THP Entry: A Repurposed Luminiferous Aether Detector

July 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

laser In the late 1800s, no one knew what light was. Everyone knew it behaved like a wave some of the time, but all waves need to travel through some propagation medium. This propagation medium was called the luminiferous aether and an attempt to detect and quantify this aether led to one of the coolest experimental setups of all time: the Michelson-Morely experiment. It was a huge interferometer mounted on a gigantic slab of marble floating in a pool of mercury. By rotating the interferometer, Michelson and Morely expected to see a small phase shift in the interferometer, both confirming the existence of a luminiferous aether and giving them how fast the Earth moved through this medium.

Of course, there was no phase shift, throwing physics into chaos for a few years. When [Beaglebreath] first learned about the Michelson-Morely interferometer he was amazed by the experimental setup. He’s built a few interferometers over the years, but for The Hackaday Prize, he’s making something useful out of one of these luminiferous aether detectors: a functional laser rangefinder capable of measuring distances of up to 60 inches with an error of 0.000005 inches.

The core of the system is an HP 5528A laser interferometer system. [Beaglebreath] has been collecting the individual components of this system off of eBay for several years now, and amazingly, he has all the parts. That’s dedication, right there. This laser interferometer system will be mounted to a simple camera slider, and with the interferometer measurements, humidity and temperature measurements, and some interesting code (running on one of these for hacker cred), [Beaglebreath] stands a good shot at measuring things very, very accurately.

The devil is in the details, and when you’re measuring things this precisely there are a lot of details. The original Michelson-Morely interferometer was affected by passing horse-drawn carriages and even distant lightning storms. While [Beaglebreath] isn’t using as long of a beam path as the OG interferometer, he’ll still have a lot of bugs to squash to bring this project to its full potential.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

Developed On Hackaday: Demonstration Video And Feedback Request

July 2, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 143 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYaz-s5SXCc

For months our dear Hackaday readers have been following the Mooltipass password keeper’s adventures, today we’re finally publishing a first video of it in action. This is the fruit of many contributors’ labor, a prototype that only came to be because of our motivation for open hardware and our willingness to spend much (all!) of our spare time on an awesome project that might be just good enough to be purchased by others. We’ve come a long way since we started this project back in December.

In the video embedded above, we demonstrate some of our platform’s planned functionalities while others are just waiting to be implemented (our #1 priority: PIN code entering…). A quick look at our official GitHub repository shows what it took to get to where we are now. What’s next?

We need your input so we can figure out the best way to get the Mooltipass in the hands of our readers, as our goal is not to make money. The beta testers batch has just been launched into production and I’ll be traveling to Shenzhen in two weeks to meet our assembler. When materials and fabrication are taken into account we expect each device to cost approximately $80, so please take 3 seconds of your time to answer the poll embedded below: (poll has ended)

Third Person Perspective Is Guaranteed To Mess With Your Senses

July 2, 2014 by James Hobson 29 Comments

3rd person oculus rift

Third person video games are never really that realistic — you get a much wider range of vision, you can typically see around things your character can’t actually see… the list goes on. But what would it be like to have a third person perspective, in real life?

That’s exactly what some hackers in Poland decided to do! This is their Real World Third Person Perspective VR / AR Experiment. It makes use of an Oculus Rift, two GoPros, a microprocessor and a few servo motors. It’s essentially a glorified camera on a stick that you wear as a backpack, but nonetheless it has a really cool effect.

The project was built in under 2 days to get into the tight deadline for Intel’s Wearable contest, which has an impressive prize list, including a grand prize of $500,000 for business development! They didn’t place, but it’s still a Hack a Day worthy project!

Check it out!

Continue reading “Third Person Perspective Is Guaranteed To Mess With Your Senses” →

[Fran] & [Bil]’s Dinosaur Den

July 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

I suppose I can take credit for introducing the super awesome [Fran Blanche] to Hackaday’s very own crotchety old man and Commodore refugee [Bil Herd]. I therefore take complete responsibility for [Fran] and [Bil]’s Dinosaur Den, the new YouTube series they’re working on.

