PIC32 Smart Watch For Less Than A Benjamin

January 10, 2016 by Al Williams 20 Comments

[Matthew Filipek] likes smart watches, but wanted to build one for under $100, so he did. The watch has a 1.7 inch LCD touchscreen, a rechargeable LiPo battery, an SD card, and Bluetooth. The watch is a little large since [Matthew] had only a month to complete the project that drove him to use some pre-made modules and meant one shot at getting his custom PCB right.

The watch sports three applications: a settings app, a simple game, and a sketch program (you can see a demo in the video below). Power management is a primary goal, of course, although the clock rate is held high enough to make the game playable. To simplify the software, [Matthew] uses protothreads–a lightweight thread abstraction for embedded systems.

We’ve seen several DIY smartwatches in the past including one entry for the Hackaday Prize. It is hard to roll your own watch that has the same small size and style as a commercial offering. However, there is something to be said for having a homebrew watch for boosting your hacker cred.

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The ESP32 Beta Units Arrive

December 23, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

A little more than a year ago, the ESP8266 WiFi module showed up uneventfully in Seeed Studio’s store. Since then, the documentation has been translated to English, a proper development environment for this chip was created, and everybody is using this cheap but powerful chip for the latest Internet of Things things.

The company behind the ESP8266, Espressif, is not one to rest on their laurels, and for several months they’ve been working on the next generation of powerful WiFi-enabled tiny, cheap systems. They have their silicon, and already 200 lucky people have their hands on the very first test units of the ESP32, the next generation of Espressif’s WiFi chips. The teardowns have begun, and [LadyAda] streamed her initial experiments with the chip to the Intertubes (available below). [Martin] is also one of the guys who received these early beta chips, and he was kind enough to post his thoughts on Espressif’s newest chip.

A little bit of information on the ESP32 has dribbled out, and [LadyAda] and [Martin]’s demo unit confirm all we’ve suspected. There are two Tensilica L108 processors running at up to 160MHz, a lot of peripherals including ADCs, DACs, I2C, SPI, I2S, and PWM, more RAM, AES and SSL for security, and Bluetooth Low Energy. WiFi has also been upgraded, and the ESP32 will support speeds up to 150 Mbps.

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OSWatch, An Open Source Watch

December 13, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 18 Comments

If you are a soldering ninja with a flair for working with tiny parts and modules, check out the Open Source Watch a.k.a. OSWatch built by [Jonathan Cook]. His goals when starting out the project were to make it Arduino compatible, have enough memory for future applications, last a full day on one charge, use BLE as Central or Peripheral and be small in size. With some ingenuity, 3d printing and hacker skills, he was able to accomplish all of that.

OSWatch is still a work in progress and with detailed build instructions available, it is open for others to dig in and create their own versions with modifications – you just need to bring in a lot of patience to the build. The watch is built around a Microdunio Core+ board, an OLED screen, BLE112A module, Vibration motor, a couple of LEDs and Buttons, and a bunch of other parts. Take a look at the schematics here. The watch requires a 3V3, 8MHz version of the Microdunio Core+ (to ensure lower power consumption), and if that isn’t readily available, [Jonathan] shows how to modify a 5V, 16MHz version.

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Hackaday Dictionary: Bluetooth Low Energy

December 2, 2015 by Richard Baguley 22 Comments

Bluetooth is one of the mainstays of the mobile gadget world, allowing mobile devices to communicate easily over short distances. It’s how your wireless headset talks to your cell phone without the complexity and power requirements of WIFi. In particular, the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) component is interesting for those who build portable gadgets, because it requires a very small amount of power. Continue reading “Hackaday Dictionary: Bluetooth Low Energy” →

Citizen Scientist: Hedy Lamarr

November 16, 2015 by Dan Maloney 97 Comments

For all the destruction and human misery unleashed during World War II, it was also a time of incredible creativity and ingenuity. In America, it was a time when everyone wanted to pitch in. Young men and women enlisted and were shipped overseas, and those left behind kept the factories running full tilt. Even Hollywood went to war, with its steady output of films that gave people a little glamour and provided an escape from the horror and loss of the war. Hollywood stars lined up to entertain troops and raise money for the war effort, and many joined up and fought too.

But one Hollywood star made an unconventional contribution to the war effort, and in the process proved that beauty and brains are not always mutually exclusive. This is the story of Hedy Lamarr, movie star and inventor.

“The Most Beautiful Woman in the World”

By the time she was 23 in 1937, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was a genuine film star in her native Austria. She was also trapped in an unhappy marriage to a rich and powerful Austrian munitions magnate, Fritz Mandl. Hedy was miserable as a trophy wife, adorning the dining room as her husband entertained rich and powerful guests – including Mussolini and Hitler – over long dinners in one of his mansions. They dismissed her; clearly a woman so beautiful could have nothing else to offer, an empty head perched on a graceful neck. But she was far from stupid, and while her husband discussed business with the men who were building the Axis arsenal, Hedy listened and learned.

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Superbike Gets Bootstrapped Instrument Refit

October 27, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 32 Comments

[Josh] got rid of the standard, factory gauges on his GSXR Super-bike and installed a custom built instrument panel which displays some additional parameters which the regular instrumentation cluster did not. He was working on converting his bike in to a Streetfighter – a stripped down, aggressive, mean machine. The staid looking gauges had to go, besides several other mods to give his bike the right look.

Luckily, he had the right skills and tools available to make sure this DIY hack lives up to the Streetfighter cred of his bike. The important parameter for him was to log the Air / Fuel mixture ratio so he could work on the carburation. Along the way, he seems to have gone a bit overboard with this build, but the end result is quite nice. The build centers around a Planar 160×80 EL graphic display lying in his parts bin. The display didn’t have a controller, so he used the Epson S1D13700 graphic controller to interface it with the microcontroller. An Atmel ATmega128L runs the system, and [Josh] wrote all of his code in “C”.

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Bluetooth Thermometer Minds Your Meats

October 21, 2015 by Al Williams 14 Comments

The summer may have come to a close here in the USA, but any time of the year is a good time for grilling. In the colder weather, it’s a drag to have to stay near the hot grill to keep an eye on your burgers and franks. [Eric Ely] thought it would be smarter to have a meat thermometer that sent his phone the current reading via Bluetooth.

Instead of starting from scratch, [Eric] took an off the shelf electronic thermometer and removed its temperature probe (which was a thermistor). The hardware used an off the shelf Bluetooth board with a companion battery board and prototype board. If you can’t bear to cut up a good thermometer, you can get replacement probes that ought to work just as well.

In addition to the boards and the scavenged thermistor, [Eric] used a couple of resistors. One resistor is in parallel with the thermistor to improve the linearity of the device’s response curve. The second resistor forms a voltage divider that the Bluetooth board reads.

The software (using Node.js and C) is available on Github. The C program reads the temperature and pushes it out using JSON. Node.js provides a server that [Eric] can hit with his phone’s Web browser.

Sure, you can buy wireless thermometers, but what self-respecting hacker wants to carry around a store-bought box just to display meat temperature? Viewing it on your phone has much more street cred. Of course, a real hacker isn’t going to cook on a conventional grill, either.

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