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Why not round out our two-week Bay Area Maker Faire coverage with a Links post? This time around it’s video links. We mixed together a bunch of interesting clips that didn’t get their own video, as well as a dose of what it feels like to walk around the Faire all weekend. Join us after the break for the links.
Continue reading “Video Links: Hunting For Hacks At Maker Faire”
We’re pretty sure that most of our readers already know it by now, but we’ll tell you anyway: the Hackaday community (writers and readers) is currently developing an offline password keeper, the Mooltipass. As it has been more than two weeks since we wrote an article about our progress, today’s will be about the Mooltipass front panels and our beta testers program.
At the end of our mechanical design rundown article we showed that we were originally planning to put a slightly tinted acrylic panel on top of our device. We however could still make out the Mooltipass’ insides, which wasn’t in line with the nice professional look we wanted. We then designed another front panel, one which was transparent above the OLED screen/LEDs and opaque (black) on top of the rest. To our surprise the result still wasn’t as good as we had hoped, as the contrast between the front panel and the screens/LEDs was too big. We finally came up with the panel shown above (see GitHub repository folder) which combines the two techniques previously described. As it is still in China, we’ll show you the final result when we get it in our hands.
We launched around 10 case prototypes in production, they will soon be shipped to our current contributors/advisers together with the smart cards chosen by Hackaday readers. In the meantime we sent our official call for beta testers to our mailing list recipients and hackaday.io followers, in which we asked them to fill a small form that will allow us to know them a bit better. We asked about their home/work computer setup, their level of expertise, their willingness to contribute to the prototype cost and finally specifics about who would use the Mooltipass they’d receive. We are targeting a broad range of users but also testers that will provide us with detailed feedback and clear bug reports.
We also spent quite a while searching for cheaper alternate parts that could be sourced in relatively big quantities. This is usually an overlooked aspect of a project so we preferred to tackle this as soon as possible. In a few weeks the contributors and I will receive all the components required to assemble our final prototype (front panels / case / top & bottom PCBs / smart cards) and it will be time to write a new update. Want to stay informed? You can join the official Mooltipass Google Group or follow us on Hackaday Projects.
[Matt] wanted his own light saber. You could argue that this is nearly as dangerous since you can’t see the beam and it doesn’t end a few feet past the business end of the grip. Plus there’s that who “not actually a Jedi” thing.
We don’t know if retro computing fans are going to love or hate this (translated). On the one hand it’s pretty cool to see a ZX81 clone up and running. On the other hand, an Amiga 600 case was sacrificed to serve as the body for the hack. [Thanks Juan]
Watchdog timer. If you know what that is your mind immediately says “good idea” when you hear the word. If you don’t know, you need to learn. Watchdogs are reset timers that are built into most microcontrollers. If your firmware gets stuck and doesn’t maintain the timer’s counter at a regular interval the watchdog it will perform a hardware reset and hopefully your hardware will start functioning again. Here’s a guide for using the watchdog in an Arduino, but the concepts are pretty much universal.
We see all kinds of stepper-motor based music machines. One of our favorites was this recent floppy drive jukebox. But not every song is going to sound good on this type of hardware. One that does sound especially neat is the Doctor Who theme on an array of 8 drives.
And finally, if you’re struggling with surface mount soldering we recommend grabbing two soldering irons. But in a pinch just grab some heavy gauge copper wire and wrap it around your soldering iron tip. It ends up being a two-point soldering iron set for the size of specific components such as 0805 resistors. [Thanks Rupert]
[Vishak] tipped us about the iFind Kickstarter campaign, a 1.25×1.06×0.09″ (32x27x2.4mm) tag meant to be attached to anything you may lose in your daily life. This device communicates with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) enabled smartphones, has a 200ft (60m) detection range and a loud alarm. What is interesting to mention is that this device doesn’t need any battery to operate as it
recycles electromagnetic energy and stores it in a unique power bank.
As you can guess, this particular claim intrigued the Hackaday team given that we never featured so small energy harvesting devices. The ‘closest’ thing that comes to our minds is the Allsee project, a simple gesture recognition device that uses existing wireless signals (TV and RFID transmissions) to extract any movement that occur in front of it. However the antenna was quite big and very little power was extracted.
A quick Google search let us know that Bluetooth Low Energy solutions usually consume an idle current of around 10uA @ ~3V. The (very) successful Sticknfind campaign which promoted the same battery-enabled product claimed a one year autonomy with a CR2016 battery and a 100ft range, leading to a ~90mAh/24/30.5/12 = 10.2uA idle current. As we’re not expert on the subject, we would like to ask our readers if they ever came across such energy harvesting performances (3V*10.2uA = 30uW) in a normal home environment. Our very bad maths indicate that if one would like to extract power from a typical Wifi router located 2 meters from you emitting 0.5Watts of power (in a perfect vacuum environment) with a 32*27mm = 864mm = 0.000864m² tag you’d only be able to get 0.5 * (0.000864/(4*pi*2*2)) = 8.6uW.
