Hackaday Links: September 16, 2018

September 16, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

Apple released a phone, the most phone in the history of phones. It’s incredible.

There are four machines that are the cornerstone of electronic music. The TR-808, the TR-909, the TB-303, and the SH-101 are the machines that created techno, house, and every other genre of electronic music. This week at KnobCon Behringer, the brand famous for cheap mixers, other audio paraphernalia of questionable quality, and a clone of the Minimoog, teased their clone of the 909. Unlike the Roland reissue, this is a full-sized 909, much like Behringer’s clone of the 808. Price is said to be under $400, and the best guess on the release is, ‘sometime in the next year’

Speaking of synths, [jan] has created a ton of electronic musical instruments based around single chips. There’s one that fits inside a MIDI plug, and another that also adds a keyboard. Now he has an ‘educational kit’ on IndieGoGo. It’s surprisingly cheap at $19.

Europe is outlawing memes (I’m 12 and what is this?).

The EU parliament adopted a proposal for a Copyright Directive, the most onerous proposal being Article 13, requiring platforms to adopt copyright filters to examine everything uploaded to a platform.

The takeaway analogy is that this proposal is opposite of the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provision that protects ISPs from consequences of user’s actions; If Article 13 is adopted, an image-hosting service could be sued by copyright holders because users uploaded copyrighted images.

Needless to say, this is dumb, and a massive opportunity for you to become a startup founder. Companies like Google and Facebook already have robots and databases crawling their servers looking for copyrighted content, but smaller sites (hackaday.io included) do not have the resources to build such a service themselves. You’re looking at a massive B2B startup opportunity when these copyright directives pass.

Easy Portable Serial Ports

September 14, 2018 by Al Williams 51 Comments

Modern operating systems insulate us — as programmers, especially — from so much work. Depending on how far back you go, programmers had to manage their own fonts, their own allocation space on mass storage, or even their own memory allotments. Every year, though, it seems like things get easier and easier. So why is it so annoying to open a simple serial port? It isn’t hard, of course, but on every operating system it seems to be painful — probably in an attempt to be flexible. And it is even worse if you want portability. I needed to write some C code that read data from an FPGA’s embedded logic analyzer, and I was annoyed at having to write yet more serial port code. I have my own shim library, but it isn’t well tested and isn’t all that flexible — it does what I need, but I wanted something better. What I wound up with the serial library from Sigrok. You know Sigrok? The logic analyzer software.

You might counter that the serial port is old hat, so no one wants to support it with modern systems. While the physical serial port might be on life support, there’s no shortage of equipment that connects via USB that appears to be a serial port. So while I was talking to an FTDI chip on an FPGA board, you could just as well be talking to an Arduino or a USB voltmeter or anything.

I guess the Sigrok developers had the same problem I did and they took the time to write a nice API and port it to major platforms. Although Sigrok uses it, they maintain it as a separate project and it was just what I needed. Sort of. I say sort of because the version installed with Ubuntu was old and I needed some features on the newest release, but — as usual — the Internet came to the rescue. A quick Git command, and four lines of build instructions and we were ready to go.

Continue reading “Easy Portable Serial Ports” →

My Career As A Spammer, And Other Stories From The Sneakernet

September 13, 2018 by Jenny List 12 Comments

A large hacker camp is in microcosm a city, it has all the services you might expect to find in a larger settlement in the wider world. There is a telecommunication system, shops, bars, a health centre, waste disposal services, a power grid, and at some camps, a postal system. At Electromagnetic Field, the postal system was provided by the Sneakernet, a select group of volunteers including your Hackaday scribe under the direction of the postmaster Julius ter Pelkwijk. I even had the fun of delivering some chopped pork and ham. (More on that later.) Continue reading “My Career As A Spammer, And Other Stories From The Sneakernet” →

The DIN Rail And How It Got That Way

September 13, 2018 by Dan Maloney 57 Comments

Unless you’ve spent some time in the industrial electrical field, you might be surprised at the degree of integration involved in the various control panels needed to run factories and the like. Look inside any cabinet almost anywhere in the world, and you’ll be greeted by rows of neat plastic terminal blocks, circuit breakers, signal conditioners, and all manner of computing hardware from programmable logic controllers right on to Raspberry Pis and Arduinos.

A well-crafted industrial control panel can truly be a thing of beauty. But behind all the electrical bits in the cabinet, underneath all the neatly routed and clearly labeled wires, there’s a humble strip of metal that stitches it all together: the DIN rail. How did it come to be, and why is it so ubiquitous?

