Live Apollo 11 Transcript On EInk Display

July 18, 2019 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

There are few moments in history that have ever been recorded in more detail or analyzed as thoroughly as the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. Getting three men to our nearest celestial neighbor and back in one piece took a lot of careful planning, and recording every moment of their journey was critical to making sure things were going smoothly. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of man’s first steps off our world, these records give us a way to virtually tag along with Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins.

As part of the 50th anniversary festivities at the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, [Andrew] created a badge that would let him wear a little piece of Apollo 11. Using an ESP32 and an eInk screen, it replays the mission transcript between the crew and ground control in real-time. It’s a unique way to experience the mission made possible by that meticulous data collection that’s a hallmark of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

[Andrew] was inspired by the “Apollo 11 In Real Time” website, but rather than pulling the content from the Internet, he’s loaded the mission transcripts onto the ESP32’s SPIFFS filesystem as a CSV file. Not that the badge is completely offline, it does need to connect to the Internet (via a hotspot on his phone) so it can keep its internal clock synchronized with NTP. Keeping everything local does reduce power consumption compared to streaming it from the Internet, but he admits that otherwise he didn’t give much thought to energy efficiency and there’s definitely some room for improvement.

The LILYGO TTGO board he’s using combines the ESP32 with a 2.13 inch eInk display, in a formfactor not unlike the Badgy we’ve covered previously. He was able to find a STL for a 3D printed case on Thingiverse which he modified to fit a battery. Unfortunately the original model was released under a license that prevents him from distributing his modified version, but it doesn’t sound too difficult to replicate if you’re interested in building your own running ticker of humanity’s greatest adventure.

Neat Smart(ish) Watch Build Uses BLE

June 17, 2019 by Richard Baguley 6 Comments

Digital watches are a pretty neat idea, and are a great way to experiment with designing and building low-power circuits. That’s what [Eric Min] did with this neat smart watch build. It’s based around an nRF52832 SoC that does all of the heavy lifting, including connecting to a smartphone to get the time when the battery is replaced. It also has a decent quantity of blinky LEDs, which is important on any project of this type.

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Open Source Headset With Inside-Out Tracking, Video Passthrough

June 15, 2019 by Donald Papp 4 Comments

The folks behind the Atmos Extended Reality (XR) headset want to provide improved accessibility with an open ecosystem, and they aim to do it with a WebVR-capable headset design that is self-contained, 3D-printable, and open-sourced. Their immediate goal is to release a development kit, then refine the design for a wider release.

An early prototype of the open source Atmos Extended Reality headset.

The front of the headset has a camera-based tracking board to provide all the modern goodies like inside-out head and hand tracking as well as the ability to pass through video. The design also provides for a variety of interface methods such as eye tracking and 6 DoF controllers.

With all that, the headset gives users maximum flexibility to experiment with and create different applications while working to keep development simple. A short video showing off the modular design of the HMD and optical assembly is embedded below.

Extended Reality (XR) has emerged as a catch-all term to cover broad combinations of real and virtual elements. On one end of the spectrum are completely virtual elements such as in virtual reality (VR), and towards the other end of the spectrum are things like augmented reality (AR) in which virtual elements are integrated with real ones in varying ratios. With the ability to sense the real world and pass through video from the cameras, developers can choose to integrate as much or as little as they wish.

Terms like XR are a sign that the whole scene is still rapidly changing and it’s fascinating to see how development in this area is still within reach of small developers and individual hackers. The Atmos DK 1 developer kit aims to be released sometime in July, so anyone interested in getting in on the ground floor should read up on how to get involved with the project, which currently points people to their Twitter account (@atmosxr) and invites developers to their Discord server. You can also follow along on their newly published Hackaday.io page.

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Waterproofing The Best Watch Ever Made

June 4, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 59 Comments

The Casio F-91W is probably the most popular wristwatch ever made. It’s been in production forever, it’s been worn by presidents, and according to US Army intelligence it is “the sign of al-Qaeda”. There’s a lot of history in this classic watch. That said, there is exactly one problem with this watch: it’s barely water resistant. [David] thought he had a solution to this problem, and it looks like he may have succeeded. This classic watch is now waterproof, down to 700 meters of depth. If you’re ever 700 meters underwater, you have bigger problems than a watch that isn’t waterproof.

The basic idea of this hack is to replace the air inside the watch with a liquid. This serves two purposes: first, the front glass won’t fog up. Second, liquids are generally incompressible, or at least only slightly compressible. By replacing the air in the watch with mineral oil, the watch is significantly more water resistant.

