Demystifying Camcorder CRT Viewfinders

November 14, 2012 by 58 Comments

Every smartphone (and most dumb phones) has a video camera built into it these days. Some of them are even capable of recording respectable HD video. So we’d bet that the decades old camcorder you’ve got kicking around isn’t getting any use at all anymore. [John] wants to encourage you to hack that hardware. He published a post showing just how easy it is to salvage and use a camcorder CRT.

The gist is that you simply need to hook up power and feed it video. The board that is attached to the CRT has its own voltage hardware to drive the tube. He demonstrates a 9V battery as a power supply, but also mentions that it should be pretty easy to power the thing from a USB port. As for video, all it takes is a composite signal. Of course you’ve got to determine the pinout for your particular CRT module. The method he chose was to use a continuity tester to find the path from a capacitor’s negative leg to the appropriate pin header. Next he used a bench supply to inject a current-limited low voltage until he saw response when probing the pins. Finding the composite-in is a similar trial and error process.

So what can you use this for? Why not make it the display for a simple video game?

A Wearable Pipboy 3000

November 14, 2012 by 20 Comments

[Zachariah Perry] builds a lot of replica props, and judging from the first few offerings on his blog he’s quite good at it. We enjoyed looking in on the Captain America shield and Zelda treasure chest (complete with music, lights, and floating heart container). But his most recent offering is the wearable and (kind of) working Pipboy 3000 from the Fallout series.

From his description in the video after the break it sounds like the case itself came as a promotional item that was part of a special edition of the game. He’s done a lot to make it functional though. The first thing to notice is the screen. It’s domed like the surface of a CRT, but there’s obviously not enough room for that kind of thing. The dome is made from the lens taken out of a slide viewer. It sits atop the screen of a digital picture frame. [Zachariah] loaded still images from the game into the frame’s memory, routing its buttons to those on the Pipboy. He also added a 12 position rotary switch which toggles between the lights at the bottom of the screen.

A little over a year ago we saw a more or less fully functional Pipboy. But that included so many added parts it was no longer wearable.

Continue reading “A Wearable Pipboy 3000” →

Mesh Networking With Multiple Raspberry Pi Boards

November 14, 2012 by 19 Comments

Since he’s got several Raspberry Pi boards on hand [Eric Erfanian] decided to see what he could pull off using the robust networking tools present in every Linux installation. His four-part series takes you from loading an image on the SD cards to building a mesh network from RPi boards and WiFi dongles. He didn’t include a list of links to each article in his post. If you’re interested in all four parts we’ve listed them after the break.

He says that getting the mesh network up and running is easiest if none of the boards are using an Ethernet connection. He used the Babel package to handle the adhoc routing since no device is really in charge of the network. Each of the boards has a unique IP manually assigned to it before joining. All of this work is done in part 3 of the guide. The link above takes you to part 4 in which [Eric] adds an Internet bridge using one of the RPi boards which shares the connection with the rest of the mesh network.

If the power of this type of networking is of interest you should check out this home automation system that takes advantage of it.

Continue reading “Mesh Networking With Multiple Raspberry Pi Boards” →

Put Your Dev Board To Work As A Demoscene Display

November 14, 2012 by 4 Comments

If you’re looking for a way to push your comfort zone with that slick new microcontroller you’ve been working with we think [Morgan Gangwere] has the answer. He took his chipKit development board and used it as a demoscene platform.

Demoscene refers to audio and visual demos written to squeeze as much entertainment out of a given platform as possible. We’ve seen demos for a lot of different platforms; for instance, here’s a Propeller chip demo. But this use of the onboard OLED screen brings a smile to our faces. With well under 100 lines of code [Morgan] implemented several different video effects (the music heard in the clip after the break is not being produced by the board). There is a star field which serves as the background. Over the top of it a scrolling message is displayed following a sine wave shape. The speed at which it scrolls is set by the trimpot, which you can see adjusted about 50 seconds into the clip.

Continue reading “Put Your Dev Board To Work As A Demoscene Display” →

Wristband RFID Unlocks Car Door And Starts Engine

November 14, 2012 by 19 Comments

[João Ribeiro] is an electronics engineer by day, but in his free time he likes to ply his trade on everyday items. Recently he’s been integrating his own microcontroller network to unlock and start his car via RFID. In addition to the joy of pulling apart the car’s interior, he spent time designing his own uC breakout board and developing an RFID reader from a single chip.

He’s working with a 1988 Mercedes that has very little in the way of electronics. It sounds like the stock vehicle didn’t even include a CAN bus so the prelude to the RFID hack had him installing a CAN bus network made up of two microcontrollers. One reads the velocity and RPM while the other displays it on the tachometer. When he began the tag-based entry system he used an RFID reader module for prototyping, but eventually built his own reader around the TRF7960 chip. This included etching his own receiver coil which was mounted in the side-view mirror bracket. To unlock the doors he holds the bracelet up to the mirror and the vehicle lets him in. The video after the break starts with a demonstration of the completed project and moves on to some build videos.

We certainly like the idea of using a bracelet rather than implanting the tag in the meaty part of your hand.

Continue reading “Wristband RFID Unlocks Car Door And Starts Engine” →

Playing Led Zeppelin On A C64

November 14, 2012 by 24 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iikj5EfL770&w=470]

In the C64 demoscene there are a ton of awesome software hacks that push the Commodore 64, the 1MHz 6510-based computer from 1982, to its limits. Most of these C64 demos are very much limited by the hardware inside the C64, but the demoscene is always coming up with new ways of pushing the envelope. [No Quarter] just sent in one of these software hacks that propel the capabilities of the C64 into the realm of absurdity by playing full length songs directly from the floppy drive.

Playing a song on the C64 begins with an Amiga and a Perfect Sound digitizer to convert the digital audio file into a 4-bit sample. Once this sample is transferred over to the C64 where it was manually timed so streaming it off a 1581 disk drive would result in the song playing at the correct pitch. It’s an amazing work of optimization; the audio data is streamed off the disk just as fast as it’s played from memory, an amazing data throughput rate for the ‘ol C64

After the break you can see [No Quarter] playing Led Zeppelin, Bon Jovi, Shania Twain, and Extreme. A very, very cool project and with the addition of a C64 hard drive makes it possible to have a media player for the C64.
Continue reading “Playing Led Zeppelin On A C64” →

Make Dual Pin Header Footprints Into Breadboard Friendly DIP

November 13, 2012 by 28 Comments

[John] wrote in with a solution to a prototyping issue that has vexed us for quite some time. Above you can see the DIP friendly solution for dual-row pin headers which he came up with. With just a bit of easy soldering he now has a breadboard friendly device for prototyping.

He starts by soldering a dual row pin header on the board, then clips off all of the legs on the outside row. The row of legs that remain are then inserted into one side of the trench on his breadboard. The other side of the trench has a single row pin header, and he solders them to the outer row on the breakout board using another single pin header aligned horizontally. This isn’t a 100% convenient solution, as it’s still pretty hard to get your jumper wires in the breadboard on the side covered by the breakout board. But if you plan in advance you can place your wires first, then plug in the development board.

Here [John] is working with TI’s eZ430-RF2500 board. We’d like to go back and remove the dual pin socket we soldered on our eZ430-F2013, replacing it with this style of pins.