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This excellent content from the Hackaday writing crew highlights recurring topics and popular series like Linux-Fu, 3D-Printering, Hackaday Links, This Week in Security, Inputs of Interest, Profiles in Science, Retrotechtacular, Ask Hackaday, Teardowns, Reviews, and many more.

Adding Spice To Your Workbench

February 26, 2016 by 43 Comments

Most of us didn’t fight in World War II, drive a race car, or fly the Space Shuttle. But with simulation, you can experience at least some of what it would be like to do those things. Granted, playing Call of Duty isn’t really the same as going to war. No matter what you are simulating, it only goes so far. However, you can get a lot of value from a simulation. I’d bet the average kid who has played Call of Duty knows more about WWII locales and weapons than my high school history teacher.

When it comes to electronics, simulation is an excellent way to get insight into a circuit’s operation. After all, most circuits operate in the abstract–you can’t look at an audio amplifier and see how it works without a tool like a scope. So simulation, when done well, can be very satisfying. You just have to be careful to remember that it isn’t always as good as the real thing.

That’s Spicy

One of the best-known electronics simulators is Spice, which Berkeley created in 1973. In its original form, you had to punch cards that described your circuit and the analysis you wanted to perform. Modern PC versions sometimes replace the deck of cards with a text file. The best modern versions, though, give you a GUI that allows you to draw a schematic and then probe it to see the results.

There are several paid and free versions of Spice (and other simulators) that include a GUI. One of the best for a casual user is the free offering from Linear Technology called LTSpice.

Linear makes LTSpice available and populates it with models for their devices in the hopes you’ll buy components from them. However, the software is entirely usable for anything, and it has a powerful set of features. Linear produces the software for Windows, but I can attest that it runs just fine under Wine on Linux. The Web site will invite you to register, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

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The Challenges Of A Laundry Folding Robot

February 24, 2016 by 54 Comments

rosie“This is the year of the general purpose home robot!” “2016 is going to be for robots like 1976 was for the home computer!” The problem with statements like those is the fact that we’ve been hearing them since the 1970’s. General purpose home robots still have a long way to go. Sure, we’ve got Roomba, we’ve even got self-driving cars. But we don’t have Rosie from the Jetsons. And while I don’t think we’re going to get to Rosie for a while, there are some simple challenges that can spur development in that direction. One need look no further than one’s own laundry room.

maytagUsing machines to wash and dry laundry isn’t a new concept. Washers and dryers have become commonplace enough that we don’t think of them as robots. Hamilton Smith patented the rotary washing machine in 1858. Maytag has had home machines available for nearly 100 years. Many of the early machines were powered by gasoline engines, as electricity wasn’t common in rural farmhouses. Things have improved quite a bit since then! From the dryer we transfer our laundry to a basket, where it has to be folded. It is this final step that cries out for a homemaking automaton to take this chore out of Everyman’s hands.

As one can imagine, folding laundry is one of those tasks that is easy for humans, but hard for robots. However, it’s not impossible. The idea of this article is to show what has been done, and get people talking. A project like this would take a person or group of people with skills in mechanics, electronics, machine vision, and software. It would also be sure to place well in the 2016 Hackaday Prize.

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When Are 8 Bits More Than 32?

February 24, 2016 by 152 Comments

Whenever we write up a feature on a microcontroller or microcontroller project here on Hackaday, we inevitably get two diametrically opposed opinions in the comments. If the article featured an 8-bit microcontroller, an army of ARMies post that they would do it better, faster, stronger, and using less power on a 32-bit platform. They’re usually right. On the other hand, if the article involved a 32-bit processor or a single-board computer, the 8-bitters come out of the woodwork telling you that they could get the job done with an overclocked ATtiny85 running cycle-counted assembly. And some of you probably can. (We love you all!)

redblue_pillWhen beginners walk into this briar-patch by asking where to get started, it can be a little bewildering. The Arduino recommendation is pretty easy to make, because there’s a tremendous amount of newbie-friendly material available. And Arduino doesn’t necessarily mean AVR, but when it does, that’s not a bad choice due to the relatively flexible current sourcing and sinking of the part. You’re not going to lose your job by recommending Arduino, and it’s pretty hard to get the smoke out of one.

But these days when someone new to microcontrollers asks what path they should take, I’ve started to answer back with a question: how interested are you in learning about microcontrollers themselves versus learning about making projects that happen to use them? It’s like “blue pill or red pill”: the answer to this question sets a path, and I wouldn’t recommend the same thing to people who answered differently.

For people who just want to get stuff done, a library of easy-to-use firmware and a bunch of examples to crib learn from are paramount. My guess is that people who answer “get stuff done” are the 90%. And for these folks, I wouldn’t hesitate at all to recommend an Arduino variant — because the community support is excellent, and someone has written an add-on library for nearly every gizmo you’d want to attach. This is well-trodden ground, and it’s very often plug-and-play.

