Listen To The Netherworld With Artificial Intelligence

October 24, 2017 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

It’s that time of year again, and with Halloween arguably being the hacker’s perfect holiday, we’re starting to see a tick up in projects with a spooky theme. Most seem to do with making some otherwise tame Halloween decorations scarily awesome, but this is different — using artificial intelligence to search for ghosts.

It seems like [Matt Reed]’s “DeepWhisper” project is meant to be taken as light-hearted fun for the spooky season, but there may be a touch of seriousness to his efforts to listen in on ghostly conversations. The principle behind this is electronic voice phenomena (EVP), whereby the metabolically and/or dimensionally challenged are purported to influence electronic systems, resulting in heavily processed audio clips that seem to have a whispered endearment from the departed or a threat from a malevolent spirit. DeepWhisper takes this a step further by using a Raspberry Pi to feed audio into the Google Cloud Speech API for analysis. If anything is whispered in one of the 110 or so languages Google knows, it’ll get displayed on a screen. [Matt] plans to set DeepWhisper up in the aptly-named Butchertown section of Nashville and live-stream the results next week.

It’ll be interesting to see what Google’s neural network makes out of the random noise it will probably only ever hear. And [Matt] is planning on releasing his code for all to see, so there may be some valuable cloud techniques to learn from DeepWhisper. But in the unlikely event that he does discover ghosts, it’s nice to know you can have the tools and the talent to bust ’em.

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Heavily Hacked Printer For DIY PCBs

October 24, 2017 by Dan Maloney 34 Comments

Sometimes we get tips that only leave us guessing as to how — and sometimes why — a project was built. Such is the case with this PCB printer; in this case, the build specifics are the only thing in question, because it puts out some pretty impressive PCBs.

All we have to go on is the video after the break, which despite an exhaustive minutes-long search appears to be the only documentation [Androkavo] did for this build. The captions tell us that the printer is built around the guts from an Epson Stylus Photo 1390 printer. There’s no evidence of that from the outside, as every bit of the printer has been built into a custom enclosure. The paper handling gear has been replaced by an A3-sized heated flatbed, adjustable in the Z-axis to accommodate varying board thicknesses. The bed runs on linear rails that appear custom-made. Under the hood, the ink cartridges have been replaced with outboard ink bottles in any color you want as long as it’s black. The video shows some test prints down to 0.1 mm traces with 0.1 mm pitch — those were a little dodgy, but at a 0.2 mm pitch, the finest traces came out great. The boards were etched in the usual way with great results; we wonder if the printer could be modified to print resist and silkscreens too.

[Androkavo] seems to have quite a few interesting projects in his YouTube channel, one of which — this wooden digital clock — we featured recently. We’d love to learn more about this printer build, though. Hopefully [Androkavo] will see this and comment below.

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Write Your Own X86 Bootloader

October 23, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 40 Comments

What if you want to make a very lean machine and do without any operating system? Or maybe you want to try to write your own OS, even just for the challenge or fun? Maybe you were reading up on a cool OS architecture and thought to yourself, “I can write that!”. Well, before diving into your code, you’d first have to write something called a bootloader.

A bootloader is code that runs early on in a PC’s, Mac’s, Raspberry Pi’s or microcontroller’s boot sequence, before anything like an operating system is up. Often its job is to set up minimal hardware, such as RAM, and then load the OS or your embedded code.

[Alex Parker] has written a three-part series of clear blog posts that make writing the bootloader part easy, at least for x86 machines. And the nice thing is that you don’t need an x86 to get started. He does it on a Mac using the QEMU processor emulator, though he also talks about doing it under Windows and Linux.

In the first part of the series, the bootloader leaves you in the x86’s real mode, with 16-bit instructions and access to one megabyte of memory — think pre-80286 days, or 1982 for those of us who were computing back then. To prove it works, he uses BIOS calls to display “Hello world!”. This also shows that through the BIOS, you have a set of peripherals you can work with.

In the second part, he shows how to set up 32-bit protected mode and a Global Descriptor Table, making access to a large amount of memory easier.

In the first two parts, the code is written in assembly, so in the third part he finishes the series by showing how to load C++ code into memory and execute it. That C++ code would of course be your application, which we’ll leave to your imagination.

It’s reasonably rare to write bootloader code for a desktop computer — much less so for microcontrollers. For instance, [Dmitry Grinberg] wrote his own bootloader so that he could have encrypted ROM images for his AVR on USB. And we’ve talked about [Lady Ada]’s guide to burning Arduino bootloaders. But if you want to get down to the bare metal on your x86, the bootloader is the place to start. And it’s not so bad.

Don’t Miss The Bus: A One-Day Build

October 23, 2017 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Sometimes the most satisfying hacks are those that spring from a situation where resources are limited, either by choice or by chance. Constraints tend to stir the creative juices.

Serial Hackaday poster [limpkin] limited himself to a one-day build with what he had on hand for this bus-route countdown timer. Full points for actually building something useful, and extra credit for making something to keep his wife from being late for work.

