Fubarino Contest Winners

December 31, 2013 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

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It is with great pleasure that I announce the winners of the Fubarino Contest (alphabetical order): Brian, Daniel, Dave, Dominic, Eric, Gerben, James, Joel, Joseph, Laurens, Luis, Mats, Mike, Nathanael, Pete, Peter, Sebastian, Taciuc, Vojtěch, and Wes. They rose to the challenge and added our URL as an Easter Egg in their microcontroller project. Their hacks were chosen for their creativity, as well as completeness of presentation. Congratulations! Links to all twenty project features are after the break in reverse order in which they were originally published. To see all the entries hit up the contest tag.

We also want to take a moment to thank Microchip Technology Inc. They not only put up twenty Fubarino SD boards as prizes, they are also covering the cost of shipping to each winner. Many thanks!

We thought it was interesting that the twenty winners live in 11 different countries: Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Malaysia, Romania, South Africa, Spain, The Netherlands, UK, and the USA. Hackaday really is a global community!

If you are one of the winners please leave your acceptance speech in the comments section. This is also a great place to leave feedback — if you didn’t submit an entry we want to know why!

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Fubarino Contest: Splash Screen On System Reset

December 29, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

Here’s a Fubarino contest entry for all those homebrew computer nuts out there. [Danjovic] modified an NTSC/PAL display adapter to show an ASCII version of the Hackaday logo when his board first boots up.

The build is based on [Daryl Rictor]’s Video Display Adapter intended for use with homebrew computers, microprocessor projects, and any other minimalist digital setup that needs an NTSC or PAL video display. It’s a surprisingly simple circuit, made of a few logic ICs and an ATmega8.

[Danjovic] modified this video display adapter with an easter egg: if one pin on the ATmega8 is shorted when the board is powered on, a neat Hackaday splash screen is displayed for several seconds before falling back to the stock display of a blinking cursor. [Dnajovic] converted the ASCII Hackaday logo with the help of a short Python script and loaded it onto the AVR with a small firmware change.

Video of the boot screen in action below.

This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!

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Fubarino Contest: Hackaday On An RC Heli

December 29, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

[SF Tester] (his real name, honestly, with a brother who does QA for Blizzard) recently picked up a Blade SR remote control helicopter. Compared to the cheap coaxial helicopters you can pick up from eBay or Amazon for $30, this heli is a huge step up, but it does have one weakness – it comes with its own transmitter, and binding it to [Tester]’s shiny new DX9 transmitter is a pain.

The initial attempt at getting the proper values from the stock transmitter into his big-boy transmitter originally consisted of taking the stock transmitter, some servos, attaching them to homebrew protractors, and reading out the values of each axis manually. That’s a brute-force method of improving his new toy, so [Tester] sought out a better method.

The solution came via Arduino’s pulseIn() command. By connecting the stock receiver to an Arduino, [Tester] was able to precisely read the values coming from the stock transmitter and import them into his very fancy Spektrum DX9 transmitter.

Every Fubarino contest entry needs an easter egg, so when the value of the pulses coming from the stock transmitter is exactly 1337 microseconds, the Arduino spits out Hackaday’s URL to the serial console. Cleverly hidden, and a great way to improve an awesome heli. We can’t ask much more than that.

There’s no direct link for this, but you can literally see the code in the image after the break.

This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!

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Fubarino Contest: NTP Clock

December 29, 2013 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Toni] has been playing around with NTP, the Network Time Protocol. This allows the alarm clock build to keep very accurate time by synchronizing with an NTP server on the Internet.

The project serves as a bedside alarm clock. When it comes time to wake in the morning an alarm sounds and the screen switches from using a blue backlight to using a red one. This is show in the video below, but you’ll want to turn down your speakers before watching it; the alarm sound will have no problem waking you up in the morning. After the unwelcomed jolt you’ll get a glimpse at the Easter Egg which reminds you to check for new posts on Hackaday.

Afraid of ending up with a steaming pile of slag instead of a server [Toni] asked us to host the project files. You can find the first-hand description of the project and a link to the code below.

This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!

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Fubarino Contest: Micro Voltmeter

December 28, 2013 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

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This collection of hardware is a diy voltmeter. It can measure up to 17V with 1 microvolt resolution while taking seven samples per second. The LTC2400 ADC board is used to make the measurements, with the Arduino processing the output and taking care of the display and user input buttons.

In addition to showing off what the thing can do in the video after the break, [Luis] gives us a look at the easter egg he added to the project. When you have a source that is very precisely 12V, the meter will read out Hackaday.com!

Incidentally the display used in this hack is one we’ve seen before. Obviously this is a convenient way to add interactive controls to your projects.

This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!

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Fubarino Contest: Custom Mech Warrior Online Controller

December 28, 2013 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

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Twenty-two keys, a push button, three flip-switches, and a touch screen all let [Dominic] take his Mech Warrior Online game to the next level. He found that there are so many key bindings in the game it ends up being a huge pain to try to adapt his behavior to a static keyboard layout. Not only does the controller give him a specialized keypad, but he designed the touch screen interface to act as on-the-fly remapping. It even looks like something that would be mounted in a Battle Mech cockpit! What we can’t understand is why he didn’t tell us about this sexy peripheral hack much sooner?

What finally prompted him to tip us off about his project was the Fubarino Contest. Above you can see the easter egg he added to the controller. When the bottom five buttons on the touch screen are mapped to “31337” (aka “elite) the Teensy 3.0 board that drives the controller will automatically load up Hackaday in his browser.

This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!

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Fubarino Contest: Serial Data Transmission

December 28, 2013 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

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[Jesus] is helping his cousin learn about microcontrollers. Right now they’re on the subject of serial communications, which turned into a nice way to add a Hackaday Easter Egg.

Using and FTDI chip in conjunction with the PIC 18F4550 (it’s a little soon for them to tackle implementing USB directly) the serial data is shown in a terminal window. At the same time the binary value of each byte is flashed on the PORTD LEDs. When the chip receives the characters “hack” it immediately echos back the recommendation to check out the awesomeness that is Hackaday. He posted the code used in this example as a Gist.

This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!

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