Magsafe On An Android, Cats And Dogs Living Together

May 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

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We’re thinking most Hackaday readers have at one time or another been tasked with replacing the power connector in a laptop. Anyone who has done so can easily see the genius behind the Apple Magsafe connector. Since the second gen iPhone, there have been rumors Apple will release a cellphone with the Magsafe connector, a great idea, seeing as how cell phones are thrown around even more than laptops. [Tony] got tired of waiting, and had an Android device anyway, so he decided to retrofit a Magsafe power adapter to his Note II.

In the interest of excess, [Tony] is using the absurdly large ZeroLemon 9300mAh battery and case for his device, giving him a lot of room for this hardware mod. A tiny 3D printed adapter fits around a slightly modified Magsafe connector, and with a little bit of super glue and solder, the connector is wired up to the charging port.

Of course the charger isn’t a stock Apple power supply; it’s just another Magsafe plug wired into a 5V wall wart. We’re not going to take a guess at what would happen if [Tony] plugged a stock Apple charger into his modded phone, but the mod works perfectly without the danger of ripping a USB port out of his phone.

Hack A Camera, Win A Nikon

May 2, 2014 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

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Several juicy prizes from Nikon are ripe for the plucking. Our friends at MAKE are hosting a Nikon sponsored challenge. Grand prize is an Nikon 1 V3 with three extra lenses, and there are two runner-up prizes which offer the same without the extras. They’re basically asking for your best camera hack. Now the submission process is a one-shot deal (no posting and iterating) which may explain why the contest — which started 4/15 and ends 5/13 — only has two entries. Still, we’d love to see a Hackaday reader waltz in and claim the loot.

Need some examples to get you rolling? Connectivity is a fun topic; try interfacing your camera with something like a Nintendo DS. Everyone needs to make at least one motion rig like this Ikea slider. We can’t stop listing examples without at least one shutter trigger. Here’s a sound activated one to capture things that happen extremely quickly.

If you end up winning make sure to tell us so we can share in your delight.

Sending Open-Source Satellites To Space

May 1, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 12 Comments

An anonymous reader tipped us about two Argentinian satellites (satellite one, satellite two) that were sent in 2013 to space. What is interesting about them? They are both based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, and the team released the framework & flight computer software for their main platform (named cubesat, GitHub link). Gunter’s space page not only impresses us by showing the quantity of small/amateur satellites sent each month to space, but also lets us know that the hardware source files for CudeBug 1/2 are meant to be released. In the meantime we can only gather that they’re using a Texas Instruments TMS570 running FreeRTOS. Nevertheless, the two different web pages (in spanish and english) offer us a very interesting glimpse of what it takes to send an electronic project to space and how it later behaves.

You may also be interested in checking out ArduSat, a successful kickstarter campaign aimed at sending Arduino experiments in space.

Using The Raspberry Pi To See Like A Bee

May 1, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

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The Raspberry Pi board camera has a twin brother known as the NoIR camera, a camera without an infrared blocking filter that allows anyone to take some shots of scenes illuminated with ‘invisible’ IR light, investigate the health of plants, and some other cool stuff. The sensor in this camera isn’t just sensitive to IR light – it goes the other way as well, allowing some investigations into the UV spectrum, and showing us what bees and other insects see.

The only problem with examining the UV spectrum with a small camera is that relatively, the camera is much more sensitive to visible and IR than it is to UV. To peer into this strange world, [Oliver] needed a UV pass filter, a filter that only allows UV light through.

By placing the filter between the still life and the camera, [Oliver] was able to shine a deep UV light source and capture the image of a flower in UV. The image above and to the right isn’t what the camera picked up, though – bees cannot see red, so the green channel was shifted to the red, the blue channel to the green, and the UV image was placed where the blue channel once was.

