Putting The ‘Go’ In Frisbee Golf With A Robot Launcher

March 6, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 10 Comments

If you’ve gone to a local city park lately, you might have noticed strange metal baskets on poles with chains dangling free. These baskets are spread out throughout the park seemingly at random. For the uninitiated, Frisbee golf (sometimes known as disc golf) is a confusing concept. You might not think it, but Frisbee golf can be a very big deal to some people. [Stuff Made Here] is back with a disc launcher that he hopes will put all the disc golfers to shame.

It’s no secret that we here at Hackaday are big fans of [Stuff Made Here], or [Shane] (he has his own tag after all), and for obvious reasons — the CAD design process, the careful machining and testing, and the extremely high bar that [Shane] sets for his projects. This one is no different, and it is a tale of iteration and scaling. He started out with a simple goal: break the speed record for a thrown Frisbee.

An initial design was decided upon based on high-pressure air pushing a piston to throw the Frisbee off of an arm. Initially, the arm was way too slow as the airflow was severely restricted due to air solenoids and pressure regulators. After fixing all those problems by fabricating his own solenoid and adding a secondary tank with no regulator, the arm started really moving. However, [Shane] wanted it to be able to be arm-mounted, so making sure the torque wouldn’t melt his arm bones was an important priority.

A counterbalance was added to cancel it out, but that ended up causing additional problems down the road, so the throwing arm had to be made as light as possible. The gripper mechanism had to be redesigned again and again as each time the speed was increased, a new problem arose. Turns out that small plastic discs being accelerated at many G’s tend to deform and slip out of their holders, no matter how well engineered. So [Shane] switched to a clever new design to pull the Frisbee along rather than push. It was too dangerous to really be handheld, and the only tests while he was wearing it were at very low amounts of pressure and power.

Testing it in a wide-open field at full power showed promise and while he had plenty of speed, he wasn’t able to beat the distance record. Breaking the distance record is much harder as Frisbees aren’t really designed with the sheer acceleration that [Shane] is subjecting them to, and they want to flip. Additionally, the Frisbees are lacking the spin that would keep them more stable, and what we do as humans is quite difficult to reproduce. Maybe a larger-scale version of this disc launcher could be made that accepts Frisbees?

It’s incredible to watch this contraption come together as each part needs to be designed and machined first by [Shane]. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Putting The ‘Go’ In Frisbee Golf With A Robot Launcher” →

Review: DevTerm Linux Handheld Has Retro-Future Vibe

March 2, 2022 by Donald Papp 32 Comments

It’s not every day that an open-source, portable Linux handheld computer gets announced, so I couldn’t resist placing an order for the DevTerm by ClockworkPi back when we first learned about the stylish little terminal, which includes a 1280 x 480 screen (double-wide VGA) and a modular little thermal printer.

Of course, the global semiconductor shortage combined with shipping slowdowns led to delays, but things did ultimately come together for the project. I’ve always been a sucker for small-format machines, especially ones that come as a well-designed kit, and that means I can tell you all about what it was like to put it together and turn it on. There’s a lot to look at, so let’s get started.

Continue reading “Review: DevTerm Linux Handheld Has Retro-Future Vibe” →

Two revisions of Wenting's custom SSD board - earlier revision on the left, later, sleeker and more complete, on the right.

Custom SSD Gives New Life To Handheld Atom PC

February 25, 2022 by Arya Voronova 12 Comments

People don’t usually go as far as [Wenting Zhang] has – designing a new IDE SSD board for a portable x86 computer made in 2006. That said, it’s been jaw-dropping to witness the astounding amount of reverse-engineering and design effort being handwaved away.

The Benq S6 is a small MID (Miniaturized Internet Device) with an Atom CPU, an x86 machine in all but looks. Its non-standard SSD’s two gigabytes of storage, however, heavily limit the OS choice – Windows XP would hardly fit on there, and while a small Linux distro could manage better, it’s, and we quote, “not as exciting”. A lot of people would stop there and use an external drive, or a stack of adapters necessitating unsightly modifications to the case – [Wenting] went further and broke the “stack of adapters” stereotype into shards with his design journey.

Tracing quite a few complex multi-layer boards into a unified and working schematic is no mean feat, especially with the SSD PCB being a host to two BGA chips, and given the sheer amount of pins in the IDE interface of the laptop’s original drive. Even the requirement for the SSD to be initialized didn’t stop him – a short fight with the manufacturer’s software ensued, but was no match for [Wenting]’s skills. The end result is a drop-in replacement SSD even thinner than the stock one.

This project is well-documented for all of us to learn from! Source code and PCB files are on GitHub, and [Wenting] has covered the journey in three different places at once – on Hackaday.io, in a YouTube video embedded down below, and also on his Twitter in form of regular posts. Now, having seen this happen, we all have one less excuse to take up a project seemingly so complex.

Hackers play with SSD upgrades and repurposing every now and then, sometimes designing proprietary-to-SATA adapters, and sometimes reusing custom SSD modules we’ve managed to get a stack of. If case mods are acceptable to you aesthetics-wise, we’ve seen an SSD upgrade for a Surface Pro 3 made possible that way.

Continue reading “Custom SSD Gives New Life To Handheld Atom PC” →

A USB interface connected to a Psion Organiser II

Arduino Nano Adds USB Interface To The Psion Organiser II

February 7, 2022 by Robin Kearey 4 Comments

Introduced in 1984, the Psion Organiser series defined the first generation of electronic organizers or PDAs (personal digital assistants). Even though these devices are now over 30 years old, the Psion Organiser scene is alive and well: with new hardware and software is still being developed by enthusiasts the world over.

