Fire At The Geek Group

January 3, 2014 by 121 Comments

Geek Group

The Geek Group, an absurdly large and well stocked hackerspace in Grand Rapids, Michigan caught fire yesterday.

You may recall The Geek Group from their many over-the-top projects that include a quarter shinker, a 200,000 Watt Tesla coil, enough capacitors to kill a demi-god, and a giant robot that crushes TVs. From what TGG has shown on their website and their YouTube, they have an amazing space that could still be the home of quite a few amazing builds.

According to Geek Group head honcho [Chris], the fire was caused by an overheated electric motor. No one was at the space at the time, but the fire was hot enough to crack the exterior brick and melt porcelain insulators in their high voltage lab. To add insult to injury, this was only TGG’s second day of being open to the public.

The folks at The Geek Group are looking for volunteers for their cleanup, so if you’re around the Grand Rapids area and would like to pitch in, head on over around noon today.

A Low Cost Dual Discriminator Module For The Easy-phi Project

January 3, 2014 by 9 Comments

A few months ago I presented you the Easy-phi project, which aims at building a simple, cheap but intelligent rack-based open hardware/software platform for hobbyists. With easy-phi, you simply have a rack to which you add cards (like the one shown above) that perform the functions you want.

Recently my team finished testing our FPGA-based discriminator or “universal input” if you prefer. As easy-phi cards use a well-defined electrical signal to communicate with each other, we needed to make a card that would translate the different kinds of electrical signals from the outside, as well as perform plenty of other functions. It was therefore designed to have a 100MHz input bandwidth with an AC/DC coupled 50 ohm/high impedance input stage (x2) and 4 easy-phi outputs. For this module, we picked the (old) spartan3-an FPGA to perform the different logic functions that may be needed by the final users (high speed counter, OR/XOR/AND, pulse creation,…). Using the cortex-m3 microcontroller present on the board, it may be easily reconfigured at will. All design resources may be found on our Github, and you can always have a look at our official website.

Myst(ery) Box

January 3, 2014 by 7 Comments

Anyone remember the game Myst? Well, [Michael] and his girlfriend have been playing quite a bit of it lately, so for her birthday, he decided to make her something inspired from it.

For those unaware of the classic that is the Myst series, it is a set of games that started back in 1993 where you assume the role of the Stranger who gets to explore other planets (called Ages) to solve various logical and mechanical puzzles.

Anyway, [Michael] got his girlfriend tickets to visit GC319QK (a geocache site requiring diving) — since the gift is a relatively small token, it was logical for [Michael] to make a fancy box for it — and that’s exactly what he did. It’s a peculiar little wooden box with LEDs, a button, a latch, an unplugged wire, different rods and strange looking sensors — and it is a very clever little puzzle.

We could explain to you how it works (with the Arduino, phototransistors and maybe the source code), but instead we think you’ll enjoy watching [Michael’s] video of it.

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Spoofing Pokemon Trades

January 2, 2014 by 16 Comments

[Adan] had an old Game Boy sitting around, and without anything better to do decided to investigate the link cable protocol with a microcontroller. He had a Stellaris Launchpad for the task, but initially had no project in mind. What he came up for this adventure in serial protocols is a first gen Pokemon trade spoofer that allows him to obtain pokemon without having two Game Boys, or for the weird ones out there, “friends.”

The Game Boy link protocol is extremely well documented (dead link, try Internet Archive), so getting data from the Game Boy to the Launchpad was as simple as a soldering up an old link cable connector to a piece of perf board. After figuring out the electronics, [Adan] looked at what happened when two Pokemon games tried to trade pokemon. When two Game Boys are linked, there are two in-game options: trade or battle. Looking at the data coming after the ‘trade’ option, [Adan] found something that could possibly be the data structure of the Pokemon being sent. He reverse-engineered this all by himself before discovering this is also  well documented.

Bringing everything together, [Adan] figured out how to trade non-existent Pokemon with a small dev board. Right now he’s only transmitting Pokemon that are hard-coded on the Launchpad, but it’s very possible to transmit the Pokemon values in real-time over USB.

Thanks [Dan] for sending this in, and no, we don’t know what’s up with the influx of Pokemon posts over the last week. Video of the spoof below.

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Gesture Based Security Lock

January 2, 2014 by 13 Comments

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A team of students from Cornell University are looking into alternative ways of creating a security system that can be locked or unlocked by using physical gestures in an enclosed space.

It is the final year project for [Ankur], [Darshan] and [Saisrinivasan] in their MEng of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The system prototype is capable of recording a gesture and then comparing the gesture with future gestures to lock or unlock the system. Consider it like a secret handshake to get into the office!

To analyze the gesture they are using four SparkFun proximity sensors setup in a linear array to sense the distance a hand is moved. An ATMega1284P is used to convert the analog sensor signal to digital for further processing. The project is extremely well documented, as it appears to be the final report for the project.

A short video after the break shows off the prototype and gives a good explanation of how the system works.

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Un-crapifying A Car Stereo

January 2, 2014 by 49 Comments

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[Noah Farrington] has just accomplished a major milestone in his life, purchasing his first car! A glorious 2001 Ford Focus wagon. While it may be a fully loaded luxury vehicle, it is missing one thing poor [Noah] can’t live without. An aux-in port.

He had a few options for rectifying the situation. Live with it as is, hack the strange Ford media protocol out of the back, or fool the CD player into playing his input. Naturally he chose the third option.

His first challenge was removing the deck from the car. People told him he’d have to buy fancy stereo removal tools — he made do with tent pegs and coat hangers. Using the same method as described in a past aux-in hack, he identified the audio in leads on the CD player’s ribbon cable. By carefully soldering in his own aux-in plug, he’s almost ready for business! Unfortunately, the CD player also needs to think that it is on for it to properly output the audio. [Noah] chose the simple solution — record a silent CD to always leave in the deck.

Stick around after the break to see it in action.

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Controlling Ten Thousand RGB LEDs

January 2, 2014 by 51 Comments

RGB LEDs are awesome – especially the new, fancy ones with the WS2812 RGB LED driver. These LEDs can be individually controlled to display red, green, and blue, but interfacing them with a microcontroller or computer presents a problem: microcontrollers generally don’t have a whole lot of RAM to store an image, and devices with enough memory to do something really cool with these LEDs don’t have a real-time operating system or the ability to do the very precise timing these LEDs require.  [Sprite_tm] thought about this problem and came up with a great solution for controlling a whole lot of these WS2812 LEDs.

[Sprite] figured there was one device on the current lot of ARM/Linux boards that provides the extremely precise timing required to drive a large array of WS2812 LEDs: the video interface. Even though the video interface on these boards is digital, it’s possible to turn the 16-bit LCD interface on an oLinuXino Nano into something that simply spits out digital values very fast with a consistent timing. Just what a huge array of RGB pixels needs.

Using a Linux board to drive RGB pixels using the video output meant [Sprite_tm] needed video output. He’s running the latest Linux kernel, so he didn’t have the drivers to enable the video hardware. Not a problem for [Sprite], as he can just add a few files to define the 16-bit LCD interface and add the proper display mode.

[Sprite_tm] already taken an oscilloscope to his board while simulating 16 strips of 600 LEDs, and was able to get a frame rate of 30 fps. That’s nearly 10,000 LEDs controlled by a single €22/$30USD board.

Now the only obstacle for building a huge LED display is actually buying the RGB LED strips. A little back-of-the-envelope math tells us a 640×480 display would be about $50,000 in LEDs alone. Anyone know where we can get these LED strips cheap?

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