fidget spinners

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Hackaday Links: ???? ???? Spooky Edition, 2017

October 29, 2017 by 23 Comments

A few links posts ago, we wrote something about a company selling huge LED panels on eBay, ten panels for $50. Those panels are gone now, but a few lucky hackers got their hands on some cool hardware. Now there’s a project to reverse engineer these Barco NX-4 LED panels. Who’s going to be the first to figure out how to drive these things? Doesn’t matter — it’s a group project and we’re all made richer by the contributions of others.

Prague is getting a new hackerspace.

A year and a half ago, a $79 3D printer popped up on Kickstarter. I said I would eat a hat if it shipped by next year. Seeing as how it’s basically November, and they’re not selling a $79 printer anymore — it’s $99 — this might go down as one of my rare defeats, with an asterisk, of course. I’m going to go source some very large fruit roll-ups and do this at Supercon. Thanks, [Larry].

Speaking of bets, this week Amazon introduced the most idiotic thing ever invented. It’s called Amazon Key. It’s an electronic lock (dumb), connected to the Internet (dumber), so you let strangers into your house to deliver packages (dumbest). CCC is in a few months, so I don’t know if Amazon Key will be hacked by then, but I’m pretty confident this will be broken by March.

The Lulzbot Taz is one of the best printers on the market, and it is exceptionally Open Source. The Taz is also a great printer for low-volume production. It was only a matter of time until someone built this. The Twoolhead is a parallel extruder for the Taz 6. Instead of one extruder and nozzle, it’s two, and instead of printing one object at a time, it prints two. Of course it limits the build volume of the printer, but if you need smaller parts faster, this is the way to go.

Hey, did you hear? Hackaday is having a conference the weekend after next. This year, we’re opening up the doors a day early and having a party at the Evil Overlord’s offices. Tickets are free for Supercon attendees, so register here.

At CES this year, we caught wind of one of the coolest advances in backyard astronomy in decades. The eVscope is ‘astrophotography in the eyepiece’, and it’s basically a CCD, a ton of magic image processing, and a small display, all mounted inside a telescope. Point the scope at a nebula, and instead of seeing a blurry smudge, you’ll see tendrils and filaments of interstellar gas in almost real-time. Now the eVscope is on Kickstarter. It’s a 4.5 inch almost-Newtonian (the eyepiece is decoupled from the light path, so I don’t even know how telescope nomenclature works in this case), an OLED display, and a 10-hour battery life.

Is the fidget spinner fad over? Oh, we hope not. A technology is only perfected after it has been made obsolete. Case in point? We can play phonographs with lasers. The internal combustion engine will be obsolete in automobiles in twenty years, but track times will continue going down for forty. Fidget spinners may be dead, but now you can program them with JavaScript. What a time to be alive!

Audio tomphoolery even an idiot tech blogger can see through! I received a press kit for a USB DAC this week that included the line, “…low drop out voltage regulators running at 3.3 V, meaning the 5 V USB limit is well preserved.” Yes, because you’re running your system at 3.3 V, you won’t draw too much current from a USB port. That’s how it works, right?

[Peter Sripol] is building an ultralight in his basement. The last few weeks of his YouTube channel have been the must-watch videos of the season. He’s glassed the wings, installed all the hardware (correctly), and now he has the motors and props mounted. This is an electric ultralight, so he’s using a pair of ‘150 cc’ motors from HobbyKing. No, that’s not displacement, it’s just a replacement for a 150 cc gas engine. On a few YouTube Live streams, [Peter] did what was effectively a high-speed taxi test that got out of hand. It flew. Doing that at night was probably not the best idea, but we’re looking forward to the videos of the flight tests.

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Hackaday Links: September 17, 2017

September 17, 2017 by 51 Comments

BREAKING NEWS: APPLE HAS RELEASED A NEW RECTANGLE. IT IS BETTER THAN THE PREVIOUS RECTANGLE, WHICH WAS A LESSER RECTANGLE. SOME PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY WITH THE NEW RECTANGLE BECAUSE OF [[CHANGES]]. THE NEW RECTANGLE HAS ANIMATED POO.

Mergers and acquisitions? Not this time. Lattice Semiconductor would have been bought by Canyon Bridge — a private equity firm backed by the Chinese government — for $1.3B. This deal was shut down by the US government because of national security concerns.

[Jan] is the Internet’s expert in doing synths on single chips, and now he has something pretty cool. It’s a breadboard synth with MIDI and CV input. Basically, what we’re looking at is [Jan]’s CVS-01 chip for a DCO, DCF, and DCA), a KL5 chip for an LFO, and an envelope chip. Tie everything together with a two-octave captouch keyboard, and you have a complete synthesizer on a breadboard.

