An Impressively Large LED Matrix

October 26, 2013 by 10 Comments

One of the more impressive projects a home-bound tinkerer can pull off is some sort of display. Not only does the final project result in a lot of blinky, glowey things, but driving hundreds of LEDs is an achievement in itself. [Fabien] decided he wanted to build his own LED display and ended up with something great (French, Google translation).

Instead of going off the deep end and making his own boards for this giant LED display, [Fabien] found a very cheap 16×32 LED display board on DealExtreme. Once these kits were pieced together, [Fabian] mounted them in a wooden frame and started connecting the displays together.

The original plan was to drive these with an Arduino, but with so many pixels he quickly ran out of RAM. Replacing the Arduino with a larger ATMega1284p, [Fabian] found the RAM he needed and started work on some interesting visualizations.

Of course, Conway’s Game of Life made a showing in the final build, but [Fabian] also managed to whip up a spectrograph using FFT. It’s a very nicely put together display that makes us want to buy a few of these displays ourselves.

Hackerspacing In Europe: RevSpace In Den Haag

October 26, 2013 by 17 Comments

IMG_1075 (Custom)

Welcome to RevSpace!

This was the Netherland’s largest hackerspace — Until Hack42 acquired a military base in Arnhem… More on that later though. RevSpace is a 24/7 hackerspace located in the basement of a large industrial building turned workshop/studio. They have lots of space, but could even use more as they continue to grow! The photo above is from the Tuesday night BBQ – a weekly event that has happened every Tuesday for almost 2 years straight! It’s the social night and it draws many people out to share in good food, good company, and good times.

Special thanks to [Mark] for picking us up from the train station! He’s the fellow in the bottom right of the photo, and also happens to be one of the board members of RevSpace!

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Trinket Contest Update #2

October 26, 2013 by 12 Comments

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Whoa nelly, the Trinket entries are really starting to rolling in fast now! The last update featured only five, but below you’ll find an even dozen, and there are more coming in as we write!

The contest asks you slap the Hackaday logo onto something for a chance at winning one of 20 Trinket dev boards donated by Adafruit for this contest.

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A Twitter Connected Mechanical Calculator

October 26, 2013 by 11 Comments

The TwitALU

Two students at the University of Bristol wanted to create a computer to demonstrate how ALUs work. The result is the TwitALU, a Twitter connected mechanical calculator.

The device uses a custom 7400 series ALU based on the famous MOS 6502 processor. Instead of doing the calculations on a silicon die, the ALU drives mechanical relays. This produces a nice clicky-clacky sound as the calculation is computed.

To start a calculation, you tweet @twittithmetic with your input. A Raspberry Pi is used to load the instructions into the ALU. Once the computation is done, it’s tweeted back to you and displayed on the Nixie tube display. It’s not efficient, or fast, but it does the job of demonstrating the inner workings of the device while doing simple math.

The device’s schematics are all available on the website, and are helpful for understanding how a simple ALU works. After the break, check out a quick clip of the TwitALU in action.

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HHH: Sniffing Proprietary CNC To Hack In G-Code Support

October 25, 2013 by 19 Comments

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Here’s a beautiful desktop CNC mill which had one big drawback: it used a proprietary interface for driving it. To increase the flexibility of the tool it was hacked to work with G-Code.

The project is a Hackaday Hackerspace Henchmen submission from rLab, the Reading Hackspace in the UK. [Barnaby] explains the entire project after the break. The machine itself wasn’t altered, but a translator script was written in Python after capturing a bunch of packets and working out the protocol. This script listens for G-Code and does the translation into the type of commands the machine is expecting to receive.

If you know of a CNC hack from your own hackerspace send us the story for a chance to win some loot.

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Learn Wireless Sensor Networks With Nanode

October 25, 2013 by 3 Comments

wicked

Getting a device on the internet is great – but what if you want to monitor multiple wireless sensors? The [WickedDevice] crew have been publishing a tutorial series focusing on just that. Their weapon of choice is the Nanode, an Arduino based wireless sensor system we’ve seen a few times in the past. So far the first and second parts have been posted up. Part one starts with an explanation of the Arduino and Nanode platform, and takes us through connecting the Nanode to a wireless temperature sensor. Part two walks through the hardware and code changes to add multiple wireless sensors to the system. Part three will focus on getting the entire network up on the internet, and piping data onto the Xively data hosting site.

This tutorial does begin a bit on the basic side, covering the installation of the Arduino software environment. This may seem a bit simplistic for some of our readers, but we think this type of tutorial is necessary. It helps ‘newbies’ get started down what could otherwise be a difficult path. For more advanced readers, it’s easier to skip past steps you already know than it is to try to hunt down information that isn’t there.

Making 128MB SIMMs From Junk

October 25, 2013 by 25 Comments

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Working for a tech repair/recycling center, [Jax] has access to a ton of cool hardware. Most of it is junk, but that’s just the way he likes it. Among his better finds in the depths of a tech treasure trove is a huge antistatic bag of 64 MB 72 pin SIMMs. These were the standard RAM form factor for just about everything in the 90s, and while 64 MB is a huge amount of RAM for the time, they’re still a bit away from the 72 pin max of 128 MB.

After inspecting these sticks, [Jax] noticed something odd. Each side had pads for memory chips, but only one side was populated. Given the rarity of 128 MB sticks of RAM, [Jax] decided he would have a go at adding 64 Megs of RAM to these chips by desoldering one stick and sticking it on the back of another.

These new 128 MB SIMMs made their way into a Macintosh Quadra 605 for testing. While the 64 MB chips worked fine, the new 128 MB chips threw a chime of death. Something was terribly wrong.

While investigating, [Jax] couldn’t find any bridged solder joints, and everything looked okay. Heat is a wonderful test of what went wrong, and with the SIMM connected to a power source, he found all of the newly transplanted chips were hot. Because the chips on back side of the SIMMs were meant to be installed upside down, [Jax] had inadvertently connected the ground to power and power to ground.

Fixing his mistake on a new SIMM, [Jax] popped it in his old Mac and tried booting with these SIMMs again. There wasn’t a chime of death, but booting with these chips took a very long time. This was actually just the Mac checking all the RAM, which was successfully addressed once [Jax] finally booted his OS.