$25 Coupon Code For Texas Instruments Store

September 18, 2013 by Mike Szczys 108 Comments

ti-25-buck-coupon

If you’ve been coveting a piece of Texas Instruments hardware you should put in an order before September 30th. A coupon code for $25 off a purchase was posted to the Stellaris ARM Community forums and it should work until that date. Above is the overview of an order placed yesterday for two Tiva Launchpads (apparently TI has rebranded the Stellaris chips as Tiva for some odd reason). After applying the coupon code “National-1yr” the total price of [BravoV’s] order is just under one dollar (including shipping). The coupon code can be entered into a box on the right hand column of step #3 (payment) when placing an order.

UPDATE: There are now multiple comments reporting that the coupon code no longer works.

We’re pretty sure you can use this coupon code on anything in the TI store. But if you don’t have a Stellaris/Tiva Launchpad yet we highly recommend getting one. We picked ours up about a year ago. It’s a great way to try your hand at ARM programming. We have had some issues with how the breakout headers are organized — there’s some gotchas with multiple pins being connected (read the last five paragraphs of the project write up linked in this post for more). But for the price and ease of programming this will get you up and coding in no time. If you need some ideas of what to do with the board look at our posts tagged as “Stellaris”.

[Thanks Vlad]

Team Van Gogh Uses OpenXC To Create Art From Your Drive

September 18, 2013 by Adam Fabio 11 Comments

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In this video, [Joe Grand] takes us through [Team Van Gogh’s] entry in the OpenXC hackathon event. In what could possibly be the greatest road trip in history, [Joe Grand, Ben Krasnow, TechNinja, and Super Awesome Sylvia] all pile into a car. With them they bring a host of dev boards, wires, a CB Radio, and of course Sylvia’s WaterColorBot.

As their name implies, [Team Van Gogh] took a more artistic approach to the challenge than other teams. OpenXC steering, gear shift, accelerator and brake data is sent through a ChipKit to an RS-232 link into [TechNinja’s] laptop. The laptop translates the data into commands for the WaterColorBot. With this system, a simple Sunday drive can become abstract art.

The team also showed the concept of what could be done if OpenXC was extended to send data back to the vehicle – something Ford doesn’t support. Their example works when a phone call comes in by using the system to lower the volume on a CB radio standing in for car’s Bluetooth system.

Most of this challenge was completed with simulated data from the OpenXC vehicle interface. The team only had a few minutes to work the bugs out in a real vehicle. However, they proved their concepts well enough to win the grand prize.

Continue reading “Team Van Gogh Uses OpenXC To Create Art From Your Drive” →

The Arduino YUN. YUN Means Cloud.

September 12, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 95 Comments

For the longest time, the creators of the Arduino have been looking at how to bring the Arduino platform into the cloud. Ethernet and WiFi shields technically work, but if you’re processing data scraped from a web page, a lowly microcontroller really isn’t the best option. Enter the Arduino YUN. At its core, it’s a regular old Arduino Leonardo. Underneath that metal plate on the board? That’s an SoC running Linux.

Basically, the Linux side of the Yun is pretty similar to a WiFi router running OpenWRT. There’s a USB port for plugging in peripherals, native WiFi support (802.11n, even!), an Ethernet connector, and enough RAM to do all the interesting stuff a small computer connected to the Internet can do.

To make all this web programming easier for Arduino neophytes, the YUN also includes a ‘bridge’ library that automates HTTP transactions between the Linux and microcontroller sides of the YUN. There’s also support for Temboo, an SDK for dozens of APIs that interact with Facebook, Dropbox, FedEx, and hundreds of other web services.

Below you can check out [Massimo] and [David] showing off their wares and going over how the YUN connects to the Internet and interacts with the microcontroller over the ‘bridge’. It’s an interesting device, and something we’ll surely check out at the World Maker Faire.

Continue reading “The Arduino YUN. YUN Means Cloud.” →

Cooling Fan Speed Controllers Do It By Generating Heat

August 30, 2013 by Mike Szczys 82 Comments

cooling-fan-speed-controllers

We’ve never torn one apart ourselves, but it boggles the mind just a little bit to learn that these cooling fan controllers generate heat to do their job. We’d bet we’ll get shouted down in the comments, but doesn’t this seem counter-productive?

