Dead E. Ruxpin Appears Alive And Well

September 26, 2023 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

What are you doing to scare trick-or-treaters this Halloween? Surely something, right? Well, Hackaday alum [CameronCoward] certainly has his holiday under control with Dead E. Ruxpin, a murderous, cassette tape-controlled animatronic bear.

Readers of a certain vintage will no doubt see the correlation to Teddy Ruxpin, an animatronic bear from the 1980s whose mouth moved as it read stories from cassette tapes. Cleverly, the engineers used one stereo channel for the story’s audio, and the other channel to control the bear’s mouth.

Dead E. Ruxpin takes this idea and expands it, using the same two channels to send audio and control three servo motors that move both arms and the mouth. How is this possible? By sending tones built from one or more frequencies.

Essentially, [Cameron] assigned a frequency to each movement: mouth open/closed, and left and/or right arm up or down. These are all, of course, synced up with specific points in the audio so Dead E. doesn’t just move randomly, he dances along with the music.

The bear is actually a hand puppet, which leaves room for a 3D-printed skeleton that holds the RP2040 and the servos and of course, moves the puppet’s parts. We can’t decide if we prefer the bulging bloodshot eyes, or think the cutesy original eyes would have made a scarier bear. Anyway, check out the build/demo video after the break to see it in action.

Are you now into Teddy Ruxpin? Here’s a bit more about those scare bears. And don’t forget, Halloween Hackfest runs now until October 31st.

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$13 Scope And Logic Analyzer Hits 18 Msps

September 26, 2023 by Al Williams 31 Comments

We aren’t sure what’s coolest about [Richard Testardi’s] Flea-Scope. It costs about $13 plus the cost of making the PCB. It operates at 18 million samples per second. It also doesn’t need any software — you connect to it with your browser! It works as an oscilloscope, a logic analyzer, and a waveform generator. Not bad. The board is basically a little life support around a PIC32MK and the software required to run it.

Of course, for $13, you need to temper your expectations. One analog input reads from -6 to 6V (hint: use a 10X probe). The goal was for the instrument to be accurate within 2%. There are also nine digital inputs sampled simultaneously with the analog sampling. The signal generator portion can output a 4 MHz square wave or a 40 kHz arbitrary waveform.

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Button, Button, Who’s Got The (Pico) Button?

September 20, 2023 by Al Williams 26 Comments

There is an episode of Ren and Stimpy with a big red “history eraser’ button that must not be pressed. Of course, who can resist the temptation of pressing the unpressable button? The same goes for development boards. If there is a button on there, you want to read it in your code, right? The Raspberry Pi Pico is a bit strange in that regard. The standard one lacks a reset button, but there is a big tantalizing button to reset in bootloader mode. You only use it when you power up, so why not read it in your code? Why not, indeed?

Turns out, that button isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t connected to a normal CPU pin at all. Instead, it connects to the flash memory chip. So does that mean you can’t read it at all? Not exactly. There’s good news, and then there’s bad news.

The Good News

The official Raspberry Pi examples show how to read the button (you have read all the examples, right?). You can convert the flash’s chip-select into an input temporarily and try to figure out if the pin is low, meaning that the button is pushed. Sounds easy, right?

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Open Source Tracker Keeps An Eye On Furry Friends

September 19, 2023 by Richard Baguley 49 Comments

Most of the time, you’ll know where your cats are — asleep on the bed about 23.5 hours a day and eating or pooping the rest of the time. But some cats are more active than others, so there’s commercial options for those who want to keep tabs on their pet. Unfortunately, [Sahas Chitlange] didn’t like any of them, so he designed and built his own open source version: FindMyCat.io.

The system is in two parts: a module that fits onto a cat collar, and a home station that, well, stays at home. It offers a variety of tracking modes. In home mode, the home station signals the collar every 10 seconds, which stays in a deep sleep most of the time. If the collar doesn’t get a signal from the home station, it switches to ping mode, where it will wait for a signal from the FindMyCat over the LTE-M connection and report its location.

