ESPcopter: A Fully Customizable Drone

September 25, 2019 by Sharon Lin 5 Comments

With so many capabilities for obstacle avoidance, the only natural progression for drones would be for them to be hand-controlled. For Turkish inventor [metehanemlik], even this wasn’t enough of a challenge, as he decided to create the ESP8266-Powered Mini Drone: ESPcopter, a programmable Arduino-compatible modular drone that is open to modding through expansion shields. Not only can DIY enthusiasts modify the algorithms used for obstacle avoidance, but the drone can be sized to whatever dimensions fit their needs.

The drone is almost entirely built from expansion shields, including the multi-ranger shield with four VL53L0x laser-ranging sensors on the forward, backward, right, and left directions of the drone. The website for the ESPcopter comes with an SDK that lets users easily modify the software running on the drone’s MCU as well as pinouts to better understand its hardware functionality. Impressively, it was fully funded through a 60-day crowdfunding campaign, and will be undergoing a second launch shortly, with some new and improved features.

Power comes from a 26 0mAh LiPo battery that allows for up to six minutes of flight time; includes a 3-axis gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer; runs on an ESP8266-12S 32-bit MCU; fully charges within 45 minutes through a USB connection; weighs around 35 g; and is about 90 mm from motor to motor. Continue reading “ESPcopter: A Fully Customizable Drone” →

Fighting Household Air Pollution

September 24, 2019 by Sharon Lin 35 Comments

When Kenyan engineer [Aloise] found out about the health risks of household air pollution, they knew there had to be a smart solution to combatting the problem while still providing a reasonable source of energy for families cooking without the luxury of cleaner fuels. Enter OpenHAP, a DIY household air pollution monitor that provides citizen scientists and researches the means to measure air particulates in developing countries.

The device is based on an ESP32 communicating with a ZH03B Particulate matter sensor over UART; a DS3231SN real-time clock (RTC), temperature and humidity sensor, and MLX90640 2D thermal sensor array over I2C; and wirelessly sending the data received to a Bluetooth low energy wrist-strap beacon and an Internet enabled phone. The device also uses a TCA9534 GPIO expander to control the visual and auditory notifiers (buzzers and LEDs) and to interface to a SD card.

The project uses the libesphttpd project modified for the ESP32 for the webserver, which is used to stream data to a mobile handset or computer using the WiFi capabilities of the ESP32. The data includes real-time sensor information, system status, storage media status, visualizations of the thermal array sensor data (to ensure the camera is facing the source of heat), and tag information to test the limits of the Bluetooth tag with regards to distance.

Power input is provided through a Micro-USB connector, protected with a TVS diode and a Schottky diode in series to prevent reverse power flow.

The project was tested in two real-life scenarios: one with a household in rural Kenya and another with an urban low-income family of four. In the first test, the family used a three stone open fire stove. A FLiR thermal camera captured the stove temperatures, while a standard camera was enough to capture the high levels of smoke inside the kitchen. The readings from OpenHAP were high enough to exceed the upper detection threshold for the particulate sensor, showing that the woman cooking in the house was receiving the equivalent of 8 cigarettes a day, about 8 x the WHO’s recommended particulate levels.

Within the second household, a typical energy mix of charcoal briquettes and kerosene was typically used for cooking, with kerosene used during the day and briquettes used at night. The results from measuring pollution levels using OpenHAP showed that the mother and child in the household regularly received around 1.5 x the recommended limit of pollutants, enough to lead to slow suffocation.

There’s already immense potential for this project to help researchers test out different energy sources for rural households, not to mention the advantage of having a portable low-energy pollution monitor for citizen scientists.

Continue reading “Fighting Household Air Pollution” →

What’s Your Fidget Spinner Say?

September 23, 2019 by Sharon Lin 4 Comments

The persistence of vision (POV) optical illusion is pretty common in cheap toys nowadays, but how cool would it be to have your own programmable POV message board? German electronics grad student [Matej] has luckily created an open source fidget spinner with a fully customizable POV display that lets you share whatever thoughts you’d like fellow fidget spinning friends to know.

The displayed graphics don’t rely on rotation velocity, thanks to a solution that tracks the rotation angle. Unlike over POV devices, the POV fidget spinner displays the same graphics at higher and lower rotational speeds, which is useful considering the fidget spinner doesn’t automatically spin at the same rotational speed for every user. It also doesn’t require a constant speed for the image to be displayed correctly, unlike POV fans or clocks.

Continue reading “What’s Your Fidget Spinner Say?” →

A Stylish Home For Your Next ESP Project

September 20, 2019 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

The ESP8266 and ESP32 are fast becoming the microcontroller of choice for, well, everything. But one particular area we’ve seen a lot of activity in recently is home automation; these boards make it so incredibly easy and cheap to get your projects online that putting together your own automation system is far more appealing now than it’s ever been. Capitalizing on that trend, [hwhardsoft] has been working on a ESP enclosure that’s perfect for mounting on the living room wall.

