Building An X-ray Machine And Letting Everything Go To Your Head

May 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

It’s not every day one of the builds on Hackaday gets picked up by a big-name publication, and it’s even rarer to see a Hackaday contributor grace the pages of an actual print magazine. Such is the case with [Adam Munich] and his home-built x-ray machine.

We first saw [Adam]’s x-ray machine at the beginning of this year as an entry for the Buildlounge/Full Spectrum laser cutter contest. [Adam] won the contest, landed himself a new laser cutter, and started writing for Hackaday. Now that [Adam] is gracing the pages of Popular Science, we’re reminded of the story of Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

[Adam]’s x-ray machine is built around a Coolidge tube, the same type of vacuum tube found in dental x-ray machines. The device is housed in two suitcases – one used as a control panel and graced with beautiful dials and Nixies, the other housing the Coolidge tube and power supply. Proper x-ray images can be taken by pointing a camera at the scintillation screen, allowing [Adam] to see inside hard drives and other inanimate objects.

Sure, it’s a build we’ve seen before but it’s still very cool to see one of Hackaday’s own get some big name recognition.

SpaceX Finally Launches, [Scotty] Makes It To Space.

May 23, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

We’ve been eagerly anticipating the first launch of our new space era. Like it or not, NASA isn’t going up anymore, so someone else has to. When we posted that the launch event was going to be broadcasted live (which ultimately failed), there was a lot of debate in our comments on the subject of private vs government entities doing the space traveling. There was also a lot of childish bickering.

Just to clarify, Hackaday’s official stance is, “Go to space”. We do not care if it is the government, [Elon Musk], The russian space program, a hackerspace in a home made rocket, or an evil billionaire. We just want space research to continue. Sure, there are drawbacks to some of these, most notably that the evil billionaire would most likely be doing this to kill us all, but at least the research would be funded.

You can watch a short clip of the launch, and while you do so, remember that on board that ship are the ashes of actor [James Doohan] also known as [Scotty]. That’s pretty awesome.

Reminder: SpaceX Launch Tomorrow. Watch It Live!

May 18, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 74 Comments

There isn’t a hacker out there that isn’t interested at least a little bit in the prospect of building a mission specific rocket to explode someone off the face of the planet… without killing them. We got a tiny taste of what is coming when they let us watch their engine test a few weeks ago. Tomorrow, May 19th, they are going to broadcast a launch live! You can watch it on their site beginning at 1:15 AM pacific. For some additional insight, you can also read the tweets of [Elon Musk], the founder of spaceX during the event.

Take a few minutes and enjoy the video below that discusses the program and some of the engineering obstacles they’ve had to overcome.

[via BoingBoing]

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SparkFun Gets A Subpoena For All Orders; Says Nah

May 18, 2012 by Mike Szczys 82 Comments

It’s no secret that we’re fans of open source, and open hardware. And we have to applaud companies like SparkFun who also keep their customers in the loop about what’s going on with the business end of the company. For instance, they were recently contacted by a Sheriff’s office and asked for customer information and are sharing the story. One of their products had been used in a series of credit card skimmers and the officers wanted to get purchase information to track down the bad guys. SparkFun doesn’t just give out customer data and so was subsequently served with a subpoena.

The thing is, the document asks for all customer orders shipped to Georgia during a six month period. This seemed like it covered way too many orders, since the majority of them didn’t include the part in question. But the officials were willing to work with the company and narrowed the request to just the 20 or so orders that had the item in them.

It’s an interesting read, and we agree with SparkFun’s point about white hats and black hats. Often when posting about projects here we wonder about the potential to use the knowledge for no-good. But restricting the availability of knowledge (or hardware in this case) because of a few bad-actors is a concept we oppose. It’s like being a hacking super hero, with great skill comes great responsibility.

Sell Your Projects With Club Jameco

May 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

Everyone’s favorite electronic component distributor, Jameco, rolled out a new way for you to make a few bucks off of your projects. It’s called Club Jameco and looks like a great place to design, sell, and learn about new projects from around the Internet.

The premise behind Club Jameco is simple. You send Jameco a short description of one of your projects. If the folks at Jameco think your project will sell, they’ll post it on Club Jameco for some feedback while you write up the instructions and the BOM. Once your project is done, Jameco will build it, sell it, and send you a nice royalty check in the mail.

Already there are some pretty neat projects up on Club Jameco like a build your own transformer kit and a photodiode geiger counter. We’re sure Hackaday readers have a few interesting projects up their sleeves, so we’ll wait patiently until we see them on Club Jameco.

Tip ‘o the hat to [War_Spigot] and [PUNiSH3R] for sending this one in.

Graphic Equalizer Display Flashes LED Sign To The Beat

May 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

Careful planning and a steady hand let [Leo Rampen] fit everything he needed to build a graphic equalizer display on his LED wall sign. There’s a lot of components that needed to fit on this board, and he decided not use to an etched board for the build.

The idea for the project started off as just an LED sign. After spelling out “Sweat Box” using LED rope lights, he needed a way to switch them on and off. But why stop there? He also decided to use an MSGEQ7 chip in the build since the sign adorns their party-room and adding music-based flashing lights seemed like a good idea.

He laid out the equalizer chip, ATmega328 (running the Arduino bootloader) and a series of N-channel MOSFETS for switching the LEDS out in Eagle. With design in hand he grabbed a medium-sized piece of strip board and used a drill to cut the traces where necessary. In the end he has a very flashy sign as shown in the clip after the break.

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