An Enigma Wrapped In A Riddle Wrapped In A Vintage Radio

September 30, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 5 Comments

Puzzle boxes are great opportunities for hacking. You can start with a box which was originally used for something else. You get to design circuitry and controls which offer a complex puzzle for the players. And you can come up with a spectacular reward for those who solve it. [thomas.meston’s] Dr. Hallard’s Dream Transmission Box, which he created for an original party game, has all those elements.

The box was a broken 1948 National NC-33 Ham Radio purchased on eBay after a number of failed bids. Most of it was removed except for the speaker. The electronics is Arduino based, so most of the smarts are in the form of code. Potentiometers and a switch provide the mechanism for players to enter codes. And when the correct code is entered, a relay triggers an external smoke machine and turns on a laser which illuminates a party ball, rewarding the victors. And of course, there are also sound effects as well as a recorded message.

We weren’t kidding when we said puzzle boxes make great hacks. Here’s one which ignites fireworks, one made only from discrete components, and a valentine based one which makes your significant other work for their gift.

Maker Faire NY: Developing For The Final Frontier

September 28, 2018 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

The cost of getting a piece of hardware into space is now cheaper than ever, thanks in no small part to the rapid progress that’s been made by commercial launch providers such as SpaceX. In the near future, as more low-cost providers come online, it should get even cheaper. Within a few years, we could be seeing per kilogram costs to low Earth orbit that are 1/10th what they were on the Space Shuttle. To be sure, this is a very exciting time to be in the business of designing and building spacecraft.

But no matter how cheap launches to orbit get, it’ll never be cheaper than simply emailing some source code up to the International Space Station (ISS). With that in mind, there are several programs which offer students the closest thing to booking passage on a Falcon 9: the chance to develop software that can be run aboard the Station. At the 2018 World Maker Faire in New York we got a chance to get up close and personal with functional replicas of the hardware that’s already on orbit, known in space parlance as “ground units”.

On display was a replica of one of the SPHERES free-flying satellites that have been on the ISS since 2006. They are roughly the size of a soccer ball and utilize CO2 thrusters and ultrasonic sensors to move around inside of the Station. Designed by MIT as a way to study spaceflight techniques such as docking and navigation without the expense and risk of using a full scale vehicle, the SPHERES satellites are perhaps the only operational spacecraft to have never been exposed to space itself.

Expansion port for additional hardware.

MIT now runs the annual “Zero Robotics” competition, which tasks middle and high school students with solving a specific challenge using the SPHERES satellites. Competitors run their programs on simulators until the finals, which are conducted using the real hardware on the ISS and live-streamed to schools.

We also saw hardware from “Quest for Space”, which is a company offering curricula for elementary through high school students which include not only the ground units, but training and technical support when and if the school decides to send the code to the matching hardware on the Station. For an additional fee, they will even work with the school to design, launch, and recover a custom hardware experiment.

Their standard hardware is based on off-the-shelf platforms such as Arduino and LEGO Mindstorms EV3, which makes for an easy transition for school’s existing STEM programs. The current hardware in orbit is setup for experiments dealing with heat absorption, humidity, and convection, but “Quest for Space” notes they change out the hardware every two years to provide different experiment opportunities.

Projects such as these, along with previous efforts such as the ArduSat, offer a unique way for the masses to connect with space in ways which would have been unthinkable before the turn of the 21st century. It’s still up for debate if anyone reading Hackaday in 2018 will personally get a chance to slip Earth’s surly bonds, but at least you can rest easy knowing your software bugs can hitch a ride off the planet.

DIY Puff-Suck Interface Aims For Faster Text Input

September 25, 2018 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

Puff and Suck (or Sip and Puff) systems allow people with little to no arm mobility to more easily interact with computers by using a straw-like unit as an input device. [Ana] tells us that the usual way these devices are used to input text involves a screen-based keyboard; a cursor is moved to a letter using some method (joystick, mouse emulator, buttons, or eye tracking) and that letter is selected with a sip or puff into a tube.

[Ana] saw such systems as effective and intuitive to use, but also limited in speed because there’s only so fast that one can select letters one at a time. That led to trying a new method; one that requires a bit more work on the user’s part, but the reward is faster text entry. The Puff-Suck Interface for Fast Text Input turns a hollow plastic disk and a rubber diaphragm into bipolar pressure switch, able to detect three states: suck, puff, and idle. The unit works by having an IR emitter and receiver pair on each side of a diaphragm (one half of which is shown in the image above). When air is blown into or sucked out of the unit, the diaphragm moves and physically blocks one or the other emitter-receiver pair. The resulting signals are interpreted by an attached Arduino.

How does this enable faster text input? By throwing out the usual “screen keyboard” interface and using Morse code, with puffs as dots and sucks as dashes. The project then acts as a kind of Morse code keyboard. It does require skill on the user’s part, but the reward is much faster text entry. The idea got selected as a finalist in the Human-Computer Interface Challenge portion of the 2018 Hackaday Prize!

Morse code may seem like a strange throwback to some, but not only does the bipolar nature of [Ana]’s puff-suck switch closely resemble that of Morse code input paddles, it’s also easy to learn. Morse code is far from dead; we have pages of projects and news showing its involvement in everything from whimsical projects to solving serious communication needs.

DIY Arduino Soldering Iron Hits Version 2.0

September 22, 2018 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

A few months ago we brought word that [Electronoobs] was working on his own open source alternative to pocket-sized temperature controlled soldering irons like the TS100. Powered by the ATMega328p microcontroller and utilizing a 3D printed enclosure, his version could be built for as little as $15 USD depending on where you sourced your parts from. But by his own admission, the design was held back by the quality of the $5 replacement soldering iron tips he designed it around. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for.

