Interactive Robot: Project Naughty Ball

May 21, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

A month before the Bay Area Maker Faire, there were ominous predictions the entire faire would be filled with BB-8 droids, the cute astromech ball bot we’ll be seeing more of when The Force Awakens this December. This prediction proved to be premature. There were plenty of R2 units droiding around the faire, but not a single BB-8. Perhaps at the NYC Maker Faire this September.

Regarding ball bots, we did have one friendly rolling companion at Maker Faire this year. It was a project by UC Davis students [Henjiu Kang], [Yi Lu], and [Yunan Song] that rolls around, seeking out whoever is wearing an infrared ankle strap. They team is calling it Project Naughty Ball, but we’re going to call it the first step towards a miniature BB-8 droid.

The design of the Naughty Ball is somewhat ingenious; it’s set up as a two-wheel balancing bot inside a clear plasic sphere. A ton of batteries work well enough as the ballast, stepper motors and machined plastic wheels balance and steer the ball bot, and the structure on the top hemisphere of the ball houses all the interesting electronics.

There is a BeagleBone Black with WiFi adapter, a few motor drivers, an IMU, and a very interesting 3D printed mount that spins the robot’s eyes – infrared cameras that spin around inside the ball and track whoever is wearing that IR transmitting ankle band.

As far as robotics project go, you really can’t do better at Maker Faire than a semi-autonomous ball bot that follows its owner, and the amount of work these guys have put into this project sends it to the next level. You can check out a video description of their project below.

Hackaday BAMF Meetup Reaches Critical Mass And Overflows Awesome

May 20, 2015 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

I love the Hackaday crowd. Despite a long day standing at a booth or crawling the fairgrounds as a spectator, everyone still made it on Saturday night to the 2nd Annual Hackaday BAMF meetup and made it one for the annals of hacker history. Just look at that crowd… I see a couple of Hackaday Prize Judges, a friend I met in Germany (who I actually found out I first met at this same event last year), and many many more great people. I don’t want to spoil the fun so check out the full size over on [Rich Hogben’s] photo log and see how many you can identify.

We started this gathering last year as a come-as-you-are and bring-what-you’re-proud-of after party to Bay Area Maker Fair. We don’t rent out the bar — O’Neil’s Irish Pub in San Mateo — but we had a handshake agreement for drink tickets (thank you to Supplyframe for buying the first round for everyone) with the bartenders. The place feels like the perfect size, and before long we were packed into every available space. The ramp to the restroom area in the back was a gauntlet of conversation — enough room to walk by but you felt like you were interrupting people talking to those across from them.

OSHChip

HeartBeat Boombox

mark-1 Macetech glasses

The amount of hardware on hand was spectacular. Taking pictures of it was tough in the tight quarters. I got a look at the first prototype of the Pebble smart strap. I really enjoyed seeing OSHChip (pictured above) which is an ARM Cortex-M0 chip and BLE rolled into a DIP-16 form factor. [Sophi’s] HeartBeat Boombox was a big hit; it uses the heartrate and blood oxygen sensors seen above to drive a drumbeat. Those blinky glasses should look familiar. [Garrett Mace] and his colleague [Jason] were on hand. These Macetech glasses are from a couple of years back but don’t worry, they were sporting the newest RGB flavor which I’m told will have black solder mask and integrated controller among other tasty goodies.

The Band

One-wire RGB LEDS (literally 1 conductor)

DIY Flex PCB; vinyl cutter and copper tape

Perhaps the best way to tell the success of the night is that there were a lot of friends in the room that I never realized were even there. The next day I met up with [Sarah Petkus] and [Mark Koch] and was surprised to find they had been at the Hackaday meetup and I missed them. The same thing happened when I looked at [Rich’s] album from the night and saw [Trey German] was there too. I wasn’t hiding and I wasn’t stuck in one conversation, it was just that kind of a party that makes the room feel like a TARDIS but somehow the night doesn’t last forever.

It’s hard to imagine BAMF without this Saturday gathering. If you missed it this year, add it to your calendar for next.

Interview With The Creators Of CHIP, A $9 Single-Board Computer

May 19, 2015 by Mike Szczys 125 Comments

Single-board computing is hot on the DIY scene right now and riding that knife edge is C.H.I.P., a project currently in crowd-funding which prices the base unit at just $9. I was happy to run into the crew from Next/Thing Company who developed C.H.I.P. They were happy because, well, the project’s reception has been like a supernova. Right now they’re at about $1.5M of their original $50k goal. We spoke about running Linux on the board, what connectors and pinout headers are available, as well as the various peripheral hardware they have ready for the board.

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Adafruit And The Arduinos At Maker Faire

May 18, 2015 by Elliot Williams 67 Comments

The apparent lull on the Arduino front the last few weeks was just the calm before the storm that is the Bay Area Maker Faire (BAMF). Both companies claiming the Arduino name were there over the weekend, with news and new products in tow. Ironically, you could see from one booth straight over to the other. Small world.

