Hackaday links

775 Articles

Hackaday Links: December 13th, 2012

December 13, 2012 by 20 Comments

Cardboard box computer

links-cardboard-box-computer

[Alistair] chapman had a Laptop with a broken screen sitting in his parts bin. He knew he had an LCD panel on hand that would probably work with it, but it wouldn’t fit in the case. His solution was to transplant all the computer parts into a cardboard box from a motherboard.

This violin is garbage

links-landfill-instruments

The kids in this orchestra live in a villiage built on top of a landfill. But they make the most out of what they have. This orchestra is composed of instruments built from garbage and they seem to work pretty well. [Thanks Bruce]

More LED mystery puzzles

links-led-puzzle

[Henryk] is at it again. He puts together some very impressive circuits that play tricks on your engineering mind. His latest is three LEDs in series. Look closely and you’ll see they’re not performing as expected. Watching the solution to one of his previous puzzles will help you figure out how he’s doing it. His work is simply amazing.

Netbook framed as a dedicated weather station

links-netbook-weather-display

Not wanting to get rid of old but still working hardware, [Retro Toaster] built a dedicated weather station by mounting the screen, keyboard, and track pad in a picture frame.

Current and voltage testing your USB projects

links-USBTesterFront

This dev board is a pass-through for USB devices. It makes voltage and current testing your device quite simple.

Hackaday Links: December 5, 2012

December 5, 2012 by 17 Comments

PS1 hombrew competition

code

The PlayStation Development Network is hosting a six-month long competition to develop homebrew games for the original PlayStation.We don’t get many homebrew games for old systems in our tip line, so if you’d like to show something off, send it in.

This is how you promote a kickstarter

snes

[Andy] has been working on an SNES Ethernet adapter and he’s finally got it working. Basically, it’s an ATMega644 with a Wiznet adapter connected to the second controller port. The ATMega sends… something, probably not packets… to the SNES where it is decoded with the help of some 65816 assembly on a PowerPak development cartridge. Why is he doing this? To keep track of a kickstarter project, of course.

What exactly is [Jeri] building?

jeri

[Jeri] put up an awesome tutorial going over the ins and outs of static and dynamic flip-flops. There’s a touch of historical commentary explaining why dynamic registers were used so much in the 70s and 80s before the industry switched over to static designs (transistors were big back then, and dynamic systems needed less chip area). At the end of her video, [Jeri] shows off a bucket-brigade sequencer of sort that goes through 15 unique patterns. We’re just left wondering what it’s for.

Finally, a camera for the Raspberry Pi

camera

In case you weren’t aware, the camera board for the Raspberry Pi will be released sometime early next year. Not wanting to wait a whole month and a half, [Jouni] connected a LinkSprite JPEG serial camera to his Raspberry Pi. The whole thing actually works, but [Jouni] didn’t bother posting the code. Maybe we can encourage him to do so?

Blatant advertising? Yes, but fireballs

Nintendo gave [MikenGary] a Wii U and asked them to make a film inspired by 30 years of Nintendo lore and characters. They did an awesome job thanks in no small part to Hackaday boss man [Caleb](supplied the fire), writer [Ryan] (costume construction) and a bunch of people over at the Squidfoo hackerspace.

Hackaday Links: November 29th, 2012

November 29, 2012 by 37 Comments

EMC2 CNC keyboard labels

If you’ve got a dedicated computer running EMC2 for CNC control you may be interested in these keyboard labels. [Rich] mentions that they use the labels for their engraver at the Connecticut Hackerspace. Just print them out and glue them in the face of the keys.

Dev board seminars and freebies

[Mike] wrote in to tell us STM is giving away samples of the STM32 F3 Discovery again. But you can also get in on some free seminars. One is an online webinar for TI’s Launchpad family, the other is for the F3 Discovery board and is being held all around the US.

Replacing batteries with USB power

[Johan] didn’t want to use batteries for the light on the microscope he uses when working with SMT parts. He added a few components with let him power the device from USB instead.

MSP430 VU meter uses FFT

Here’s an MSP430 using Fast Fourier Transform for signal processing. There’s very little explanation, but apparently this collection of FFT related material was used heavily in the project. [via Reddit]

Cell Racr

If you’re looking for a new office game you might consider Cell Racr. It pits your cellphone’s vibrating motor against everyone else’s. Just place the phone on an incline and repeatedly dial its number to advance toward the finish line.

Hackaday Links November 22nd 2012

November 22, 2012 by 20 Comments

HDD Grinder

hdd-grinder1

As [unicorn] described it, “this is no big thing.”  We would agree, but a grinder made from a hard disk drive at least deserves to be in a [HAD] links post. Here’s the original source.

The No-Video Game

no-video-game

What do you get when take [Sub Hunt] and take away the ability to see what you’re playing with? The No-Video Game is what [Sean] at [Hive76] came up with. Thanks [Kyle] for writing in to tell us about it!

SD Card Hack ‘N Slash

sd-card-slashed1

[Paul] wrote in to tell us about his friend [Ahmad’s] discovery that you can cut a standard SD card in two and still have it function. Sure, some people know this, but we’d be willing to bet most don’t. In the pictures provided, it makes for a nice upgrade to the Raspberry Pi’s form factor.

FM Transmitter for FPGA

fm-sos

[Hamster] wrote in to tell us about how he added an FM tranmitter to his field programmable gate array project. Check out the wiki for the code to do this with, or this Youtube video to see it in action!

