Misc Hacks

4137 Articles

PicoDebugger Makes Development Easier

July 12, 2023 by 12 Comments

Debugging a Raspberry Pi Pico is straightforward enough; it simply involves hooking up something up to the USB and SWD pins. [Mark Stevens] whipped up the PicoDebugger to make this job easier than ever before.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation developed the Picoprobe system to allow a RP2040 to act as a USB to SWD and UART bridge for debugging another Pico or RP2040. The problem is that hooking it up time and time again can be fussy and frustrating.

To get around this, [Mark] whipped up the PicoDebugger board, which directly connects most of the important pins for you. Drop a Pico into the “Target” slot, and you can hook up the PicoDebugger to its UART lines with the flick of a DIP switch. The SWD pins can then also be connected via jumpers if so desired.  It also features a 2×20-pin header to allow the target to be wired into other hardware as necessary.

It’s a neat project, and it certainly beats running a bird’s nest of jumper wires every time you want to debug a Pico project. Simply dropping a board in is much more desirable.

We’ve seen some other neat debug tools over the years, too. If you’ve got your own development productivity hacks in the works, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Building A Digital Compass With An Arduino

July 12, 2023 by 8 Comments

The magnetic compass has been a crucial navigational tool for around a thousand years or so, perhaps longer. While classical versions still work perfectly well, you can now get digital magnetometers that work in much the same way. [mircemk] decided to whip up a digital compass to demonstrate the value of these parts.

The build uses a HMC5883L magnetometer. While this can detect magnetic fields in three axes, just one is necessary for building a device that operates akin to a traditional compass. The output of the device is read by an Arduino Nano, which is hooked up to a string of WS2812B LEDs and a small OLED display. The LEDs display the bearing of magnetic north, while the OLED screen shows the current angle between the compass’s arrow and magnetic north.

It’s a tidy build that would be a great educational resource for teaching both electronics and navigational skills. We’ve seen similar projects before, like the hilarious Pizza Compass. Video after the break.

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Gas-Powered Fly Swatter Slightly Over-Engineered

July 10, 2023 by 10 Comments

Any good flyswatter ought to be able to break through a hefty piece of wood. At least, that is how [Finn] explains the design philosophy behind this enormous, overpowered flyswatter. Although we don’t know if everyone needs as robust a machine as this to deal with a minor annoyance like a house fly, we can certainly appreciate the over-engineered, extremely powerful (and dangerous) machine that can swat flies but also break through a two-by-four with ease.

The build comes to us in two parts, with the first part documenting the construction of some of the parts of the flyswatter, including the piston-driven gas cylinder. As a bit of a tangent, [Finn] first tests this part by using it to shoot lemons at pieces of plywood. After this initial testing of the gas cylinder, a cam mechanism is installed on the top, and the gas cylinder is slightly modified to pull on a piece of Dyneema rope attached to the cam. At the other end of the rope is a long metal lever with the flyswatter on the end, in this case, made out of a sheet of laser-cut plate steel.

With the addition of a few safety features, like a spring-assisted bumper to keep the flyswatter from swinging too far and hitting its operator, the machine is ready for use. It also eventually received some other upgrades as well including extra weights to prevent the flyswatter from bouncing after firing and a reinforced metal rod to hold the flyswatter after its demonstrations on various dimensional lumber destroyed it. In all likelihood, this is the largest insect-control device we’ve seen since this microwave-powered bug zapper. Now if you are building an insect…

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Thermochromic Treatment Keeps Solderless Breadboards Smokeless

July 8, 2023 by 17 Comments

There’s a point in a component’s thermal regime that’s between normal operation and overloaded to the point of obvious failure. That’s a dangerous region, because the component isn’t quite hot enough to release the Magic Smoke, but hot enough to singe any finger you poke around with the see if everything’s running right. So if you’re looking to keep your fingerprints unmodified, but you don’t want to invest in a thermal camera, you might want to let this thermochromic breadboard point the way to overloaded components.

