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Caption CERN Contest Enters Week 8

March 26, 2015 by 25 Comments

The Caption CERN Contest has been going great guns thanks to the community of users over on Hackaday.io. The contest just finished up its seventh week of finding funny captions for images which CERN has in their archives. CERN has decades of great photo documentation of their projects. Unfortunately they don’t know which project each image goes with, or who exactly is in the image. We’re helping them out where we can, by letting CERN know any information we can find on their photos. We’re also having some fun along the way, by giving out a T-Shirt for the best caption each week.

Here are some of the best quotes from week 7

The Funnies:

“Are Socks and Sandals acceptable safety equipment for the Demolition Pit? Yes, because these are Kelvar socks and Zylon sandals being testing. Quite uncomfortable, but these feet will survive a close proximity blast.” – [controlmypad]

“Check it out! One tube for each Ninja Turtle” – [OzQube]

“Before the LHC, hunting for the Higgs was much less glamorous.” – [Tachyon]

The winner of course is [Tim] with the featured image at the top of this article.

week6winrarIf [Tachyon] sounds familiar, that’s because he came up with the best caption back in week 6. Runners up for week 6 were:

“Damn Mario Brothers ….. ‘gotta save the princess’ How about watching where you’re going for once. – [Scott Galvin]

“Here at CERN, you don’t get shafted. You get tubed.” – [Rollyn01]

“Thank god the separator caught him. Another 50 meters, and he’d be nothing but quarks.” – [Curtis Carlsen]

Click past the break to check out this week’s image!

Continue reading “Caption CERN Contest Enters Week 8” →

OpenSelfie Photobooth

Hackaday Prize Worldwide: Makers Asylum

March 23, 2015 by 8 Comments

Several weeks before we launched the Hackaday Prize 2015 officially, I was asked to set up a local event in Mumbai to help spread the word about the event to local Makers. Since I also help run a local maker space, Makers’ Asylum, we decided to have a Bring-a-Hack evening on March 21st at the Asylum.

It was a packed day at the Asylum. We had an Aeromodeling workshop in the morning. One bunch was building a quad bike from old bicycle frames, and another was doing something similar using PVC pipes. A third bunch was building a work table from a recycled wooden pallet. All this before we even hit lunch hour. I set up my OpenSelfie photobooth, and everyone quickly wolfed down a lunch of Biryani. We started off late in the afternoon with a quick round of introductions.

Calm before the Storm
Media streaming over the internet using a cloud server
Siji Sunny talks about open source media streaming solution
Media streaming using open source tools

 

First up was Siji Sunny, who quickly setup his latest hack – an Intel Atom NUC running Ubuntu + a WiFi router and he had media streaming over the local network from his Phone. Something like AirPlay, but using open source software – ffmpeg, ffstream and ffserver.

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SXSW Create: ATX Hackerspace Area

March 17, 2015 by 9 Comments

We had a wonderful time over the weekend at the 2015 SXSW Create. I was really excited to see that there was a very large area set aside for the Hackerspaces of the Austin area and they took full advantage of that. Most notably, ATX Hackerspace who had multiple tables and was drawing a huge crowd.

sxsw-atx-thereminThis table is a good example of the demonstrations on hand. Primarily It’s a collection of ultrasonic theremin. The classic theremin uses oscillator-based sound production (we’ve been running a series on that concept) with a set of antennas that uses your body’s proximity to tweak that signal. This version mimics the user interface but greatly simplifies the skillset needed to produce the instrument by swapping the antenna for an ultrasonic rangefinder and generating the audio digitally. The more astute viewer will have noticed the instrument being held. I neglected to ask about this but it sure looks like a Holophonor which is another great seed idea for your next project. Update: it’s a Hulusi.

sxsw-atx-solderingI do think it’s worth noting that ATX also set aside a lot of table-space for their members to actually work on building projects at the event. We’re big advocates of this rather than simply exhibiting finished projects. It doesn’t really matter what you’re working on; seeing a table covered with interesting parts and tools, being worked on by fun people obviously enjoy each other’s company is the core message of a Hackerspace… right?

I talk with [Gardner] about ATX in the video after the break, and make a quick loop around the display tables.

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Arduino V Arduino: Part II

March 12, 2015 by 122 Comments

Since our last article covering the Arduino v. Arduino case, we’ve received a couple of tips, done some more digging, and learned a lot more about what’s going on. We thought it was time to share the story with you as it develops.

The Players

In short, there are two companies calling themselves “Arduino” at the moment. One, Arduino LLC was founded by [Massimo Banzi], [David Cuartielles], [David Mellis], [Tom Igoe] and [Gianluca Martino] in 2009, runs the website arduino.cc, and has been directing and releasing the code that makes it all work. Most of these folks had been working together on what would become the Arduino project since as early as 2005.

The other “Arduino” used to be called Smart Projects and was the manufacturing arm of the project founded and run by [Gianluca Martino]. Smart Projects changed their name to Arduino SRL in November 2014. (A “Società a responsabilità limitata” is one form of Italian limited-liability company.) They have been a major producer of Arduino boards from the very beginning and recently registered the domain arduino.org.