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Video Quick Bit: The Best In Human Computer Interfaces

September 12, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

We’re neck deep in the Hackaday Prize, and we just wrapped up the Human Computer Interface Challenge. This is an incredible contest to go beyond traditional mice and keyboards to find new ways to transfer your desires directly into a computer. Majenta Strongheart is back at it again, giving us a look at some of the coolest Human Computer Interface builds in this year’s Hackaday Prize

The Hackaday Prize is all about hacking, really, and there’s no better project that demonstrates this than [Curt White]’s hacked fitness tracker. This is a tiny, $35 fitness tracker that’s loaded up with Bluetooth and an ECG front end. With a few slight modifications this cheap bit of consumer electronics can become a prototyping platform for ECG/EMG/EEG projects. Awesome work.

But when it comes to Human Computer Interfaces, what’s really cool is games. Remember the Power Glove? Of course, everyone does. How about the Sega Activator, the first full-body motion controller? Yeah, now we’re getting into the good stuff. [Arcadia Labs] build a Head Tracker for their favorite space flight sims, and the results are remarkable. Take a look at the videos and you can see the promise of this kind of tech.

The biggest advance in Human-Computer Interaction in the last few years is obviously VR. Once the domain of some early-90s not-quite cyberpunk, VR is now showing up in living rooms. The HiveTracker is an ingenious device that reverse engineers the technology behind the Vive Tracker from HTC. This is a tiny little device that allows for sub-millimeter 3D positioning, and also adds a 9DOF IMU to the mix. If you’ve ever wanted to know exactly where you are, this is the project for you.

Right now we’re plowing through the Musical Instrument Challenge where we’re asking you to build something that pushes the boundaries of instrumentation. If you’re building a synth, we want to see it. If you’re making music with vacuum tubes, we want to see it. Got one of those guitars that are like, double guitars? Yes, we want that too. Twenty of the Musical Instrument Challenge submissions will be selected to move on to the finals and win $1000 in the process. The top five entries of the 2018 Hackaday Prize will split $100,000! This is your chance, so enter now!

What’s A Couplate? The Stepping Stone To Integrated Circuits

September 12, 2018 by Al Williams 22 Comments

We are spoiled these days because you can shop online and get all manner of inexpensive electronic goodies shipped to your door. This is due to the fantastic electronic fabrication workflow that has grown into a global powerhouse, facilitated by complex yet inexpensive integrated circuits! But it took a few intermediate steps to get here, and one of those is known as a couplate.

When I was a kid, the big deal was to find an old radio in the trash. You could spend a few hours stripping all sorts of parts from the thing and add it to your collection for a future project. Of course, old radios from the 1970s and earlier had a lot of the usual parts we use today, even though many of them were bigger — no surface mount parts yet. Since older radios were the usual find in a dumpster, tubes were common but you could find some transistor radios.

Once in a while something older. There would be a little box with some wires poking hiding in an old radio from the 1940s or 1950s (too early for ICs). In a way, though, these were predecessors to the Integrated Circuit and they went by a few names, depending on who sold them. PEC (Printed Electronic Circuit), a couplate, or a BulPlate, are all names for hardware that was a stepping stone between discrete circuitry and ICs.

Continue reading “What’s A Couplate? The Stepping Stone To Integrated Circuits” →

Friday Hack Chat: Playing With Fire

September 12, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

We’re pretty sure all the hackers and tinkerers and makers out there were a tiny bit of a pyromaniac in their youth. That’s what makes this week’s Hack Chat so exciting: we’re talking about Hacking With Fire.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Brice Farrell], who, like most of us, has been interested in fire his entire life. He’s taken this interest and turned his amateur passion into something semi-professional. He’s a PGI certified pyrotechnician, an electrical engineer, and an ice carver. This year, he appeared on BattleBots where he built the flame system for Battle Royale with Cheese.

Given [Brice]’s extensive expertise, this Hack Chat is going to cover the relevant safety concerns of work with fire, how to keep yourself safe, and how to do everything legally. We’ll be talking about fireball shooters of all sizes, ignition techniques, and the use (and introduction) of fire in combat robotics. That last point is extremely interesting: is fire on a BattleBot actually useful, and what can you do to protect your bot from it?

Points of interest for this Hack Chat will include:

Fire safety
The difference between generating flames and fireballs
Ignition techniques
Fire safety
Fire in combat robotics
Fire safety

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Hacking with Fire event page 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 is just like any other, and we’ll be gathering ’round our video terminals at noon, Pacific, on Friday, September 14th. That’s not the same in every time zone, but don’t worry, we have some amazing time conversion technology.

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 Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.