Button, Button, Who’s Got The (Pico) Button?

September 20, 2023 by Al Williams 26 Comments

There is an episode of Ren and Stimpy with a big red “history eraser’ button that must not be pressed. Of course, who can resist the temptation of pressing the unpressable button? The same goes for development boards. If there is a button on there, you want to read it in your code, right? The Raspberry Pi Pico is a bit strange in that regard. The standard one lacks a reset button, but there is a big tantalizing button to reset in bootloader mode. You only use it when you power up, so why not read it in your code? Why not, indeed?

Turns out, that button isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t connected to a normal CPU pin at all. Instead, it connects to the flash memory chip. So does that mean you can’t read it at all? Not exactly. There’s good news, and then there’s bad news.

The Good News

The official Raspberry Pi examples show how to read the button (you have read all the examples, right?). You can convert the flash’s chip-select into an input temporarily and try to figure out if the pin is low, meaning that the button is pushed. Sounds easy, right?

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Hello, Halloween Hackfest!

September 19, 2023 by Elliot Williams 1 Comment

Halloween is possibly the hackiest of holidays. Think about it: when else do you get to add animatronic eyes to everyday objects, or break out the CNC machine to cut into squashes? Labor day? Nope. Proximity-sensing jump-scare devices for Christmas? We think not. But for Halloween, you can let your imagination run wild!

We’re happy to announce that DigiKey and Arduino have teamed up for this year’s Hackaday Halloween Contest. Bring us your best costume, your scariest spook, your insane home decorations, your wildest pumpkin, or your most kid-pleasing feat!

We’ll be rewarding the top three with a $150 gift certificate courtesy of DigiKey, plus some Arduino Halloween treats if you use a product from the Arduino Pro line to make your hair-raising fantasy happen.

We’ve also got five honorable mention categories to inspire you to further feats of fancy.

Costume: Halloween is primarily about getting into outrageous costumes and scoring candy. We don’t want to see the candy.
Pumpkin: Pumpkin carving could be as simple as taking a knife to a gourd, but that’s not what we’re after. Show us the most insane carving method, or the pumpkin so loaded with electronics that it makes Akihabara look empty in comparison.
Kid-Pleaser: Because a costume that makes a kid smile is what Halloween is really all about. But games or elaborate candy dispensers, or anything else that helps the little ones have a good time is fair game here.
Hallowed Home: Do people come to your neighborhood just to see your haunted house? Do you spend more on light effects than on licorice? Then show us your masterpiece!
Spooky: If your halloween build is simply scary, it belongs here.

Head on over to Hackaday.io for the full details. And get working on your haunts, costumes, and Rube Goldberg treat dispensers today.

What Is Killing Cursive? Ballpoints. Probably.

September 18, 2023 by Kristina Panos 226 Comments

I get it — you hate writing by hand. But have you ever considered why that is? Is it because typing is easier, faster, and more convenient here in 2023? Maybe so. All of those notwithstanding, I honestly think there’s an older reason: it’s because of the rise of ballpoint pens. And I’m not alone.

Bear with me here. Maybe you think you hate writing because you were forced to do it in school. While that may very well be, depending on your age, you probably used a regular wood-case pencil before graduating to the ballpoint pen, never experiencing the joys of the fountain pen. Well, it’s never too late.

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Satellite Hunting Hack Chat

September 18, 2023 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, September 20 at noon Pacific for the Satellite Hunting Hack Chat with Scott Tilley!

From the very first beeps of Sputnik, space has primarily been the domain of nations. It makes sense — for the most part, it takes the resources of a nation to get anything of appreciable size up out of the gravity well we all live in, but more importantly, space is the highest of high ground, and the high ground has always been a place of advantage to occupy. And so a lot of the hardware we’ve sent upstairs in the last 70 years has been in the national interest of this or that country.