As an aside relating to the above, does anyone know what the cool kids are using for a CV/Gate keyboard controller these days? Modular synths are making a comeback, but it looks like everyone is running a MIDI keyboard into a MIDI-CV converter. It seems like there should be a –simple, cheap– controller with quarter-inch jacks labeled CV and Gate. Any suggestions?

World leaders are tweeting. The Canadian PM is awesome and likes Dark Castle.

Way back in July, Square, the ‘POS terminal on an iPad’ company posted some data on Twitter. Apparently, fidget spinner sales peaked during the last week of May, and were declining through the first few weeks of summer. Is this proof the fidget spinner fad was dead by August? I have an alternate hypothesis: fidget spinner sales are tied to middle schoolers, and sales started dropping at the beginning of summer vacation. We need more data, so if some of you could retweet this, that would be awesome.

Remember [Peter Sripol], the guy building an ultralight in his basement? This is going to be a five- or six-part video build log, and part three came out this week. This video features the installation of the control surfaces, the application of turnbuckles, and hardware that is far too expensive for what it actually is.

Fidget Spinners Put The ‘S’ In STEAM Education

July 14, 2017 by 55 Comments

Centrifuges are vital to the study of medicine, chemistry, and biology. They’re vital tools to separate the wheat from the chaff figuratively, and DNA from saliva literally. Now, they’re fidget spinners. [Matlek] designed a fidget spinner that also functions as a simple lab centrifuge.

The centrifuge was designed in Fusion 360, and was apparently as easy as drawing a few circles and hitting copy and paste. Interestingly, this fidget spinner was designed to be completely 3D printable, including the bearings. The bearing is a standard 608 though, so if you want to get some real performance out of this centrispinner, off-the-shelf bearings are always an option. The design of this fidget spinner holds 2 mL and 1.5 mL vials, but if your lab has 500 μL tubes on hand, there are handy 3D printable adapters.

Still think using a toy to do Real Science™ is dumb? Contain your rage, because a few months ago a few folks at Stanford devised a way to build a centrifuge out of paper. This paperfuge can — at least theoretically — save lives where real commercial centrifuges or even electricity aren’t available. Fidget spinners save humanity once again.

Hackaday Links: July 9, 2017

July 9, 2017 by 14 Comments

Doom is now running on the ESP32. This is some work from [Sprite_tm], and the last we heard about Doom on the ESP32 is that there was a silicon bug or something. Now we’re knee deep in the dead on a tiny WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled microcontroller.

Loading animations have a long and storied history. What originally began as an hourglass quickly turned into a hand counting to five and progress bars. There were clocks, the Great Beach Ball of Death, and now loading animations are everywhere. However, the loading animation has still not been perfected — until now, that is. This is a fidget spinner loading animation. It’s beautiful.

Just a quick reminder that a Minecraft scholarship exists. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, but there is a scholarship from the Klingon Language Institute for studying any language, and last year’s winner built a redstone computer from scratch,

[8bit generation] recently released a documentary, about the rise of Atari. Easy to Learn, Hard to Master is about the rise of Atari under [Nolan Bushnell]. Now [8bit generation] is working on a new documentary: Firing Steve Jobs. The [Steve Jobs] story is fascinating, and no matter what you think of him, he probably knew what he was doing.

Want to build and sell some hardware? Over on Tindie, we’re taking a look at some of the most successful designers of custom crafted hardware. This time it’s [Albertas Mickėnas] of Catnip Electronics who has sold five thousand soil moisture sensors.

You can just go out and buy a CNC machine, but that doesn’t quite underscore the difficulty in getting a CNC machine running. Our ‘ol pal [Jeremy] recently picked up a Romaxx CNC machine and put together a video of its commissioning. There’s a lot of work here, from building a shelf/stand for a rather beefy machine to cutting into the bed for t-tracks, and figuring out how dust collection is going to happen.

Before there was KiCad and Eagle and a ton of web-based PCB design tools, there was Autotrax. Want to know what PCB design and GUIs look like in DOS? I did a walkthrough for designing a small PCB in the DOS version of Autotrax late last year. There are thousands of designs locked up in discontinued EDA suites, and [Erich] has a way to revive them. He’s developed an Autotrax/Easytrax layout import/export plugin for pcb-nd. Now legacy Protel designs can be imported into software released in this century. This is really cool, and you can check out some screenshots here.