Misc Hacks

4072 Articles

Slime Mold-Powered Smart Watches See Humans Fall In Love With The Goo

February 16, 2024 by 13 Comments

Humans are very good at anthropomorphising things. That is, giving them human characteristics, like ourselves. We do it with animals—see just about any cartoon—and we even do it with our own planet—see Mother Nature. But we often extend that courtesy even further, giving names to our cars and putting faces on our computers as well.

A recent study has borne this out in amusing fashion. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that human attitudes towards a device can change if they are required to take actions to look after it. Enter the slime mold smartwatch, and a gooey, heartwarming story of love and care between human and machine, mediated by mold.

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Brushless ESC Becomes Dual-Motor Brushed ESC With A Few Changes

February 15, 2024 by 15 Comments

What is a brushless ESC, really? Well, generally, it’s usually a microcontroller with a whole lot of power transistors hanging off it to drive three phases of brushless motor coils. [Frank Zhao] realised that with a little reprogramming, you could simply use a brushless ESC to independently run two brushed motors. Thus, he whipped up a custom firmware for various AM32-compatible ESCs to do just that.

The idea of the project is to enable a single lightweight ESC to run two brushed motors for combat robots. Dual-motor brushed ESCs can be hard to find and expensive, whereas single-motor brushless ESCs are readily available. The trick is to wire up the two brushed motors such that each motor gets one phase wire of its own, and the two motors share the middle phase wire. This allows independent control of both motors via the brushless ESC’s three half-bridges, by setting the middle wire to half voltage. Depending on how you set it up, the system can be configured in a variety of ways to suit different situations.

[Frank’s] firmware is available on Github for the curious. He lists compatible ESCs there, and notes that you’ll need to install the AM32 ESC firmware before flashing his version to make everything work correctly.

The VESC project has long supported brushed motor operation, too, though not in a tandem configuration. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own neat ESC hacks, don’t hesitate to hit us up on the tipsline!

3D Printed DIN Rail Mount Is Attractive

February 11, 2024 by 8 Comments

DIN rails aren’t very common in hobby projects, although you do see them occasionally. But in some industries, they are everywhere. The rail is just a piece of aluminum or steel with slots to hold it to a wall or bulkhead. There are two small lips that equipment like circuit breakers, power supplies, or controllers can attach easily. A common 3D printing project is a way to mount something like a printer controller to DIN rails. [NotLikeALeafOnThe Wind] shows a different take on it: a magnetic holder that temporarily attaches a rail to a ferrous surface.

Of course, mounting the rail is only half the equation. After that, you still need things to mount on the rail. Luckily, there’s no shortage of designs for DIN mounts for many common boards and modules.

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Analog Engineer’s Pocket Reference Needs A Big Pocket

February 10, 2024 by 22 Comments

We always admire when companies produce useful tools or documentation that aren’t specific to their products. For example, consider LTSpice. Sure, it has the company’s models baked in. But there’s no reason you can’t use it for anything. Thanks! We were interested to see Texas Instrument’s fifth edition of the “Analog Engineer’s Pocket Reference” is still freely available. While we aren’t sure a book with nearly 200 pages in it is a “pocket reference,” we do think you’ll enjoy it, even if you don’t want to use TI’s offerings. This book has been around for 50 years, but it is updated periodically, and this version is the fifth iteration.

The book has several sections ranging from conversion between units and color codes to amplifier noise calculations and understanding ADC settling times. Want to know more about PCB microstrips? Page 85.

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Keeping Track Of The Night Sky With Discrete Logic Chips

February 9, 2024 by 11 Comments

As hobbies go, stargazing has a pretty low barrier to entry. All you really need is a pair of Mark 1 eyeballs and maybe a little caffeine to help you stay up late enough. Astronomy, on the other hand, takes quite a bit more equipment, not least of which is a telescope and a way to get it pointed in the right direction at the right time, and to make up for the pesky fact that we’re on a moving, spinning ball of rock.

