Hackaday Links: March 20, 2016

March 20, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

Western Digital introduced their second revision of the PiDrive this week. This is a native USB hard drive – formatted to 314GB – based on the WD Blue drive. The earlier version of the WD PiDrive was 1TB, and cost about $70 USD. The new, 314GB version, sells for about $35. Does Western Digital manufacture 314GB hard drives? No, that would be stupid. Who’s taking bets on the actual capacity of these drives?

[SopaXorsTaker] has introduced us to a brand new way of removing BGA chips. PCBs are usually more flexible than chips, and a few whacks with a hammer is all that’s needed.

For the last few months, [quarterturn] has been upgrading a PowerBook 520. He’s trying to replace the CPU with a 68040 that has an FPU. His first attempt failed, and his second attempt – a new Freescale part that certainly has an FPU – also failed. It’s great experience in desoldering and reworking fine-pitch QFP parts, but [quarterturn] has no idea why the Apple System Profile reports an FPU-less CPU. It might be something in the ROM that tells the PowerBook not to use the FPU, in which case the obvious upgrade would be to replace the ROM with one from a PowerBook 550c or a Sonnet upgrade card. If you have either of those, I’m sure [quarterturn] would like to have a word with you.

LIDAR! We all know what the coolest use of LIDAR is, but it’s also useful for robots, drones, and other autonomous thingamadoos. Here’s a Kickstarter for a LIDAR module, 40 meter range, 360 degree range, 500 samples per second, and UART/USB connections.

[Bill] is trying to start a Makerspace in Fort Lauderdale. Here’s the indiegogo campaign.

We launched the 2016 Hackaday Prize this week. Why should you enter? Because last year, it seemed everyone who entered early won something. There’s $300,000 worth of prizes on the line. Need an idea? [Dave Darko] has just the thing for you. It’s the Hackaday Prize Buzzword Generator, the perfect thing for spitballing a few ideas and seeing what sticks.

Hacklet 100 – The 2016 Hackaday Prize

March 19, 2016 by Adam Fabio 11 Comments

Welcome to the 100th Hacklet! This has been a huge week for Hackaday, as we launched The 2016 Hackaday Prize. We’ve invited you to change the world. Hackers, makers, and engineers have already answered the call, with nearly 200 entered projects! What better way to celebrate our 100th Hacklet than taking a look at a few of these early entrants?

We start with [Patrick Joyce] and Raimi’s Arm – Bionic Arm for Kids. Raimi was born with an arm which ends just below the elbow. She’s still a kid – and growing, which means she will quickly grow out of any prosthetic. This has placed bionic arms out of her reach. [Patrick] saw a plea from Raimi’s father for help. 3D printed arms for the disabled are a thing, but [Patrick] couldn’t find one which fit the bill for Raimi. So he’s set out to design one himself. This will be an open source project which anyone with the proper tools can replicate. [Patrick] has already created several test rigs, and is well on the way to building an arm for Raimi and others!

Next up is [castvee8] who has entered the 2016 Hackaday Prize with Building Simplified Machinery. Over the years, [Castvee8] has built a few 3D printers and CNC machines. These projects always start with buying the same parts over and over: ground rods, linear bearings, stepper motors, drivers, etc. [Castvee8] is trying to build 3D printed machines which use as few of these vitamins as possible, yet are still strong enough to work in wood, plastic, wax, foam, and other light maker-friendly materials. So far the simple, modular components and electronics have led to a mini mill, mini lathe, and a drill press for things like printed circuit boards. Keeping things low-cost will make these tools accessible to everyone.

[Keegan Reilly] entered Everyman’s turbomolecular pump. Vacuum pumps are great, but everyone knows the real fun starts around 10^-7 Torr. Pulling things down this low requires a specialized pump. Two common designs are oil diffusion pumps and Turbomolecular pumps. Oil diffusion is cheap, but not everyone wants a hot vat of oil bubbling away in their vacuum chamber. Turbomolecular pumps are much cleaner, but very expensive. [Keegan] is attempting to design a low-cost version of a turbomolecular pump. He’s trying to use Tesla’s bladeless turbine design rather than the traditional bladed turbines used in commercial pumps. So far tests using a Dremel tool and paper discs have been promising – nothing has exploded yet!

