The $50 Ham: Entry-Level Transceivers For Technicians

March 15, 2019 by Dan Maloney 95 Comments

Last week , I covered the ridiculously low barriers to entry to amateur radio, both in terms of financial outlay and the process of studying for and passing the FCC examination. You’ve had seven days, so I assume that you’ve taken the plunge and are a freshly minted amateur radio operator. The next big question may be: Now what?

We briefly mentioned the image that ham radio is a rich old person’s hobby, and that reputation is somewhat deserved. For ham gear, there really is no upper limit on what you can spend. Glossy brochures and slick web pages hawk transceiver bristling with knobs and switches and loaded with the latest features, all of which will probably be obsolete within a few years when the Next Big Thing comes along and manufacturers respond with new, must-have models – looking at you, ICOM IC-7300. It’s no different than any other technology market, and enough people fall for that marketing to make it a going concern.

But thankfully, while there is no apparent ceiling on what you can spend on ham gear, there certainly is a floor, and it can be very, very low. Our $50 budget can go quite a long way to getting a new Technician on the air, if you’re willing to make some compromises and can forego the latest and greatest for a while.

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Proposed NASA Budget Signals Changes To Space Launch System

March 13, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

The White House’s proposed budget for 2020 is out, and with it comes cuts to NASA. The most important item of note in the proposed budget is a delay of the Space Launch System, the SLS, a super-heavy lifting launch vehicle designed for single use. The proposed delay would defer work on the enhanced version of the SLS, the Block 1B with the Exploration Upper Stage.

The current plans for the Space Launch System include a flight using NASA’s Orion spacecraft in June 2020 for a flight around the moon. This uncrewed flight, Exploration Mission 1, or EM-1, would use the SLS Block 1 Crew rocket. A later flight, EM-2, would fly a crewed Orion capsule around the moon in 2022. A third proposed flight in 2023 would send the Europa Clipper to Jupiter. The proposed 2020 budget puts these flights in jeopardy.

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Do You Know Where Your Drone Is Headed? HJWYDK Article Explores Limits Of MEMS Sensors

March 12, 2019 by Ted Yapo 28 Comments

Knowing in what absolute direction your robot is pointed can be crucial, and expensive systems like those used by NASA on Mars are capable of calculating this six-dimensional heading vector to within around one degree RMS, but they are fairly expensive. If you want similar accuracy on a hacker budget, this paper shows you how to do it using cheap MEMS sensors, an off-the-shelf motion co-processor IC, and the right calibration method.

The latest article to be published in our own peer-reviewed Hackaday Journal is Limits of Absolute Heading Accuracy Using Inexpensive MEMS Sensors (PDF). In this paper, Gregory Tomasch and Kris Winer take a close look at the heading accuracy that can be obtained using several algorithms coupled with two different MEMS sensor sets. Their work shows that when properly used, inexpensive sensors can produce results on par with much more costly systems. This is a great paper that illustrates the practical contributions our community can make to technology, and we’re proud to publish it in the Journal.

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What Hardware Lies Beneath? Companies Swear They Never Meant To Violate Your Privacy

March 11, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 76 Comments

“Don’t Be Evil” was the mantra of Google from years before even Gmail was created. While certainly less vague than their replacement slogan “Do the Right Thing”, there has been a lot of criticism directed at Google over the past decade and a half for repeatedly being at odds with one of their key values. It seems as though they took this criticism to heart (or found it easier to make money without the slogan), and subsequently dropped it in 2018. Nothing at Google changed, though, as the company has continued with several practices which at best could be considered shady.

The latest was the inclusion of an undisclosed microphone in parts of their smart home system, the Nest Guard. This is a member of the Nest family of products — it is not the thermostat itself, but a base station for a set of home security hardware you can install yourself. The real issue is that this base station was never billed as being voice activated. If you’re someone who has actively avoided installing “always-listening” style devices in your home, it’s infuriating to learn there is hardware out that have microphones in them but no mention of that in the marketing of the product. Continue reading “What Hardware Lies Beneath? Companies Swear They Never Meant To Violate Your Privacy” →

Learning Through Play Hack Chat With Greg Zumwalt

March 11, 2019 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the Learning Through Play Hack Chat!

