Nerf Turret Controlled By Slack

February 15, 2016 by Anool Mahidharia 11 Comments

What happens when you give a former Navy weapons engineer some development boards and ask him to build “something cool”? What happens when you give a kid finger paints? [Seb] obviously built an IoT Nerf Turret Gun controlled via a team communication app.

The weapon was a Nerf Stampede which was hacked so it could be fired electronically. The safety switch was bypassed and a relay provided the firing signal. The electronics stack consists of an Intel Galileo, a motor shield and a relay shield. The turret assembly was built using off the shelf structural parts from Actobotics. Stepper motors provide motion to the turret. The fun begins with how the software is implemented. An iBeacon network detects where people sit at in the office. So when you type in the name of your target in a messaging app, it knows where they’re sitting, aims at them, and pops a nerf dart at them.

The lessons learned are what makes such projects worth their while. For example, USB is a standard. And the standard says that USB cables be not more than 1.8 m long. [Seb] was reminded of this when his electronics worked on his workbench, but refused to work when placed in-situ and connected via a 3m long cable – the serial link just wouldn’t work.

Mounting the gun such that it was nicely balanced was another challenge. Eventually, he had to use a couple of AA cells taped to the front of the gun to get it right. This could be useful though, since he plans to replace the dead weights with a sighting camera. One last hack was to zip tie heat sinks to the motor drivers, and he had a good reason to do that. Read more about it in his blog. And check out the video as someone takes aim and shoots a target via SLACK, the team messaging application.

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Open Sesame, From A Galaxy Far, Far Away.

February 14, 2016 by Anool Mahidharia 15 Comments

[TVMiller]’s description of his project is epic enough to deserve a literal copy-paste (something our readers often praise us about). In his own words, “Having discovered several spare Midichlorians in my liquor cabinet, I trained and applied them to opening a large cumbersome gate. The FORCE motion travels through my inner what-nots and is translated by the Pebble Classic accelerometer toggling a command sent to the (Particle) Cloud (City) which returns to the Particle Photon triggering a TIP120 to fire a button on an existing RF transceiver. May the ridiculous hand gestures be with you, always.” Thus was born the Gate Jedi , and you’ll need exactly 47 Midichlorians, and some other trivial parts, to build one.

The Pebble watch hooks up to his android smart phone. A Pebble ~~(android)~~ app sends the accelerometer data to the Particle (previously called Spark) cloud service. From there, the data is pushed to the Photon IoT board which runs a few lines of code. Output from the Photon turns on a TIP120 power transistor, which in turn triggers the existing RF trans receiver that opens the Gate.

This looks way cooler than the Light Sabre hacks. Check out the video of him summoning the Force. And if you’d like to do more, try integrating gesture controls with this Pebble Watch hack that turns it into a home automation controller.

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Brushed DC Servo Drive

February 13, 2016 by Anool Mahidharia 37 Comments

Brushless DC motors, and their associated drive electronics, tend to be expensive and complicated. [Ottoragam] was looking for a cheaper alternative and built this Brushed DC motor servo controller and the results look pretty promising. Check out the video after the break.

He needed a low cost, closed loop drive for his home-brew CNC. The servo drive is able to supply a brushed DC motor with up to 7 A continuous current at up to 36 V which works out to about 250 W or 1/3 HP. It does closed loop control with feedback from a quadrature encoder. The drive accepts simple STEP and DIRECTION signals making it easy to interface with micro controllers and use it as a replacement for stepper motors in positioning applications. All of the control is handled by an ATmega328P. It takes the input signals and encoder data, does PID control, and drives the motor via the DRV8701 full bridge MOSFET driver. There’s also some error detection for motor over-current and driver under-voltage. Four IRFH7545 MOSFETs in H-bridge configuration form the output power stage.

This is still work in progress, and [Ottoragam] has a few features pending in his wish list. The important ones include adding a serial interface to make it easy to adjust the PID parameters and creating a GUI to make the adjustment easier. The project is Open Source and all source files available at his Github repository. The board is mostly surface mount, but the passives are all 0805, so it ought to be easy to assemble. The QFN footprint for the micro controller could be the only tricky one. [Ottoragam] would love to have some beta testers for his boards, and maybe some helpful comments to improve his design.

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Learn How A Radial Engine Works Or Gawk At Amazing Wood Model

February 4, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 19 Comments

[Ian Jimmerson] has constructed a detailed model of a radial engine out of wood and MDF for an undisclosed reason. Rather than just delivering the wooden engine to wherever wood engines go, [Ian] decided to take the time to film himself disassembling and reassembling his engine, explaining in detail how it works as he goes. He starts by teaching about the cylinder numbering and the different possible cylinder configurations. It only gets better after that, and it’s worth watching the full 20 minutes of video. You’ll leave with a definite understanding of how radial engines work, and maybe build something neat with the knowledge.