Yes, most of the equipment needed for real astronomy is commercially available, but [Mitsuru Yamada] decided to go his own way with this homebrew retro-style telescope motor controller. Dubbed MCT-6, the controller teams up with his dual-6502 PERSEUS-9 computer to keep his scope on target. There are a lot of literally moving parts to this build, including the equatorial mount which is made from machined aluminum and powered by a pair of off-the-shelf stepper-powered rotary stages for declination and right ascension. The controller that runs the motors is built completely from discrete 74HCxx logic chips that divide down a 7.0097-MHz crystal oscillator signal to drive the steppers precisely at one revolution per diurnal day. The pulse stream can also be sped up for rapid slewing, to aim the telescope at new targets using a hand controller.

As impressive as all this is, the real star (sorry) of the show here is the fit and finish. In typical [Yamada-san] fashion, the impeccably wire-wrapped mainboard fits in a robust die-cast aluminum case that fits the retro aesthetic of the whole project. The PERSEUS-9 is used mainly as a display and control terminal, running custom software to show where the telescope is pointed and calculate the coordinates of various heavenly bodies. As a bonus, the 40×7 alphanumeric red LED display should be easy on dark-adapted eyes.

Hats off to [Mitsuru Yamada] on another fabulous build. If you haven’t had enough of his build style yet, be sure to check out his PERSEUS-8 or even his foray into the analog world.

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Custom Multi-Segment E-Ink Displays From Design To Driving

February 8, 2024 by 21 Comments

With multi-segment displays, what you see available online is pretty much what you get. LEDs, LCDs, VFDs; if you want to keep your BOM at a reasonable price, you’ve pretty much got to settle for whatever some designer thinks looks good. And if the manufacturer’s aesthetic doesn’t match yours, it’s tough luck for you.

Maybe not though. [upir] has a thing for custom displays, leading him to explore custom-made e-ink displays. The displays are made by a company called Ynvisible, and while they’re not exactly giving away the unique-looking flexible displays, they seem pretty reasonably priced. Since the displays are made with a screen printing process, most of the video below concerns getting [upir]’s preferred design into files suitable for printing. He uses Adobe Illustrator for that job, turning multi-segment design ideas by YouTuber [Posy] into chunky displays. There are some design restrictions, of course, chief of which is spacing between segments. [upir] shows off some Illustrator-fu that helps automate that process, as well as a host of general vector graphics design tips and tricks.

After sending off the design files to Ynvisible and getting the flexible displays back, [upir] walks us through the details of driving them. It’s not as simple as you’d think, at least in the Arduino world; the segments need +1.5 volts with reference to the common connection to turn on, and -1.5 volts to turn off. His clever solution is to use an Arduino Uno R4 and take advantage of the onboard DAC. To turn on a segment, he connects a segment to a GPIO pin set high while sending 3.5 volts out of the DAC output into the display’s common connection. The difference between the two pins is 1.5 volts, turning the segment on. To turn it off, he drops the DAC output to 1.5 volts and drives the common GPIO pin low. Pretty clever, and no extra circuitry is required.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen [upir] trying to jazz things up in the display department. He’s played with masking LED matrix displays with SMD stencils before, and figured out how to send custom fonts to 16×2 displays too.

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Atopile Wants You To Code Schematics

February 6, 2024 by 58 Comments

We’d wager that, if you’re reading Hackaday, you’ve looked at more than a few circuit diagrams in your day. Maybe you’ve even converted a few of them over to a PCB. It’s a workflow that, at this point, is well-understood. But as designs become more complex, the schematics are harder to create and maintain. That’s why Atopile wants to treat hardware design more like writing code.

We can see some real benefits to this but also some possible drawbacks. On the plus side, reusing chunks of PCB description should be easy. On the other hand, detecting certain errors on a schematic or PCB layout is easier than spotting them in code. Of course, there are probably types of errors that are easier to catch in code, too, so maybe that’s not a problem. Certainly, if you can spit out a schematic from your code, you could — potentially — have the best of both worlds.

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