A Two Tapes Turing Machine

February 23, 2018 by Jenny List 6 Comments

Though as with so many independent inventors the origins of computing can be said to have been arrived at through the work of many people, Alan Turing is certainly one of the foundational figures in computer science. His Turing machine was a thought-experiment computing device in which a program performs operations upon symbols printed on an infinite strip of tape, and can in theory calculate anything that any computer can.

In practice, we do not use Turing machines as our everyday computing platforms. A machine designed as an academic abstract exercise is not designed for efficiency. But that won’t stop Hackaday, and to prove that point [Olivier Bailleux] has done just that using readily available electronic components. His twin-tape Turing machine is presented on a large PCB, and is shown in the video below the break computing the first few numbers of the Fibonacci sequence.

The schematic is available as a PDF, and mostly comprises of 74-series logic chips with the tape contents being displayed as two rows of LEDs. The program is expressed as a pluggable diode matrix, but in a particularly neat manner he has used LEDs instead of traditional diodes, allowing us to see each instruction as it is accessed. The whole is a fascinating item for anyone wishing to learn about Turing machines, though we wish [Olivier] had given us a little more information in his write-up.

That fascination with Turing machines has manifested itself in numerous builds here over the years. Just a small selection are one using 3D printing, another using Lego, and a third using ball bearings. And of course, if you’d like instant gratification, take a look at the one Google put in one of their doodles for Turing’s 100th anniversary.

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A Jukebox For The 21st-Century Kit Blends Raspberry Pi, Sonos, QR Codes

February 19, 2018 by James Hobson 17 Comments

When [Chris Campbell]’s children wanted to play an album in the background over dinner, switching the outputs on his family’s Sonos sound system was perhaps too involved for their budding mastery of technology. This got him thinking about using kid-friendly inputs so they could explore his music collection. Blending QR codes, some LEGO, and a bit of arts and crafts, a kid-friendly QR code reader media controller comes out!

Working with a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and a cheap camera, [Campbell] whipped up some code to handle producing and reading the QR codes — though he’s running the media server on another computer to maintain fast response times. Once [Campbell] had his QR codes, he printed them out and got his kids involved in cutting and gluing the double-sided cards. Additional cards access different functions — starting a playlist queue, switching output channels, and full album playback, among others. Cue spontaneous dance-parties!

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Printed It: Do More With Lockable Ball And Socket Helping Hands

February 8, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 28 Comments

In one hand you hold the soldering iron, in the other the solder, and in two more hands the parts you’re trying to solder together. Clearly this is a case where helping hands could be useful.

Luckily helping hands are easy to make, coolant hoses will do the job at under $10. Attach alligator clips to one end, mount them on some sort of base, and you’re done. Alternatively, you can steal the legs from an “octopus” tripod normally used for cell phones. So why would you 3D print them?

One reason is to take advantage of standardized, open source creativity. Anyone can share a model of their design for all to use as is, or to modify for their needs. A case in point is the ball and socket model which I downloaded for a helping hand. I then drew up and printed a magnifying glass holder with a matching socket, made a variation of the ball and socket joint, and came up with a magnetic holder with matching ball. Let’s takea look at what worked well and what didn’t.

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Hackaday Links: January 28, 2018

January 28, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

In case you haven’t heard, we have a 3D printing contest going on right now. It’s the Repairs You Can Print Contest. The idea is simple: show off how you repaired something with a 3D printer. Prizes include $100 in Tindie credit, and as a special prize for students and organizations (think hackerspaces), we’re giving away a few Prusa i3 MK3 printers.

[Drygol] has made a name for himself repairing various ‘home’ computers over the years, and this time he’s back showing off the mods and refurbishments he’s made to a pile of Amiga 500s. This time, he’s installing some new RAM chips, fixing some Guru Meditations by fiddling with the pins on a PLCC, adding a built-in modulator, installing a dual Kickstart ROM, and installing a Gotek floppy adapter. It’s awesome work that puts all the modern conveniences into this classic computer.

Here’s an FPGA IoT Controller. It’s a Cyclone IV and a WiFi module stuffed into something resembling an Arduino Mega. Here’s the question: what is this for? There are two reasons you would use an FPGA, either doing something really fast, or doing something so weird normal microcontrollers just won’t cut it. I don’t know if there is any application of IoT that overlaps with FPGAs. Can you think of something? I can’t.

Tide pods are flammable.

