The Faboratory at Yale University has set a number of stretch goals. We don’t mean that in the usual sense. They’ve been making, as you can see in the video below, clones of commercial devices that can stretch over 300%. They’ve done Ardunios and similar controllers along with sensors. The idea is to put computer circuits in flexible robots and other places where flexibility is key, like wearable electronics.
If you are interested in details, you’ll want to read the paper in Science Robotics. They take the existing PCB layout and use a laser to cut patterns in a paper mask over the stretchable substrate. They then apply oxidized gallium-indium to build conductors.
For hackers of a certain age, the warbling of an analog modem remains something of a siren song. Even if you haven’t heard it in decades, the shrill tones and crunchy static are like a time machine that brings back memories of a bygone era. Alien to modern ears, in the 1980s and 90s, it was the harbinger of unlimited possibilities. An audible reminder that you were about to cross the threshold into cyberspace.
If you can still faintly hear those strangely comforting screeches in the back of your mind, the JawnCon 0x1 badge is for you. With a row of authentic vintage red LEDs and an impeccably designed 3D-printed enclosure, the badge is essentially a scaled-down replica of the Hayes SmartModem. But it doesn’t just look the part — powered by the ESP8266 and the open source RetroWiFiModem project, the badge will allow attendees to connect their modern computers to services from the early Internet via era-appropriate AT commands while they’re at the con.
Your shiny new personal electronic device is likely to be designed solely as an app platform to run the products of faceless corporations, so the story goes, and therefore has an ever smaller hacking potential. Perhaps that view is needlessly pessimistic, because here’s [JP3141] with an example that goes against the grain. It’s an Apple Watch, being used as an ammeter. How it does that comes as the result of a delicious piece of lateral thinking.
Like many mobile devices, the device comes with a magnetometer. This serves as an electronic compass, but it’s also as its name might suggest, an instrument for sensing magnetic fields in three axes. With a 3D printed bobbin that slides over the watch, and a few turns of wire, it can sense the magnetic field created by the current, and a measurement can be derived from it. The software on the watch is only a simple proof of concept as yet, but it applies some fairly understandable high-school physics to provide a useful if unexpected measure of current.
We’re surprised to see just how many times the Apple Watch has appeared on these pages, but scanning past projects it was a cosmetic one which caught our eye. Who wouldn’t want a tiny Mac Classic!
It may be the last gasp of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, but it’s always cold somewhere, whether it’s outdoors or inside. If you suffer from cold, stiff hands, you know how difficult it can be to work comfortably on a computer all day. Somehow, all that typing and mousing does little to warm things up. What you need are hand warmers, obviously, and they might as well be smart and made to fit your hands.
Fifteen-year-old [Printerforge] created these bad boys in an effort to learn how to code LCDs and control heat like Magneto controls ferrous metals. Thanks to digital control, they can heat up to specific temperatures, and they happen to run for a long time.
Power-wise, these warmers use a 18650 cell and a TP4056 charging module. Everything is controlled by an Arduino Nano, which reads from both a thermistor and a potentiometer to control the output.
[Printerforge] really thought this project through, as you’ll see in the Instructable. There’s everything from a table of design requirements to quick but thorough explanations of nichrome wire and basic electronic theory.
And then there’s the material consideration. [Printerforge] decided that polymer clay offers the best balance of heat conductivity and durability. They ended up with two styles — flat, and joystick grip. The best part is, everything can fit in a generous pocket.
A common design language for watches has evolved ever since they first started popping up in the 1500s. Whether worn on the wrist or in a pocket, watches are relatively slim front to back, with the display mounted on the face. That’s understandable given the imperatives of human anatomy. Still, it’s not the only way to arrange things, as this very cool LED matrix watch with an edge-mounted display demonstrates.
True, the unique form factor of this watch wasn’t really the point of the whole project. Rather, [Vitali]’s design was driven by a couple of things. First off were the extremely cool Hewlett Packard HDSP-2000 displays, with four 5×5 5×7 LED matrices shining through the clear cover of a DIP-12 package. Also visible through the cover are the shift registers that drive the matrices, complete with gold bonding wires.
The main attraction for [Vitali], though, was the challenge of working within the limits of the ATtiny85 he chose to run the watch. The MCU’s limited IO made hardware multiplexing necessary, no mean feat given the limited resources and real estate available. He still managed to pack everything in, with the unique edge-mount display coming from the LEDs bridging the space between the two main PCBs. Everything fits into a nice wood veneer case, although we think it looks just fine without it. [Vitali] puts it through its paces in the short video below.
Hats off to [Vitali] for a great-looking project that pushed his limits. We just love these displays, too; of course, it’s not the first time we’ve seen them put to similar use.
Every now and then, a commercial product aims to help you in your life journey, in a novel way, making your life better through its presence. Over the years, I’ve been disappointed by such products far more often than I have been reassured, seeing each one of them rendered unimaginative and purposeless sometimes even despite the creator’s best intentions. The pressures of a commercial market will choke you out without remorse, metal fingers firmly placed on your neck, tightening with every move that doesn’t promise profit, and letting money cloud your project’s vision. I believe that real answers can only come from within hacker communities, and as we explore, you might come to see it the same way.
This is the tip of the iceberg of a decade-long project that I hope to demonstrate in a year or two. I’d like to start talking about that project now, since it’s pretty extensive; the overall goal is about using computers to help with human condition, on a personal level. There’s a lot of talk about computers integrating into our lives – even more if you dare consult old sci-fi, much of my inspiration.
Tackling a gigantic problem often means cutting it down into smaller chunks, though, so here’s a small sub-problem I’ve been working on, for years now, on and off: Can you use computers to modify your sense of time?
You might think of the smartwatch era as beginning with Apple, relatively recently. Or, you might think back to those fancy Timex models with the datalink thing going on in the 1990s. Seiko can beat them all, though, with its UC-2000 smartwatch that debuted all the way back in 1984.
The UC2200 was the bigger docking station of the two.
The UC-2000 very much looks cutting edge for its era, and absolutely ancient today. It featured a 4-bit CPU, 2 kilobytes of RAM, and 6 kilobytes of ROM. Display was via a simple 10×4 character LCD in a rectangular form factor, with four buttons along the bottom. Branded as a “personal information processor,” it was intended for use with the UC-2100 dock. This added a full physical QWERTY keyboard that interacted with the UC-2000 when the two were combined together. Alternatively, you could go for the UC-2200, which not only had a keyboard but also a thermal printer to boot. Oh, and ROM packs for Microsoft Basic, games, or an English-to-Japanese translator.
What could you do on this thing? Well, it had basic watch functions, so it told the time, acted as a stop watch, and an alarm, of course. But you could also use it to store two memos of up to 1000 characters each, schedule appointments, and do basic calculations.
The one thing this smartwatch was missing? Connectivity. It couldn’t get on the Internet, nor could it snatch data from the ether via radio or any other method. By today’s measures, it wouldn’t qualify as much of a smartwatch at all. Moreso a personal organizer that fit on the wrist. Still, for its day, this thing really was a whole computer that fit on your wrist.
