WS2811 Can Be Addressed At 800kHz Using A 8MHz Clock

May 27, 2013 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

ws2811-running-at-8mhz

Timing is everything and that’s why most communication protocols require a very accurate clock source. The WS2811 LED strip controllers are no different. But [Danny] figured out a way to drive them reliably with an 8MHz clock source.

The WS2811 has become one of the most popular controllers for RGB pixels and strips alike. We’ve seen several hacks used to address them, including the 16MHz AVR technique that inspired [Danny] to take on this project. He planned to use that library but the 25-day shipping time for a 16MHz crystal drove home to invent a way to use the internal oscillator instead.

The gist of the hack is that he wrote assembly code to handle pairs of binary bit values. With a code block for each of the four possible combinations in hand he had to find a way to craft the conditional jumps to preserve accurate timing. After hitting the wall trying to solve this puzzle by hand he wrote a C++ program to solve it for home. The proof is in this video which shows one chip driving multiple Larson scanners on a single strip.

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Adding Night Vision To The Raspberry Pi Camera

May 27, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

After months of promises, the Raspberry Pi camera is finally heading out to hackers and makers across the world. Of course the first build with the Pi cam to grace the pages of Hackaday would be removing the IR filter, and it just so happens [Gary] and his crew at the Reading hackerspace are the first to do just that.

As [Gary] shows in his video, the process of removing the Pi cam’s IR filter is extremely fiddly. Getting the filter out of the camera involves removing the sensor, gently cutting it open with a scalpel, and finally gluing the whole thing back together with a tiny bit of superglue. Not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for anyone without a halfway decent bench microscope.

If you’re looking for a Raspberry Pi-powered security camera, game camera, or something for an astronomy application, this is the way to make it happen. You might want to be careful when removing the IR filter; [Gary] broke one camera on their first attempt. They got it to work, though, and the picture quality looks pretty good, as seen in the videos below.

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Book Review: The Good Life Lab

May 27, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

Stop whatever you’re doing and get this book. I’ve just finished reading it and I have to say that [Wendy] and [Mikey] could easily be the poster children for modern day hacking, and this book could be the manual for a life built on hacking.

When I visited [Wendy] and [Mikey] last year I was blown away. Their little homestead was a veritable smorgasbord of hacks. Everywhere I looked, things were cobbled together, modified, repaired, and improved. There wasn’t a single piece of their lives that wasn’t somehow improved by their efforts to play an active role in their own living.

That sounds a bit cheesy I know. We all play an active role in our lives right? Sure. But what they have done is created a hacker’s homestead. My projects tend to live on my workbench, occasionally poking into my daily life, but they went were there was virtually nothing and hacked together everything they found they needed. Their life is their workbench.

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Moostar — Fortune Telling Moose Knock-off Of Zoltar

May 27, 2013 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Meet Moostar, the fortune-telling Moose inspired by Zoltar. You remember Zoltar, the coin operated fortune-teller who made [Tom Hanks] a rich movie star? Maybe you didn’t see that flick, but [Sketchsk3tch] did and he pulled this show piece together for a company-wide conference with relative ease.

If you’re good at choosing parts for your projects it makes things a lot simpler. He started with a singing Christmas moose, a mini plasma ball to act as the crystal ball, and somehow came across a collector’s basketball case which was the perfect size for the enclosure.

The electronics also came together remarkably well. He uses a thermal printer to spit out the fortunes — which are actually security tips for employees since that’s the dcpartment he works in. The coin acceptor is a Sparkfun part and he tried two ready made solutions to make the moose talk. The first is seen below and uses pre-recorded messages played by an Arduino Wave shield. This was improved upon by using an EMIC2 text-to-speech module that really opens up the moose’s range of chatter.

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Hackaday Links: Sunday, May 26th, 2013

May 26, 2013 by Mike Szczys 56 Comments

The warmer months cometh and it’s time to think of this year’s Burning Man. [Matt’s] already set himself up with a sound-reactive LED project he calls the Seed of Life.

Older readers, and those who really know their hobby electronic history, will know the name Heathkit. Many readers tipped us off about their triumphant return. We’re not sure what form this reincarnation will take, but you can help shape it by participating in the survey.

Dust off that MSP430 launchpad and turn it into a composite video Pong console.

Here’s a way to use your Android phone as a computer mouse.

We’re not quite sure what this is, but turn your volume down before watching the video about a modular sythesizer hack.

[Arkadiusz Spiewak] wrote in to share some of the printing success (translated) he’s had recently with the H-bot style printer we saw a while back.

Strap an Arduino and an Electric Imp to your arm (and everyone else’s) and it’ll remember everyone you meet. You know, kind of like Google Glass but with geeky arm-wear instead of geeky headgear?

And finally, [Nerick] has just finished a thermometer project using Nixie tubes (translated).

Crown Earns You The Title King Of The Junkyard

May 26, 2013 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

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[Greg Shikhman] wanted to use the school tools one more time before graduation. After hitting up some local motorcycle shops around town for parts he fashioned this crown for himself.

He didn’t pay ‘the iron price‘ as the motorcycle roller chain is waste material anyway. Chains do wear out and these were left over after being replaced with new ones. He first cleaned them up with a bit of WD-40 solvent, xylene, and soapy water to cut through the grime. There was also a layer of black oxide which normally keeps them from rusting which he peeled off with a dunk in some hydrochloric acid.

Chains are flexible and this would have made for a disheveled looking crown. The fix involved using an aluminum form the size of his head to keep the crown in round while he did his TIG welding. A double row of polished steel ball bearings take the place of jewels. As if the ten-pounder wasn’t painful enough he added four rings of bicycle chain as accents which he admits makes the thing unwearable because they dig into his noggin. We still don’t think that’s a good enough excuse to post about the project and not include an image of him wearing the thing during the junkyard coronation.

It would be fun to see a follow-up king-ring with similar LED features as that engagement ring but using this heavy-metal design style.

Detecting Galactic Rotation With Software Defined Radio

May 26, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

Last summer in the heyday of software defined radio via USB TV tuners we asked hackaday readers a question: Is anyone using everyone’s favorite method of SDR for radio astronomy? It took nearly a year, but finally there’s an awesome project to turn a USB TV tuner into a radio telescope. It’s from the fruitful mind of [Marcus Leech] (PDF warning), and is good enough to detect the rotation of the galaxy with a three-foot satellite dish.

News of [Marcus]’ work comes to us from [Carl] over at RTL-SDR.com who has been keeping tabs on the advances of building a radio telescope in a backyard. He’s been collecting a lot of interesting tidbits including this gif showing an arm of the galaxy entering and leaving [Marcus]’ telescope’s field of view over the course of a few hours.

Not only can [Marcus]’ telescope record continium measurements – basically, a single-pixel camera sensitive to only one frequency – it can also produce spectral plots of the sky. Combine the ability to measure multiple frequencies at the same time with the Doppler effect, and [Marcus] can measure the rotation of the galaxy with a USB TV tuner. That’s just awesome in our humble opinion.

If you already have an RTL-SDR TV tuner and a largish satellite dish, [Marcus]’ project should be fairly inexpensive to replicate; the feed assembly is made out of a coffee can, the amplifiers are repurposed satellite television equipment, and all the software – [Marcus]’ own simple_ra tool for GNU Radio – is open source. Of course with a 3 foot diameter dish, it will be impossible to replicate the data from huge radio telescopes. Still, it’s an impressive piece of work that leaves us searching craigslist for an old C-band dish.