Simone Does Strange Things With Motors And Servos

December 29, 2015 by Adam Fabio 52 Comments

If DC motors are the “Hello World” of making things move, servo motors are the next logical step. [Simone Giertz] is following this exact path with the Wake-up Machine and her newly released Chopping Machine. [Simone] discovered that the best way to wake up in the morning is to be repeatedly slapped in the face by a robot. The Wake-up Machine was custom designed to do exactly that. Who could sleep through being repeatedly slapped in the face? A beefy gearmotor from ServoCity spins a Halloween prop arm round and round, providing “refreshing” slaps.

The system is triggered by an alarm clock. The clock’s alarm output is connected to an Arduino Uno. The Uno then activates a relay, which spins up the motor. [Simone] realizes that she could have skipped the Arduino here, but it was the path of least resistance in for this project. If the slapping hand isn’t enough to get you going, the Wake-up machine does have a secret weapon: It may just grab your hair, turning a video shoot into a painful ordeal.

Simone’s latest project is the Chopping Machine. ServoCity must have liked her first videos, as they’ve sponsored her for this project. The machine consists of two knives that … well, chop. Two high-powered servos are controlled by an Arduino Nano. The servos raise spring-loaded knives, which then drop down, chopping vegetables, fingers, and anything else in their path. The whole machine is built with aluminum channel stock, and a huge wooden cutting board. Of course, just building the machine wasn’t enough. [Simone] filmed a parody infomercial for any perspective Chopping Machine buyers, and to put fear in the heart of anyone named Chad.

Click past the break for a couple of [Simone’s] vlogs describing the machines.

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Drone Registration Is Just FAA Making You Read Their “EULA”

December 29, 2015 by Mike Szczys 94 Comments

Over the last few weeks we’ve waded through the debate of Drone restrictions as the FAA announced, solicited comments, and finally put in place a registration system for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). Having now had a week to look at the regulation, and longer to consider the philosophy behind it, I don’t think this is a bad thing. I think the FAA’s move is an early effort to get people to pay attention to what they’re doing.

The broad picture looks to me like a company trying to get users to actually read an End User Licensing Agreement. I’m going to put the blame for this firmly on Apple. They are the poster children for the unreadable EULA. Every time there is an update, you’re asked to read the document on your smartphone. You scroll down a bit and think it’s not that long, until you discover that it’s actually 47 pages. Nobody reads this, and years of indoctrination have made the click-through of accepting an EULA into a pop-culture reference. In fact, this entire paragraph has been moot. I’d bet 99 out of 103 readers knew the reference before I started the explanation.

So, we have a population of tech adopters who have been cultivated to forego reading any kind of rules that go with a product. Then we have technological advancement and business interests that have brought UAS to the feet of the general public both with low costs, wide availability, and pop-culture appeal. What could possibly go wrong? Let’s jump into that, then cover some of the other issues people are concerned about, like the public availability of personal info on the drone registry.

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Desoldering Doesn’t Necessarily Suck

December 28, 2015 by Kristina Panos 37 Comments

What’s your favorite way to fix soldering mistakes or get usable components off that board you found in a Dumpster? I’ve always been partial to desoldering braid, though I’ve started to come around on the vacuum pump depending on the situation. [Proto G] sent in an Instructable that outlines nine different ways to desolder components that take varying amounts of time and skill.

He starts with one that is often overlooked if you don’t have a solder pot. [Proto G] recommends this method only when you don’t want to keep the board. Cover the solder joints of the components you want to keep with flux and hold it over the solder pot while pulling out the components with pliers. The flux isn’t critical, but it makes removal faster and easier.

For boards in need of repair, [Proto G] uses a manual pump or copper desoldering braid that comes coated with flux. If you can afford one, a desoldering machine seems like the way to go—it combines the heat of a soldering iron with the vacuum of a manual pump. Desoldering tweezers and hot air rework stations look like great ways to remove surface mount components.

If you enjoyed this, check out [Bil Herd’s] guide on component desoldering. There are also few ways that [Proto G] doesn’t mention, like holding the board over an alcohol flame. Let us know your favorite desoldering method in the comments.

