RasPi FM Transmitter

Easily Turn Your Raspberry Pi Into An FM Transmitter

Have you ever wanted to be your own radio DJ? [Kevin] has made it easier than ever with his Raspberry Pi FM Transmitter program. The program is written in C. [Kevin] has made source code is available along with a compiled binary.

PIFM allows you to load up any audio file and specify a frequency to transmit. The program will then use PWM to modulate the audio sample through the Pi’s GPIO4 pin. [Kevin] claims that the RasPi alone will only transmit around a 10 cm distance. He says that making a simple antenna out of a jumper wire can increase the distance to around 100 meters. All you have to do is hook up the wire to the GPIO4 pin to drastically increase the range.

The legality of such a transmitter will vary from place to place, so be sure to check out your local regulations before you go transmitting audio on regulated frequencies. If this kind of thing is interesting to you, you may want to investigate ham radio. It’s not all Morse code and old fogies. Some people claim it’s a hacker’s paradise.

[via Reddit]

RFID Tag Cell Phone

Simple Hack Puts An RFID Tag Inside Your Mobile Phone

RFID security systems have become quite common these days. Many corporations now use RFID cards, or badges, in place of physical keys. It’s not hard to understand why. They easily fit inside of a standard wallet, they require no power source, and the keys can be revoked with a few keystrokes. No need to change the locks, no need to collect keys from everyone.

[Shawn] recently set up one of these systems for his own office, but he found that the RFID cards were just a bit too bulky for his liking. He thought it would be really neat if he could just use his cell phone to open the doors, since he always carries it anyways. He tried searching for a cell phone case that contained an RFID tag but wasn’t able to come up with anything at the time. His solution was to do it himself.

[Shawn] first needed to get the RFID tag out of the plastic card without damaging the chip or antenna coil. He knew that acetone can be used to melt away certain types of plastic and rubber, and figured he might as well try it out with the RFID card. He placed the card in a beaker and covered it with acetone. He then sealed the beaker in a plastic bag to help prevent the acetone from evaporating.

After around 45 minutes of soaking, [Shawn] was able to peel the plastic layers off of the electronics. He was left with a tiny RFID chip and a large, flat copper coil. He removed the cover from the back of his iPhone 4S and taped the chip and coil to the inside of the phone. There was enough room for him to seal the whole thing back up underneath the original cover.

Even though the phone has multiple radios, they don’t seem to cause any noticeable interference. [Shawn] can now just hold his phone up to the RFID readers and open the door, instead of having to carry an extra card around. Looking at his phone, you would never even know he modified it.

[Thanks Thief Dark]

Hard Drive Clock Is Simple And Elegant

Binary hard drive clock

[Aaron] has been wanting to build his own binary desk clock for a while now. This was his first clock project, so he decided to keep it simple and have it simply display the time. No alarms, bells, or whistles.

The electronics are relatively simple. [Aaron] decided to use on of the ATMega328 chips he had lying around that already had the Arduino boot loader burned into them. He first built his own Arduino board on a breadboard and then re-built it on a piece of protoboard as a more permanent solution. The Arduino gets the time from a real-time clock (RTC) module and then displays it using an array of blue and green LED’s. The whole thing is powered using a spare 9V wall wort power supply.

[Aaron] chose to use the DS1307 RTC module to keep time. This will ensure that the time is kept accurately over along period of time. The RTC module has its own built-in battery, which means that if [Aaron’s] clock should ever lose power the clock will still remember the time. The RTC battery can theoretically last for up to ten years.

[Aaron] got creative for his clock enclosure, upcycling an old hard drive. All of the hard drive guts were removed and replaced with his own electronics. The front cover had 13 holes drilled out for the LED’s. There are six green LED’s to display the hour, and seven blue LED’s for the minute. The LED’s were wired up as common cathode. Since the hard drive cover is conductive, [Aaron] covered both sides of his circuit board with electrical tape and hot glue to prevent any short circuits. The end result is an elegant binary clock that any geek would be proud of.

The Small & Cheap MiniSpartan6+

FPGA

There have been quite a few boards put out in recent months with an FPGA, some RAM, Flash, and a bunch of I/O, the working theory being FPGAs are the new hotness, ready to steal the crown from Arduino and put a programmable logic development board in the hands of millions. We’re not so sure that’s going to happen. but Scarab Hardware’s miniSpartan6+ board does look pretty nice, and has more than enough on board to serve as anyone’s first FPGA platform. It’s also one of the first FPGA boards we’ve seen that is breadboard friendly. Nice touch.