Around the time of the name change [Martino] sold his shares to a Swiss firm Gheo SA and [Federico Musto] was appointed CEO. Gheo SA is owned and directed by [Musto], who also runs a design consultancy based in the US and Taiwan called dog hunter, LLC.

dog hunter and [Musto] helped develop the Arduino Yun, a mashup of an Arduino with an OpenWRT-compatible WiFi router. dog hunter also runs the Linino.org website to support the Linux distribution that’s running on the router part of the Yun.

In short, on one side is Arduino LLC, run by the original Arduino Five and hosting arduino.cc. On the other is now called Arduino SRL, run by a former co-developer [Federico Musto] who bought out the largest producer of Arduino boards and opened up arduino.org.

Continue reading “Arduino V Arduino: Part II” →

Cheap, Dirty And Perfect V-Groove Foam Cutter

March 5, 2015 by 13 Comments

If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Conversely, if you have the right tool for every job, it makes the difference between pro and amateur. [ftregan] needs to cut perfect V-grooves in foam for many of his projects, especially building RC planes. He wasn’t too satisfied with the results using his Xacto knife. And a proper tool was going to set him back by almost $25, but following that example he built his own version of the tool for much less.

Two pieces of wood cut at a 45 degree angle are held between two flat support pieces. A pair of regular shaving blades form the cutting elements. While it looks simple, it’s important to get the angles and blade directions correct. A central wooden wedge holds the two blades in place. He also added a small guide marker that let’s you cut precise straight grooves. [ftregan] built the tool to allow cutting 6mm thick foam but given that it’s so quick and cheap to build, we guess it’s easy to make a few of these to allow cutting different thicknesses of foam. We’re sure that many of you will find different or better ways of doing this, but considering [ftregan] spent just 15 minutes cooking this up, it’s not too bad, especially since the results are mighty good.

Another method of cutting foam is with hot wire. Check out this DIY Foam Cutter that we featured earlier.

Design & Build Part 2: Multi-Band, Phasing SSB, And SDR

March 4, 2015 by 13 Comments

 

Amateur radio is the ultimate hacker’s hobby. You can design, build, and put on the air your own high power transceivers. And with this homemade gear you are able to reach out directly, not relying on any infrastructure whatsoever, to connect with people all over the world. It is a thrilling experience to communicate with that long distance station using equipment you created, where you know at that instant what every single transistor is doing as you key down the mic.

In a previous post I described how SSB radio equipment worked and provided an example of a single-band 20m SSB transceiver. In this post I will discuss a multi-band SSB transceiver, an entire homemade amateur station including amplifiers, and conclude with software defined radio (SDR) that you can make in one weekend.

Continue reading “Design & Build Part 2: Multi-Band, Phasing SSB, And SDR” →

Arduino Zero Pro Soft Release?

March 4, 2015 by 48 Comments

There’s an updated product page for the Arduino Zero, now called the Arduino Zero Pro, up on Arduino.org, one of the two dueling “Arduinos”.

We first covered the Arduino Zero in May 2014, and shortly thereafter even got to see a development prototype in the flesh. Based an Atmel’s ARM Cortex-M0+ chip, it’s built on a faster processor than the AVR Arduini, and it includes Atmel’s Embedded Debugger which serves as a USB-to-serial channel and on-chip debugging peripheral. But so far all we’ve seen is the prototype.

Now, there’s schematics and Eagle files available that are dated January 7, 2015. The Arduino.org site says that the Zero Pro is “Available now!” but we couldn’t see any in stock yet at any of our favorite online electronics distributors. Maybe we’re looking in the wrong places (unlikely) or maybe it’s just a matter of time.

Anyway, two things struck us in our casual perusal of the new Zero Pro info.

First of all, compared to (pictures of) the prototype versions, there’s more and larger decoupling capacitors scattered all over the board, from the power supply to the Embedded Debugger chip, to a really beefy 4.7uF tantalum capacitor buffering the analog reference voltage level. This suggests there’s been some real-world testing and a shakedown of some of the prototype’s design bugs. That’s all good, and we hope it’s a sign that it’s really coming to market soon.

Secondly, given the ongoing trademark dispute, even the annotations to the schematic for the Zero Pro become interesting. On opening up either the PDF schematic (PDF, naturally) or any of the Eagle files, there’s the usual “Do not finalize a design with this information” boilerplate. But where it used to read “Arduino is a registered trademark. Use of the ARDUINO name must be compliant with http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Policy ” it now reads:

“Arduino” name and logo are trademarks registered by Arduino S.r.l. in Italy, in the European Union and in other countries of the world.

(After noticing this change, we went back and compared the “rev3” Uno schematics PDF on arduino.cc to the “rev3E” schematics on arduino.org. Yup, same change in the legal notice.)

We’re not lawyers, but one of the “other countries of the world” that’s conspicuously missing from the claim is the U.S. of A. where Arduino LLC presumably holds the trademark. We’re still trying to make sense of all this, but it’s funny to see the legal battle playing itself out in annotations of Eagle schematics, no?

Stay tuned for more coverage of the Arduino vs Arduino legal battle and, of course, reviews of new hardware as it comes out.

And thanks [Marc] for the tip to the new board release.