Hackaday Links: April 28, 2019

April 28, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

Lego is releasing a series of Braille bricks. As near as we can tell, these Braille bricks are standard 2 x 4 bricks, with studs corresponding to Braille letters on the top. There are also screen/pad printed legends on top. I don’t mean to be a downer, but why, exactly, is this being created now? Did it really take fifty years for someone to say, ‘hey, if you don’t put some studs on top of a brick, it becomes Braille?’ How is this not already a thing? This isn’t me being facetious — how did it take so long for this to be invented?

KiCon is this weekend, so here’s a tip for everyone in Chicago right now: get a hot dog. Don’t put ketchup on it, or else someone will shoot you.

KiCon and Moogfest in one weekend? Yes, and that means new toys. The Matriarch is Moog’s latest synthy boi and the apparent successor to last year’s Moog Grandmother. The Matriarch is a four-note paraphonic synth that is semi-modular; no, you don’t need patch cables to make noises, but there are ninety-odd patch points for modular fun. It’s two grand, which is getting up there in the synth game. If only Radio Shack were still around and sold Moog synths…

We’re all aware that Russia launches rockets out of Baikonur cosmodrome, and the first stages eventually make their way onto the steppes of Kazakhstan. The locals, few there are, end up recycling these rockets, scrapping them, and sometimes taking space tourists and photojournalist out to the crash site of these boosters. Russia has other spaceports, and now we’re getting pictures of booster crashes from the frozen north. These rockets came from the Plesetsk cosmodrome and fell in the boreal forests near Arkhangelsk where hunters discovered them. Yes, these boosters are carcinogenic, but that’s what you do when a few tons of aluminum and titanium fall in your backyard.

No spoilers, but oh man the after-credits scene in Endgame was hilarious.

Giving An Industrial Push Button USB, Elegantly

April 3, 2019 by Donald Papp 37 Comments

[Glen]’s project sounds perfectly straightforward: have a big industrial-style push button act as a one-key USB keyboard. He could have hacked something together in any number of ways, but instead he decided to create a truly elegant solution. His custom PCB mates to the factory parts perfectly, and the USB cable between the button and the computer even fits through the button enclosure’s lead hole.

It turns out that industrial push buttons have standardized components which can be assembled in an almost LEGO-like manner, with components mixed and matched to provide different switch actions, light indicators, and things of that nature. [Glen] decided to leverage this feature to make his custom PCB (the same design used in his one-key keyboard project) fit just like a factory component. With a 3D printed adapter, the PCB locks in just like any other component, and even lines up with the lead hole in the button’s enclosure for easy connecting of the USB cable.

What does [Glen] use the big button for? Currently he has two applications: one provides a simple, one-button screen lock on a Linux box running a virtual machine at his place of work. It first disengages the keyboard capture of the virtual machine, then engages the screen lock on the host. The other inserts a poop emoji into Microsoft documents. Code and PCB design files for [Glen]’s small keyboards are available on GitHub.

Farming Items With RasPi-Modified Joycons

April 2, 2019 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

The Pokémon games have delighted legions of Nintendo gamers over the years, and show no signs of slowing down any time soon. Despite its popularity, there are certain aspects of the games that are unarguably about simply grinding your way to success. For [Mori Bellamy], this simply wouldn’t do – yet their thirst for gold bottlecaps was insatiable. What to do? Automate it, of course.

The first step was to hack the Joycons from the Nintendo Switch. A DG333A analog switch IC was hooked up to the buttons inside, and controlled by the GPIO pins of a Raspberry PI. The joystick was then controlled with an MCP4725 DAC, allowing the system to fully emulate control inputs to the console.

With the console now under control by the Raspberry Pi, the next step was to add intelligence. Google’s Tesseract OCR platform was combined with a helping of Python code. This allows the script to read dialog boxes from the game, and use this data to determine which buttons to press to farm items.

[Mori] has provided the code on GitHub for others to use, noting that it should be generalizable to other games with a little work. Fundamentally, the underlying hardware could readily be repurposed to other controllers, too. There’s plenty of other ways to automate the drudgery of gaming, even if you have to use a touch screen. Video after the break.

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Raspberry Pi Tracks Humans, Blasts Them With Heat Rays

March 22, 2019 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

Given how long humans have been warming themselves up, you’d think we would have worked out all the kinks by now. But even with central heating, and indeed sometimes because of it, some places we frequent just aren’t that cozy. In such cases, it often pays to heat the person, not the room, but that can be awkward, to say the least.

Hacking polymath [Matthias Wandel] worked out a solution to his cold shop with this target-tracking infrared heater. The heater is one of those radiant deals with the parabolic dish, and as anyone who’s walked past one on demo in Costco knows, they throw a lot of heat in a very narrow beam. [Matthias] leveraged a previous project that he whipped up for offline surveillance as the core of the project. Running on a Raspberry Pi with a camera, the custom software analyzes images and locates motion across the width of a frame. That drives a stepper that swivels a platform for the heater. The video below shows the build and the successful tests; however, fans of [Matthias] should prepare themselves for a shock as he very nearly purchases a lazy susan to serve as the base for the heater rather than building one.