But [Electronoobs] is back with the second version of his DIY portable soldering iron, and this time it’s using the vastly superior HAKKO T12 style tip. As this tip has the thermocouple and heating element in series it involved a fairly extensive redesign of the entire project, but in the end it’s worth it. After all, a soldering iron is really only as good as its tip to begin with.

This version of the iron deletes the MAX6675 used in V1, and replaces it with a LM358 operational amplifier to read the thermocouple in the T12 tip. [Electronoobs] then used an external thermocouple to compare the LM358’s output to the actual temperature at the tip. With this data he created a function which will return tip temperature from the analog voltage.

While the physical and electrical elements of the tip changed substantially, a lot of the design is still the same from the first version. In addition to the ATMega328p microcontroller, version 2.0 of the iron still uses the same 128×32 I2C OLED display, MOSFET, and 5V buck converter from the original iron. That said, [Electronoobs] is already considering a third revision that will make the iron even smaller by replacing the MOSFET and buck converter. It might be best to consider this an intermediate step before the DIY iron takes on its final form, which we’re very interested in seeing.

The first version of the DIY Arduino soldering iron garnered quite a bit of attention, so it seems there’s a decent number of you out there who aren’t content with just plunking down the cash for the TS100.

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Building A Pocket Sized Arduino Oscilloscope

September 21, 2018 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

There’s little question that an oscilloscope is pretty much a must-have piece of equipment for the electronics hacker. It’s a critical piece of gear for reverse engineering devices and protocols, and luckily for us they’re as cheap as they’ve ever been. Even a fairly feature rich four channel scope such as the Rigol DS1054Z only costs about as much as a mid-range smartphone. But if that’s still a little too rich for your taste, and you’re willing to skimp on the features a bit, you can get a functional digital oscilloscope for little more than pocket change.

While there are a number of very cheap pocket digital storage oscilloscopes (DSOs) on the market, [Peter Balch] decided he’d rather spin up his own version using off-the-shelf components. Not only was it an excuse to deep dive on some interesting engineering challenges, but it ended up bringing the price even lower than turn-key models. Consisting of little more than an Arduino Nano and a OLED display, the cost comes out to less than $10 USD for a decent DSO that’s about the size of a matchbox.

But not a great one. [Peter] is very upfront about the limitations of this DIY pocket scope: it can’t hit very high sample rates, and the display isn’t really big enough to convey anything more than the basics. But if you’re doing some quick and dirty diagnostics in the field, that might be all you need. Especially since there’s a good chance you can build the thing out of parts from the junk bin.

Even if you’re not looking to build your own version of the Arduino-powered scope [Peter] describes, his write-up is still full of fascinating details and theory. He explains how his software approach is to disable all interrupts, and put the microcontroller into a tight polling loop to read data from the ADC as quickly as possible. It took some experimentation to find the proper prescaler value for the Atmega’s 16MHz clock, but in the end found he could get a usable (if somewhat noisy) output with a 1uS sample rate.

Unfortunately, the Arduino’s ADC leaves something to be desired in terms of input range. But with the addition of an LM358 dual op-amp, the Arduino scope gains some amplification so it can pick up signals down into the mV range. For completion’s sake, [Peter] included some useful features in the device’s firmware, such as a frequency counter, square wave signal source, and even a voltmeter. With the addition of a 3D printed case, this little gadget could be very handy to have in your mobile tool kit.

If you’d rather go the commercial route, Hackaday’s very own [Jenny List] has been reviewing a number of very affordable models such as the DSO Nano 3 and the JYE Tech DSO150 build-it-yourself kit.

[Thanks to BaldPower for the tip.]

Easy GUI Front Ends For Arduino, Rasberry Pi, And More With MyOpenLab

September 21, 2018 by Al Williams 24 Comments

If you want to integrate a nice graphical interface with a microcontroller or single-board computer for a useful piece of custom equipment, how will you go about it? MyOpenLab is a platform that makes it easy to design virtual interfaces your electronic builds. If you want controls and readouts for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Android, or anything with a serial port, this is worth a try.

MyOpenLab reminds me of LabView. Not so much modern LabView with all of its add-ons and extras, but LabView back when it did just a few things but did them really well. The open source MyOpenLab project has been around for a while. The website and documentation are not in English, which may have kept some people from giving it a try, but the software itself is available in German, English, and Spanish. I took the plunge and found the language barrier didn’t cause me trouble.

As an example of what you can do, image you want to build a custom bench tool. You build virtual device (they call it a “VirtualMachine”) that uses your computer as the control panel and readout, and your electronic project as the physical interface. In myOpenLab your device will consist of two parts: a diagram and a front panel. Some things only live on the diagram, like a timer or a connection to an Arduino. But some things live on both like switches, LEDs, graphs, and so on. You can connect all the little boxes together to build up applications. They can stand alone, but the power comes in being able to connect to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi (or a few other options) for I/O.

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Golf Practice Made Easy With Robotics

September 20, 2018 by Al Williams 11 Comments

When you think of sports, you usually think of something that takes a lot of physical effort. Golf is a bit different. Sure, you can get some walking in if you don’t take a cart. But mostly golfing is about coordination and skill and less about physical exertion. Until you want to practice driving. You hit a bucket of balls and then you have to go walk around and pick them up. Unless you have help, of course. In particular, you can delegate the task to a robot.

The robot that [webzuweb] built looks a little like a plywood robot vacuum. However, instead of suction, it uses some plywood disks to lift the balls and deposit them in a hopper. The electronics consist of an Arduino and an Orange Pi Lite. A GPS tells the robot where it is and it develops a search pattern based on its location.

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