Plastic Sword Detects WiFi-enabled Orcs

January 21, 2013 by 15 Comments

sword

For a few years now, [Jomegat] has been thinking about Sting, the sword wielded by [Bilbo Baggins] and later [Frodo] in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Sting glows blue whenever an orc is near. Assuming the Elvish magic created by Tolkien is in reality highly advanced Elvish technology, [Jomegat] figured out a way to make his plastic Sting detect WiFi-enabled orcs.

Since The Hobbit was released, toy stores have been flooded with related merchandise that included a wonderful toy version of everyone’s favorite orc killing weapon. The only problem was how to add orc sensors to this plastic Sting. [Jomegat] assumed all orcs carry a cell phone, and being the low creatures they are, would always have their WiFi turned on. [Jomegat] found a very inexpensive WiFi detector key chain that would sense these phone-carrying orcs and light up to alert our warrior to imminent danger.

After acquiring the materials crafted from Elvish magic technology, [Jomegat] opened up the plastic hilt of Sting and installed the WiFi detector. Now, whenever Sting senses the preferred wireless connection of the orc, the blade glows a bright blue.

[Jomegat] was eaten by a grue shortly after completing this project.

Flatbed Scanner Eliminates The Perils Of Macro Photography

January 20, 2013 by 48 Comments

IMG_7728

If you have ever played around with macro photography, you’ll know how hard it is to get a focused image of something that isn’t two-dimensional. For virtually every 3D object, you’ll have to deal with the depth of field – the small region where things are actually in focus. [David] came up with a neat homebrew solution for making sure everything in his macro photos is in focus using a discarded flatbed scanner and a Raspberry Pi.

[David]’s technique relies on focus stacking. Basically, [David] takes dozens of images of the same object, moving the camera closer by a fraction of an inch before snapping each frame. These pictures are stitched together with CombineZ, a piece of software used for extending the depth of field in images.

The hardware part of the build is a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a stepper motor driver and the shutter button of [David]’s camera. By attaching his camera to the carriage of a flatbed scanner, [David] can inch his camera ever closer to his object of study while grabbing the images for CombineZ.

The results are impressive, and would be nearly impossible to replicate any other way without tens of thousands of dollars in camera equipment.

Raspberry Pi And R

January 20, 2013 by 10 Comments

R

[Stephen] picked up a Raspberry Pi to do a little hardware hacking and add a blinking LED to the many feathers in his software development hat. He picked up an analog to digital converter and a temperature sensor that would serve him well in a few projects he wanted to put together, including a weather station and a small Pi-controlled home brewing setup. He ended up not liking Python, and didn’t like the C-ness of wiringPi. He’s a scientist, so he’s most comfortable with R and Matlab. Of course, playing around with a R and a Raspberry Pi means replicating his sensor-reading code in R.

[Stephen] put together a neat little package that will allow him to read his sensors over an SPI bus with his Raspberry Pi. Yes, this functionality can easily be duplicated with Python, but if you’re looking to generate beautiful graphs, or just do a whole lot of statistics on something, R is the tool you need.

It’s a cool project, even if it is only measuring the temperature. Using R for the nerd cred isn’t bad, either.

A Better Template For Your STM32 F3 Dev Board

January 20, 2013 by 20 Comments

If you’ve picked up one of those really cool STM32 ARM dev boards, you’ve probably poked around looking for a good toolchain. No fear, then, because [Matt] has your back. He put together a template for the ARM Cortex-M4 powered STM32 board.

[Matt] had been using a template for the STM32 F4 we’d covered before, but found the implementation a bit lacking. Wanting to exploit the functionality of his fancy STM32 F3 board, [Matt] took the F0 template whipped up by our very own [Mike S] and got it to work with the newer, fancier dev board.

There are a few bonuses to using [Matt]’s template; the ARM chip in the F3 Discovery board has a hardware floating-point unit that is inaccessible using the Code Sourcery G++: Lite Edition toolchain. [Matt]’s use of gcc-arm-embedded allows access to the hardware FPU, a great benefit for a great board.

Write Code, Fix The Space Station, Win $10,000

January 19, 2013 by 126 Comments

ISS

If you want something great to add to your astronaut application, this is your chance. If you can figure out a way to optimize the position of the solar panels for the International Space Station, you’ll win $10,000 from this TopCoder competition.

Positioning the solar arrays on the ISS is an incredibly complex task; if parts of the arrays are in the shadow of other parts, they’ll bend due to the temperature difference and eventually break. NASA would like more power to run science experiments and other cool stuff, so they’re turning to hackers so they can optimize the amount of power generated on the ISS.

Your goal, as a contestant in this completion, is to define the angular position and velocity for each of the joints that connect the solar panels to the station for every point in a 92-minute orbit. Limitations on any solution  include making sure the masts for each panel aren’t in a shadow more than they need to be, making sure the cycle can be repeated each orbit, and making sure the most power is generated on board.

The completion is open, so if you haven’t done enough matrix algebra this weekend feel free to sign up. In any event, you’ll get a cool CAD model of the ISS.

 

An Arduino Hydrogen Blimp… Oh The Humanity!

January 19, 2013 by 48 Comments

arduino-hydrogen-balloon

This sort of flying contraption seems more suited for indoor use. Well, except for the fire hazard presented by building an Android controlled hydrogen blimp. The problems we often see with quadcopters come into play when a motor wire comes loose and the thing goes flying off in a random direction. Loosing a motor on this airship will be no big deal by comparison.

Because the build relies on the buoyancy of the gas, light-weight components are the name of the game. The frame of the chassis is built from balsa wood. It supports two tiny DC motors which are almost indistinguishable in the image above. An Arduino nano and wireless receiver monitor commands from the transmitter and drive the propellers accordingly.

You may have noticed that we categorized this one as a chemistry hack. That’s because [Btimar] generated the hydrogen himself. He used an Erlenmeyer flask with a spout for the chemical reaction. After placing several heat sinks and other scraps of solid aluminum in the flask he poured on the lye solution. This generates the H2 but you need to keep things cool using ice to keep the reaction from getting out of control. We’re going to stick with helium filled blimps for the time being!

See this beast flying around [Btimar’s] living room in the clip after the break.

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Custom Gauges With A Stepper Motor Breakout Board

January 19, 2013 by 26 Comments

Throw some blinking LEDs on a project and it’s bound to make the front page of Hackaday. We do love builds of a more analog character, though, and this analog gauge stepper motor breakout board seems like just the ticket to make those projects a reality.

The idea behind the project is simple: take a stepper motor, put a needle on it, and connect it to an Arduino. Instant analog gauge, measuring anything an Arduino can calculate.

The motor used in the build is a Switec X27.168, the same motor used in the dashboard of tens of thousands of automobiles from dozens of different makes and models. Controlling the motors is done through [Guy Carpenter]’s Switec X25 library for the Arduino, allowing an Arduino Uno to control up to three stepper motor gauges simultaneously.

The movement of the needle is amazingly smooth and quite fast, as seen in the video after the break. A pretty cool piece of kit if you want a more analog display than LEDs and LCDs can provide.

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