Finally, we have [Samuel Bowman] with Seamless IoT Protocol Translation: Common Ground. Love it or hate it, the Internet of Things is going to be here for a while. Every device seems to speak a different language though . Z-wave, Zigbee, LoRa, WiFi, and a host of other protocols, all on different frequencies. Some are frequency hopping, some use mesh networks. [Samuel] is trying to design one device to translate between any of the emerging standards. Common Ground started as a science fair project connecting MQTT to Phillips Hue devices. Once [Samuel] achieved that goal, he realized how much potential there is in a universal translator box. We’re hoping [Samuel] achieves his goals quickly – it seems like new IoT standards are being introduced every day.

New projects are entering the 2016 Hackaday Prize every hour! You can see the full list right here. That’s it for the 100th Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

Beyond Measure: Instrumentation Amplifiers

March 18, 2016 by Brandon Dunson 35 Comments

In the first article about measurement systems we looked at sensors as a way to bring data into a measurement system. I explained that a sensor measures physical quantities which are turned into a voltage with a variable conversion element such as a resistor bridge. There will always be noise in any system, and an operational amplifier (op-amp) can be used to remove some of that noise. The example we considered used an op-amp in a differential configuration that removes any disturbance signal that is common to both inputs of the op-amp.

But that single application of an op-amp is just skimming the surface of the process of bringing a real-world measurement of a physical quantity into a digital system. Often, you’ll need to do more work on the signal before it’s ready for sampling with a digital-to-analog converter. Signal conditioning with amplifiers is a deep and rich topic, so let me make it clear that that this article will not cover every aspect of designing and implementing a measurement system. Instead, I’m aiming to get you started without getting too technical and math-y. Let’s just relax and ponder amplifiers without getting lost in detail. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Continue reading “Beyond Measure: Instrumentation Amplifiers” →

Crawl, Walk, Run: Planning Your First CPU Design

March 16, 2016 by Al Williams 42 Comments

I’ve worked with a lot of students who want to program computers. In particular, a lot of them want to program games. However, when they find out that after a few weeks of work they won’t be able to create the next version of Skyrim or Halo, they often get disillusioned and move on to other things. When I was a kid, if you could get a text-based Hi-Lo game running, you were a wizard, but clearly the bar is a lot higher than it used to be. Think of the “Karate Kid”–he had to do “wax on, wax off” before he could get to the cool stuff. Same goes for a lot of technical projects, programming or otherwise.

I talk to a lot of people who are interested in CPU design, and I think there’s quite a bit of the same problem here, as well. Today’s commercial CPUs are huge beasts, with sophisticated memory subsystems, instruction interpreters, and superscalar execution. That’s the Skyrim of CPU design. Maybe you should start with something simpler. Sure, you probably want to start learning Verilog or VHDL with even simpler projects. But the gulf between an FPGA PWM generator and a full-blown CPU is pretty daunting.

Continue reading “Crawl, Walk, Run: Planning Your First CPU Design” →

Embed With Elliot: Microcontroller Makefiles

March 15, 2016 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

Last time on Embed with Elliot, I began my celebration of the make command’s 40th birthday next month. We discussed using the default rules and how to augment them with your own variables defined in a makefile. Next, I’ll walk you through some makefiles that can be used for real-world microcontroller code development. This week, we’ll focus on one for the AVR platform, and later on, I’ll run through a slightly more complicated version for the ST32M series of ARM Cortex micros.

Along the way, we’ll pick up a couple of tricks, but the aim is to keep the makefiles minimal, readable, and easily extensible. Once you get a little taste of the power of writing your own makefiles, you probably won’t be able to stop adding bells and whistles — custom routines for flashing, checking the size of binaries, generating assembly listings, etc. I’ll leave the extras up to you, but you’ll eventually find that anything you do can be automated with a makefile.

Continue reading “Embed With Elliot: Microcontroller Makefiles” →

Retrotechtacular: Eidophor, An Unknown Widely Used Projector

March 15, 2016 by Jenny List 42 Comments

If you own a video projector, be it a module small enough to fit in a mobile phone or one designed for a cinema screen, the chances are it will have a DLP at its heart. An array of microscopic mirrors on an integrated circuit, the current state of the art in video projection technology.

Perhaps you own an older video projector, or maybe a cheaper new one. If so the chances are it’ll have a small LCD screen doing its work, taking the place of the Kodachrome in something very similar to your grandparents’ slide projector or their grandparents’ magic lantern.