Perhaps the biggest news from Arduino LLC is that hacker-friendly Adafruit is now going to be making officially-licensed boards in the US. Competing with this news, Arduino SRL brought its new boards, including the Yun Mini and ARM-powered Arduino M0. And [Massimo Banzi] and Arduino LLC seem to be taking an end-run around the Arduino SRL trademark by announcing the “Genuino” brand for European production. For all the details, read on!

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The Biggest Day At Hamvention

May 17, 2015 by Gregory L. Charvat 6 Comments

We capped off day-2 of the Hamvention with an unexpected rain shower, and some arcing back in the hotel room. Historically, Saturday is the best attended day of the show. As normally, we spent most of the day outside in the flea market. One of our friends allowed us to use his AN/GRC-9 army surplus radio to check into one of the nets. The radio was powered by hand-crank. Later, we attended a forum on the construction of HF antennas for camping trips, and obtained parts for our project back in the room. More about that later? Overall, a great day.

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Vintage Computers At Maker Faire

May 17, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

It’s no secret that Maker Faire is highly geared toward the younger crowd. This doen’t mean the Faire is completely devoid of the historic; the Bay Area Maker Faire is right in the heart of the beginnings of the computer industry, and a few of the booths are showing off exactly how far computers have come over the last forty years.

[Vince Briel] of Briel Computers has a booth showing off his wares, mostly modern reimaginings of vintage computers. His table is loaded up with replica 1s, a board that’s much smaller but still completely compatible with the Apple I. The MicroKIM made an appearance, but the crown jewel is [Vince]’s Superboard III, a replica of the Ohio Scientific Superboard II. It’s your basic 6502 computer with 32k of RAM, but unlike just about every other modern retrocomputer out there, [Vince] put the keyboard right on the main board.

The switches are Cherry MX, the keys are from WASDkeyboards. [Vince] is actually getting a lot of interest in making modern ASCII keyboards to replace the old and busted boards that came in the home computers of the 70s and 80s. That might be a project [Vince] will release sometime in the future.

The Replica I, fully compatible Apple I replica

A much, much smaller version of the Altair

The Superboard III

MicroKIM

[Jef Raskin], the Swift Card, and the Canon Cat

[Steve Jobs] may have been the father of the Macintosh, but he was, by no means, solely responsible for the Mac. It was a team of people, and when you talk about the UI of the Mac, the first name that should come up is [Jef Raskin].

One of [Jef Raskin]’s finest works was the Swyft Card, an add-on to the Apple II that was basically just a ROM card that had an OS and Forth interpreter on it. The distinguishing feature of the Swyft card was the use of ‘leap’ keys, a simple way to change contexts when using the computer. We’ve seen replicas of the Swyft card before, courtesy of [Mike Willegal] at the Vintage Computing Festival East.

[Dwight Elvey] of the vintage-computer.com forum brought a few extra special items related to [Raskin] and the Canon Cat. The first was a Swyft card installed in an Apple IIe. The second was a prototype Swyft computer, with SERIAL NUMBER 1 printed on a Dymo label and fixed to the case.

The ‘woodie’, as [Dwight] calls it, has two 1.44 MB disk drives, of which half of the disk is actually usable. [Dwight] didn’t take the machine apart, but I’m 99% sure the CRT in it is the exact same tube found in early 9″ Macs.

Also in [Dwight]’s display is a production Swyft computer and a Canon Cat, the final iteration of [Jef Raskin]’s idea of what a text-based computer should be.

The vintage-computer booth also had a few interesting retrocomputers including a Commodore 128D, the Apple made, Bell & Howell branded Apple II, and an Amiga 2000. Right next door was the Computer History Museum, who brought a very kid-friendly storage medium display. Showing a 10-year-old an 8″ disk is fun.

Analog computer from the Computer History Museum. It was display Chua’s Circuit.

A Collection of [Jef Raskin]’s work

Cat Keyboard

Bell & Howell branded Apple II

Leap keys for the Canon Cat

Live Steam… Chugga Chugga

May 16, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

At Maker Faire this weekend. tucked in between a building full of homegrown foodstuffs and a rock polishing booth is the Bay Area Garden Railway Society (BAGRS). They’re running a few live steam locomotives, and they’re beautiful works of engineering and modeling. None of these trains are electric; they all move by boiling water with either coal or butane. It’s a true, proper locomotive running on 45mm gauge track.

[David Cole] of BAGRS gave me the walkthrough of their booth. It’s a simple oval track that took a solid day to level out. There are technically three sets of tracks, two G-scale, and another O scale sharing a rail with a G-scale track. Each and every one of these locomotives is powered by steam produced when water is heated by either coal or butane. Butane is the fuel of choice because of its ease of acquisition, but BAGRS had a few coal-fired locomotives with tiny shovels shoveling anthracite into tiny fireboxes. After loading up with water and getting the firebox nice and hot, these locomotives will cruise around the oval track for about half an hour, with the speed of the locomotive controlled by a servos and RC gear.

Maker Faire isn’t the headline event for BAGRS; in July 2016 they’ll be hosting the National Garden Railway Convention in San Francisco. If you’re local to the Faire, it will be a cool event to check out.