Of course, there’s more to this project than an admittedly very nice plastic box. The system also includes a ILI9341 2.4 inch touch screen LCD, an integrated voltage regulator, and even a section of “perfboard” that gives you a spot to easily wire up ad-hoc circuits and sensors. You don’t even need to switch over to the bare modules either, as the PCB is designed to accommodate common development boards such as the Wemos D1 Mini and NodeMCU.

Despite its outward appearance, this project is very much beginner friendly. Utilizing through hole components, screw down terminals, and a impeccably well-labeled silkscreen, you won’t need to be a hardware expert to produce a very slick gadget the whole family can appreciate.

Much like the HestiaPi project we covered a few months back, this project takes a cheap and readily available development board and turns it into something that has all the trappings of a commercial offering. These projects are reminders that the line between built and bought is only getting blurrier as time goes on.

Continue reading “A Stylish Home For Your Next ESP Project” →

Pew Pew In The Palm Of Your Hand

September 19, 2019 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

It’s often said that “getting there is half the fun”, and we think that can be just as true when building hardware as it is during the roadtrip to your favorite hacker con. Many of us enjoy the process of planning, designing, and building a new gadget as much as playing with it when it’s done. We get the impression [Radomir Dopieralski] feels the same way, as he’s currently working on yet another iteration of his PewPew project.

For the uninitiated, [Radomir] has already created a number of devices in the PewPew line, which are designed to make programming games on “bare metal” easier and more approachable for newcomers by using CircuitPython.

The original version was a shield for the Adafruit Feather, which eventually evolved into a standalone device. The latest version, called the M4, includes many niceties such as a large TFT screen and an acrylic enclosure. It’s also switched over to the iconic Game Boy layout, to really drive home that classic gaming feel.

As [Radomir] explains, previous versions of the PewPew were designed to be as cheap and easy to manufacture as possible, since they were to be used in game programming workshops. But outside of that environment, they left a little something to be desired. With the M4, he’s created something that’s much closer to a traditional game system. In that respect it’s a bit like the Arduboy: you can still use it to learn game development, but it’s also appealing enough that you might just play other people’s games on it instead.

Smart Thermometer Probes First, Asks Questions Later

September 18, 2019 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

As flu season encroaches upon the northern hemisphere, doctor’s offices and walk-in clinics will be filled to capacity with phlegm-y people asking themselves that age-old question: is it the flu, or just a little cold? If only they all had smart thermometers at home that can tell the difference.

Typically, a fever under 101°F (38.5°C) in adults and 100.4°F (38°C) in children is considered low-grade, and thus is probably not the flu. But who can remember these things in times of suffering? [M. Bindhammer]’s iF°EVE is meant to be a lifesaving medical device that eliminates the guesswork. It takes readings via 3D printed ear probe mounted on the back, and then asks a series of yes/no questions like do you have chills, fatigue, cough, sore throat, etc. Then the Teensy 3.2 uses naive Bayes classification to give the probability of influenza vs. cold. The infrared thermometer [M.] chose has an accuracy of 0.02°C, so it should be a fairly reliable indicator.

Final determinations should of course be left up to a throat swab at the doctor’s office. But widespread use of this smart thermometer could be the first step toward fewer influenza deaths, and would probably boost the ratio of doctors to patients.

A Curiously Strong Z80 In Your Pocket

September 17, 2019 by Tom Nardi 42 Comments

Like many hackers, [Tom Szolyga] has soft spot for the venerable Z80. The number of instructions and registers made it relatively easy to program in ASM, and he still has fond memories of the refreshingly straightforward CP/M operating system he used to run on them back in the day. In fact, he loves Z80 computers so much he decided to build one that he could carry around in his pocket.

The result is the Minty Z80, so-called because it lives inside a tin formerly inhabited by every hacker’s favorite curiously strong mint. But the goal of this build wasn’t just to make it small, but also make it convenient to work with. [Tom] is using a ATmega32A to help interface the Z84C0008 microprocessor with the modern world, which allows for niceties such as support for a micro SD card. There’s no onboard USB-to-serial capability, but with an external adapter connected to the Minty’s header, it’s easy to use log into this microcosm of classic computing with a terminal emulator running on a computer or mobile device.

[Tom] has provided the schematics and Bill of Materials for the Minty Z80 on the project’s Hackaday.io page, but as of the latest update, he’s holding off on releasing the board files until he’s sure that all the bugs have been worked out. There’s no word yet if he found any show stoppers in the first iteration of the board design, but he’s posted a picture of the fully assembled miniature retrocomputer in all its glory which seems like a good sign.

The design of the Minty Z80 is similar to that of the Z80-MBC2 by [Just4Fun], but on an even smaller scale. It’s encouraging to see several projects leveraging modern design and components to prevent classic computing from becoming little more than a distant memory.