Designing A Quadcopter Brain PCB

July 27, 2012 by 6 Comments

When working on his quadcopter project [Matt] decided it would be best to build a robust controller for the device. He had never sent off a PCB design for fabrication, but took the plunge and ended up with a compact and reliable PCB on the first try.

One of the first things that comes to mind when we hear about quadcopter controllers are the feedback sensors. The accelerometers which are used for these projects generally come in a DFN or QFN package. This means there are no legs. Instead the chip has pads on the bottom of the package making it a lot more difficult to solder. [Matt] side-stepped this issue by using an IMU board which already has the sensors in place and offered a 0.1″ SIL pin header to use as an interface. This is simple to roll into the design, along with all of the other connectors for motor control, power, etc. He grabbed a copy of Eagle Lite to do the layout, and used OSH Park to get the boards fabricated. He was surprised that everything worked on the first try. Thanks to his planning it fits inside of a plastic food container where it should be able to ride out most minor crashes with ease.

A Simple Touch Interface For Music Player Daemon And More

March 15, 2012 by 6 Comments

mpd-controller

[Andrew] recently got the authorization to install Linux on his work PC, and he was looking for a way to control his music without relying on keyboard shortcuts to do so. Additionally, he wanted an unmistakable visual cue when he received messages in Pidgin, so he decided to build an external input/notification box.

The control box, quite literally, is a cardboard box in which [Andrew] crammed some components he got way back when from the crew at Seeed Studio. A Seeeduino serves as the brains of his control panel, interfacing with his PC over USB. He uses a set of 4 touch sensors and a potentiometer to control the MPD, allowing him to easily switch tracks, pause his music, control the volume, and lock his computer with a simple touch. A side-mounted RGB LED lights green to show that the system has received his commands successfully, pulsing a bright blue whenever a message arrives via Pidgin.

While the case isn’t exactly pretty, it is small, recycled, and takes up very little desk space. [Andrew] says that it works great, and he has made his code available on github if anyone is interested in using it.

Brain Control For The Arduino

October 20, 2009 by 20 Comments

brain-controlled-arduino

When we hear about a brain controlled Arduino project we immediately think about a coding nightmare. As always, the simple hacks are the best hacks. [Joel] and [Akshay] used hardware from a kid’s game as a brain interface for an Arduino.

We came across the video (embedded after the break) of their work and asked for more info on what we thought was an incredibly difficult hack. It turns out they purchased Uncle Milton’s Force Trainer which uses a headset to measure brain waves and has a base unit that reacts to these measurements. Hacking into this device didn’t require reverse engineering of anything. They took the easy route, and tapped into the five LEDs on the base unit. As the game measures greater levels of concentration, it lights up more LEDs.

So far tapping into the game is just a proof of concept. It’s up to you to implement a brain controlled beer bot.

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Solar Heart Engineered To Beat For Decades

December 6, 2018 by 5 Comments

It’s often said that if something is worth doing it’s worth doing right, or maybe even worth overdoing. This is clearly a concept that [ANTALIFE] takes very seriously, as made abundantly clear by projects like the solar powered “beating” heart he made as a gift for his wife. What for most of us would have ended up being a junk bin build becomes a considerable engineering project in his hands, with a level of research and fine tuning that’s frankly staggering.

But [ANTALIFE] didn’t put this much thought into the device just for fun. He wants it to remain functional for as long as 30 years, and hopes he and the missus can still look on it fondly in their retirement years. Keeping an electronic device up and running for decades straight means you need to look carefully at each component and try to steer clear of any potential pitfalls.

The biggest one was the battery. More specifically, the fact he couldn’t use one. The lifetime of most rechargeable batteries is measured in hundreds of cycles, which for a device which will be charged by solar every day, means the battery is going to start showing its age in only 4 to 5 years. That simply wasn’t going to cut it.