The principle is simple: scrape a web page to find out how much time is left before either of two busses leaves his wife’s stop, and display the number of minutes left on a huge LED display. The parts bin gave up everything needed, including an ESP8266, a boost converter, a charge controller, and the display and driver. We’re skeptical that the PCB was fabricated the same day; looks like [limpkin] is only counting the design and coding time in his 10-hour build. Still, it’s a testament to what’s possible with a deep inventory and the skills to put it to use.

Check out some of [limpkin]’s other hacks, like this Formula-E race car PCB or his adventures in laundry larceny. Oh, and he also used to write for Hackaday.

Hazardous Dollhouse Teaches Fire Safety

October 22, 2017 by Kristina Panos 20 Comments

Fire safety is drilled into us from a young age. And for good reason, too, because fire hazards are everywhere in the average home. Even a small fire can turn devastatingly dangerous in a matter of minutes. But how do you get kids to really pay attention to scary (and often boring) adult concepts? You can teach a kid to stop, drop, and roll until you’re blue in the face and still might not drive home the importance of fire prevention. Subjects like this call for child-sized visual aids that ignite imaginations.

That’s exactly what firefighters in Poznań, Poland did in collaboration with mlabs, a local software company. They built a mobile, interactive fire safety education tool that simulates common household fire hazards in great detail (translated). This is easily the most tricked-out dollhouse we’ve ever seen. The many different hazard scenarios are controlled via touchscreen using a custom-built application. At the tap of a button, the house becomes a total death trap. The lamp-lit hazards glow realistically and with varied intensity, and there is actual smoke coming out of them that triggers smoke detectors. Cameras embedded throughout the house provide a first-person view of the terror on a nearby monitor.

Almost no room is safe for the figurine family that lives inside this intricately detailed 1:12 scale dwelling. Dad’s in the kitchen standing idly by while food scorches on the stove. Grandma’s sitting on her bed upstairs, her forgotten cigarette burning a hole in the duvet. Daughter is overloading the electrical outlets in her bedroom with all her gizmos. Smoldering coals have spilled out from the toppled stove in the utility room.

This isn’t the first smart dollhouse we’ve seen, but it’s probably the most intriguing. The fire safety dollhouse was on display this week at POL-EKO-SYSTEM, an annual environmental fair in Poznań. Nowhere near Poland? Check out the video after the break.

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The Web Clock You Can Control Over A LAN

October 22, 2017 by Inderpreet Singh 8 Comments

Not every project is meant to solve a new problem. Some projects can be an extension of an existing solution just to flex the geek muscles. One such project by [limbo] is the Web Clock 2.0 which is an internet-connected clock.

Yes, it uses a WEMOS D1 mini which is equipped with an ESP-12F (ESP8266) and yes, it uses an LCD with an I2C module to interface the two. The system works by connecting to the Google servers to get GMT and then offsets it to calculate the local time. It also has the hourly nagging chime to let you know that another precious hour of your life has gone and you need to set it up.

What [limbo] adds to the conventional functionality is a LAN application to send custom messages to the LCD. The software is called ‘Clock Commander’ and can be downloaded as a Windows binary through the source code is unavailable for now. Simply point it to the correct IP address and you can then send it commands to display stuff as well as control the sound. The project comes with Lua scripts and instruction how to DIY.

We imagine this can be used to create a custom geeky table clock or hack a digital coo-coo clock to drive your co-workers crazy at the press of a button. For those who are looking for something with lasers, check out the Laser Pointer Clock for a slightly more challenging build. Continue reading “The Web Clock You Can Control Over A LAN” →

Low-Budget Hydroformer Puts The Squeeze On Sheet Metal Parts

October 20, 2017 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

Between manufacturing technologies like 3D-printing, CNC routers, lost-whatever metal casting, and laser and plasma cutters, professional quality parts are making their way into even the most modest of DIY projects. But stamping has largely eluded the home-gamer, what with the need for an enormous hydraulic press and massive machined dies. There’s more than one way to stamp parts, though, and the budget-conscious shop might want to check out this low-end hydroforming method for turning sheet metal into quality parts.

If hydroforming sounds familiar, it might be because we covered [Colin Furze]’s attempt, which used a cheap pressure washer to inflate sheet metal bubbles with high-pressure water. The video below shows a hydroformer that [Rainbow Aviation] uses (with considerably less screaming) to make stamped aluminum parts for home-brew aircraft. The kicker with this build is that there is no fluid — at least not until the 40,000-pound hydraulic press semi-liquifies the thick neoprene rubber pad placed over the sheet metal blank and die. The pressure squeezes the metal into and around the die, forming some pretty complex shapes in a single operation. We especially like the pro-tip of using Corian solid-surface countertop material offcuts to make the dies, since they’re available for a pittance from cabinet fabricators.

It’s always a treat to see hacks from the home-brew aviation world. They always seem to have plenty of tricks and tips to share, like this pressure-formed light cowling we saw a while back.

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