Our only complaint is the lack of build photos or construction techniques. It’s a real feat to build something with this many moving parts that can run off an electric drill. Was a CNC involved, or was he one of those hardcore guys who manage to get precision parts with manual methods? Part 1 and 2 after the break.

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ESP8266 Killer?

January 30, 2016 by Elliot Williams 47 Comments

We’ve seen rumors floating around the Twittersphere about a new integrated microprocessor and WiFi SOC: the NL6621 from Nufront. Details are still scarce, but that doesn’t seem to be because the chip is vaporware: you could buy modules on Taobao.com and eBay right now for between two-and-a-half and three bucks, and Nufront’s website says they’ve produced a million modules since 2013.

The NL6621 WiFi SOC is powered by a 160 MHz ARM Cortex-M3 with 448 KB of RAM, and everything else is integrated in the SOC. The module has 32 GPIOs, SPI, I2C, I2S digital audio, and most of the peripherals that you’d expect. They say they have a completely open source SDK, but we can’t find a link to it anywhere. An English-language forum has sprung up in anticipation of the next new thing, and they say that they’ve contacted Nufront about the SDK, so that’s probably as good a place as any to lurk around if you’re interested. With an ARM core, it shouldn’t be long before someone gets GCC working on these things anyway.

It’s also worth noting that we’ve announced ESP8266 killers before, and it hasn’t come to pass. The mixture of community and official support that (eventually) came out of Espressif seems to be the main factor determining the ESP8266’s success, and we don’t see that yet with the NL6621. So take the question mark in the title seriously, but if this turns out to be the next big thing, remember where you heard it first, ok?

Thanks [David Hunt] for the tip!

Cheap WiFi Devices Are Hardware Hacker Gold

January 27, 2016 by Elliot Williams 51 Comments

Cheap consumer WiFi devices are great for at least three reasons. First, they almost all run an embedded Linux distribution. Second, they’re cheap. If you’re going to break a couple devices in the process of breaking into the things, it’s nice to be able to do so without financial fears. And third, they’re often produced on such low margins that security is an expense that the manufacturers just can’t stomach — meaning they’re often trivially easy to get into.

Case in point: [q3k] sent in this hack of a tiny WiFi-enabled SD card reader device that he and his compatriots [emeryth] and [informatic] worked out with the help of some early work by [Benjamin Henrion]. The device in question is USB bus-powered, and sports an SD card reader and an AR9331 WiFi SOC inside. It’s intended to supply wireless SD card support to a cell phone that doesn’t have enough on-board storage.

The hack begins with [Benajmin] finding a telnet prompt on port 11880 and simply logging in as root, with the same password that’s used across all Zsun devices: zsun1188. It’s like they want to you get in. (If you speak Chinese, you’ll recognize the numbers as being a sound-alike for “want to get rich”. So we’ve got the company name and a cliché pun. This is basically the Chinese equivalent of “password1234”.) Along the way, [Benjamin] also notes that the device executes arbitrary code typed into its web interface. Configure it to use the ESSID “reboot”, for instance, and the device reboots. Oh my!

From here [q3k] and co. took over and ported OpenWRT to the device and documented where its serial port and GPIOs are broken out on the physical board. But that’s not all. They’ve also documented how and where to attach a wired Ethernet adapter, should you want to put this thing on a non-wireless network, or use it as a bridge, or whatever. In short, it’s a tiny WiFi router and Linux box in a package that’s about the size of a (Euro coin | US quarter) and costs less than a good dinner out. Just add USB power and you’re good to go.

Nice hack!

Amazing IMU-based Motion Capture Suit Turns You Into A Cartoon

January 23, 2016 by Elliot Williams 40 Comments

[Alvaro Ferrán Cifuentes] has built the coolest motion capture suit that we’ve seen outside of Hollywood. It’s based on tying a bunch of inertial measurement units (IMUs) to his body, sending the data to a computer, and doing some reasonably serious math. It’s nothing short of amazing, and entirely doable on a DIY budget. Check out the video below the break, and be amazed.

Cellphones all use IMUs to provide such useful functions as tap detection and screen rotation information. This means that they’ve become cheap. The ability to measure nine degrees of freedom on a tiny chip, for chicken scratch, pretty much made this development inevitable, as we suggested back in 2013 after seeing a one-armed proof-of-concept.

But [Alvaro] has gone above and beyond. Everything is open source and documented on his GitHun. An Arduino reads the sensor boards (over multiplexed I2C lines) that are strapped to his limbs, and send the data over Bluetooth to his computer. There, a Python script takes over and passes the data off to Blender which renders a 3D model to match, in real time.

All of this means that you could replicate this incredible project at home right now, on the cheap. We have no idea where this is heading, but it’s going to be cool.

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