[ANTALIFE] did some digging and realized that the solution was to use a supercapacitor, specifically the AVX SCMS22C255PRBA0. This is little wonder is rated for a staggering half million cycles, which in theory means that even with daily use it should still take a charge in the year 3300. In practice of course there are a lot of variables which will reduce that lifetime such as temperature fluctuations and the Earth being conquered by apes; but no matter what caveats you put on the figure it should still make 30 years without breaking a sweat.

Similar thought was given to choosing a solar cell with a suitably long lifetime, and he did plenty of testing and experimentation with his charging circuit, including some very nice graphs showing efficiency over time, to make sure it was up to snuff. Finally he walks the reader though his light-sensitive ring oscillator circuit which gives the device its pleasing “breathing” effect once the lights go down.

We’d love to bring you an update on this device in 30 years to see how close [ANTALIFE] got, but as we’re still trying to work the kinks out of the mobile version of the site we can’t make any guarantees about what the direct-brain interface version of HaD might look like. In the meantime though, you can read up on the long term battle between supercapacitors and traditional batteries.

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Latest PiEEG Shield Now Offers 16 Channels

September 17, 2024 by 24 Comments

We’ve previously covered the PiEEG, an affordable brain-computer interface (BCI) shield designed to connect to the Raspberry Pi. The open source project developed by [Ildar Rakhmatulin] is intended to allow students and hobbyists to experiment with detecting electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and electrocardiography (ECG) biosignals — unlocking a wide array of applications ranging from assistive tech to gaming.

Now, the PiEEG hardware has been upgraded to detect sixteen channels via either wet or dry electrodes. The new board, referred to as the PiEEG-16, offers up the same ease of use and features as its predecessor, including the ability to read out signals from the device using Python scripts. Compared to the eight channels supported by the previous generation of hardware, the PiEEG-16 promises to provide the fine-grain data required for more complex operations.

Since we last checked in with the PiEEG back in 2023, [Ildar] says the project has attracted plenty of attention. To help document how the community is using the capability offered by these BCIs, he’s added a page on the project’s site to show off what folks are building with the technology.

Inevitably, some express concern when talking about non-professionals working with brain interfacing hardware. But the project’s documentation is quick to point out that efforts have been taken to make the endeavour as risk-free as possible. The most important thing to remember is that the Raspberry Pi and PiEEG are intended to be powered by batteries so as to remain completely isolated. Similarly, there’s no need to connect the devices to a mains-powered computer, as everything happens on the Pi itself.

Even still, it’s made clear that the PiEEG-16 is not a medical device, and has received no formal certifications. If you want to experiment with this technology, you do so at your own risk. Just something to keep in mind…no pun intended.

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New DuckyPad Pro Is Bigger And Smarter Than Original

September 17, 2024 by 3 Comments

In a world that has no shortage of macropads, the duckyPad still managed to set itself apart. The open source mechanical pad offered an incredible array of customization options, and thanks to its onboard OLED display, you never had to wonder which key did what. But there’s always room for improvement.

Announced earlier today, the duckyPad Pro is the culmination of everything creator [dekuNukem] learned from developing, marketing, and supporting the original duckyPad. Much hasn’t changed — it looks largely the same, offers the same RGB-backlit mechanical switches, and the trademark OLED is still there, although it’s gotten a little larger. The obvious changes are the addition of five more keys, and a pair of rotary encoders.

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Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard Lives Again With RP2040

September 9, 2024 by 8 Comments

Hackaday readers are likely the kind of folks that have a favorite keyboard, so you can probably imagine how devastating it would be to find out that the board you’ve sworn by for years is going out of production. Even worse, the board has some internal gremlins that show up after a few years of use, so functional ones in the second-hand market are becoming increasingly rare. So what do you do?

This is the position [TechBeret] recently found himself in with his beloved Sculpt keyboard. When Microsoft decided to step back from the peripheral market last year, he started looking at alternatives. Finding none of them appealing, he decided instead to breathe new life into the ergonomic keyboard with the RP2040. Every aspect of the resurrection is covered in a phenomenally detailed write-up on his blog, making this a valuable case study in modernizing peripherals with the popular microcontroller.

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