It is therefore too bad that we can’t see in the presentation video what is inside the iFind, nor more details about the patent pending technologies involved. We hope that our dear readers will enlighten us in the comments section below.
Ah, the heady days of the early 60s, where companies gave their salesmen exquisitely produced documentaries, filled with incidental music written by the best composers of the era, and a voice actor that is so unabashedly ordinary you would swear you’ve heard him a hundred times before. It’s a lot better than any PowerPoint presentation anyone could come up, and lucky for us, these 16mm films are preserved on YouTube for everyone to enjoy. This one was sent out to IBM sales reps pushing a strange technology called a ‘punched card’, a system so efficient it will save your company tens of thousands of dollars in just a few short years.
Like most explanations of what a punched card does, this IBM documercial begins with the history of the Jacquard loom that used punched cards for storing patterns for textile weaving. In a rare bit of historical context befitting IBM, this film also covers the 1880 US census, an important part in the evolution of punched cards being used not as instructions for a loom, but data that could be tabulated and calculated.
The United States takes a census every ten years. The tenth census of 1880 took so long to compile into the data – seven years – it was feared the next census of 1890 wouldn’t be complete until the turn of the century. This problem was solved by [Herman Hollerith] and his system of encoding census data onto punched cards for tabulation. [Hollerith] would later go on to found the Tabulating Machine Company that would later merge with two other companies to form IBM. Isn’t it great that IBM chose to include that little nugget in their film.
As a point of interest, the film does contain a short pitch for IBM punched card writers, sorters, and calculators – the backbone of IBM’s medium to large size business sales. At the time this film was produced (1964) IBM was ready to announce the System/360, what would become the de facto mainframe for businesses of all sizes. Yes, the /360 also used punched cards, but we wonder how many angry phone calls the sales reps received months after showing this film.
Think the original Pong is cool? How about point to point Pong? [v8ltd] did it in three months, soldering all the leads directly to the chip pins. No sockets required. It’s insane, awesome, a masterpiece of craftsmanship, and surprising it works.
[Jeremy Cook] is building a servo-powered light graffiti thing and needed a laser diode. How do you control a laser pointer with a microcontroller? Here’s how. They’re finicky little buggers, but if you get the three-pack from Amazon like [Jeremy] did, you get three chances to get it right.
NFC tags in everything! [Becky] at Adafruit is putting them in everything. Inside 3D printed rings, glued onto rings, and something really clever: glued to your thumbnail with nail polish. Now you can unlock your phone with your thumb instead of your index finger.
Photographs capture still frames, but wouldn’t it be great if a camera could capture moving images? No, we’re not talking about video because this is the Internet where every possible emotion, reaction, and situation can be expressed with an animated GIF. Meet OTTO, the camera that captures animated GIFs! It’s powered by the Raspberry Pi compute module, so that’s interesting.
[Nate] was getting tired of end mills rolling around his bench. That’s a bad thing. He came up with a solution, though: Mill a piece of plywood into a tray to hold end mills.
The Da Vinci printer, a printer that only costs $500 because they’re banking on the Gillette model, has been cracked wide open by resetting the DRM, getting rid of the proprietary host software, and unbricking the device. Now there’s a concerted effort to develop custom firmware for the Da Vinci printer. It’s extraordinarily bare bones right now, but the pins on the microcontroller are mapped, and RepRap firmwares are extremely modular.
That’s a deal for a project, how hard could it be to fix it up?
If you’re a real hacker we’d wager you’ve fallen for this type of thought process before. [Luft] bought this used Sharp XR-10X-L projector about a year back and planned to retrofit it with an LED bulb. He gathered all the parts and got to work, successfully testing and installing the modifications. But as luck would have it, the project is stuck in some type of boot loop.
This fail is certainly not for lack of preparation. The first post documenting his adventure shows that the hack has been done before, he acquired the service manual for this particular hardware, and he did his homework when ordering the parts. Success requires circumventing some sensors which ensure the case and internals are in place, and making sure the electronic status of the ballast is reported correctly event though it’s not needed for the LED source. Power-on gets as far as illuminating all the indicator lights in green as it should, but is then followed closely by a reboot sequence.
He tried watching the serial port to see if he can get any status info there but no dice. In keeping with the nature of this column, let’s see if we can provide any constructive troubleshooting advice in the comments.
Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which runs every Wednesday. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.