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ARM Unveils New, High Efficency CPU

February 23, 2016 by 40 Comments

ARM has announced their latest IP core the Cortex A32. This 32-bit chip brings the benefits of the ARMv8-A architecture to low-power devices, ostensibly ones that will be the backbone of the Internet of Things.

For the last few years, the state of ARM CPUs has been firmly planted in the world of ARMv7 instructions. These chips, the Cortex A5, A7, A9, A15, and A17 are divided into ‘good, better, best’ segments, with the A7 pulling its weight as the processor in the Raspberry Pi 2, and a dual-core A15 finding its way into the latest BeagleBoard. While these CPUs are very capable, they don’t support the latest ARM architecture, ARMv8. For the last few years, the only ARM processors with the v8 architecture fell into the ‘better’ and ‘best’ segments. Although the A53, A57, and A72 chips are very capable, there hasn’t been a low power ARMv8 chip until this announcement.

So what does this announcement mean for the next generation of the Internet of Things, single board computers, and the wearable electronics of tomorrow? Absolutely nothing. Only the processor IP was released, and it will take at least a year for this core to make it into a chip. It will be 18 to 24 months until you can find this core in a consumer device. On the other hand, when these devices do appear, they will be significantly faster than current devices with a Cortex A5 and A7.

A Slew Of Open-Source Synthesizers

February 23, 2016 by 55 Comments

Hackaday reader [Jan Ostman] has been making microcontroller-based DIY synthesizers for quite a while now. Recently, he’s opened up the source for a lot of them so that you can play along at home. All of these virtual-analog synths and soundmakers can be realized on an Arduino or AVR ATmega328 if you happen to have one lying around.

Extra parts like a keyboard, some pushbuttons, or some potentiometer knobs to twiddle won’t hurt if you’d like to make something more permanent or more obviously playable, like [Jan] does. On the other hand, if you’d just like to get your feet wet, I’ve tweaked his code to be more immediately plug-and-play. The code is straightforward enough that it’s a good learning platform. So let’s take a quick tour through three drum machines and a string synth, each of which you can build on a breadboard in just a few minutes.

To install on an Arduino UNO, fetch the zip file from this GitHub repository, and move each subfolder to your Arduino sketch directory. You’re ready to play along.

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Ask Hackaday: Selling CAD Prints That Are Not Yours

February 22, 2016 by 242 Comments

[Louise] tried out her new E3D Cyclops dual extrusion system by printing a superb model dragon. The piece was sculpted in Blender, stands 13cm tall and can be made without supports. It’s an impressive piece of artwork that reflects the maker’s skill, dedication and hard work. She shared her creation on the popular Thingiverse website which allows others to download the file for use on their own 3D printer. You can imagine her surprise when she stumbled upon her work being sold on eBay.

It turns out that the owner of the eBay store is not just selling [Louise]’s work, he’s selling thousands of other models taken from the Thingiverse site. This sketchy and highly unethical business model has not gone unnoticed, and several people have launched complaints to both Thingiverse and eBay. Now, there are lots of things to talk about here, but the 800 pound high voltage transformer in the room is the legality of the whole thing. What he’s doing might be unethical, but is it illegal?

When [Louise] politely asked the eBay store owner to remove her work, he responded with:

“When you uploaded your items onto Thingiverse for mass distribution, you lost all rights to them whatsoever. They entered what is known in the legal world as “public domain”. The single exception to public domain rules are original works of art. No court in the USA has yet ruled a CAD model an original work or art.”

Most of the uploaded CAD models on Thingiverse are done under the Creative Commons license, which is pretty clear in its assertion that anyone can profit from the work. This would seem to put the eBay store owner in the clear for selling the work, but it should be noted that he’s not properly attributing the work to the original creator. There are other derivatives of the license, some of which prohibit commercial use of the work. In these cases, the eBay store owner would seem to be involved in an obvious violation of the license.

There are also questions stirring with his use of images.  He’s not taking the CAD model and making his own prints for images. He lifting the images of the prints from the Thingiverse site along with the CAD files. It’s a literal copy/paste business model.

With that said,  the eBay store owner makes a fairly solid argument in the comments section of the post that broke the news. Search for the poster named “JPL” and the giant brick of text to read it. He argues that the Thingiverse non-commercial license is just lip service and has no legal authority. One example of this is how they often provide links to companies that will print a CAD design on the same page of a design that’s marked as non-commercial. He sums up one of many good points with the quote below:

“While we could list several other ways Thingiverse makes (money), any creator should get the picture by now-Thingiverse exists to make Stratasys (money) off of creators’ designs in direct violation of its very own “non-commercial” license. If a creator is OK with a billion-dollar Israeli company monetizing his/her designs, but hates on a Philly startup trying to make ends-meet, then they have a very strange position indeed.”

OK Hackaday readers, you have heard both sides of the issue. Here’s the question(s):

1.  Is the eBay seller involved in illegal activity?

2. Can he change his approach to stay within the limits of the license? For instance, what if he credits the                      original maker on the sale page?

3. How would you feel if you found your CAD file for sale on his eBay store?