We’re never disappointed by [Matthias]’ videos, and we’re always impressed by his range as a hacker. From DIY power tools to wooden logic circuits to his recent Lego chocolate engraver, he always finds ways to make things interesting.

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Hackaday Podcast 010: XKCD Graphs, Turing Complete Meta Computers, False Finger Printing 3D Printers, And Jargon

March 15, 2019 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys walk through the past week in hackerdom. There’s a new jargon quiz! Do you know what astrictive robotic prehension means? We look at the $50 Ham series, omni-wheeled pen plotting robots, a spectrum of LED hacks, LEGO CNC for chocolate rework, and grinding lenses with a CNC mill. In the “can’t miss” category are fingerprinting 3D Printers, and how NASA designs far beyond the stated life of an engineering project.

Links for all discussed on the show are found below. As always, join in the comments as we’ll be watching those as we work on next week’s episode!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

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It’s Raining Brand-new Commodore 64s

March 12, 2019 by Jenny List 34 Comments

There’s never been a better time to build your own Commodore 64, apparently. Within a day of each other, we got tipped off on three (3!) separate C64 builds from two different hackers.

This has been made possible by a series of disparate projects that have individually recreated a piece of the full machine. Replacement motherboards exist, like the Ultimate 64 and the C64 Reloaded Mk2. New cases can be had courtesy of Pixelwizard. Even new keyboard bases can be had thanks to the Mechboard 64 project.

[Eric Hill] took all these parts and built his own C64 from scratch. And not content with one, he repeated the process and built another.

These two machines serve as demos for the two different motherboard options. Taken together, they serve to demonstrate how many of the vintage Commodore components have been remanufactured by the fan community: with the exception of the keycaps and possibly some of the silicon, all the parts in both machines are new.

Did we just say “keycaps?” This became the pet project of [Perifractic], who discovered that certain Lego Technic pieces had the same cross-shaped slot as the original Commodore 64 keys. After some experimentation, a full set of Lego keycaps was produced. (YouTube, embedded below.) Far from a thrown-together set of random pieces, the sets are available for order with printed tiles with recreation graphics. And this lets you build a C64 using precisely zero parts that came out of a Commodore factory. It’s a testament to the popularity of the world’s best selling computer that it is now once again possible to build one with brand new parts.

If you want to replicate this feat, [Perifractic]’s website is set up to make ordering everything you need easy. Things have certainly come a long way from the first reproduction cases launched on Kickstarter a few years ago.

[Thanks to Keith O for the tip!]

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Sphero RVR’s Quest For A Niche In Introductory Robotics

February 19, 2019 by Roger Cheng 15 Comments

Thanks to internet commerce opening up a global marketplace, it is now easier than ever for a budding roboticist to get started. There are so many robot kits available, across such a wide range of price and sophistication, that deciding which one to buy becomes a challenging project in itself. Is there room for another product in the crowded introductory robotics market? Sphero believes so, and they’ve launched RVR to explore not just workshops and classrooms, but also to see if they can find a market niche.

At the low end of this market, we can go online and buy a super simple chassis – two small wheeled gear motors and a chassis plate of laser-cut acrylic – for pizza money. At the high end, we have robots that cost as much as a car. Sphero’s RVR slots somewhere above Wonder Workshop’s Dash, but below LEGO’s Mindstrom EV3. Products in this range are expected to take care of low-level motion control details, so beginners won’t get bogged down by things like PID tuning before their robot can drive in a straight line. Sphero engineers are certainly capable of hiding such annoying details from beginners, with their experience in consumer robotics.

But a big selling point here is completely opposite from closed-box consumer electronics: RVR is built to be extensible. Not with proprietary accessories & add-on kits like many of its competitors, but with the components we know and love on Hackaday pages: Raspberry Pi, micro:bit, and whatever else willing to communicate with RVR via its UART port and powered by RVR’s on board five volt power supply. Proper care and feeding of a lithium-ion battery is also one of the beginner-unfriendly details taken care of. But RVR isn’t finalized – one of the reason Sphero stated for launching via Kickstarter is to get customer feedback. Certainly the funding goal of $150,000 (easily met in a few hours) was unlikely to be the most important part for a company of Sphero’s size.

We hope RVR will help introduce a new audience to building their own robots. When they’re ready to grow beyond Sphero’s kit, Hackaday is happy to help show the way. If you have a 3D printer, there’s never been a better time to build your own robot. (Zerobot is on one editor’s to-do list.) Those fascinated by electronics can peek under the covers of low-level motor control, and there’s always room to explore high level machine vision and neural networks.

Whatever it takes to get you started, just get started!

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