One of those enthusiasts is [James Stanley], who designed and built a USB interface for the Psion Organiser II. Although a “CommsLink” module providing an RS-232 port was available back in the day, it’s become hard to find, inspiring [James] to design a completely new module based on an Arduino Nano. Hooking it up to the Psion’s data bus was a simple matter of wiring up the eight data lines to the Nano’s GPIO ports. A set of series resistors served to prevent bus contention without having to add glue logic.

Getting the software working was a bit more difficult: the Organiser’s native OPL programming language doesn’t allow the user to directly access the expansion port’s memory address, so [James] had to write a routine in HD6303 machine code to perform the read, then call that routine from OPL to display the result on the screen. Currently, the routine only supports reading data from the Arduino, but extending it to a bidirectional interface should be possible too.

Finally, [James] designed and 3D printed a neat enclosure for the Arduino-USB interface, which makes it look almost as sleek as the original CommsLink module. Perhaps with a bit of further development, this could turn into another way to connect old Psions to the internet. We’ve also featured a new type of Datapak to enhance the Organiser’s memory. Continue reading “Arduino Nano Adds USB Interface To The Psion Organiser II” →

The PawPet board in a 3D-printed case, with a d-pad on the right and four buttons on the left. On its small monochrome screen, there's a cat-like pet looking at you.

Reject Modernity; Return To Tamagotchi

January 27, 2022 by Arya Voronova 9 Comments

Browsing through the recent projects on Hackaday.io, we’ve found this entry by [NanoCodeBug]: a single-PCB low-power trinket reviving the “pocket pet” concept while having some fun in the process! Some serious thought was put into making this device be as low-power as possible – with a gorgeous Sharp memory LCD and a low-power-friendly SAMD21, it can run for two weeks on a pair of mere AAA batteries, and possibly more given a sufficiently polished firmware. The hardware has some serious potential, with the gadget’s platform lending itself equally well to Arduino or CircuitPython environments, the LCD being overclock-able to 30 FPS, mass storage support to enable pet transfer and other PC integrations, a buzzer for all of your sound needs, and an assortment of buttons to help you create mini-games never seen before. [NanoCodeBug] has been working on the hardware diligently for the past month, having gone through a fair few revisions – this is shaping up to be a very polished gadget!

There’s no wonder that people love to start Tamagotchi-like projects – something special happens when an electronic device invokes the same feelings that we’d get while caring for our own pet, and this project does justice to the idea. With homebrew Tamagotchi projects, there’s a trend – once hardware is finished, the software doesn’t always get to a usable stage, feeling more like an afterthought. There’s a hacker twist that should help us subvert this trend, however – [NanoCodeBug] has shared all sources with us in a GitHub repository! If you would like to help with the “software” part, you can start working on that with just a few breakouts. The board files are also there, if you feel like the boards are marvelous enough for your liking to go through modern-day component sourcing pains.

Hackers have been playing with the “pocket pet” concept here and there, to delightful and unconventional results. If you’re on the lookout for other serious Tamagotchi recreation projects, this one takes the cake – otherwise, check out this furry Tamagotchi-like Tribble pet, disarming in its cuteness! If you’re one of our mischief-minded hackers, we have two posts to keep you entertained – one about dumping ROM on newer Tamagotchi toys, and another about building a WiFi-cracking one. And when it comes to the spirit of “what we have on hand” builds, this giant desktop-sized LED matrix Tamagotchi fits the bill pretty well!

Improving An Already Phenomenal Star Trek Prop

January 14, 2022 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

When Star Trek: Voyager was in the development phase, concept art was created for a new style of tricorder to be used by the crew of the titular starship. But as it often the case with a younger sibling, the show ended up having to largely make do with the hand-me-down props from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which had recently finished its TV run.

Trek aficionado [Mangy_Dog] completed a jaw-dropping recreation of this unused tricorder design back in 2019, but unable to leave well enough alone, he’s recently completed a second version that truly raises the bar for fan replicas. It’s not hyperbole to say that the prop he’s created is of a far higher quality and fidelity than anything they would have had during the actual filming of the show.

Now you might be thinking that building the second version of the tricorder was easier than the first, and indeed, [Mangy_Dog] learned some important lessons from the earlier build. But that’s not to say that construction of this new replica, which was actually done on commission, went off without a hitch. In fact, he almost immediately ran into a serious problem. When he attempted to order a new display from Nextion, he found the quality had dropped significantly from the ones he’d used previously. The viewing angles and color reproduction were abysmal, so he was forced to go back to the drawing board and not only find a new display, but a completely new graphics chip to talk to it. Continue reading “Improving An Already Phenomenal Star Trek Prop” →

Portable PI Powered Music Player

January 9, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 13 Comments

There was a brief time in the early 2000s when we carried cellphones, wallets, keys, and a bespoke digital media player loaded with a small selection of our music libraries. Devices like iPods, Zunes, Sandisk Sansa, and iRiver. Then as cell phones gained more storage and processing power, the two devices became one, and audio players slipped to obscurity as sports accessories. Perhaps in that vein, [BalderDragonSlayer] made his own Raspberry Pi-powered media player.

The device was cobbled together using a Raspberry Pi Zero, an Adafruit OLED bonnet, a LiPo charger, and a cheap USB DAC. The interface software is written in python, which has all your usual player controls, using the directional joystick and two pushbuttons on the bonnet. DietPi is a slimmed-down Linux that offers an impressively fast boot time, which is why it was picked for this project. The case was a simple project case with some holes dremeled into the face for the screen and buttons.

It is a wonderful little project that seems wonderful for walks in the park. This isn’t the first Pi-powered media player we’ve seen before. But we’re hoping we see more in the future.