The Best Of VCF East

April 6, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

Last weekend was the Vintage Computer Festival East in Wall, New Jersey. While this yearly gathering of nerds nerding out on old computers might be a bit too obscure for some, there are always amazing exhibits of actual historical importance. A few Enigma machines showed up, and the rarest Commodore goodies made an appearance. We saw the pre-history of Hackaday and ‘maker’ culture with Southwest Technical Products Corporation, and found out it was probably, possible to build a RepRap in the 80s. You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you came from, and even though the old timers were a bit more grizzled than us the Vintage Computer Festival shows how little things have actually changed.

What was the coolest and weirdest stuff at VCF? What does the Silverball pinball museum look like? Check that out below.

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World Create Day: The Hackaday Event In Your Town

April 5, 2017 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

It’s official, World Create Day is on April 22nd. Get together with hackers in your area and create something! This is best way to meet all the Hackaday readers in your area, and a great excuse to carve out a few hours of your busy life to have fun working on a project.

These are really easy to organize, but we can’t do it without you. Sign up now to host a meetup in your town!

The Hackaday community around the world will meetup and spend time building together on Saturday, April 22nd. If you’re like us you have a long list of projects you want to do ‘some day’, this is the day. Pack up your current build (or grab gear to start a new one), get together with some old and new friends, and hack on your projects with each other.

It’s traditional to block out a bit of time at the end for lightning talks to show off the builds each of you has been working on. Don’t forget to take pictures and post the story of your World Create Day meetup. We enjoyed getting a great look at many of last year’s meetups this way and want to expand the builds we feature on the front page this year.

Meetup Organizers Wanted

Fill out this form to let us know you want to host a meetup.

This is the second year of World Create Day. Last year we saw meetups in 64 cities. Many of those will happen again this year, but we also need you to organize an event in your area. We’ll help you get things set up and put your event up on the big map so others in your area will plan to join in. Do it now, if we get your shipping info early we’ll send you stickers and other swag to hand out at your gathering.

Build Something that Matters

The core of World Create Day is to stop making excuses and just build something. Since you’re already getting together with other people consider forming a team to enter the 2017 Hackaday Prize. Currently we’re in the idea phase: Design Your Concept means tackling a problem and planning a build to solve it. When you get a bunch of creative people together in one place, great ideas begin to flow. Seize the moment by turning that creativity into an entry for the Hackaday Prize and see where it takes you!

How Many Parts In A Triumph Herald Heater?

April 4, 2017 by Jenny List 67 Comments

This Herald is in much better condition than my 12/50 was. Philafrenzy [CC BY-SA 4.0]

What was your first car? Mine was a 1965 Triumph Herald 12/50 in conifer green, and to be frank, it was a bit of a dog.

The Triumph Herald is a small saloon car manufactured between about 1959 and 1971. If you are British your grandparents probably had one, though if you are not a Brit you may have never heard of it. Americans may be familiar with the Triumph Spitfire sports car, a derivative on a shortened version of the same platform. It was an odd car even by the standards of British cars of the 1950s and 1960s. Standard Triumph, the manufacturer, had a problem with their pressing plant being owned by a rival, so had to design a car that used pressings of a smaller size that they could do in-house. Thus the Herald was one of the last British mass-produced cars to have a separate chassis, at a time when all other manufacturers had produced moncoques for years.

My 12/50 was the sporty model, it had the high-lift cam from the Spitfire and a full-length Britax sunroof. It was this sunroof that was its downfall, when I had it around a quarter century of rainwater had leaked in and rotted its rear bodywork. This combined with the engine being spectacularly tired and the Solex carburetor having a penchant for flooding the engine with petrol made it more of a pretty thing to look at than a useful piece of transport. But I loved it, tended it, and when it finally died irreparably I broke it for parts. Since then I’ve had four other Heralds of various different varieties, and the current one, a 1960 Herald 948, I’ve owned since the early 1990s. A piece of advice: never buy version 0 of a car.

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When The Grid Goes Dark

April 3, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 92 Comments

If you lived through the Y2K fiasco, you might remember a lot of hype with almost zero real-world ramifications in the end. As the calendar year flipped from 1999 to 2000 many forecast disastrous software bugs in machines controlling our banking and infrastructure. While this potential disaster didn’t quite live up to its expectations there was another major infrastructure problem, resulting in many blackouts in North America, that reared its head shortly after the new millennium began. While it may have seemed like Y2K was finally coming to fruition based on the amount of chaos that was caused, the actual cause of these blackouts was simply institutional problems with the power grid itself.

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Review: The O-scope Mayer D4/WG5 Calibrated Fleshy Test Probe

April 1, 2017 by Jenny List 54 Comments

A selection of probes, from [Jim Williams'] Linear Technology app note 72. — A selection of probes, from [Jim Williams’] Linear Technology app note 72.

It’s not often that we are shown an entirely new class of test equipment here at Hackaday, so it was with some surprise that we recently received the new O-scope Mayer offering. If your most simple piece of test equipment is your own finger, able to measure temperature, detect voltage, and inject a 50 or 60 Hz sine wave, then what they have done is produce a synthetic analogue with a calibrated reading. The idea is that where previously you could only say “Too hot!”, or “High voltage!”, you should now be able to use their calibrated probe to gain an accurate reading.

The O-scope Mayer D4/WG5 Calibrated Fleshy Test Probe is a roughly 4″ (100mm) long cylinder of their InteliMeat™ synthetic finger analogue terminated with a calibrated matching unit and a BNC socket. In the box aside from the instruction leaflet is a BNC lead through which you can connect it to your oscilloscope.

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An Introduction To Differential I²C

March 31, 2017 by Sonya Vasquez 45 Comments

A few weeks back, we talked about the no-nos of running I²C over long wires. For prototyping? Yes! But for a bulletproof production environment, this practice just won’t make the cut. This month I plucked my favorite solution from the bunch and gave it a spin. Specifically, I have put together a differential I²C (DI²C) setup with the PCA9615 to talk to a string of Bosch IMUs. Behold: an IMU Noodle is born! Grab yourself a cup of coffee and join me as I arm you with the nuts and bolts of DI²C so that you too can run I²C over long cables like a boss.

What’s so Schnazzy about Differential Signals?

There’s a host of ways to make I²C’s communication lines more noise resistant. From all of the choices we covered, I picked differential signals. They’re simple, fairly standardized, and just too elegant to ignore. Let’s take a moment for a brief “differential-signals-101” lecture. Hopefully, you’re already caffeinated! Continue reading “An Introduction To Differential I²C” →

Linux-Fu: Applications On The Web

March 31, 2017 by Al Williams 38 Comments

Did you know you can run remote Linux GUI programs in a browser with HTML5 support? It’s even secure because you can use SSH tunneling and that little trick means you don’t even need to open additional ports. If this sounds like gibberish, read on, it’s actually pretty easy to get up and running.

I recently was a guest on a Houston-based podcast, and the hosts asked me if the best thing about writing for Hackaday was getting to work with the other Hackaday staff. I told them that was really good, but what I like best was interacting with people (well, most people) in the comments. That sometimes you’d post an article and someone would bring a topic up in comments that would really knock your socks off. This is how I wound up with this nearly ideal remote access solution, that requires nothing on the remote side but a web browser.

A while back I posted about keeping programs running after log off on a Linux box. The post was mostly about non-GUI programs but you could use NX or VNC to handle it. In the comments, someone mentioned how unhappy they’d been with recent copies of NX and another commenter called [Screen for X11] posted about a tool called xpra.

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