Twin jet engines mounted on tank treads

Big Wind Is The Meanest Firefighting Tank You Ever Saw

As the Iraqi army retreated at the end of the first Gulf War, they took the term “scorched Earth policy” quite literally. Kuwaiti oil wells were set alight en masse, creating towering infernos that blackened the sky.

As it turns out, extinguishing a burning oil well is no easy feat. In the face of this environmental disaster, however, a firefighting team from Hungary made a name for themselves out on the desert sands, astride a jet-engined tank named Big Wind.

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Schematic-o-matic

Tricked-Out Breadboard Automatically Draws Schematics Of Whatever You Build

When it comes to electronic design, breadboarding a circuit is the fun part — the creative juices flow, parts come and go, jumpers build into a tangled mess, but it’s all worth it when the circuit finally comes to life. Then comes the “What have I done?” phase, where you’ve got to backtrack through the circuit to document exactly how you built it. If only there was a better way.

Thanks to [Nick Bild], there is, in the form of the “Schematic-o-matic”, which aims to automate the breadboard documentation process. The trick is using a breadboard where each bus bar is connected to an IO pin on an Arduino Due. A program runs through each point on the breadboard, running a continuity test to see if there’s a jumper connecting them. A Python program then uses the connection list, along with some basic information about where components are plugged into the board, to generate a KiCad schematic.

[Nick] admits the schematics are crude at this point, and that it’s a bit inconvenient to remove some components, like ICs, from the breadboard first to prevent false readings. But this seems like one of those things where getting 80% of the work done automatically and worrying about the rest later is a big win. Plus, we can see a path forward to automatic IC probing, and even measurement of passive components too. But even as it is, it’s a great tool.

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Google Sheet showing wins and losses of sports team. Data automated by IFTTT, Alexa, and Particle

An Overly Complicated Method Of Tracking Your Favorite Sports Team

Much of the world appears to revolve around sports, and sports tracking is a pretty big business. So how do people keep up with their favorite team? Well, [Jackson] and [Mourad] decided to devise a custom IoT solution.

Their system is a bit convoluted, so bear with us. First, they tell Alexa whether or not the team won or lost that week. Alexa then sends that information to IFTTT where two different Particle Argon boards are constantly polling the results to decide how to respond next. One Particle responds by lighting up an LED, green for a win and red for a loss. Another Particle board displays the results on an LCD screen. But this is where things get tricky. One of the more confusing aspects of their design is one of the Particle boards then signals back to IFTTT, telling it to tally the number of wins and losses. This seems a bit roundabout since the system started with IFTTT in the first place. Regardless, they seemed to be happy with the result and I’m sure they learned something in the process.

This project might not fulfill any functional need given that Alexa knows everything about all our lives already and you could just ask her how your favorite team is doing whenever you want to. But hey, we’re all about learning by doing here at Hackaday and we’re all guilty of building useless projects here and there just because we can. In any case, their project could serve as a good intro to integrating your Particle with IFTTT or Alexa since there appears to be quite a bit of probably unnecessary handshaking going on here.

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Paper Plate Surround Sound System

With the holiday season, you might turn to paper plates to cut down on dishwashing after having family or friends over. But what do you do with the extras? If you are [TKOR] you make some speakers. The process is fairly simple and if you know how a speaker works, you won’t find any surprises, but there are some neat techniques you might pick up. You can see the video below.

A drill and a steel rod help with the coil winding duty. You can probably adapt the technique to make other kinds of coils and we’d rig up an encoder to count revolutions, too.

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PVC ROV is a study in MPV

Low Buck PVC ROV IS Definitely A MVP

Do you have a hundred bucks and some time to kill? [Peter Sripol] invites you to come along with him and build a remotely operated submarine with only the most basic, easily accessible parts, as you can see in the video below the break.

Using nothing more than PVC pipe, an Ethernet cable, and a very basic electrical system, [Peter] has built a real MVP of a submarine. No, not Most Valuable Player; Minimum Viable Product. You see, there’s not a microcontroller, motor controller, sensor, or MOSFET to be found except for that which might reside inside the knock-off GoPro style camera which is encased in a candle wax sealed enclosure.

Instead, simple brushed motors live right out in the open water. Single pole double throw switches are connected to 100 feet of Ethernet cable and control the relays powering the motors. The camera signal is brought back to the controller through the same cable. Simple is the key to the build, and we have to admit that for all of its Minimum Viability, the little ROV has a lot going for it. [Peter] even manages to use the little craft to find and make possible the retrieval of a crustacean encrusted shopping cart from a saltwater canal. Not bad, little rover, not bad.

Also noteworthy is that the video below has its own PVC ROV Sea Shanty, which is something you just don’t hear every day.

Underwater ROV builds are the sort of thing almost every hacker thinks about doing at least once, and some hackers even include Lego, magnets, and balloons in their builds! Continue reading “Low Buck PVC ROV IS Definitely A MVP”

Flip dot display submerged in oil

Giving Flip Dots The Oil Treatment To Shut Them Up

Flip dot displays are awesome — too bad it’s so hard to find large panels to play around with, but that’s for another article. [Pierre Muth] has been working to find different and interesting things to do with these flip dots, and he recently explored how you can flip them very very gently.

Now you likely remember [Pierre’s] work from earlier this year where he was pushing the speed of the displays as high as possible. Using a capacitor discharge trick he made it to 30 fps, which absolutely stunning work. This time around he attempted to do something equally impressive by micro-stepping the dots. It’s a bonkers idea and unfortunately didn’t work. It seems the dots are engineered for two steady states and you just can’t get very good performance with the in-between states.

However, along the way he had an a-ha moment. Part of what he wanted to do with the microstepping was to slow down the change of the state and for that, he just grabbed a viscous fluid that’s thicker than air: Vaseline oil. (We’d imagine it’s not the cocoa-scented variety, but who knows?) He’s taken a page out of the mineral-oil-cooled PC sub-genre and applied it to flipdots. But watch the video after the break and you’ll see that the slower animations are super pleasing to watch, and the clickity-clackity that was driving you nuts while trying to works is now whisper quiet. It’s a new dawn for displays.

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Z80 Video Output Via The Raspberry Pi Pico

Building basic computers from the ground up is a popular pastime in the hacker community. [Kevin] is one such enthusiast, and decided to whip up a video interface for his retro Z80 machine.

The output from [Kevin]’s build.
The computer in question is a RC2014 Classic ][, a popular single-board 8-bit computer kit. As standard, it doesn’t have a video output, so [Kevin] built one using the PIO interface of the Raspberry Pi Pico.

74-series logic is pressed into service to handle address selection, enabling the Pico and Z80 to effectively communicate. Wait states in the Z80 are used to avoid the vintage chip tripping over when the two are communicating. The Pico outputs video in 160 x 120 resolution with eight bits of color per pixel, using a simple resistor-ladder DAC to do basic VGA.

The build serves as a great way to get familiar with programming both the Pi Pico and the Z80 itself. With that said, it’s probably possible to simply just emulate the Z80 on the Pi Pico given the latter runs at a default clock rate of 125 MHz, eclipsing the RC2014’s snail-like 7.3728 MHz main clock.

If you’ve been building your own retro graphics hardware, do let us know.  We love that sort of thing around here!