The owner of Hackaday, [Jason Calacanis], wants to sell this site. The editors and contributors of Hackaday want to buy it and turn it into a nonprofit. You can help!
Here’s a really nice Powerpoint going over what we’re going to do while making Hackaday the best it can be.
Continue reading “Turning Hackaday Into A Virtual Hackerspace”
Back in 2005, the Arduino was just a twinkle in they eyes of [Massimo Banzi] and the other core developers. Since then, you can’t go to any electronics site without hitting something beginning with ‘ard~’ or ending with ‘~duino’. The platform has become so popular, people everywhere are piggybacking on the name to the point of trademark infringement or simply outright counterfeiting one of the many official Arduino boards. Now [Massimo] has something to say about these clones, ripoffs, derivatives, and ‘duino-compatible boards.
On the list of things bad for the open source ecosystem, [Massimo] points to direct clones of existing Arduino boards. While these boards are electrically identical to officially licensed boards, they simply don’t support the Arduino project financially and usually don’t contribute to the existing libraries and code. Even worse are counterfeits; these boards copy the trademarks of the Arduino project – sometimes terribly given the three examples above (guess which one is the real one) – and directly profit off of the Arduino project without giving any support in return.
There are other veins of Arduino that [Massimo] considers more acceptable. Arduino-compatible boards, seen by the dozen over on Kickstarter, usually add something of their own, be it a radio chip, or an entirely different microcontroller. Derivatives, like Teensy and Adafruit’s Flora actually bring new things to the table with improved hardware and new and interesting libraries.
As far as counterfeits and clones go, we can’t agree more with what [Massimo] has to say. You have to admire the folks in the Arduino project being so open about their creations and admiring the Arduino derivatives that bring some new hardware to the table. Then again, that’s the lesson of the Arduino project; you can make hardware open source and still be outrageously popular.
Wanting to repair his much-used NES controllers [Michael Moffitt] sourced a replacement for the rubber button pads. They didn’t work all that well but he fixed that by using angle clippers on the part that contacts the PCB traces.
Here’s a neat Claw Game project show-and-tell video. [Thanks David]
We already know that [Bunnie] is building a laptop. Here’s an update on the project.
Hackaday alum [Caleb Kraft] continues his helpful hacking by adding an alternative to clicking an Xbox 360 stick.
[Blackbird] added a camera to the entry door of his house. He didn’t want to forget to shut it off (wasting power) so he built an automatic shutoff.
We’re not really sure what this computational photography project is all about. It takes pictures with the subject illuminated in different colors then combines individual color channels with a MATLAB script.
Finally, [Dave Jones] tears down a Nintendo 64 console on a recent EEVblog episode.
[Tim] and [Jon] have a hankering for some pork product of their own making. Your average residential kitchen is ill-equipped to handle an entire pig, so they got down to business building this pig spit out of old bicycle parts.
The main components in the project are two stands built out of square tube which go on either side of the cooking fire (coal bed?). They include bearings to support a horizontal bar on which a pig carcass is somehow mounted. The whole point of a spit is to turn it while cooking, and that’s where the gear system comes in. The front crank from a bicycle was welded onto the spit, with one pedal still in place. This way if the motorized system breaks down they can still turn the thing by hand.
The crank connects to the cogs with one chain, while the other chain connects the cogs to a windshield wiper motor. When connected to the specified 12V it turns around 6 rpm; close but a bit too fast. After some trial and error they found a 5V supply turns it at the optimal 2 rpm.
We wonder if you can put a whole pig in a meat smoker?
A single cell of this distributed flight system can spin its propeller but it comes at the cost of the chassis flying out of control. To realize any type of stable flight it must seek a partnership with other cells. The more astute reader will be wondering how it can autonomously pair if incapable of controlled solo flight? The designers of the project thought of that, and gave each frame a way to propel itself on the ground.
Along the bottom rails of each cage there are several small knobby wheels. These seem to function similar to omniwheels since they are not aligned in parallel to each other. Pairing is accomplished mechanically by magnets, also helping to align the pogo-pins which connect the cells electronically.
Flight tests are shown in the video below. The array can be oriented in symmetrical or asymmetrical patterns and still work just fine. If they have 3D camera feedback they can hold position and navigate quite accurately. But this can also be piloted by remote control in the absence of such a feedback system.
At first glance you might not even notice that this 1934 radio has been altered. But close study of the tuning dial will tip you off that changes have been made. It still scrolls through stations just like the original. But it’s not a wheel with some numbers on it. The rotary motion is an effect produced by an LCD screen.
This is the second time we’ve seen one of [Florian Amrhein’s] Internet radio projects. The first used guts from a Laptop paired with an Arduino to pull everything together. This time he’s chosen to wield a Raspberry Pi board. It feeds a USB sound card for a bit better quality. A small amplifier board us used to power one large speaker behind the original grill of the radio.
Check out the demo video to see that radio dial in action. It’s delightful that he went to the trouble to emulate a rotating disc to keep with the theme of the project.
Continue reading “Simple Looking Antique Internet Radio Has A Lot Under The Hood”
Your car’s airbag is one of the major engineering accomplishments of the auto industry. In an accident, a whole host of processes must take place in sequence to keep your face from slamming into the steering wheel, and everything must happen in just a fraction of a second. [Steve] over at Make thought it would be a cool idea to discover what actually goes in to saving a life with an airbag and decided to build his own.
The electronics of the build consisted of an accelerometer and an Arduino. A lot of research, development, and experimentation has gone into the algorithms that trigger airbags, but [Steve] decided to keep things simple: when a sudden acceleration is detected, set off a small charge of black powder.
The airbag itself is ripstop nylon reinforced with canvas, contained in a small wooded box fitted with hinged doors. All these components are put on wheeled aluminum test rig, manned with a honeydew melon crash test dummy, and pulled into a short wall at a few miles per hour.
Despite [Steve] not putting hundreds of thousands of man hours into the development of his airbag – unlike the ones you’ll find in your steering column – his device actually worked pretty well. While not a complete success, he did manage to come up with something that both looks and acts like the familiar device that has saved countless lives.