LCD technology was invented in the 1970s, while DLP was invented at the end of the 1980s. So how did the video projectors that were such a staple of televised spectaculars in the preceding decades work? For that matter, how did NASA project their status displays on the huge screen at Mission Control? Certainly not with CRT technology, even the brightest CRT projectors weren’t up to filling a cinema-sized screen.

The answer came from the Eidophor (Greek: ‘eido’ and ‘phor’, ‘image’ and ‘bearer’), a device invented in the years before World War II by the Swiss physicist Dr. Fritz Fischer and granted a US patent in 1945. It featured a complex vacuum device in which an electron gun painted the video frames as a raster on an oil-covered mirror in the light path of a fairly conventional projector. High-voltage electric charges have the effect of deforming the surface of mineral oils, and it was this effect that was exploited to vary the effectiveness of the mirror as the raster was drawn. An unfortunate side-effect of tracing an oil surface with an electron beam is that a charge will build up on the oil surface, so the entire oil-covered mirror assembly had to rotate within its vacuum enclosure and pass under an electrode which removed any charge build-up.

Eidophor-wikipedia — Eidophor [by Topquark2 CC-BY-SA 3.0]

The resulting machine as seen in this 1952 issue of Popular Science was very large, complex, and expensive to run, but delivered by far the brightest and sharpest projected video available. In a literal sense they painted the backdrop to our culture, as they found a home not only in NASA’s control room but in television studios and at large televised events. This Shirley Bassey performance from the 1960s for example, or the spectacular video light show on this rather poor quality VHS YouTube clip from Seville Expo 1992.

You will probably be unaware of the exact date you last saw an eidophor performance. Quince Imaging tell us their last one was used at the TWA Dome in St Louis in July 2000. Eidophores may have become more compact over the decades but they remained costly to run, and through the 1990s they were suplanted by DLP devices that did substantially the same job with a lot less fuss.

It is not often that a search in the Hackaday archives for a technology returns no results, but the eidophor is one of those cases. Perhaps that is a fitting epitaph for a device that created its own show but never starred in it, that it is only its spectacular performances that live on.

Hackaday Links: March 13, 2016

March 13, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

Way back in 2014, Heathkit was a mystery. We knew someone was trying to revive the brand, but that was about it. Adafruit pulled out all the stops to solve this mystery and came up with nothing. The only clue to the existence of Heathkit was a random person who found a geocache in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Since then, Heathkit has released an odd AM radio kit and $150 antenna. These offerings only present more mysteries, but at least [Paul] was finally rewarded for finding the Heathkit geocache. Heathkit sent [Paul] the AM radio kit. He says it’s neat and well documented.

[David] is doing his masters thesis on, “The motivation of the maker community”. That means empirical data, and that (usually) means surveymonkey. You can take his survey on the motivations of the maker community here.

America’s best loved companies, Verizon and Makerbot, together at last.

The BeagleBone Black was launched in 2013. The BeagleBone Green – a Seeed joint – showed up last August. The BeagleBone Blue, released just a few months ago, is a collaboration between the UCSD engineering department and TI. Now there’s the BeagleBone Enhanced. Yes, they should have picked another color. Perhaps ecru. The BB Enhanced sports one Gigabyte of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, two USB ports and two USBs via an expansion header, optional serial NOR Flash for a bootloader, optional six-axis gyro, and optional barometer.

Atmel is changing a few AVRs. There is a new die for the ATMega 44, 88, 168, and the ‘Arduino chip’, the ATMega328. Most of the changes are relatively inconsequential – slightly higher current consumption in power save mode – but one of these changes is going to trip up a lot of people. The Device ID, also known as the source of the avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1 error, has changed on a lot of chips.

Makeit Labs in Nashua, New Hampshire has a problem. They were awarded $250,000 in tax credits to help them move and renovate. Sounds like a very good problem, right? Not so: they need to sell these tax credits before the end of the month, or they lose them. They’re looking for a few businesses in New Hampshire to buy these tax credits. From [Peter Walsh]: “Under the credit program, a typical business donating $10,000 would save $9,000 on their state and federal taxes! That $10,000 donation would cost them only $1006!” Does that make sense? No, it’s taxes, of course not. If you’re a business in New Hampshire and are looking to reduce your tax burden, this is the solution.

So I mentioned MRRF, right? You should go to MRRF. It’s next weekend.