The Ultimate Breadboard – A Prototyping Station That Has It All

February 9, 2012 by Mike Nathan 27 Comments

[Claudio] was working on a homebrew oscilloscope project when he started thinking about how unsuitable a standard breadboard is for a large-scale project. Rather than adding components on top of components until they became what he lovingly calls a “fragile, unforgiving crapstack”, he decided to build himself the Ultimate Breadboard.

He packed so much into his design, that it’s honestly hard to know where to begin describing it. Aside from an appropriately large breadboarding surface embedded in the center of the console, he added a power supply to the left hand side, which sits just below an Avr-Net-IO board. The right side of the console features an Arduino NG, and a pair of level converters. He also added some LED-based VU meters, a couple of 7-segment displays, an LCD display, an analog voltmeter, along with plenty of I/O connectors.

The Ultimate Breadboard might look a bit daunting at first, but it seems like an awesome setup on which to do any sort of prototyping. Be sure to check out the video below for more details and to see [Claudio] give a tour of the device.

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Color Sensor Gives The RGB Values Of Anything

February 7, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

[Rick Osgood] wanted to build a color sensor that could be held up to any object to get RGB color values. He originally started with a photoresistor and a few LEDs, but couldn’t get that to work reliably. [Rick] finally completed his color sensor after finding a digital luminosity sensor on Adafruit, ending up with a pretty accurate piece of hardware to judge the color of something.

The idea behind the color sensor is to light up red, green, and blue LEDs and see how much light is reflected back from the object with a luminosity sensor. [Rick] chose an Arduino to do all the heavy lifting for the light sensor and activating the LEDs.

After a few tests [Rick] got his color sensor working, but it’s not up to par with what he had expected. This isn’t really a problem: the LEDs probably don’t have the same brightness and the luminosity sensor doesn’t respond evenly across the entire rainbow. Those things can always be fixed in software, though. It’s a nice project that could serve as part of a prototype for this color picker pen.

Measure Radiation With Military Surplus

February 2, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

It’s really amazing what you can find at military surplus shops. [David] just built a radiation detector out of a DT-590A scintillation probe originally made to test if Air Force bases were contaminated with Plutonium. Who says nothing good came out of massive nuclear arsenals?

DT-590A / PDR-56 Gamma ray probes were made obsolete by the US Air Force a few years ago and they’re trickling into military surplus stores around the country and the Internet. [David] found the manual for this probe and put together a little circuit to drive this x-ray sensor. The build uses an ammeter as a simple dial, and includes a piezo speaker for the prerequisite Geiger counter ‘clicks.’

[David] also threw up a post on converting this x-ray probe into a general purpose Gamma probe, effectively making it a Geiger counter for the really dangerous radiation. You could always use your smart phone for the same task, but recycling military hardware imparts a good bit of geek cred.

Resurrecting A Mac LC For Server Duties

February 2, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

It might just be a case mod, but we love [Eduard]’s take on a modern Macintosh LC (translation). The donor motherboard came from a disused home server, and the LC came from [Eduard]’s childhood memories of playing Glider and The Incredible Machine.

The case was donated from a venerable Macintosh LC, manufactured circa 1990. The original LC had a Motorola 68020 CPU, which [Eduard] upgraded to an Intel Atom board. It was a somewhat tricky build – he adapted a 90 Watt power supply from a piece of old office equipment to power the new Intel board. With a great deal of very careful Dremel work, the old-school Apple logo was modified into a power button for the new computer.

For frequent readers of Hack a Day, it’s no surprise that we’ll grab up any old Apple or Mac build. [Kevin] built a weather station and analog joypad for his Apple IIc, We’ve seen custom Mac ROM SIMMS, and of course [Sprite_tm]’s amazing SE/30 emulation. If you’ve got something that will send our 68k senses tingling, send it on into the tip line.

Powering An Ultrasonic Transducer

January 30, 2012 by Kevin Dady 25 Comments

[Lindsay] has a wonderful writeup about a new toy in the shop, an ultrasonic transducer. The 28kHz, 70W bolt-clamped Langevin transducer by itself is not much use, you need a power supply, a horn to focus the energy, and a way to tune it. [Lindsay] starts off by showing how to find out the resonant frequency of the transducer, designing and building a high voltage high frequency AC power supply, and how to design a horn.

Not missing the meaning of DIY [Lindsay] casts and machines a horn for the transducer with a high level of precision as this will also tune the horn to the correct frequency. Once some brackets are machined the whole setup is put through some fun experiments in water and lemonaide, but the real purpose is to drill fine holes in glass for his home made Panaplex displays.

Join us after the break for a short video.

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LiPo Charging Circuit Tutorial

January 28, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 86 Comments

As far as battery technology goes, Lithium Polymer cells are the bee’s knees. They’re powerful enough to handle very demanding applications and come in a multitude of sizes for any conceivable application. There’s a problem with LiPos, though – they have the tendency to explode when charged incorrectly. Luckily, [Paul] sent in a great tutorial on building a LiPo charger that works over USB.

In the original design of [Paul]’s board, he chose a Maxim MAX1551 Lithium battery charger. Confounded by the expense and/or unavailability of this IC (although Sparkfun has a few), he moved onto the similar Microchip MCP7813. This IC supports charging from a power source from 3.5 to 6 Volts as would be found in a USB hub.

The board [Paul] came up with is incredibly small – just barely larger than the USB plug itself. The layout is fairly simple as well. We’re thinking this could be a highly useful application of some home board fabrication. If you have a simpler way to charge LiPos that don’t require a specialized chip, send it into the tip line.

Make A Simple O-scope With A FTDI Board And A Couple Of ADC’s

January 22, 2012 by Kevin Dady 25 Comments

[RandomTask] has posted a nice tutorial on how to use a FTDI serial to usb converter, and a couple analog to digital converters to make a simple software oscilloscope. Using a “Universal Serial to USB converter” and one of many FTDI break out boards, he first reprograms the chip using FTDI’s programming software to put the device into a FIFO (first in first out) mode.

From there a pair of ADC0820 8 bit digital to analog converters are wired up, and input is fed to a couple 555’s for testing. It should be noted that there is no input protection, so things like voltages above 5 volts, or negative voltages are a big no-no with this setup. It still could be very handy while working with micro controllers or other digital circuits.

Data is then sent to the computer and displayed using a VB.net program, which has some basic features like scale and triggering, but also contains a couple bonuses like Calc Freq and Calc V delta calculation.

Many people have these little serial to usb converters, and might be in need of a simple scope. If you’re one of them, then you can cobble this together pretty darn quickly, and cheaply.