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Hackaday Space: Pixel Art Contest

May 1, 2014 by Ben Delarre 8 Comments

During the Final Transmission — which I’ll post about tomorrow — we decided to open up a creative area on the Minecraft server for people to build whatever they wanted as part of a Pixel Art contest. Today we announce the winners of that art challenge, and assign them their points so that we can draw the overall winner of the Final Transmission. Each winner gets additional points added to their score. These were judged by Hackaday alum [Caleb Kraft] since he hadn’t been involved in the shenanigans up to this point and was, considered unbiased, and has a well-developed set of art chops himself. So, here goes…

3rd place : Hack A Tardis

The third place goes to the Dr Who Box by [Marcus1297], entitled ‘Hack a Tardis’. This is a great rendition of the tardis, while its only 2 dimensional it has fine detail, and the beacon beam coming out of the top is a nice finishing touch. Excellent work! [Marcus1297] gets an additional 2.5k points for his score.

2nd place : Nicola Tesla Memorial

Second place goes to [st3al2012] for his stunning Tesla Coil which he dedicated to Nikola Tesla. This was picked because the “Art was exceptional”. There’s a lot of detail in there, not only did he build the main structure of the coil complete with the toroidal ring, but he also showed the core components. The spark gap generator, the capacitors and even the AC outlet. There’s a lot of detail and it looks stunning at night. Great job, [st3al2012] you get an extra 5k points for your scoreboard.

1st place : Portal Cube

First place goes to [XDjackieXD] for his quite amazing Portal Cube. [Caleb] declared this the winner saying that the “Art and execution were exemplary”. We have to agree, the cube looks fantastic, but best of all he went to all of the trouble to create “Want you Gone” (the ending song from the game) using note blocks positioned inside the cube. Lovely work and he thoroughly deserves the 10k points he has received for this.

Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to everyone that contributed. The Minecraft server is still up so if you want to take a look at all the art for yourself connect to it at ‘minecraft.hackaday.com’. We have put up the world and all the plugins used to build it here. I’ll be releasing the source for the MatrixMiner plugin that I developed for the teleporter display when I get a chance to finish it.

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A Z80 Retro Microcomputer For The Papilio Pro FPGA Board

May 1, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 26 Comments

[Will] wrote a 128MHz Z80-based retro microcomputer which runs on a Papilio Pro board. For those who don’t know, the latter is built around a Spartan-6 LX9 FPGA so you may imagine that much work was required to implement all the computer features in VHDL. The T80 CPU core was taken from opencores, the SDRAM controller was imported from Mike Field’s work but [Will] implemented several additional functions on his own:

– a 4KB paged Memory Management Unit to translate the 16-bit (64KB) logical address space into a 26-bit (64MB) physical address space.

– a 16KB direct mapped cache to hide the SDRAM latency, using the FPGA internal block RAM

– a UART interface for external communications

He also ported CP/M-2.2, MP/M-II and UZI (a UNIX system) to the computer. His project is completely open-source and all the source code can be downloaded at the end of [Will]’s write up.

Thanks [hamster] for the tip.

Eye Tracking With The Oculus Rift

May 1, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

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There’s a lot you can do with eye and gaze tracking, when it comes to interface design, so when [Diako] got his hands on an Oculus Rift, there was really only one thing to do.

Like a few other solutions for eye tracking we’ve seen, [Diako] is using a small camera with the IR filter removed to read the shape and location of an eye’s pupil to determine where the user is looking. This did require cutting a small hole near one of the Oculus’ eye cups, but the internal camera works great.

To get a window to the world, if it were, [Diako] slapped another camera onto the front of the Oculus. These two cameras are fed into the same computer, the gaze tracking is overlaid with the image from the front of the headset, and right away the user has a visual indication of where they’re looking.

Yes, using a computer to know where you’re looking may seem like a rather useless build, but stuff like this is used in research and extraordinarily high tech heads up displays. Although he’s not using the motion tracking on the Oculus, if [Diako] were to do so, he’d have the makings of one of the most powerful heads up displays possible.

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