Teardown: Nabaztag

May 26, 2020 by Jenny List 27 Comments

In 2020 there is nothing novel or exciting about an online device. Even the most capable models are designed to be unobrusive pucks and smart speakers; their function lies in what they do rather than in how they look. In 2005, an Internet connected device was a rare curiosity, a daring symbol of a new age: the “Internet of Things”!

Our fridges were going to suggest recipes based upon their contents, and very few people had yet thought of the implications of an always-on connected appliance harvesting your data on behalf of a global corporation. Into this arena stepped the Nabaztag (from the Armenian for “rabbit”), an information appliance in the form of a stylised French plastic rabbit that could deliver voice alerts, and indicate status alerts by flashing lights and moving its ears.

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Ultra-Cheap Microcontroller Powers Addressable 7-segment Display

May 16, 2020 by Jenny List 35 Comments

Since their being revealed to our community over a year ago, the various ultra-cheap microcontrollers in the sub-ten-cent price range have attracted a lot of interest but not so many projects. Their slightly annoying programming and PIC12-derived architectures present a barrier not mitigated by their price, when picking up an Atmel or other processor represents a much easier choice. That’s not to say that they aren’t slowly making an appearance though, and a cracking example comes from [Tim], who’s used a Padauk microcontroller to make an addressable 7-segment display. If you’re used to addressable multi-colour LEDs, this extends the idea into the world of numerical information.

The result is a PCB little bigger than the 7-segment display it serves, with interlocking 0.1″ pin connectors allowing daisy-chaining of modules. The extreme low cost of the parts makes it an attractive solution. Software wise it’s driven in a similar manner to addressable LEDs, and he goes into significant detail on its protocol. The firmware can be found in a GitHub repository. He directs readers to the Easy PDK programmer and the Small Device C compiler, which should be of interest to anyone tempted by these processors.

A Homebrew Weller RT Soldering Station

January 6, 2020 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

Like a number of hackers before him, [MarcelMG] was impressed with Weller’s RT soldering iron tips, but considerably less enthused about the high purchase price on the station they’re designed to go into. Inspired by similar projects, he decided to try his hand at building his own soldering station which reaps the benefits of these active tips without the sticker shock.

The station’s user interface was kept intentionally simple, with little more than a four digit LED display to show the temperature and a rotary encoder to set it. The display alternates between the current temperature and the set temperature every few seconds while the knob is being turned, and if you push it in, the set temperature will be saved as the default for next time.

[MarcelMG] also included a feature that drops the iron’s temperature when it’s sitting in the holder, reducing tip wear and energy consumption. He originally planned on using a Hall effect sensor to detect when the iron was holstered without needing to physically interface with it, but in the end he realized the easiest approach was to simply connect one of the input pins on the microcontroller to the metal holder. Since the tip is grounded, he could easily detect if it was in place with a couple lines of code.

Speaking of which, the station is powered by an ATtiny24A with firmware written in C using the Atmel Studio IDE. [MarcelMG] mentions that the limited storage on the 24A was a bit of a challenge to work around, and suggests that anyone looking to follow in his footsteps uses something with a bit more flash under the hood. The LED display is a very common TM1637 type, the rotary encoder was salvaged from a radio, and the power supply was from an old laptop. All told, this looks like a very economical build.

Depending on your needs, a DIY soldering station can either have features to rival the commercial models or be exceedingly simplistic. In either case, the advent of low-voltage irons and active tips have made self-built soldering stations much more approachable. Attempts without the use of these modern niceties tended to be somewhat less glamorous.

Linux Fu: Stupid SSH Tricks

December 17, 2019 by Al Williams 52 Comments

If you connect to remote computers over the Internet, it is a pretty good chance you use some form of SSH or secure shell. On Linux or Unix you’ll use the ssh command. Same goes for Linux-like environments on Windows like Cygwin or WSL. For native Windows, you might be using Putty. In its simplest form, ssh is just a terminal program that talks to a server using an encrypted connection. We think it is very hard to eavesdrop on anyone communicating with a remote computer via ssh.