A lot of these satellites are — or were, at least — top secret stuff, with classified payloads, poorly characterized orbits, and unknown communications protocols. This can make tracking them from the ground a challenge, but one that’s worth undertaking. Scott Tilley has been hunting for satellites for years, writing about his exploits on the Riddles in the Sky blog and sometimes being featured on Hackaday. After recently putting his skills to work listening in on a solar observation satellite as its orbit takes it close to Earth again, we asked him to stop by the Hack Chat to share what he’s learned about hunting for satellites, both long-lost and intentionally hidden. Join us as we take a virtual trip into orbit to find out just what’s going on up there.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, September 20 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Hackaday Links: September 17, 2023

September 17, 2023 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

OK, it’s official — everyone hates San Francisco’s self-driving taxi fleet. Or at least so it seems, if this video of someone vandalizing a Cruise robotaxi is an accurate reflection of the public’s sentiment. We’ve been covering the increasingly fraught relationship between Cruise and San Franciscans for a while now — between their cabs crashing into semis and being used for — ahem — non-transportation purposes, then crashing into fire trucks and eventually having their test fleet cut in half by regulators, Cruise really seems to be taking it on the chin.

And now this video, which shows a wannabe Ninja going ham on a Cruise taxi stopped somewhere on the streets of San Francisco. It has to be said that the vandal doesn’t appear to be doing much damage with what looks like a mason’s hammer; except for the windshield and side glass and the driver-side mirror — superfluous for a self-driving car, one would think — the rest of the roof-mounted lidars and cameras seem to get off lightly. Either Cruise’s mechanical engineering is better than their software engineering, or the neo-Luddite lacks the upper body strength to do any serious damage. Or maybe both.

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Inspiration

September 16, 2023 by Elliot Williams 55 Comments

While we were debating about whether it even makes any sense to reboot RadioShack, or indeed any brick-and-mortar electronics store in the modern era, Dan Maloney and I stumbled on what probably is the real source of all of our greybeard nostalgia for the store chain: inspiration.

For both of us, the appeal of a store like RadioShack was going through the place and thinking of what you’d do with all of those parts. Looking at the back of the beefiest MOSFET in the joint, you’d think about all the current you could pass with it. Or what you’d do with all of those piezo buzzers. And if you didn’t know yet what electronics project you wanted to make, there were things like the Forrest Mims notebooks to inspire you. There you’d find a way to turn the humble LED into a light sensor, whether you needed to or not. I wonder how many packs of assorted LEDs that book sold?!

Dan got his first hands on with a computer in RadioShack as well, because they let folks try them right there. If you didn’t know what you wanted a computer for, and that was the big question of the early microcomputer era, you could head into the store yourself and find out. Seeing, and playing with, Demon Dancer inspired.

A lot of this role is taken over by hackerspaces these days, and even more is taken by the Internet itself, of course. We have no shortage of inspiration – just read a day’s worth of Hackaday if you don’t believe me. So is there any room left for RadioShack’s inspirational role? Maybe not. But if that’s the cost of living in a world where we have access to more great ideas than we’ll ever have time to execute, then so be it!

Image of the presenter on the podium, in front of the projector screen with graphs shown on it

Supercon 2022: [Alex Whittemore] On Treating Your Sensor Data Well

September 15, 2023 by Arya Voronova 4 Comments

If you build your own devices or hack on devices that someone else has built, you know the feeling of opening a serial terminal and seeing a stream of sensor data coming from your device. However, looking at scrolling numbers gets old fast, and you will soon want to visualize them and store them – which is why experienced makers tend to have a few graph-drawing and data-collecting tools handy, ready to be plugged in and launched at a moment’s notice. Well, if you don’t yet have such a tool in your arsenal, listen to this 16-minute talk by [Alex Whittemore] to learn about a whole bunch of options you might not even know you had!

For a start, there’s the Arduino Serial Plotter that you get for free with your Arduino IDE install, but [Alex] also reminds us of the Mu editor’s serial plotter – about the same in terms of features, but indisputably an upgrade in terms of UX. It’s not the only plotter in town, either – Better Serial Plotter is a wonderful standalone option, with a few features that supercharge it, as [Alex] demonstrates! You don’t have to stop here, however – we can’t always be tethered to our devices’ debugging ports, after all. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: [Alex Whittemore] On Treating Your Sensor Data Well” →