Tis The Season

December 7, 2024 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

’Tis the season for soldering! At least at my house. My son and I made some fairly LED-laden gifts for the immediate relatives last year, and he’s got the blinky bug. We were brainstorming what we could make this year, and his response was “I don’t care, but it needs to have lots of LEDs”.

It’s also the season for reverse engineering, apparently, because we’re using a string of WS2812-alike “fairy lights”. These are actually really neat, they look good and are relatively cheap. It’s a string of RGB LEDs with drivers, each dipped in epoxy, and run on a common three-enameled-wire bus. Unlike WS2812s, which pass the data on to the next unit in the line and then display them with a latching pulse at the end of a sequence, these LED drivers seem to count how many RGB packets have been sent down the wire, and only respond to their own number.

This means that if you cut up a string of 200 LEDs, it behaves like a string of 200 WS2812s. But if you cut say 10 LEDs off the string, where you cut them matters. If you cut it off the front of the string, you only have to send 10 color packets. If you cut them off the other end, you need to send 290 dummy packets before they even start listening. Bizarre, but ’tis the season for bizarre hacks.

And finally, ’tis the season for first steps into “software architecture”. Which is to say that my son is appreciating functions for the first time in his life. Controlling one LED is easy, but making a light show is about two more abstraction layers on top of that. We’ve been having fun making them dim, twinkle, and chase so far. We only have two more weekends, though, and we don’t have a final light show figured out yet, but after all, ’tis the season for last minute present hacking.

A chocolate coating machine works in the round to enrobe mint Oreos.

Chocolate-Coating Machine Mk. 2: The Merry-Go-Round

November 28, 2024 by Kristina Panos 16 Comments

This holiday season, [Chaz] wanted to continue his family’s tradition of enrobing a little bit of everything in dark chocolate, and built an improved, rotating chocolate-coating machine.

You may remember last year’s offering, aka the conveyor belt version. Although that one worked, too much chocolate was ultimately lost to the surface of the kitchen table. [Chaz] once again started with a standard chocolate fountain and bought a round wire rack that fits the circumference of the bowl at the bottom. He snipped a hole in the center large enough to accommodate the business part of the fountain and printed a collar with holes that he cleverly zip-tied to the rack.

[Chaz] also printed a large gear to go around the bowl, a small gear to attach to a six RPM motor, a motor mount for the bowl, and an air blade attachment for a portable Ryobi fan. The air blade worked quite well, doing the double duty of distributing the chocolate and thinning out the coating. Plus, it gives things a neat rumpled look on the top.

Want to make some special chocolates this year, but don’t want to build an enrober? Get yourself a diffraction grating and make some rainbow goodies with melted chocolate.

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Flaming Power Wheels Skeleton Wins Halloween

November 5, 2024 by Jenny List 48 Comments

When the project description starts with the sentence “I use an RC remote and receiver, an esp32, high-current motor drivers, servos, an FPV camera, and a little propane”, you know that this is one which deserves a second look. And so [gearscodeandfire]’s Halloween project caught our eye. It’s a pink Power Wheels jeep driven by a skeletal rider, and the best part is that the whole thing is remote controlled down to a pan-and-tilt skull, a first-person video feed, and even real flames.

At its heart is an ESP32 with a set of motor controllers and relays to do the heavy lifting. The controller is a standard radio remote controller, and the first-person view is an analogue feed as you’d find on a drone. The skeleton is given a child-like appearance by discarding the original adult-proportioned plastic skull and replacing it with a much larger item. The thought that plastic Halloween skulls are available in a range of standard sizes and can be considered as a part in their own right is something we find amusing. The propane burner is supplied from a small cylinder via a solenoid valve, and ignited with the spark from a high-voltage transformer.

The result, we think, wins Halloween hands down. Twelve-foot skeletons are SO 2023!

The video is below the break.

