Awesome Little UAV Flies 1 Km

December 7, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

After going to an SMD soldering workshop at the Stuttgart hackerspace ShackSpace, [Corvus] decided to be an over achiever and build a flight controller for his very own unmanned aerial vehicle.

The airplane itself is a regular store-bought foam contraption, and not terribly interesting in and of itself. Autonomous flight piques some interest, though. A custom flight controller PCB was designed and built by [Corvus] to work alongside a tiny STM32 Linux board. These two boards, combined with the OpenPilot project allow the plane to keep altitude, bearing, speed, and position in check autonomously. Telemetry between the ground station and vehicle is handled by UAVTalk and a ThinkPad.

In the video after the break, [Corvus] piloted the plane up to altitude, then directed it to fly 500 meters North and turn around. The result was an autonomous flight of over one kilometer. The next stage of the project is implementing some SLAM applications with optical path finding and obstacle avoidance.

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Ethernet Controlled Garage Door

December 5, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

[Thomas]’ garage door opener is a big old industrial unit, so he doesn’t have the convenience of a remote-controlled garage door opener. Obviously, this would get annoying after a while, so [Thomas] decided to build an Ethernet enabled relay board so he can open his door with his iPhone.

The build is based around an ATMega328 and a neat little Ethernet controller from Microchip. There are two relays on the board that connect to the Up and Down buttons on the door opener. The board receives UDP packets with instructions like, ‘RELAY 2 ON’ and the door responds accordingly.

Building just one of his boards cost [Thomas] the meager sum of $43. Considering the new Arduino Ethernet board costs around $60, we’re thinking he did a good job here. From the video after the break, we’re seeing that [Thomas] has to hold the button on his iPhone down for the door to go up. We see a few more pins on his AVR, so perhaps v.2 of his board could contain a few headers to attach sensors. Still, it’s a very nice build.

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A Keyboard For Your FIGnition

December 4, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

[Carl] sent in his keyboard he made for his FIGnition microcomputer. At least now he has more than 8 buttons.

The FIGnition is a tiny little microcomputer that harkens back to the 8-bit days of yore. Designed to be an educational computer like the Altair or Heathkit (sans blinkenlights), the FIGnition gives its students ‘bare metal’ access to everything in the system. It’s powered by an ATMega168, a 4 Kb SRAM and an 8Mb Flash chip for storage. Unfortunately, the FIGnition only has 8 buttons to program Forth with, so [Carl]’s project is very much desired in the community.

To expand 8 buttons into an alpha-numeric keyboard, [Carl] came up with the solution of using two tact switches per character. The switches are of different button heights, so pressing a pair of buttons actuates the two buttons in order, which is natively interpreted by the FIGnition. It’s a perfect match for the chord-keys of the FIGnition.

Check out the video of [Carl]’s bundle of wires after the break.

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Calculating Pi To 10 Trillion Digits; The Last Number Is 5

November 28, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 44 Comments

In August, 2010, [Alexander Yee] and [Shigeru Kondo] won a respectable amount of praise for calculating pi to more digits than anyone else. They’re back again, this time doubling the number of digits to 10 Trillion.

The previous calculation of 5 Trillion digits of Pi took 90 days to calculate on a beast of a workstation. The calculations were performed on 2x Xeon processors running at 3.33 GHz, 96 Gigabytes of RAM, and 32 Terabytes worth of hard drives. The 10 Trillion digit attempt used the same hardware, but needed 48 Terabytes of disk to store everything.

Unfortunately, the time needed to calculate 10 Trillion digits didn’t scale linearly. [Alex] and [Shigeru] waited three hundred and seventy-one days for the computer to finish the calculations. The guys used y-cruncher, a multithreaded pi benchmarking tool written by [Alex]. y-cruncher calculates hexadecimal digits of pi; conveniently, it’s fairly easy to find the nth hex digit of pi for verification.

If you’re wondering if it would be faster to calculate pi on a top 500 supercomputer, you’d be right. Those boxes are a little busy predicting climate change, nuclear weapons yields, and curing cancer, though. Doing something nobody else has ever done is still an admirable goal, especially if it means building an awesome computer.

Rebuilding A Mac SE As A Server Again

November 26, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Around this time last year, [Sprite_TM] took a 1980’s-era Macintosh SE and rebuilt it as a home file server. He used a Seagate Dockstar as the new motherboard, but over the past year he’s been annoyed with the fact that the Dockstar doesn’t have real SATA ports. Using USB to SATA converters on a server is a slow way of doing things, so [Sprite_TM] rebuilt his SE using an HP thin client. To do this, he had to break out the onboard SATA and PCIE; not an easy task, but that’s why [Sprite_TM] is around.

The first order of business was installing a pair of SATA ports. The stock thin client had two NAND-flash chips serving as the drive, both connected to a SATA controller. All [Sprite_tm] had to do was desolder the flash chips and wire up the new SATA connections. Easy enough.

Because the HP thin client only had 100Mbps Ethernet, [Sprite_tm] wasn’t looking forward to the order of magnitude difference between his expected rsync speeds and what he would get with a 1Gbps connection. The only problem is the thin client didn’t have a spare PCIE connection for an Ethernet card. That’s really no problem for [Sprite_tm], though: just desolder the GPU and run a few wires.

Just like last year’s work on his SE, [Sprite_tm] ended up with a functional and very cool home server. The old-school System 7 is still there, and of course he can still play Beyond Dark Castle. Awesome work, in our humble opinion.

Seeing With Another Person’s Eyes

November 23, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

We suppose they could just trade shoes, but that wouldn’t be a hack. [Timothy] wanted to design a team-building exercise at work, and he figured the best way to get some empathy would be to have people swap eyes. He calls his project eyeSwap and it is supposed to, “put the eye back in team.”

[Tim] found a few CRT viewfinders in a junk box attached small video cameras to each one. During the ‘training phase’ of his team-building exercises, both people playing the game complete a few hand-eye coordination tasks to get a feel for the rig. After the training phase, the inputs are swapped; Alice’s cameras are sent to Bob’s viewfinders and vice versa. The participants then complete the same tasks they did during the training phase.

The tasks aren’t that hard – putting balls into holes, for example – but it does require a huge amount of communication and coordination. eyeSwap reportedly builds trust and empathy towards others, and looks like a lot more fun than a ‘trust fall.’

Check out the video of two people playing eyeSwap after the break.

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Syneseizure Makes Objects Feel Loud

November 18, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

Synesthesia is a mix-up in the wiring of the brain where sensory inputs are perceived differently than what ‘normal people’ usually experience. People with synesthesia can have visual input mapped to aural perception in the mind, or driving along a highway where there’s a recent skunk roadkill can smell ‘loud.’ It’s an interesting way of perceiving the world that’s usually inaccessible to most of the population, but the Syneseizure tries to replicate this way of viewing the world.

There’s a bunch of types of synesthesia (Led Zeppelin feels purple, or apples smelling further away than grapes), but [Greg] and his team needed to choose one subtype to reduce the complexity of their project. They chose mapping visual input to touch sensation. This was accomplished by attaching a dozen speakers to the test subject’s face. A webcam recorded where the subject was looking at and with a Processing sketch, the webcam was reduced to a grayscale 4×3 pixel grid. The intensity of the each pixel corresponded to the strength of buzzing in each speaker. All that was left to do is put a mask over the subject and have them walk around.

The Syneseizure was built for Science Hack Day San Francisco and ended up winning the people’s choice award. There’s a bunch of pics and a great write-up on the project website, so be sure to check that out.