Hackaday 10th Anniversary: Demoscenes And Blink(1)

October 8, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

There were two LA hackerspaces represented at our 10th anniversary party, and members from both of them were able to give a talk on the projects coming out of their labs. [Arko] from null space labs showed up with a few of his creations including CUBEX, his high altitude balloon payload and a demoscene board he’s been working on. [Tod] from Crashspace showed up with the rest of the Crash crew and helped out with the morning build-offs and labs.

A Demoscene Board

Demoscenes, for one reason or another, aren’t extremely popular in the US. In Europe, you can find teams working on programatically generated music videos year-round, coded for Commodore 64s, Amigas, even stranger computers, and x86 assembly. There’s an art to the whole thing, but for those of us on this side of the pond, there aren’t many venues to demonstrate impeccable graphics programming skill.

[Arko] wants to change this. He’s designed a demoscene board around a PIC micro with hardware graphics acceleration, USB OTG, VGA out at 640×480, and an audio out port. It’s meant to be a platform to create demos on, and already [Arko] ~~has ported the famous Craft demo from [lft]~~ to his platform. Edit: the Craft demo was playing on the older ATmega88 version of the board. The PIC board is a little more capable.

Being that there are so few Demo parties in the US, only building a board to play demos would be just a bit shortsighted. [Arko]’s main reason for giving this talk was to tell everyone about the LayerOne Demoparty next year just a few miles from the Hackaday Hackaspace. It coincides with the LayerOne conference, and the board itself will soon be available for sale in the Hackaday store.

Blink(1) and How To Kickstarter

When it comes to electronics and tech Kickstarters, Blink(1) defines what it means to have a minimum viable product. It’s a USB plug, a small microcontroller, and an RGB LED. That’s it. [Tod] wanted to take this simple project and learn how to turn it into a product. [Tod] emphasised the ‘learn’ part of his plan; the alternate title for this talk was, “How to Fail Multiple Times and Still Ship 20,000 Units.”

The Blink(1) started as a standard My First Arduino Sketch, blinking three LEDs, quickly moving over to a USB LED device. This rather large USB dongle sat there for a few years until he decided to turn this into a product. It turned out building a product is a lot more involved than building a kit, with considerations to the enclosure, the packaging, and the inevitable CNC mold fails. Assembly – and the success of his first Kickstarter – was also an issue. [Tod]’s friends ended up assembling most of the kits.

Despite these problems, [Tod] was still able to ship a few thousand units and is now working on another production run with SeeedStudio. It’s a remarkable story, with the Blink(1) used by Google, Disney, Microsoft, Facebook, and a whole bunch of other huge companies. The Blink(1) is also in the mainline Linux kernel, something you can’t say about a lot of Kickstarters out there.

LED Light Staffs For The Ultimate Portable Rave

August 28, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 15 Comments

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[risknc] and [mpinner] have been working on a couple of LED light staff designs for a while now and have come up with a prototype that can light up the night with an array of streaming colors. There is even a dial that can turn up and down the brightness.

Originally, [risknc] began developing his own project at SpaceX and dove further into the idea right before Burning Man. The visual effects, when twirled through the air, produced an extremely bright flow of energy that can be seen circling around the user.

The 8ft long carbon fiber staff was stuffed to the edges with RGB LEDs. Neopixel strips at 60 LED per meter were used to alternate between colors, and a whole bunch of white capable LEDs were embedded into the staff as well. One of early designs was purposefully left at a local hackerspace called Crashspace in Culver City, California. Photos of community members trying it out surfaced on the hackerspace’s website. In addition, a description of the staff and a few high-quality photos of the ‘Sparkle Stick’ were uploaded on to the Suprmasv projects page. Searching through the pictures reveal an instance that shows the LED light staff being used during a flow session with a fire poi spinner in the background. Perhaps there is a way to combine LEDs and fire? Anyways, a later version of the staff was tested out at the 2014 Maker Faire in San Francisco.

Full specs and logs of the project can be found on Hackaday.io. A quick video of [mpinner]’s light staff being spun around comes up after the break. In the video, it looks like they are testing it out outside of Crashspace as they run through the darkness of the alleyway in the back, lighting up the area with a nice LED glow. Plans for the future include building a bunch of them and wirelessly syncing them up. CAD models will be uploaded soon as well.

Continue reading “LED Light Staffs For The Ultimate Portable Rave” →

Hackaday Links: May 4, 2014

May 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

We’ve seen a few builds from the Flite Test guys before, like a literal flying toaster, airsoft guns mounted to planes, and giving an electric plane an afterburner (that actually produced a little extra thrust). Now the Flite Test crew is gearing up for the Flite Fest, an all things remote-controlled flight convention in Malvern, Ohio during the last weekend in July. Seems like a pretty cool way to spend spend a weekend.

Unless you get one of those fancy resistor kits where every value has its own compartment in a case or plastic baggie, you’ll soon rue the day your loose resistors become disorganized. [Kirll] has an interesting solution to hundreds of loose resistors: packaging tape. If you want a resistor, just grab a pair of scissors.

Okay, these Adafruit “totally not Muppets™” are awesome. The latest video in the Circuit Playground series is titled, “C is for Capacitor“. There’s also “B is for Battery“, because when life gives you lemons, light up an LED. Here’s the coloring book.

A few years ago, a couple of people at the LA Hackerspace Crashspace put together an animated flipbook device – something between a zoetrope and the numbers in those old electromechanical clocks – and launched a kickstarter. Now they’re putting on a show, presented by Giant Robot, featuring the animated art of dozens of artists.

Vintage electronics? Yes. Vintage Soviet electronics? Here’s 140 pages of pictures, mostly of old measurement devices.