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Start Your Creepy Jack-O-Lantern Project Early This Year With Gourdan

May 2, 2024 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

For a lot of us, projects take time, and they have to be squeezed in around the regular chores of real life. Thus, if you’re starting your Halloween builds after the holiday displays have already hit the stores, you’re probably too late. We’re here to implore you to start building early this year—and you can take inspiration from a great pumpkin called Gourdan.

Gourdan is the work of [Braden Sunwold]. It’s a pumpkin with a fearsome visage and creepy eyes that follow you around the room. This is achieved thanks to a Raspberry Pi 3 nestled within Gourdan’s gourdy body. Gourdan’s eyes are a pair of 1.54-inch LCDs which display animated eyes. Thus, no mechanical wizardry is required here—it’s all done digitally. A camera attached to the Raspberry Pi tracks people with the aid of OpenCV, and the eyes are created and animated with the help of Adafruit example code.

There’s never a better time to start hacking for Halloween than right now. And hey, who knows—your neighbour might have kicked off in January, so they’ll have an almighty head start. They could have something really impressive in the works!

And don’t forget—you can always send us your holiday hacks, whatever the time of year! Just hit up the tipsline. Happy making!

An Animated LED Fireplace Powered By The CH32V003

January 2, 2024 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

Once you’ve mastered the near-magical ability of turning your ideas into a piece of hardware you can hold in your hand, it’s only natural that you’ll want to spread the joy. The holidays are a perfect time to produce a custom piece of electronics for friends and family, but there’s a catch: going from making one or two of something to making dozens of them can introduce some interesting challenges. Not only will you want to cost optimize your design, but to save yourself some aggravation, you’ll likely want to simplify the assembly process.

The fifty electronic fireplaces designed by built by [Adam Anderson], [Daniel Quach], and [Johan Wheeler] are a perfect example of both concepts, and while we’re coming across it a bit late for this year’s gift exchange, we wouldn’t be surprised if these MIT-licensed beauties end up under a few more trees in 2024.

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Festive PCB Gives The Gift Of Hacking

December 8, 2023 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

‘Tis the season for gift giving, and what better to give than a newfound love for hacking, soldering, and blinkenlights? In order to spread cheer and education at the local hackerspace, [Tom Goff] created this festive tree circuit board that can either sit in a stand to be admired, or worn as jewelry. The resistors are even designed to look like candy canes hanging from the boughs.

The brains of this festive little tree is an ATmega328P, which you probably recognize as the microcontroller that powers the Arduino Uno. Although this circuit has none of the extra bits you’d find on an Uno, not even a crystal oscillator, it can still be programmed with Arduino and use the 8 MHz internal clock.

[Tom] has provided good, thorough instructions, especially for the sticky bit of setting up the IDE to program using the 8 MHz internal clock. So even if you’re nowhere near Norwich Hackerspace, you can join in the fun. Be sure to check out the video after the break, wherein [Tom] walks through designing the PCB using Inkscape and Fritzing.

Want to whip up a little something for the hackerspace wall? Check out this Sierpinski Christmas tree.

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The Ghost Detector 9000 Is A Fun Spirit-Chasing Game

November 21, 2023 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

Halloween may have come and gone for another year, but we’re still finding neat spooky projects lurking out on the Interwebs. Case in point, the Ghost Detector 9000 from [Jules].

Effectively, what you’re looking at here is a fun interactive ghost-detecting game. It consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero hooked up with an IMU sensor that can detect the rig’s movement and orientation. As the user moves the Ghost Detector 9000 around, it outputs lights and sound when it’s aimed at a so-called “ghost-signal”. The user then pulls the trigger to “capture” the ghost. The whole rig is built inside a flashlight which presented a useful form factor for modification.

For those eager to dive into the nitty-gritty, [Jules] has shared the project files on GitHub. There’s some nifty stuff going on, like Rust code that interfaces with I2C devices hooked up to the Pi, and a sensor-fusion algorithm to make the most out of the data from the 9-axis IMU.

It’s a fun build that probably taught [Jules] a great deal along the way, even if it’s a game at heart. If you prefer to shoot zombies instead of capture ghosts, we’ve seen a build that lets you go hunting with a laser crossbow, too.

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