or weird serial adapters anymore. Bluetooth LE is good enough for short-range communication, and there are a ton of boards and Kickstarter projects out there that are ready to fill the need.

[Michah] has built what is probably the lowest-spec and cheapest BTLE board we’ve ever seen. It’s really just an ATTiny85 – a favorite of the crowd that’s just slightly above Arduino level – and an HM-10 Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy module.

This board was developed as a means to connect sensors for a vintage motorcycle to an iOS device for display and data logging. A small, cheap board was needed that could be powered by a LiPo battery, and [Micah] created a board that fit his needs perfectly.

Four of the six IO pins on the ‘Tiny85 are broken out on a pin header; two are used to communicate with the BTLE module. It’s simple, fairly cheap, and can be powered by a battery. Exactly what you need if you want a wireless sensor board. All the files can be found in the Git repo and everything is open source. Not bad.