[Ross] is the proud owner of a 50 MHz Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope. He’d like to have the 100 MHz version but the $400 difference in price puts it out of his reach. After some extensive poking around on the PCB and pouring over datasheets, he managed to reverse engineer the design and upgrade to a 100 MHz version. This is as easy as desoldering one capacitor to deactivate a high-pass filter present in the lesser model of scope, unlocking the faster potential of its bigger brother.
[Steve Hoefer] pulled together a great hack for the friendless. This glove will play a heated game of rock-paper-scissors against you. [Steve] realized that the middle and fourth fingers are all that need to be monitored to decide which of the three signs you are making. He used flex sensors on the back of these fingers as an input. There is also an accelerometer to judge the three shakes that lead up to the shoot.
The small screen you see displays what the glove chose and is a hack in itself. This idea adapts from an Evil Mad Scientist project, using three sheets of acrylic etched with the different icons and edge-lit with LEDs. All of this, along with a speaker and scoreboard, connect to an Arduino. The icing on the cake? [Steve] coded an adaptive learning algorithm that observes your playing style to gain an advantage.
See this in action after the break. Once you’ve mastered rock-paper-scissors you should consider building other glove-based peripherals.
I Heart Robotics has posted a guide for building your own clean room. They’ve been clever with their materials, starting with heavy-duty shelving to provide the framework. We like that idea, it allows you to position your workspace at whatever height you desire.
The side walls are MDF painted with white enamel. Light, power, and tools are mounted to these walls. To keep things clean, a ventilation system uses a vacuum filter and 12V fans to keep filtered air moving in and dirty air out.
Maybe now we’ll be able to pull off that window hack without killing our hard drive.
[Thanks Mawitö and Ciric]
Here’s a USB oscilloscope project from a few years back. It’s easy to build on a single-sided PCB and very cheap because it uses just a handful of parts. At the center, an ATtiny45 microcontroller uses its ADC capabilities for the two traces and also handles the USB connectivity. The internal oscillator is used and trimmed up for accuracy by referencing the USB clock. On the PC side of things, a program written in C# displays the data coming over the serial bus. Quick, small, and useful; a schematic, board layout, firmware, and PC software sources are all available for download.
[Thanks Shri]
[Pete] has written up this in depth how-to on building a vacuum pick and place from an aquarium pump and a pen. The pump conversion to vacuum is extremely simple, with a slight modification to a valve being all that is necessary. The pen is only slightly more involved, but still extremely simple. This entire project could be done in an evening for less than $30. If you’re doing a ton of SMD work, it could be a no-brainer.
[thanks Drone]
Hackaday alum [Ian Lesnet] has been working in cahoots with a dedicated team of developers to produce the OpenBench Logic Sniffer. This caseless logic analyzer can operate at 100MHz and sample 32 channels at once. Better yet, a digital oscilloscope add-on is in the works. The pre-order comes in at $45, that’s a lot of functionality for just a few greenbacks. We’ve embedded a demo video after the break that details installing and using this device under Ubuntu.
If you’ve ever been caught in the situation of needing to drill a clean straight hole down the center of a bolt or rod, you’ve probably tried and ended up with a broken bit or tilted hole, and a ton of cursing to boot.
[Vik] let us know about this nifty trick for drilling ‘down the middle’ using a simple hobby drill press and vice. He claims it’s ‘physics guiding the bit’ but in reality its just crafty use of a chuck. Either way the quick trick works, and will hopefully save a lot of hackers some headaches in the future.
Let us know in the comments if you have any simple quick tips that you use when you’re out in the shop.