We’re not sure where this tip came from, but judging by the look of the website it was sometime in the late 90s. We’re also not sure who’s behind this little hack, so we’ll just credit [improwis]. The idea is pretty simple — white acrylic paint is mixed with thermochromic pigment, and the mixture is carefully painted onto the plastic surface of a standard-issue solderless breadboard. Care is taken to apply thin coats, lest the paint gets into the contacts and really muck things up. Once the paint is dry you’re ready to build your circuit. We have to admit we’re surprised at how sensitive the paint is; judging by the pictures, the heat coming off a 1/4-watt resistor dissipating 350 mW is plenty, even when the body of the resistor is well above the surface of the breadboard. We’d imagine the paint would point out not only hot components but probably the breadboard contacts too, if things got really toasty.

This seems like such a great application of thermochromism, one that’s a bit more useful than clocks and Pi Day celebrations. If you’re going to try this yourself, you’ll have to track down your own supply of thermochromic pigment, though — the link in the article is long dead. That’s not a problem, though, as Amazon sells scads of the stuff, seemingly aimed mainly at nail salons. The more you know.

Watch Those 1% Resistors

July 7, 2023 by 54 Comments

Decades ago, electronic components were not as easy to acquire as they are today. Sure, you could get some things at Radio Shack. But you might not have many choices, and the price would be on the high side. TV repair components were another option, but, again, big bucks. Some places sold surplus parts, which could be cheap. These often came from manufacturing runs where a company bought 10,000 components and made 8,000 products. But today, you can order parts inexpensively and get them on your doorstep in a day or, sometimes, even less. Are these inexpensive parts really any good? [Denki Otaku] likes to find out. In a recent video, he checks out some Amazon-supplied 1% resistors to find out how good they are. You can watch his results below.

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It’s Easy To Make Gears Out Of Wood

June 30, 2023 by 20 Comments

Typically, most of the gears we use in our life are made of plastic or metal. However, wood gears can do just fine in some simple roles, and they’re utterly pleasant to make, as this video from [botto bie] demonstrates.

With steady hands, it’s easy to make basic gears by hand with basic tools and a printer. You just need the help of a spur gear generator to produce the required outlines for you to follow. [botto bie] uses the online tool from Evolvent Design which will spit out DXF or SVG files as you desire.

Basic woodworking techniques are used to produce the gears, and they prove simple and effective. A rack is produced by first applying a involute tooth template with paper to a rectangular piece of wood. A series of circular and table jigsaw operations are then used to cut out the required material to produce the rack. A variety of toothed gears are produced in a similar fashion.

If you’re lacking a CNC machine or a 3D printer, this can be a great way to experiment. Bonus points if you use your wooden geartrain as part of some kind of exciting mechanism, like an automated marble run or musical contraption. Video after the break.

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Sci Fi UI Made Easy With Arwes

June 29, 2023 by 18 Comments

Many of us grew up watching Star Trek, marvelling at the beautiful colorful interfaces on the computers that ran the Starship Enterprise. Today’s computer interfaces have certainly grown fancier since the Windows 3.1 and Mac System 7 days, but they’re still nowhere near that gorgeous. The Arwes framework aims to change that, at least where web apps are concerned.

The framework is inspired by the cyberprep and synthwave aesthetics, while drawing from media like TRON: Legacy and Halo. You can get a peek at what it can do on the Arwes website, or look at how it runs on sites like SoulExtract or the Cyber Movie Database. It’s very much about glowing lines, 1980s computer sounds, and screens with animated text fills.

It’s still in an alpha release, and likely isn’t yet ready for business-critical production use. It currently consists of a set of basic components that can be assembled into a functional futuristic website design, but you’ll need some experience to use the tools at hand. There’s a sandbox for experimenting that should help in that regard.

You might just find that it’s the perfect tool to create an interface for your very own cyberdeck, or you might put it to work on your next website design. Either way, if you create something fantastic, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.