MoCA Networking Is A Niche Solution For Coax Lovers

November 3, 2022 by 63 Comments

When it comes to networking these days, the vast majority of our devices are connected wirelessly. Beyond that, we’re all familiar with the Cat 5 and Cat 6 cables that form the high-capacity Ethernet networks in our homes, schools, and offices.

It’s only if you go back to the very dawn of Ethernet that coaxial cables are relevant… right? Wrong! MoCA networking is all about coaxial cables, designed to hook up devices over cable TV infrastructure!

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End Of An Era, As LEGO To Discontinue Mindstorms

November 3, 2022 by 46 Comments

When there are so many single board computers and other products aimed at providing children with the means to learn about programming and other skills, it is easy to forget at time before the Arduino or the Raspberry Pi and their imitators, when a computer was very much an expensive closed box.

Into this late-’90s vacuum left in the wake of the 8-bit home computer revolution came LEGO’s Mindstorms kits, a box of interlocking goodies with a special programmable brick, which gave kids the chance to make free-form computerized robotic projects all of their own. The recent news that after 24 years the company will discontinue the Mindstorms range at the end of the year thus feels like the end of an era to anyone who has ridden the accessible microcontroller train since then.

What became Mindstorms has its roots in the MIT Media Lab’s Programmable Brick project, a series of chunky LEGO bricks with microcontrollers and the Mindstorms LEGO brick contacts for motors and sensors. Their Logo programming language implementation was eschewed by LEGO in favor of a graphical system on a host computer, and the Mindstorms kit was born. The brand has since been used on a series of iterations of the controller, and a range of different robotics kits.

In 1998, a home computer had morphed from something programmable in BASIC to a machine that ran Windows and Microsoft Office. Boards such as Parallax’s BASIC Stamp were available but expensive, and didn’t come with anything to control. The Mindstorms kit was revolutionary then in offering an accessible fully programmable microcontroller in a toy, along with a full set of LEGO including motors and sensors to use with it.

We’re guessing Mindstorms has been seen off by better and cheaper single board computers here in 2022, but that doesn’t take away its special place in providing ’90s kids with their first chance to make a proper robot their way. The kits have found their place here at Hackaday, but perhaps most of the projects we’ve featured using them being a few years old now underlines why they are to meet their end. So long Mindstorms, you won’t be forgotten!

Header image: Mairi, (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Heirloom Knife Will Carve Pumpkins For Years To Come

November 3, 2022 by 6 Comments

Halloween may be behind us, but that just means that we’ve reached the best time to buy pumpkins. After all, it’s still fall, and there are pies to be made and tables to be decorated. Why should carved-up pumpkins be restricted to spooky season?

The only problem is that it’s 2022, and we’re still expected to use those terrible little serrated knives to carve our pumpkins. Those orange-handled garbage ‘knives’ are hardly suited to cut the lid, much less carve any of the intricate designs that come in the little booklet. So what’s a pumpkin-carving enthusiast to do? If you’re [XYZ Create], you make your own out of walnut, maple, and a gently-used jigsaw blade that’s still way sharp enough to tear through pumpkin flesh.

[XYZ Create] started with a nice chunk of walnut, which he split lengthwise in order to insert the blade, which sits in a cavity within a thin piece of maple. Once [XYZ Create] had the handle ready to go, he inserted the jigsaw blade and epoxied the sandwich together. After sanding down the edges to make a comfortable grip, he finished off the build by rubbing a bit of carving board wax into the handle. Check out the build video after the break.

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Roll The Radioactive Dice For Truly Random D&D Play

November 2, 2022 by 22 Comments

When you have a bunch of people gathered around a table for a “Dungeons & Dragons” session, you have to expect that things are not always going to go smoothly. After all, people who willingly create and immerse themselves in an alternate reality where one bad roll of the dice can lead to the virtual death of a character they’ve spent months or years with can be traumatic. And with that trauma comes the search for the guilty — it’s the dice! It’s always the dice!

Eliminating that excuse, or at least making it statistically implausible, is the idea behind this radioactively random dice roller. It comes to us from [Science Shack] and uses radioactive decay to generate truly random numbers, as opposed to the pseudorandom number generators baked into most microcontrollers. The design is based on [AlphaPhoenix]’s muon-powered RNG, but with a significant twist: rather than depending on background radiation, [Science Shack] brought the power of uranium to the party.

They obtained a sample of autunite, a weird-looking phosphate mineral that contains a decent amount of uranium, perfect for stimulating the Geiger counter built into the dice roller. Autunite also has the advantage of looking very cool under UV light, taking on a ghostly “fuel rod glow,” in the [Homer Simpson] sense. The decay-powered RNG at the heart of this build is used to simulate throws of every standard D&D die, from a D4 to a D100. The laser-cut hardboard case holds all the controls and displays, and also has some strategically placed openings to gaze upon its glowing guts.