The highlight of this week’s episode is a very vintage Rubicon mirror galvanometer. This was one of the first ways to accurately measure voltage, and works kind of like a normal panel meter on steroids. In your bone stock panel meter, a small coil moves a needle to display whatever you’re measuring. In a mirror galvanometer, a coil twists a wire that is connected to a mirror. By shining a light on this mirror and having the reflected beam bounce around several other mirrors, the angle of the mirror controlled by the coil is greatly exaggerated, making for a very, very accurate measurement. It’s so sensitive the output of a lemon battery is off the scale, all from a time earlier than the two dinosaurs showing this tech off. Neat stuff.

One last thing. Because [Bil] and [Fran] are far too proud to sink to the level of so many YouTube channels, here’s the requisite, “like comment and subscribe” pitch you won’t hear them say. Oh, [Bil] knows the audio is screwed up in places. Be sure to comment on that.

Continue reading “[Fran] & [Bil]’s Dinosaur Den” →

Pew Pew! An Arduino Based Laser Rangefinder

July 1, 2014 by Nick Conn 23 Comments

Arduino Laser Rangefinder
Lasers are some of the coolest devices around. We can use them to cut things, create laser light shows, and also as a rangefinder.[Ignas] wrote in to tell us about [Berryjam’s] AMAZING write-up on creating an Arduino based laser rangefinder. This post is definitely worth reading.

Inspired by a Arduino based LIDAR system, [Berryjam] decided that he wanted to successfully use an affordable Open Source Laser RangeFinder (OSLRF-01) from LightWare. The article starts off by going over the basics of how to measure distance with a laser based system. You measure the time between an outgoing laser pulse and the reflected return pulse; this time directly relates to the distance of the object. Sounds simple? In practice, it is not as simple as it may seem. [Berryjam] has done a great job doing some real world testing of this device, with nice plots to top it all off. After fiddling with the threshold and some other aspects of the code, the resulting accuracy is quite good.

Recently, we have seen more projects utilizing lasers for range-finding, including LIDAR projects. It is very exciting to see such high-end sensors making their way into the maker/hacker realm. If you have a related laser project, be sure to let us know!

DIY 3D Tilt Sensor

July 1, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

tilt If you’re trying to detect the orientation of an object, sometimes you really don’t need a 6DOF gyro and accelerometer. Hell, if you only need to detect if an object is tilted, you can get a simple “ball in a tube” tilt sensor for pennies. [tamberg] liked this idea, but he required a tilt sensor that works in the X, Y, and Z axes. Expanding on the ‘ball in a tube’ construction of simple tilt sensors, he designed a laser cut 3D tilt sensor that does all the work of of a $30 IMU.

The basic design of this tilt sensor is pretty simple – just an octahedron with four nails serving as switch contacts at each vertex. An aluminum ball knocks around inside this contraption, closing the nail head switches depending on what orientation it’s in. Simple, and the three dimensional version of a ball in tube tilt sensor.

To get the tilt data to the outside world, [tamberg] is using an Adafruit Bluetooth module, with two of the nails in each corner connected to a pin. With just a little bit of code, this 3D tilt sensor becomes a six-way switch to control an RGB LED. Video of that below.

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IcenBerg. The Ice Cream Machine That Knocks

July 1, 2014 by James Hobson 17 Comments

An Icecream Machine

It’s summer. It’s hot. After [Alex Shure] tried his hand at making his own ice cream, he knew he had to take it a step farther. Introducing icenBerg. He’s not just in the ice cream business. He’s building an empire.

Using various odds and ends from the workshop, an old mini fridge donated to him by friends, and a lathe, [Alex] built the first iteration of icenBerg. It features a fancy machined paddle inside the insulated housing, which can be driven by a power drill — or at least that was the plan…

The salvaged compressor system from the mini fridge provides the cooling for the machine. In his first attempt, he found a power drill wasn’t quite strong enough — so he ended up chucking the entire thing into his lathe for unbeatable ice cream mixing. The flavor of choice was apple banana coconut sorbet with chocolate oak cookie chunks and roasted soybeans (say that 10 times fast!).

The machine is far from complete, but as a proof of ~~concept~~ deliciousness it has spurred him to make it even better. He plans on making it a standalone unit using a windshield wiper motor, a PWM circuit with a microcontroller, and even hopes to correlate motor current to ice cream consistency.

Tread lightly.