You know what’s cool? Sparklecon. It’s a party filled with a hundred pounds of LEGO, a computer recycling company, a plasmatorium, and a hackerspace, tucked away in an industrial park in Fullerton, California. It’s completely chill, and a party for our type of people — those who like bonfires, hammer Jenga, beer, and disassembling fluorescent lamps for high voltage transformers.

A few shoutouts for Sparklecon. The 23b Hackerspace is, I guess, the main host here, or at least the anchor. Across the alley is NUCC, the National Upcycled Computing Collective. They’re a nonprofit that takes old servers and such, refurbishes them, and connects them to projects like Folding@Home and SETI@Home. This actually performs a service for scientists, because every moron is mining Bitcoin and Etherium now, vastly reducing the computational capabilities of these distributed computing projects. Thanks, OSH Park, for buying every kind of specialty pizza at Pizza Hut. I would highly encourage everyone to go to Sparklecon next year. This is the fifth year, and it’s getting bigger and better every time.

Pi Weather Lamp Puts Lava Lamps To Shame

January 14, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 15 Comments

Representing the weather on an LED lamp in a manner that’s easy to interpret can be difficult, but [Gosse Adema]’s weather/matrix lamp makes it not only obvious what the weather is but also offers a very attractive display. For rain, drops of light move downward, and for wind, sideways. The temperature is shown using a range of colors from red to blue, and since he is situated in the Netherlands he needed snow, which he shows as white. A rainy, windy day has lights moving both down and sideways with temperature information as the background.

To implement it he mounted LED strips inside a 3D printed cylinder with reflectors for each LED, all of which fitted into a glass cylinder taken from another lamp purchased online. The brains of it is a Raspberry Pi Zero W housed in the bottom along with a fan. Both the LEDs and the fan are controlled by the Pi. He took a lot of care with power management, first calculating the current that the LEDs would draw, and then writing Python code to limit that draw. However upon measurement, the current draw was much lower than expected and so he resized the power supply appropriately. He also took care to correctly size the wires and properly distribute the power with a specially made power distribution board. Overall, we really like the thorough job he’s done.

But then again, what’s not to like about [Gosse]’s projects. In the area of lighting, he’s dazzled us with WiFi controlled Christmas tree ornaments, but he’s also delighted us with a Prusa i3 based LEGO 3D printer on which he printed LEGO parts and then made a special extruder for printing chocolate.

Digital Mouse Trap

January 11, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 12 Comments

Plenty of PC games rely on the mouse for input, and browser games are no exception. Unfortunately though, this isn’t always the most intuitive controller. [Nathan Ramanathan] combined a couple hacks to get the controller he wanted for playing browser games like Agar and Slither. No rodents were harmed in this project.

The games he wanted to dominate were top-down view so there was no need to move the mouse far from the center of the screen. For a more intuitive interface, a Wii nunchuck with its integrated joystick was selected. Nunchucks were notoriously hackable. An Arduino converted the nunchuck’s data into mouse movements. Inside the computer, Autohotkey kept the mouse pointer reined in where it was useful. Autohotkey was a scripting tool for executing keyboard and mouse macros.

The result was a joystick which controlled these browser games exactly the way you would expect a joystick to control a game. Mouse functionality, including standard and fast scrolling, was an added bonus so games like Minecraft aren’t left behind. The ergonomics of the nunchuck make us wonder why it hasn’t been seen in more wearable hacks.

Custom game controllers are no stranger to Hackaday readers. We’ve seen them built from LEGO blocks, automobiles, and even a decorative rug.

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Great People And Culture At 34th Chaos Communication Congress

January 2, 2018 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

If you’ve been to a Chaos Communication Congress, you know the feeling — the strange realization after it’s all over that you’re back in the “real world”. It’s somehow alienating and unfriendly in comparison to being surrounded by computer freaks, artists, hackers, activists, coders, and other like-minded individuals over the four days of the Congress. A hand-written poster by the podcasting center read “Endlich, normale Leute” — “At last, normal people” — which is irony piled on irony but the sentiment is still right for certain strange values of “normal”. Normal hackers? You’d probably fit right in.

We cover a lot of the talks from the Congress, because they’re first-class and because you can play along at home, but the real soul of the Congress is people getting together, making something temporary and crazy, talking over their common plans, learning new things directly from one-another, and simply having fun. Here’s our chance to give you a little of the other side of the Congress.
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