Finally, the app can set the collar to Lost Kitteh mode, where the collar will send a location to the app every seven minutes or thirty seconds. The collar also supports a direction-finding feature, using the ultra wideband (UWB) feature of recent Apple iPhones to point you in the direction and distance of the tracked cat.

The collar is built around a Nordic Semiconductor NRF-9160, a System in a Package (SiP) that does most of the heavy lifting as it includes GPS, an LTE-M modem, and an ARM processor. One interesting feature here: [Sahas] doesn’t make his antennas on the PCB, but instead uses an Ignion NN03-310, an off-the-shelf antenna that is already qualified for LTE-M use. That means this system can be connected to almost any LTE-M network without getting yelled at for using unqualified hardware and making the local cell towers explode.

The collar also includes a DWM3001CDK ultrawideband (UWB) module used for the locator feature. The accompanying app uses this and Apple’s UWB support to show the user which direction the cat is in, and how far away it is. The app isn’t in the Apple App Store yet, so you’ll need to sign up for an Apple Developer account to use it. We’d love to hear from anyone who takes it for a test drive with their own pet.

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ESP32 Drives Tiny FM Radio

September 14, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 21 Comments

Even as music streaming services and podcast apps dominate most of our listening time, it’s still a great idea to keep a radio on hand, if for nothing else than in emergency situations. After all, blizzards, hurricanes, and other natural disasters can quickly take out both home and mobile Internet access. If you’d like to have an FM radio with the absolute smallest footprint, take a look at this one built around an ESP32.

While the radio uses the ESP32 as the main control board hosted by a TTGO T-Display board which adds a 1.14 inch ST7789V IPS panel, it also makes use of the TEA5767 chip for handling the FM radio signals. As [Volos Projects] has it programmed, the ESP32 stores five preset channels which can be toggled using two buttons at the bottom of the device. There’s also some circuitry to handle output to headphones or a stereo.

For making the radio even smaller, some of the audio processing could be done on the ESP32 instead, although its much simpler to take a slightly larger footprint and offload this to an audio processing chip. Since the source code for this project is open, modifications could be done including adding seek/tune functionality instead of relying only on presets. If you’re not building this for emergencies, though, and your entire area is dominated by cookie cutter corporate-owned radio stations, an ESP32 with an internet connection is great for accessing better radio stations around the world.

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This Keyboard Doesn’t Work Without Game Boy Cartridges

September 11, 2023 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Just when we though we’d seen it all when it comes to custom keyboards (or most of it, anyway), along comes [Stu] with the TypeBoy and TypePak. Like the title implies, TypeBoy and TypePak are inseparable.

Let’s talk about TypePak first. Somehow, some way, [Stu] managed to fit the following into an aftermarket Game Boy Advance cartridge: a XIAO BLE microcontroller, a Sharp Memory Display, a shift register, and a LiPo battery. It’s all there in [Stu]’s incredibly detailed blog post linked above.

Amazing, no? And although [Stu] claims that the TypePak is mostly for aesthetics (boy howdy), it will make swapping microcontrollers much easier in the future.

If this looks sort of familiar, you may remember a likely render of [mujimaniac]’s board called the GIGA40 that also employed a cartridge system. Allegedly there is now a working prototype of the GIGA40.

Would you like to give the TypeBoy and TypePak a go? Files are available on GitHub, but this doesn’t seem like a project for the faint of heart.

Speaking of stuffing things in to Game Boy cartridges, check out this SNES cartridge turned hard drive enclosure.

Via KBD

This Arduino Debugger Uses The CH552

September 11, 2023 by Al Williams 16 Comments

One of the things missing from the “classic” Arduino experience is debugging. That’s a shame, too, because the chips used have that capability. However, the latest IDE has the ability to work with external debuggers and if you want to get started with a classic ATMega Arduino, [deqing] shows you how to get started with a cheap CH552 8-bit USB microcontroller board as the debugging dongle.

The CH552 board in question is a good choice, primarily because it is dirt cheap. There are design files on GitHub (and the firmware), but you could probably pull the same trick with any of the available CH552 breakout boards.

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