This tiny board features a Spartan6 LX9 FPGA, with just under 10,000 logic cells. An FPGA platform is useless without some sort of IDE, so the Scarab Hardware folks have taken the Mojo IDE, improved the GUI, added a few libraries, and rolled everything up into a ‘not the Arduino IDE, but as simple and better’ platform.

Right now, the crowdfunding campaign for the miniSpartan6+ is well over 200% funded with a little less than a month to go. The stretch goals the team have in mind – a very likely probability, given what they’re asking – include a faster FPGA, a higher resolution ADC, and support for HDMI input and output. That last bit – HDMI input – will allow anyone to do some cool things like overlaying video with HDMI for a pretty reasonable cost.

Tennis Ball Launcher Has Puppies Running The 100m Dash

Launching Tennis Balls with Ease

[Brian] from 24 Hour Engineer has a friend with arthritis who can’t easily play ball with his new puppy — so [Brian] stepped in and built him this awesome tennis ball launcher.

You see, most tennis ball launchers require a solid flick of the wrist, and since just plain old throwing it is out of the question too, [Brian] had to make him something powerful and easy to use. After sketching out some designs he came up with the basic concept that eventually became what is pictured above.

The frame is made of 2″ PVC pipe, which serves two purposes, support, and safety. The bungee cord launching system is actually contained within the pipe, keeping it out of the way, and free from catching on anything during firing. A pair of pulleys mounted at the cord opening ensure the cord doesn’t wear out.

What we really like is the trigger mechanism [Brian] made out of some carefully cut wood,  a steel corner brace and a few nuts and bolts. It’s a simple mechanism that provides leverage and an easy way to release the bungee cord.  Continue reading “Tennis Ball Launcher Has Puppies Running The 100m Dash”

High Voltage Monitor Power Supply Conversion

Repurpose An Old CRT Computer Monitor As A High Voltage Science Project Power Supply

Finally somebody has found a good use for all those old CRT computer monitors finding their way to the landfills. [Steven Dufresne] from Rimstar.org steps us through a very simple conversion of a CRT computer monitor into a high-voltage power supply. Sure you can make a few small sparks but this conversion is also useful for many science projects. [Steve] uses the monitor power supply to demonstrate powering an ionocraft in his video, a classic science experiment using high voltage.

The conversion is just as simple as you would think. You need to safely discharge the TV tube, cut the cup off the high voltage anode cable and reroute it to a mounting bracket outside the monitor. The system needs to be earth grounded so [Steve] connects up a couple of ground cables. One ground cable for the project and one for a safety discharge rod. It’s really that simple and once wired up to a science project you have 25kV volts at your disposal by simply turning on the monitor. You don’t want to produce a lot of large sparks with this conversion because it will destroy the parts inside the monitor. The 240K Ohm 2 watt resistor [Steve] added will help keep those discharges to a minimum and protect the monitor from being destroyed.

Yes this is dangerous but when you’re working with high-voltage science experiments danger is something you deal with correctly. This isn’t the safest way to get high-voltage but if you have to hack something together for a project this will get you there and [Steve] is quite cautious including warning people of the dangers and how to safely discharge your experiment and the power supply after every use. This isn’t the first high-voltage power supply that [Steve] has constructed; we featured his home-built 30kV power supply in the past, which is a more conventional way to build a HV power supply using a doubler or tripler circuit. Join us after the break to watch the video.

Continue reading “Repurpose An Old CRT Computer Monitor As A High Voltage Science Project Power Supply”

The Worst E-Reader Ever

oled

Over on the Projects site, [Jaromir] has created a tiny device with an OLED display, three buttons, and a USB port for storing text files, be it for saving a shopping list, a cheat sheet, or the most unusable e-reader ever made.

The front of the device is simply a 96×32 pixel OLED and three buttons for ‘up’, ‘down’, and ‘open/close’. The reverse side is where the magic happens with a PIC24 microcontroller that sets up a file system on the chip, allowing [Jaromir] to write 64kB of data on what is actually a Flash drive with a pitiful capacity. Text files are viewable on the OLED, with the video below showing the front page of Wikipedia being displayed in a glorious 16×4 text mode.

It’s not a very useful device by any means, but for some reason it’s garnered a lot of skulls and followers over on Hackaday Projects. In response to that, [Jaromir] is working on version two with a new PCB and a design for a 3D printed case. Not bad for what [Jaromir] himself describes as worse than just about any phone or tablet.

Continue reading “The Worst E-Reader Ever”