We really like the design, but we have to quibble with the handling of the uranium ore; true, the specific activity of autunite is probably pretty low, but it seems like at least some gloves would have been in order.

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Showing a car dash screen with options menu, showing a "Steering" entry and a bunch of options one can change, i.e. Normal, Sport, offroad, Eco etc.

Your Car Has Driving Profiles – Here’s How To Change Them

November 2, 2022 by 24 Comments

Just like mobile phones of yesteryear, modern cars have profiles. They aren’t responsible for the sounds your car produces, however, as much as they change how your car behaves – for instance, they can make your engine more aggressive or tweak your steering resistance. On MQB platform cars, the “Gateway” module is responsible for these, and it’s traditionally been a black box with a few user-exposed profiles – not as much anymore, thanks to the work of [Jille]. They own a Volkswagen hybrid car, and had fun changing driving modes on it – so naturally, they decided to reverse-engineer the configuration files responsible.

Now, after two years of experimentation, tweaking values and observing changes, there’s quite some sense made of the configuration binaries. You can currently edit these binaries, also referred to as datasets, in a hex editor – there’s profiles for the 010 hex editor that make sense of the data you load, and explanation of the checksums involved. With this, you are no longer limited by profiles the manufacturer composed – if a slightly different driving combination of parameters makes more sense to you, you can recombine them and have your own profile, unlock modes that the manufacturer decided to lock out for non-premium cars, and even fix some glaring oversights in factory modes.

This is pretty empowering, and far from ECU modifications that introduce way more fundamental changes to how your car operates – the parameters being changed are within the range of what the manufacturer has implemented. The smarter our cars become, the more there is for us hackers to tweak, and even in a head unit, you can find things to meaningfully improve given some reverse-engineering smarts.

Simple Wi-Fi Cat Door Solves The Extra Critter Problem, And Nothing More

November 2, 2022 by 11 Comments

Anyone with an outdoor cat in their life knows their propensity for bringing home offerings, in the form of critters in various stages of the process of becoming ex-critters. And anyone with a hacker in their life knows that there’s a tendency to throw technology at this problem. But sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best.

Take this simple stepper-powered cat door lock. For [Jason Winfield], the essential problem with his outdoor cat’s late-night demands for reentry was having to manually unlock the cat door after a quick visual check that no midnight snacks were along for the ride. Such activity tends to make it hard to get back to sleep. One natural reaction to this would be to completely automate the process with machine learning to recognize the offering and deny entry; we’ve seen exactly that before, after all. But recognizing that the disruptive part was the getting up to check bit, [Jason] just whipped up a simple stepper-driven lock with an ESP8266 microcontroller. With a 3D-printed case and a battery pack, and a nearby Wi-Fi camera, the lock denies entry to the cat until he gets a look at it, at which point he simply hits the lock’s webpage to unlock the door. The video below would show the lock in action, except the cat buggered off once it got a whiff of the doings. Cat’s gonna cat.

What we appreciate about this project is its simplicity. It solves the problem with the minimum feature set, which is something we see too little of sometimes. It’s also got some nice ideas, like the non-captive bolt that can be removed to unlock the door if the battery dies. Smart thinking, [Jason], and sweet dreams.

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Breakers for the system on a DIN rail, with markings like 48V and 24V and 12V and so on on the bottom, and two hefty devices of some kind on the bottom, probably MPTT controllers, with hefty wires running from them.

Low-Voltage DC Network Build Incited By Solar Panels

November 2, 2022 by 51 Comments

Nowadays, some people in Europe worry about energy prices climbing, and even if all the related problems disappear overnight, we’ll no doubt be seeing some amounts of price increase. As a hacker, you’re in a good position to evaluate the energy consuming devices at your home, and maybe even do something about them. Well, [Peter] put some solar panels on his roof, but couldn’t quite figure out a decent way to legally tie them into the public grid or at least his flat’s 220V network. Naturally, a good solution was to create an independent low-voltage DC network in parallel and put a bunch of devices on it instead!

He went with 48V, since it’s a voltage that’s high enough to be efficient, easy to get equipment like DC-DCs for, safe when it comes to legal matters concerned, and overall compatible with his solar panel setup. Since then, he’s been putting devices like laptops, chargers and lamps onto the DC rail instead of having them be plugged in, and his home infrastructure, which includes a rack full of Raspberry Pi boards, has been quite content running 24/7 from the 48V rail. There’s a backup PSU from regular AC in case of overcast weather, and in case of grid power failures, two hefty LiFePO4 accumulators will run all the 48V-connected appliances for up to two and a half days.

The setup has produced and consumed 115kWh within the first two months – a hefty contribution to a hacker’s energy independence project, and there’s enough specifics in the blog post for all your inspiration needs. This project is a reminder that low-voltage DC network projects are a decent choice on a local scale – we’ve seen quite viable proof-of-concept projects done at hackercamps, but you can just build a small DC UPS if you’re only looking to dip your feet in. Perhaps, soon we’ll figure out a wall socket for such networks, too.