Hackaday Links: March 29, 2015

March 29, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

Every once in a while, the Hackaday Overlords have a Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic in San Francisco. Last week was #06 featuring [Mike Estee] from Othermill and Hackaday writer [Joshua Vasquez] talking about synthesizing an SPI slave in an FPGA. Video here.

It’s no secret that [Fran] is building a DSKY – the part of the Apollo guidance computer that was on-screen in Apollo 13. It’s time for a project update, and here’s where she stands: if anyone has a source of JAN-spec Teledyne 420 or 422-series magnetic latching relays (they’re in a TO-5 package), contact [Fran]. The backplane connector has been identified; it’s a Teradyne I/O 100 series connector with a 120mil spacing. Contact [Fran] if you know where to get them.

Let’s say you want a carbon fiber quadcopter frame. What’s the most reasonable thing you can do? 3D print a CNC machine, obviously. That’s a 200mm FPV racer cut from 1mm and 3mm carbon fiber sheets, but the real story here is the CNC machine. It’s a PortalCyclone, and even the cable chains are 3D printed.

What does an AMOLED display look like up close? Pretty cool, actually. That’s 20x magnification, and it’s not a Bayer filter. Can anyone fill us in on the reason for that?

Laser cutters are tricky if you want to do grayscale or half tones. [oni305] made an Inkscape extension to generate better GCode for engraving with a laser cutter.

19″ racks have no dimensions that are actually 19″. Also 2x4s aren’t 2 inches by four inches. Somehow, a 2×4 server rack works.

Hackaday Links: March 22, 2015

March 22, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

[Liam Kennedy] built a wearable space station notifier it’s on Kickstarter, and now the campaign is in its final hours. It’s very cool; doubly so if you don’t have to talk to a crazy lady who doubts the existence of NASA.

[countkillalot] lost a Raspberry Pi. It was in his apartment, and responded to ping, but he couldn’t find it. Turning the Pi into an FM transmitter revealed its location. Relevant bash.org.

If you don’t listen to the Amp Hour podcast, oh man are you in for a treat. This time it’s [Chuck Peddle], father of the 6502, designer of the KIM-1, and someone with at least three hours’ worth of interesting stories.

MakeIt Labs, the Nashua, New Hampshire hackerspace, has done everything right – they have their 501(c)(3), and they’ve been talking to the city about getting a new space. They have the option of moving into a space three times the size as their current one, and it’s cheaper than the current space. They have an indiegogo to raise the renovation funds for the new space. Oh, hackaday.io supports pages for hackerspaces. Just pointing that out.

Speaking of hackerspaces, yours needs this sign.

A 3-DAY DESERT CAMPING AND TECH-FEST WITH BEER. That’s all you need to know about Arduino Day, an event being held next weekend in the Mojave.

Want to hide from the NSA, or whatever governments or corporate interests are listening in on your phone? Stick it in a microwave. [WhiskeyTangoHotel] tested out a Tek RSA306 spectrum analyzer in a microwave, once with the door open, once with the door closed. If you’re exceptionally clever or have access to Wikipedia, you can figure out what frequencies will leak out of a microwave given the size of the holes in the metal mesh.

Here’s a Flintstones toilet paper holder. It would have been a phonograph, but no one could find a cooperative turtle and bird.

It has been brought to our attention that everyone should be aware ucapps.de still exists. If you want something that does everything with MIDI and SID chips, there you go.

Hackaday Links: March 15, 2015

March 15, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

[Fran] and [Bil] are back again for the first Dinosaur Den of 2015. Highlights of this edition include a surprisingly young tri-power supply and Nixie display cards from 1965.

The game of Go has been turned into a sequencer. That’s a project from [Kristian Gohlke] and [Michael Hlatky]. It’s an industrial camera placed above a Go board, and some computer vision algorithms to detect stones on the board. There’s a 16×16 section to create drum patterns (black stones) or synth notes (white stones). Below that there’s a 16×3 grid for the bass notes, two 3×8 grids to control filters and effects, and a 3×3 grid to play percussive loops.

HOW TO REMOVE A GPS ANKLE MONITOR. We had to get the SEO right on this one. Here’s how you can ditch your probation officer for a weekend. Great news: his parents used their house for bail, now an entire family is homeless. Lesson learned: use a burner phone and call forwarding until you’re out of the country.

The Computer History Museum is doing a great series of interviews, and this one is with [Bob Dobkin], former director at National Semiconductor, and co-founder of Linear. Analog design isn’t wizardry, you just need a decade of experience.

[Simon] over at the Hack42 hackerspace finally found the time to repair their old Holborn 9120 terminal – the most space-age terminal ever built. The keyboard is an old Keytronic unit, and the foam underneath the keys had turned to dust. This was replaced with an Ikea mousepad, foam tape, and the foil from a discarded bag of chips. It worked, and they got their terminal to load our retro edition:

If you have some old hardware, try to point it at our retro site, take a picture (or post a writeup) and send it on in.

Hackaday Links: March 8, 2015

March 8, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

Nintendo is well known for… odd… hardware integration, but this video takes it to a new level. It’s a Gamecube playing Zelda: Four Swords Adventure, a game that can use a Game Boy Advance as a controller. [fibbef] is taking it further by using the Gamecube Game Boy Advance player to play the game, and using another GBA to control the second Gamecube. There’s also a GBA TV tuner, making this entire setup a Gamecube game played across two Gamecubes, controlled with a Game Boy Advance and displayed on a GBA with a TV tuner. The mind reels.