You may think you’ve never heard of Greg Zumwalt, but if you’ve spent any time on Instructables or Thingiverse, chances are pretty good you’ve seen some of his work. After a long career that ranged from avionics design and programming to video game development, Greg retired and found himself with the time to pursue pet projects that had always been on the back burner, including his intricate 3D-printed automata. His motto is “I fail when I decide to stop learning,” and from the number of projects he turns out and the different methods he incorporates, he has no intention of failing.

Please join us for this Hack Chat, where we’ll discuss:

Lifelong learning through play;
Toy-building as a means to skillset growth;
Sources of inspiration and getting new ideas; and
What sorts of projects Greg has in the pipeline.

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Learning Through Play Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 13, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Hackaday Links: March 10, 2019

March 10, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

Do you like hamburgers? Everyone likes hamburgers. Inspired by a phone you could buy at Spencers in 1991, [Love Hulten] built a Game Burger Advance. The guts are a Raspberry Pi Zero, a standard LCD display and what appears to be a USB control pad. The fabrication is where this one really goes crazy. It’s a significant amount of laser-cut plywood or MDF stacked together into a laminate then sanded and painted to look like a hamburger. Actually, it’s a cheeseburger, but we don’t deal with the prescriptivist view of linguistics and Wendy’s doesn’t sell hamburgers, they sell cheeseburgers without cheese. Hamburgers are not cheeseburgers without cheese but I digress… Just be glad this links post isn’t me going off for two thousand words talking about language and cheeseburgers.

If you have a 2012 MacBook Pro, congratulations, you have one of the last good laptops Apple will ever build. [Docatl] over on Reddit has one of these fine machines, but found it was overheating. This Genius did what anyone would do — drilled some vents in the bottom of the laptop. The results are impressive, with stock temperatures climbing to 80º C when rendering video, and the post-drilled temps cooling down to a balmy 65º.

Here’s a Kickstarter for you. It’s an Arduino Zero in a narrow DIP-16 package, albeit with a USB connector hanging over the outline of a normal DIP-16 footprint. The specs are an ATSAMD21 Cortex-M0+ running at 48 MHz, 256kB of Flash, 32k of RAM, and an integrated bootloader.

Ha ha Tim Cook changed his name to Tim Square because Apple users are squares amirite?

We’re not going to get into a discussion about mental health or anything here, but TheFlightChannel just published a flight sim reenactment of the SeaTac Dash-8 Horizon Air incident from last summer. This video is absolutely fantastic.

The Sipeed K210 is a chip you should know about. It’s a RISC-V microcontroller that’s right up there with the fastest, most powerful STM32 chips, but it’s RISC-V and it costs eight dollars. Also, it has neural networks, because. We first heard about this chip as a preorder on Taobao (?!), but now it’s getting a slightly more official release. Seeed is working on a Raspberry Pi Hat for this chip, and they want your input. Right now we’re looking at two versions, one with WiFi and one without, and both can either work with a Raspberry Pi or as a standalone board. They have the basic layout, but they’d like to know what features the community would want.

Hackaday Podcast 009: On The Edge Of AI, Comment Your Code, Big Big Wheels, And Makers Of Munich

March 8, 2019 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

Catch up on the past week of hacks with Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys. “AI on the Edge” is the buzzword of choice lately, with hardware offerings from BeagleBone and Google to satiate your thirst. We take on spotty data from Tesla, driving around on four bouncy-houses, reverse engineering a keytar, unearthing a gem of a dinosaur computer, and MIPI DSI display hacking. There are tips for getting better at commenting code, and making your computer do your algebra homework.

Links for all discussed on the show are found below. As always, join in the comments as we’ll be watching those as we work on next week’s episode!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)