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Weightless IoT Hardware Virtually Unavailable

December 28, 2015 by Brandon Dunson 36 Comments

It has been over 2 years since we last mentioned the Weightless SIG and their claims of an IoT open standard chip with a 10 year battery life and 10km wireless range, all at a jaw dropping price of $2 per chip. There was a planned production run of the 3rd gen chips which I would suspect went to beta testers or didn’t make it into production since we didn’t hear anything else, for years.

Recently, a company called nwave began producing dev-kits using the Weightless Technology which you can see in the banner image up top. Although the hardware exists it is a very small run and only available to members of the development team. If you happen to have been on the Weightless mailing list when the Weightless-N SDK was announced there was an offer to get a “free” development board to the first 100 development members. I use bunny ears on free because in order to become a member of the developer team you have to pay a yearly fee of £900. Don’t abrasively “pffffft” just yet, if you happened to be one first 100 there was an offer for developers that came up with a product and submitted it back for certification to get their £900 refunded to them. It’s not the best deal going, but the incentive to follow through with a product is an interesting take.

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V8 Javascript Fixes (Horrible!) Random Number Generator

December 28, 2015 by Elliot Williams 59 Comments

According to this post on the official V8 Javascript blog, the pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) that V8 Javascript uses in Math.random() is horribly flawed and getting replaced with something a lot better. V8 is Google’s fast Javascript engine that they developed for Chrome, and it’s used in Node.js and basically everywhere. The fact that nobody has noticed something like this for the last six years is a little bit worrisome, but it’s been caught and fixed and it’s all going to be better soon.

In this article, I’ll take you on a trip through the math of randomness, through to pseudo-randomness, and then loop back around and cover the history of the bad PRNG and its replacements. If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to get into PRNGs, you can use this bizarre fail and its fix as your excuse.

But first, some words of wisdom:

Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, there is no such thing as a random number — there are only methods to produce random numbers, and a strict arithmetic procedure of course is not such a method.
John von Neumann

John von Neumann was a very smart man — that goes without saying. But in two sentences, he conveys something tremendously deep and tremendously important about random variables and their mathematical definition. Indeed, when you really understand these two sentences, you’ll understand more about randomness than most everyone you’ll meet.

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An Actual Working Hoverboard

December 27, 2015 by James Hobson 79 Comments

What with 2015 being the apparent “year of the hoverboard”, we have a final contender before the year ends. It’s called the ArcaBoard from ArcaSpace, A private space company. And it doesn’t use magnets, or superconductors, or any smoke and mirrors — just a whole lot of ducted fans.

Thirty-six of them to be precise. The ArcaBoard uses 36 electric motors with an apparent 7.55HP each, powered by a massive bank of lithium ion batteries. Together, they produce 430 pounds of thrust, which allows most riders to float around quite easily. Even with that huge power drain, it apparently lasts for a whole 20 minutes, which is pretty impressive considering its size.

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Turning The Pi Zero Into A USB Gadget

December 27, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 60 Comments

The Raspberry Pi Zero is limited, or so everyone says, and everyone is trying to cram a USB hub and WiFi adapter on this tiny, tiny board. One thing a lot of people haven’t realized is that the Raspberry Pi Zero comes with a USB OTG port, meaning it can function as a USB device rather than a USB host. This means the Raspi can become a serial device with just a USB cable, an Ethernet device, MIDI device, camera, or just about anything else you can plug into a USB port. Adafruit has your back with a tutorial for using the USB OTG port as a serial and Ethernet interface, and the possible applications are extremely interesting.

The only requirement for using the USB OTG port for device applications is an update to the kernel. This is easily installed by dumping a few files on an SD card and a employing bit of command line wizardry. The simplest example is setting up the Pi Zero as a USB serial device, allowing anyone to log into a serial console on the Pi with just a USB cable.

A slightly more interesting application is setting up the Pi as an Ethernet gadget. This effectively tunnels all the networking on the Pi Zero through a USB cable and a separate computer. The instructions are extremely OS-specific, but the end result is the same: you can apt-get on a Pi Zero to your heart’s desire with a new kernel loaded onto the SD card and a USB cable.

This experimentation is just scratching the surface of what is possible with the OTG port on the Pi Zero. MIDI devices are easy, and with a ton of GPIOs, the Pi Zero itself could become a very interesting musical instrument. Want the Pi Zero to be a storage device? That’s easy too. The USB Gadget will end up being one of the most exciting uses for the Pi Zero, and we can’t wait to see what everyone will come up with next.