Brute Force Hack a Garmin GPS

brute-force-gps

Although there’s only a Youtube video to describe this hack, it’s really worth seeing.  Some people might go with a pure electrical method to open up their Garmin GPS, but why do that when you can “just” create an array of fingers to do it for you! Thanks [David] for the tip!

Hackaday Links: November 15, 2012

November 15, 2012 by 14 Comments

Another way to break out dual pin headers

[Uwe] wrote in to share his technique for breaking out dual pin headers. He uses two single pin headers, a piece of protoboard, and a dual row pin socket to make an adapter. This is removable where the other method we saw this week was not.

Web-based slide show hack

Wanting to use an old Android tablet as a digital picture frame, [Gordon] coded up a simple way to use an HTML page to scan your picture directories to feed a rotating background image.

The simplest hot plate

For his chemistry experiments [Charlie] is using a plain old clothes iron for a hot plate. he simply clamps it upside down to the bench. It doesn’t have any stirring abilities, but we already have an old iron in the shop which we use for toner transfer so we’ll have to keep this in mind if we ever need to heat chemicals (might be a good way to warm etchant).

A charging VU meter

This Cambrionix series8 universal charger has columns of LEDs that are animated when a device is charging. [Steve Tyson] works for the company and has had some fun messing with the firmware. He’s showing off the display as a VU meter.

Game Boy knockoff teardown

This wide-form-factor Game Boy is a knockoff from way back when the original system hit the market. You won’t want to miss this lengthy post that takes a look at what’s inside. [Thanks Neil]

 

Hackaday Links: November 9, 2012

November 9, 2012 by 30 Comments

Yeah, it’s like Twitter but actually cool

Thingiverse – still the best place on the Internet to find cool 3D models to print out – has gone all Web 3.0 with their new Dashboard feature. Basically, you can think of this as Thingiverse’s version of Twitter. The dashboard allows you to see the latest updates from people you like, follow people, categories, and tags, and check out your all-important ‘who’s following me’ stats. Yes, to the Hackaday crowd it may sound a little lame, but it’s a great way to winnow the (awesome) wheat from the (slightly less awesome) chaff.

Hey, we goofed. And not by using the same image twice

Remember when we jumped on the Occupy Thingiverse bandwagon? Well, there were questions about the Thingiverse Terms of Service and confusion that Makerbot actually owns everything uploaded to Thingiverse. That’s completely wrong according to Makerbot’s lawyer [Rich McCarthy]. The whole issue dealt with “Moral Rights or attribution” – a French legal doctrine that isn’t part of US law (or the law of any English-derived legal system as far as we can tell). Yeah, we goofed.

Now u cn snd SMS msgs wit n ‘ino & cell sheld

[Meir] sent in a cellular library for microcontroller projects that allows for simple sending and receiving of SMS messages. Yes, it’s been done before, but [Meir] hid all the hardware interaction with the cellular shield – a good design practice – to make the code nice and tidy.

And you thought PVC was bad…

Just in time for Thanksgiving, [Lou] shows us the fastest way to make mashed potatoes: an oxygen and propane powered potato gun. The build uses oxy and propane tanks you can pick up for a few bucks at any hardware store, steel pipe for the barrel, a grill igniter, and a few pipe fittings. It’s awesome, and we’ve got to hand it to [Lou] for this one. Now to build one and test it out on our indestructible test dummy.

It’s just like the Raspberry Pi! They’re that backordered!

Remember the Stellaris Launchpad, the very cool (and very inexpensive) ARM dev board put out by TI? Yeah, they’re shipping now. News of this comes from [Ryan Holtz] at Autodesk after the FedEx guy came knocking a few days ago. The good news is they’re shipping, the bad news is the price increased slightly to $13.

 

Hackaday Links: November 4, 2012

November 4, 2012 by 43 Comments

Wait, you’re using a Dremel to cut PCBs?

Cutting copper-clad board or – horrors – depanelizing PCBs is a pain if you don’t have the right tool. Over at Hub City Labs they’re using a small, cheap metal shear & break. Bonus: it can cut and bend sheet metal, so the Hub City folks can also make enclosures.

Color Codes? Yes, Color Codes.

[Joe] sent in a cool utility he whipped up called resisto.rs. Plug in a resistor value, and it’ll spit out the 4-band, 5-band, and surface mount labels for that resistor value. Pretty neat.

Parallel Ports

Parallel ports may be a dying breed, but that didn’t stop [Electroalek] from putting together a VU meter that connects to his LPT port. It’s an extremely simple design; just connect some LEDs and resistors to the pins of a parallel port, and you can easily control them via software on a computer. Playing around with an LPT port used to be common knowledge, so we’re glad to see [Electroalek]’s work here.

The power is out, but Radio Shack is still open

[Jason] is stuck in New Jersey without power and needed a way to charge his phone. He whipped up a cell phone charger using an RC car battery and an LM317 voltage regulator. It’s an easy circuit to piece together, and judging from [Jason]’s picture will hopefully keep his cell phone charged until the power comes back on.

Shooting 50 Nerf darts all at once

If [Rob]’s project log is to be believed, it looks like they’re having a lot of fun over in the Sparkfun warehouse. They decided to have a full-scale Nerf gun war for a summer intern’s last day. [Rob] came up with a DIY Nerf shotgun that shoots 50 darts across the room, just waiting to be found sometime in the next decade.

There’s a great video of [Rob] firing the single barrel (yeah, they made a trident-shaped one as well) gun at well prepared but unsuspecting coworkers. Be sure to check out the comments of this post to see Hackaday readers frothing at the mouth because PVC pipe isn’t a pressure vessel guys. You’ll all surely die.