Fail Of The Week: Projector LED Retrofit

fotw-projector-repair

That’s a deal for a project, how hard could it be to fix it up?

If you’re a real hacker we’d wager you’ve fallen for this type of thought process before. [Luft] bought this used Sharp XR-10X-L projector about a year back and planned to retrofit it with an LED bulb. He gathered all the parts and got to work, successfully testing and installing the modifications. But as luck would have it, the project is stuck in some type of boot loop.

This fail is certainly not for lack of preparation. The first post documenting his adventure shows that the hack has been done before, he acquired the service manual for this particular hardware, and he did his homework when ordering the parts. Success requires circumventing some sensors which ensure the case and internals are in place, and making sure the electronic status of the ballast is reported correctly event though it’s not needed for the LED source. Power-on gets as far as illuminating all the indicator lights in green as it should, but is then followed closely by a reboot sequence.

He tried watching the serial port to see if he can get any status info there but no dice. In keeping with the nature of this column, let’s see if we can provide any constructive troubleshooting advice in the comments.


2013-09-05-Hackaday-Fail-tips-tileFail of the Week is a Hackaday column which runs every Wednesday. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.

Introducing The Arduino Zero

The Arduino Uno is the old standby of the Arduino world, with the Arduino Due picking up where the Mega left off. The Arduino Tre is a pretty cool piece of kit combining a Linux system with the Arduino pinout. Care to take a guess at what the next Arduino board will be called? The Arduino Zero, obviously.

The Arduino Zero uses an Atmel ARM Cortex-M0+ for 256kB of Flash and 32k of RAM. The board supports Atmel’s Embedded Debugger, finally giving the smaller Arduino boards debugging support.

The chip powering the Zero features six communications modules, configurable as a UART, I2C, or SPI. USB device and host are also implemented on the chip, but there’s no word in the official word if USB host will be available. There are two USB connectors on the board, though.

The Arduino folk will be demoing the Zero at the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend. Hackaday will have boots on the ground there, so we’ll try to get a more detailed report including pricing and availability then.

Learning To Reverse Engineer On A Broken Printer

Lexmark Hack

When a Lexmark inkjet printer stopped working, [Mojobobo] was able to claim it as his own. He quickly realized that the machine was flooded with ink and not worth repairing, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still find a use for it. When he learned that the printer’s firmware was not only upgradable but also unprotected, he knew he should be able to get the printer to do his own bidding.

[Mojobobo] started his journey with the motherboard. The unit still powered up, but it was asking to insert a “duplex module” before it would boot any further. [Mojobobo] first tried to find a way to trick the duplex module sensor, but was unsuccessful. His next step was to search for some kind of serial communications port. He didn’t have an oscilloscope, so instead he used a speaker with a wire probe. In theory, if the wire was pressed against an active serial port, he would be able to hear varying tones through the speaker. Sure enough, he found some interesting tones after probing around some ports next to a “JTAG” label. He looked up some information about the nearby chip and found that it included an SPI bus.

After some internet research, [Mojobobo] learned enough about SPI to have a rough idea of how to use it. Having limited tools available to him, he decided to use his Arduino to try to communicate with the motherboard. After wiring up a simple circuit, (and then re-wiring it) he was able to dump the first 4096 bytes of the motherboard’s boot loader to the Arduino via the SPI interface.

[Mojobobo’s] next steps will be to find a faster way to dump the boot loader. At 9600 baud, he grew tired of waiting after three hours. Once he has the full boot loader he intends to search for a way to bypass the duplex sensor and get the board to finish booting. Then he may just use the printer for its scanning functions, or he might find other interesting uses for it.

Bumpy, The Beautiful DIY MP3 Player

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

[Matt]’s been working on a small hombrew MP3 player, and although it’s not much more useful than an iPod Shuffle, sometimes that’s all you need. Besides, it turned out to be a beautiful project, completely custom, and a great example of what a high resolution 3D printer can do with an enclosure design.

Inside Bumpy is an ATMega32u4 with a VS1003 MP3 codec IC. The device is powered by a 1000mAh lithium battery, and the user interface is an exercise in simplicity; a single click/scroll wheel changes the volume, toggles play and pause, and selects the next or previous track. Eight LEDs mounted in the center of the board glow through the case for status, volume, and interface feedback.

By far the most impressive part of Bumpy is the case. It was printed at [Matt]’s place of employment – Formlabs – in white UV curing resin. The pictures show a surface finish that would be difficult to replicated on a squirting plastic style 3D printer, with a textured, bumpy surface that inspired the name.

Eerie Robotic Instruments Make Use Of Servos And Solenoids

Turbo-gusli

Self-playing pianos are so last year. How about a robotic acoustic-gusli?

[Dmitry Morozov] calls it the Turbo-Gusli or Gusli-Samogudy. A Gusli is perhaps the oldest Russian multi-stringed instrument, which resembles a harp and whose exact history is not quite known. Add Samogudy to the name and you’ve got a “self-playing Gusli”.

The eerie sounding music is produced by six individual servo motors, a regular DC motor, a stepper motor, three solenoids, a handful of springs, and 38 strings. It’s all controlled by two Arduino Unos, with the software written in Pure Data, an open source visual programming language.

He’s made several videos of the exhibit, including a performance that sends shivers down our spines — stick around after the break for a listen!

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Frankensteined X4 Quad Is Brought Back To Life

x4 quadcopter wood frame

As kids we’ve all let a friend use a toy only to have it returned broken. That was such a bummer! At least that was years ago though…. well not for [Tom]. He had a Hubsan X4 mini quadcopter that he had crashed into all sorts of things. The little quad held up good against all of the beatings so [Tom] didn’t think too much about letting his pal take it for a test drive. Thirty seconds later, several separate pieces of the quad were laying in the dirt.

A new X4 was ordered but there was some time to kill waiting for it to show up. Since the electronics seemed to be intact and only the frame was broken [Tom] decided to try his hand at making a new frame. Keeping costs under control is an important part of any project and this one was no different. The frame would be made of cheap and rigid 5mm plywood. The only potential problem would be the weight. [Tom] cut out a piece of the plywood and weighed it, then measured the volume and calculated the density of the wood. The wood’s density was used to estimate the final weight of new plywood frame designs and shapes. This worked so well that the newly built quad only weighed more than the original by 0.31 grams, less than 1% increase in the total weight!

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Programming Micros With Impossibly Cheap Bluetooth Adapters

tooth

[Zenios] and [Raivis] are building a small balancing robot, and for communications to the outside world, they’re using a small, extremely cheap Bluetooth adapter. They figured uploading code to the microcontroller over Bluetooth would be a good idea, but their adapter, a cheap HC-06 module, had no way of resetting the microcontroller; it just provided Tx and Rx the serial port. They did notice a LED blinked when a device wasn’t connected to the adapter, so with a simple circuit they kludged a reset circuit where it wasn’t intended.

The small LED on the HC-06 module blinks when nothing is connected, and remains on when a connection is established. Figuring a new connection would be a good time to upload new code, the guys needed to design a circuit that would stay low when the LED was blinking, and switch to high when the LED was on.

A simple RC filter took care of the blinking LED, keeping the line low until a device connected. Bringing the logic level high when the LED stayed solid required digging through a part drawer, eventually finding an LM741 p differential amplifier.

After a few small changes to the bootloader, the guys had a reliable means of flashing new firmware without the need of programming adapters or wires draped over their workspace, all with a Bluetooth adapter that shouldn’t have this capability. Video below.

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