At any rate, we enjoyed reading two posts on this topic. [Göran’s] first adventure with the hardware started when he was trying to design his own speed controller. He saw a reference design in the LM7805 linear regulator datasheet which allows the adjustment of the output by changing the ground reference. When fed with 12V this ends up putting off some heat but it is a simple and reliable solution. He was a bit surprised to crack open a Zalman module and find the exact same circuit inside.

The controller in the background is an eBay purchase. He cracked that one open as well (that’s the link at the top) and found a circuit with a linear regulator in it, but this time it was a TL431 adjustable regulator. So here are our questions: Which one of these two is better and why. And can you do it relatively inexpensively without generating as much heat?

Building A Rocket To Launch Your Project Into Space

August 28, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 50 Comments

At Hackaday, we’re familiar with projects that say they’re exploring space. Most of the time, these are high altitude balloons that ascend up to 100,000 feet. Sure, this is very, very high, but it’s only about 1/3rd of the way to lower limit of what can be called space at 100 km or 62 miles. Now, we’re seeing the first steps towards embedding Arduinos, cameras, and other goodies into the celestial spheres with the NE-1 Rocket, a project by [Jonathan McCabe] in Madison, Wisconsin.

The goal of the NE-1 rocket is to launch a 5kg payload into a suborbital trajectory to a height of 120 kilometers. From there, the payload – be it an electronic, biological, or simple imaging experiment – will experience a few minutes of weightlessness before falling back to Earth under a parachute.

Getting into space without the help of a government space agency has been done a few times before, mostly with solid-fuel rockets. [Jonathan]’s system uses a liquid-fueled engine, fed with nitrous oxide as the oxidizer and a secret self-pressurizing liquid fuel. These are fed into an engine that uses a ‘cold wall vortex’ to cool the engine instead circulating fuel around the combustion chamber as in traditional engines.

[Jonathan] has already done a few static tests with a half-scale engine, and he already has a lot of the very hard-to-source components in his lab. It’s a promising project. It falls right in line with the ‘Hackaday Space Program’ idea we’ve been kicking around, and we’d be more than happy to see this project get off the ground

Making S’mores With 50,000 Volts

August 26, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 12 Comments

[Skyy] sent us a video of him cooking s’mores with an electric arc. He’s using a flyback transformer with a zero voltage switching (ZVS) driver. This produces about 50 kV, which is more than enough to toast the marshmallow.

ZVS is a technique that triggers the semiconductor switches when they have zero voltage across them. This ensures that there’s minimal heat created by the switches, since they are not interrupting any current at the time they are toggled. ZVS is also used in lighting dimmers to switch off power without creating interference.

If you’re interested in the details, there’s a great tutorial on building the driver. If you’re interested in learning how it works, check out this simulation video.

[Skyy] admits that his setup isn’t terribly safe since it uses a breadboard, which isn’t rated for the high voltages and currents. Keep in mind that these circuits could kill you. After the break, watch a marshmallow fry in a 50 kV arc.

Continue reading “Making S’mores With 50,000 Volts” →

Have You Failed Hard Enough To Be On Hackaday?

August 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 46 Comments

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There’s so much more to be discovered when your projects just don’t want to work. Grinding out the bugs, getting past roadblocks, and discovering gotchas is where real hacking know-how comes from. But most people aren’t motivated to document their failures. We want to change that.

We want to roll out a new weekly feature that showcases failure… well documented failure. But we need YOU to give up the goods. Write about your failed experience on your blog, post it to our project forums with [FAIL] in the title, or you can just write everything in an email and send it to us. Which ever way you choose, you’ll need to tip us off that you’d like to make it to the front page (come on, it’s not bragging since it didn’t even work!). If you already know of well documented project fails send in those links too even if they’re not your projects.

Make sure you include at least one descriptive image — snapshots, diagrams, schematics, screencaps, anything that tells the story is fair game. To show you what we’re after here’s a few of our favorite failed projects:

We’d like to point out that all of these projects are interesting ideas that show off missteps along the way. We will not be trashing on your skills as a hacker, but instead celebrating the lessons learned and hearlding the sharing of ideas from otherwise doomed projects.