TP-Link TL-WR703N Specialized Firmware Generator

January 18, 2013 by 10 Comments

Seen at the center of this image is a TP-Link TL-MR3020 which is basically a TL-WR703N wireless router with a few extra LEDs. We’ve seen a lot of projects using this hardware and that’s because it’s cheap and ripe for hacking. The devices can run OpenWRT, a Linux distro for routers that greatly extends the functionality when compared to the stock firmware. Now a couple of members of Shackspace — a hackerspace in Stuttgart, Germany — have written a script that automatically generates specialized firmware for the router. That link goes to their wiki page about the script, but you may find this overview post to be an easier read.

The concept is that gathering specialized hacks into easy to flash packages does away with a lot of configuration headaches. For example, if you just want to play around with an NFC reader for a day-long event you can connect hardware like what is seen above and use the NFC-gate option of the script to flash firmware meant to drive it. So far there’s also support for streaming a USB webcam, serving as a USB network bridge, and a few others. But the whole point of this is to make it simple to roll new firmware mods into the script that make it easy to preserve the work for use at a later time.

[Thanks Hadez]

Breathing Life Into An Old LCD

January 18, 2013 by 10 Comments

panel

Out of the depths of a junk drawer, [Alex]’s friend pulled out an old monochrome LCD display. This is an older low-resolution display from ancient electronics that unfortunately doesn’t have its own controller chip. No worries, though, because with the help of an FPGA [Alex] figured out how to drive this display.

On the back of this display are eight Hitachi LCD drivers, six column shifters and two row shifters, allowing the LCD to display a 256×128 pixel image. Without an LCD controller, though, [Alex] couldn’t just send a static image to the LCD. Instead, he had to continuously refresh the display just like a VGA monitor.

With the help of a 1500-page PDF titled Hitachi LCD Controller/Driver LSI Data Book, [Alex] was able to dump pixels into the ICs on the display with the help of a Papilio One FPGA board. A lot of work just to display the beautiful [Lena], but she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Building An Automatic Bicycle Transmission In A Week

January 18, 2013 by 58 Comments

1

Every year, the ECE department of Carnigie Mellon University hosts Build18, an engineering festival intended to get students out of the classroom and into the workshop. [Andrew Toth] along with team members [Jenna MacCarley], [Peter McHale], and [Nicolas Mellis] have been busy this last week putting together an automatic bicycle transmission.

Most cyclists agree that a cadence of 80 RPM is just about right for most cycling. The team’s transmission uses Hall effect sensors to sense the cadence of the rider and will change to a higher gear if the cadence drops below 60 RPM and a lower gear if the cadence is above 100 RPM.

One of the requirements of the Build18 festival is the completed project must cost less than $250. By using an Arduino Mega and a servo to change gears, the team has a fairly low cost solution to automatically changing bicycle gears.

It’s a very cool project, and hopefully we’ll see a video once the competition is over at noon, EST today.

12secbeforehit-thumb

Operation StratoSphere

January 18, 2013 by 7 Comments

12secbeforehit-thumb

Panoramic photos are nice, however a full 360 degree x 180 degree, or spherical panorama would be even better. [Caleb Anderson] decided to take this concept much further, attempting to extract panoramic photos from video taken at 100,000 feet using a high-altitude balloon and six GoPro cameras.

The overview of this project can be found here, and gives some background. The first task was to start prototyping some payload containers, which for a device that you have little control over once out of your hands is quite critical. As well as some background, there’s a cool interactive panorama of the first test results on this page, so be sure to check it out.

The “real” hacking in this experiment wasn’t a matter of putting a balloon into the stratosphere or recovering it, however. Chaining these images together into pictures was a huge challenge, and involved a diverse set of skills and software knowledge that most of our readers would be proud to possess. There are several videos in the explanation, but we’ve embedded one with the cameras falling out of the sky. Be sure to at least watch until (or skip to) just after 1:05 where all the cameras impressively survive impact! Continue reading “Operation StratoSphere” →

Hackaday Links: January 17th, 2013

January 17, 2013 by 17 Comments

Free-formed VFD clock

links-free-formed-vfd-clock [James] doesn’t need a circuit board or even some protoboard to get the job done. He free-formed all the circuits for his VFD clock. Right now this is the only project hosted on his blog so click around to see how he got to this point.

DIY LED traffic light

links-diy-traffic-light

Here’s a scratch-build traffic light which [Jarle] uses to display information about his server. If you’re unable to find your own storm damaged original this is a pretty easy way to build one.

FPGA space attack game

links-classic-shooter-running-on-fpga

This game is running on an FPGA, but it’s not written in HDL. Instead, [Johan] wrote the game in C to run on a soft processor loaded on the gate array.

Hourglass entropy

links-hour-glass-entropy

This is a fascinating idea for generating random numbers. [Gijs] is shining a laser onto a light dependent transistor. The beam of the laser is broken by the falling sand of an hourglass. This technique could be use as an entropy source for random number generation.

GPS clock source for a digital timepiece

links-gps-clock

It seems like massive overkill, but you can’t beat the time accuracy of using a GPS module as a clock source. We don’t expect that [Jay] kept the clock in one piece after finishing the project. It’s just a good way to practice decoding the GPS data.

Google Talk Bot Running On Raspberry Pi

January 17, 2013 by 13 Comments

google-talk-raspberry-pi

[Michael Mitchell] put together a demonstration of how Google Talk can be used to communicate with scripts. Although the concept isn’t new we haven’t seen very many projects that use the chat interface for issuing commands and receiving data. The one that does come to mind is this home automation project which uses Google Talk because it’s quite a bit faster than SMS or email communications.

Luckily there’s already a Python library called pygtalkrobot which helps with the XMPPPY protocol used by Google Talk. In addition to that package, [Michael] also installs some extras which allow him to access the GPIO pins on the RPi via Python. In the video after the break he demonstrates switching and LED on and off, as well as reading from a slide switch connected to pin 8. Of course it’s a snap to code feedback from the OS itself. As you can see in the image above the RPi is reporting it’s uptime after being issued a command by [Michael]

Continue reading “Google Talk Bot Running On Raspberry Pi” →

Real Life Mario Karts React To Launchable Items

January 17, 2013 by 24 Comments

real-life-mario-kart

The team over at Waterloo Labs reasserts their reputation for creativity with this real life Mario Kart project. One of the team members must work at Austin’s Park because they seem to have had free rein when it comes to modifying the go-karts and filming the delightful video presentation found after the break.

It’s one thing to put on some costumes and head off to the go-kart track. It’s another to modify the vehicles to react to items launched by another rider. You can see the painted PVC launcher hardware to the right of each driver. By stuffing a plush item (banana, star, mushroom, etc.) in the barrel the driver can use compressed air to launch it quite a distance. Inside of each item is an RFID tag. When the RFID reader on a kart detects the tag it can take control of the steering, brake pedal, or speed limiter to inflict the appropriate actions.

If you don’t have this kind of insider access to your local go-kart track don’t fret. You just need to build your own set of karts.

Continue reading “Real Life Mario Karts React To Launchable Items” →