Filling a watch with mineral oil is done simply by disassembling the watch, submerging it in a dish of mineral oil, and carefully reassembling the watch. Does it work? Don’t know about this watch, but this was done to another classic Casio watch and tested to 1200 psi. That’s a kilometer underwater, and the watch still worked afterward. We’ll take that as a success, although again if you’re ever a kilometer underwater, you have bigger problems than a broken watch.

This Solar-Powered Ear Ring Turns With The Sun

June 1, 2019 by Jenny List 3 Comments

Jewelry making offers many opportunities for the electronics tinkerer, and on these pages we’ve seen some eye-catching creations using LEDs to great effect. They all have the same limitation though, it’s difficult to power something that tiny without a cumbersome battery. In seeking to solve that problem there have been a variety of inventive solutions tried, but they haven’t matched the approach of [Lloyd Konneker] who has turned the whole premise of most electronic jewelry on its head.

Instead of LEDs, the party trick of his earring is an electric motor that makes it spin, and instead of giving out light it takes it in as solar power. The motor is a pager alert device, the solar cells are repurposed photodiodes, and the power is stored in a capacitor until there is enough to drive the motor, at which point a MOSFET is triggered to do the work. It’s all made possible by a Texas Instruments TPS3839 supply voltage supervisor chip, and it works well enough to turn from time to time in bright sunlight. The prototype uses a conventional PCB, but a better version is in the works with a flexible board.

His write-up should be of interest to anyone with a need to learn about micropower circuits, as it goes into significant detail on their tuning and operation. Last year’s Hackaday Prize had an entire section devoted to energy harvesting which is well worth searching the site for, a typical example was this solar powered microcontroller board.

A Stylish Pair Of FPGA Earrings

May 24, 2019 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Sometimes, rather than going the commercialistic route, it can be nice to make a gift for that personal touch. [Mahesh Venkitachalam] had been down this very road before, often stumbling over that common hurdle of getting in too deep and missing the deadline of the occasion entirely. Not eager to repeat the mistake, help was enlisted early, and the iCE bling earrings were born.

The earrings were a gift for [Mahesh]’s wife, and were made in collaboration with friends who helped out with the design. The earrings use a Lattice iCE40UP5k FPGA to control an 8×8 grid of SMD LEDs. This is all achieved without the use of shift registers, with the LEDs all being driven directly from GPIO pins. This led to several challenges, such as routing all the connections and delivering enough current to the LEDs. The final PCB is a 4-layer design, which made it much easier to get all the lines routed effectively. A buffer is used to avoid damaging the FPGA by running too many LEDs at once.

It’s a tidy build, which makes smart choices about component placement and PCB design to produce an attractive end result. LEDs naturally lend themselves to jewelry applications, and we’ve seen some great designs over the years. Video after the break.

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Lifelike Dinosaur Emerges From The Plumbing Aisle

May 15, 2019 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

Despite the incredible advancements in special effects technology since the film’s release, the dinosaurs in 1993’s Jurassic Park still look just as terrifying today as they did nearly 30 years ago. This has largely been attributed to the fact that the filmmakers wisely decided to use physical models in many of the close-up shots, allowing them to capture the nuances of movement which really helps sell the idea you’re looking at living creatures.

[Esmée Kramer] puts that same principle to work in her incredible articulated dinosaur costume, and by the looks of it, Steven Spielberg could have saved some money if he had his special effects team get their supplies at the Home Depot. Built out of PVC pipes and sheets of foam, her skeletal raptor moves with an unnerving level of realism. In fact, we’re almost relieved to hear she doesn’t currently have plans on skinning the creature; some things are better left to the imagination.

In her write-up on LinkedIn (apparently that’s a thing), [Esmée] explains some of the construction tricks she used to help bring her dinosaur to life, such as heating the pipes and folding them to create rotatable joints. Everything is controlled by way of thin ropes, with all the articulation points of the head mirrored on the “steering wheel” in front of her.

Now to be fair, it takes more than a bundle of PVC pipes to create a convincing dinosaur. Obviously a large part of why this project works so well is the artistry that [Esmée] demonstrates at the controls of her creation. Judging by her performance in the video after the break, we’re going to assume she’s spent a not inconsiderable amount of time stomping around the neighborhood in this contraption to perfect her moves.

In the past we’ve seen the Raspberry Pi used to upgrade life-sized animatronic dinosaurs, but even with the added processing power, those dinos don’t hold a candle to the smooth and organic motion that [Esmée] has achieved here. Just goes to show that sometimes low-tech methods can outperform the latest technological wizardry.

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