There are several tricks for using ssh — some are pretty straightforward and some are things you might not think of as being in the domain of a terminal program. You probably know that ssh can copy files securely, and there are easy and hard ways to set up logging in with no password.

However, you can also mount a remote filesystem via ssh (actually, there are several ways to do that). You can use ssh to securely browse the web in your favorite browser, or even use it to tunnel specific traffic by port or even use it as a makeshift VPN. In fact, there’s so much ground to cover that this won’t be the last Linux Fu to talk about ssh. But enough setup, let’s get to the tricks.

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Soldering Your Own Soldering Iron

October 6, 2019 by Sharon Lin 14 Comments

A device that even DIY enthusiasts don’t usually think to DIY is the humble soldering iron. Yet, that’s exactly what one Hackaday.io user did by building a USB-powered soldering pen with better performance than a $5 Chinese soldering pen.

The project draws inspiration from another Weller RT tip-based soldering pen by [vlk], although this project has a simpler display than an OLED. Slovakia-based maker [bobricius] was inspired by the DiXi ATSAMD11C14-based development board. The project uses the same 32-bit ATMEL ARM microcontroller with a USB bootloader, which makes updating the firmware a lot easier.

Two buttons control the heat (+/-) and the jack for the Weller RT soldering tip controls the power out with PWM. For the display, 20 Charlieplexed 3014 LEDs are used to show the temperature from 0-399. The last missing LED is left out since 5 GPIO pins can only drive 20 LEDs.

Assuming that the main heating controls stay the same as [vlk]’s project, the pen uses a current sensor and heating controller for PID control of a heating module, which connects to the SMT connector for the Weller RT soldering iron tip. The temperature sensor uses a an op-amp for amplification of the signal from a type K thermocouple.

While there aren’t currently GERBER files for the PCB yet, the project is based on the open-source OLED display soldering pen project by [vlk], whose schematic for the device is published.

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Hackaday Celebrates 15 Years And Oh How The Hardware Has Changed

September 5, 2019 by Mike Szczys 56 Comments

Today marks exactly 15 years since Hackaday began featuring one Hack a Day, and we’ve haven’t missed a day since. Over 5,477 days we’ve published 34,057 articles, and the Hackaday community has logged 903,114 comments. It’s an amazing body of work from our writers and editors, a humbling level of involvement from our readers, and an absolutely incredible contribution to open hardware by the project creators who have shared details of their work and given us all something to talk about and to strive for.

What began as a blog is now a global virtual hackerspace. That first 105-word article has grown far beyond project features to include spectacular long-form original content. From our community of readers has grown Hackaday.io, launched in 2014 you’ll now find over 30,000 projects published by 350,000 members. The same year the Hackaday Prize was founded as a global engineering initiative seeking to promote open hardware, offering big prizes for big ideas (and the willingness to share them). Our virtual connections were also given the chance to come alive through the Hackaday Superconference, Hackaday Belgrade, numerous Hackaday Unconferences, and meetups all over the world.

All of this melts together into a huge support structure for anyone who wants to float an interesting idea with a proof of concept where “why” is the wrong question. Together we challenge the limits of what things are meant to do, and collectively we filter through the best ideas and hold them high as building blocks for the next iteration. The Hackaday community is the common link in the collective brain, a validation point for perpetuating great ideas of old, and cataloging the ones of new.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the last 15 years of Hackaday is how much the technological landscape has changed. Hackaday is still around because all of us have actively changed along with it — always looking for that cutting edge where the clever misuse of something becomes the base for the next transformative change. So we thought we’d take a look back 15 years in tech. Let’s dig into a time when there were no modules for electronics, you couldn’t just whip up a plastic part in an afternoon, designing your own silicon was unheard of, and your parts distributor was the horde of broken electronics in your back room.

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