TI just released a great resource for analog design. It’s the Analog Engineer’s Pocket Reference, free for download, if you can navigate TI’s site. There are print copies of this book – I picked one up at Electronica – and it’s a great benchtop reference.

A few months ago, a life-size elephant (baby elephants are pretty small…) was 3D printed at the Amsterdam airport. A model of the elephant was broken up into columns about two meters tall. How did they print something two meters tall? With this add-on for a Ultimaker. It flips an Ultimaker upside down, giving the printer unlimited build height. The guy behind this – [Joris van Tubergen] – is crazy creative.

And you thought TV was bad now. Here’s the pitch: take a show like Storage Wars or American Pickers – you know, the shows that have people go around, lowball collectors, and sell stuff on the Internet – and put a “Tech” spin on it. This is happening. That’s a post from a casting producer on the classic cmp message boards. Here’s the vintage computer forums reaction. To refresh your memory, this is what happens when you get ‘tech’ on Storage Wars. Other examples from Storage Wars that include vastly overpriced video terminals cannot be found on YouTube. Here’s a reminder: just because it’s listed on eBay for $1000 doesn’t mean it’ll sell on eBay for $1000.

Hackaday Links: March 1, 2015

March 1, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

The somewhat regular Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic was a few days ago in San Francisco. Here’s the video to prove it. Highlights include [James Whong] from Moooshimeter, the two-input multimeter, [Mark Garrison] from Saleae, and a half-dozen other people giving talks on how to develop hardware.

[Taylor] made a portable NES with a retron, a new-ish NES clone that somehow fits entirely in a glop top IC. The controllers sucked, but [Taylor] made a new one with touch sensors. All that was required was eight transistors. The enclosure is an Altoid tin, and everything works great.

Here’s a YouTube channel you should subscribe to: Ham College. The latest episode covers the history of radio receivers and a crystal radio demonstration. They’re also going through some of the Technical class question pool, providing the answers and justification for those answers.

[Prusa] just relaunched prusaprinters and he’s churning out new content for it. Up now is an interview with [Rick Nidata] and his awesome printed container ship.

The tip line is overflowing with ESP8266 breakout boards. Here’s the simplest one of them all. It’s a breadboard adapter with stickers on the pin headers. Turn that into a right-angle breadboard adapter, and you’ll really have something.

Here’s something that’s a bit old, but still great. [Dillon Markey], one of the stop-motion animators for Robot Chicken modified a Nintendo Power Glove for animation duties. It seems to work great, despite being so bad. Thanks [Nicholas] for the link.

[David] the Swede – a consummate remote control professional we’ve seen a few times before – just flew his tricopter in a mall so dead it has its own Wikipedia page. Awesome tricopter, awesome location, awesome video, although we have to wonder how a few really, really bright LEDs would make this video look.

Here’s an item from the tip line. [Mark] wrote in with an email, “Why do you put names in [square brackets] in the blog entries? Just curious.” The official, [Caleb]-era answer to that question is that sometimes people have bizarre names that just don’t work in text. Imagine the sentence, “[12VDC] connected the wires to the terminal” without brackets. The semi-official answer I give is, “because.”

Hackaday Links: February 22, 2015

February 22, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

We met up with Freescale guy [Witek] at our party in Munich last year, and he wrote in to tell us about the Freescale booth at Embedded World this week in Nuremberg. They’re going to have a bunch of Freedom boards to play around with and an extremely powerful RIoTboard with a 1GHz iMX6 Solo processor, 1GB of RAM, and 4GB of EMMC Flash. It’s not a Raspi or BeagleBone killer, but if you need a small Linux board with a lot of horsepower, there ‘ya go.

SmarterEveryDay is finally getting around to doing a series of videos about space. This guy knows his stuff, and with the access he can get, it should make for interesting viewing.

Here’s something for your Sunday listening: [Vint Cerf] at Carnegie Mellon talking about the Olive Project and the Interplanetary Internet. The Olive project is an archive for executables, and solves the problem of having to preserve hardware along with software. Cool stuff.

10 GHz pulse magnetron destroys electronics. That’s the only information you’re going to get with this one. There’s a fine line between ‘don’t try this at home’ and ‘this project needs replication’.

Most of the northern half of the United States is covered in a billion tons of snow. [Jamie]’s electric snowmobile/Power Wheels is the perfect vehicle for this occasion. It’s 36V with two 500W motors. Figure out how to replace the wheels with small treads, and there’s really something interesting here.

Hackaday Links: February 15, 2015

February 15, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

[Matthias Wandel], also known as the genius/demigod that can make anything out of wood, put together a mount for a Raspberry Pi and a camera. Yes, it’s just a holder for a Raspi, but some of our readers who aren’t up to speed with [Matthias] might want to check out his Youtube channel. There are hundreds of awesome videos. Report back in a month.

[Evan], the guy working his butt off for the MidAtlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists, and the organizer for the Vintage Computer Festival East (we’re going, April 17-19, Wall, NJ) has been working on a book. It’s about mobile computing, and he’s crowdfunding it.

Your keyboard has buttons, and so does and Akai MPC. Daft PunKonsole! Press the space bar for instrumental part. There is, as yet, no video of someone doing this correctly.

Valentine’s Day was yesterday, and that means Valentine’s Day builds started rolling in on the tip line. Here’s something that’s actually a very simple circuit that’s inspired from an old ‘Electronic Games and Toys’ book by [Len Buckwalter]. Here’s a video of it in action.

A few years ago the name of the game was tiny, credit card-sized ARM boards. It had to come to this: a 64-bit board. ARM Cortex A53 running at 1.2GHz. It also costs $120 and only has a gig of RAM, but there you go.