How To Make Hardware, With Examples And An Electric Pickle

May 10, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Right now we’re throwing a two-day hackathon in Pasadena. As with all hackathons, people are going to build something, but that’s only going to happen today. Yesterday was an incredible Zero to Product talk that goes over PCB layout techniques, manufacturing, and schematic capture. In a seven hour talk, our own [Matt Berggren] took the audience through building a product, in this case a little ESP8266 breakout board. We livestreamed this; the video (and electric pickles) are below.

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Hardware You Might See In A Bar In New York

May 9, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

Our New York City trip for the TechCrunch hackathon is just about wrapped up, and this weekend we’re hosting a hardware hackathon at the Hackaday Design Lab in Pasadena, but there’s still one more event from NYC left to cover: our drink-up in the city.

Our drink-up took over about 90% of the Antler Beer and Wine Dispensary, with the usual, not electronically enabled patrons sufficiently annoyed.

While this meetup was really just a meet-and-greet pregame for the TechCrunch hackathon, and not a proper ‘bring a hack’, that didn’t stop a few people from toting out some very cool hardware. [Katie Fortunato] trucked out a flight data recorder (or an airplane’s black box, painted orange for visibility) that is supposedly from a 747.

This flight data recorder keeps relevant data on a loop of mylar tape. We didn’t crack into that part of the black box, but we did manage to dig into the electronics. Very weird stuff in there; the control electronics have a backplane design, where each card has a connector that’s basically 2 rows of 50 or 75 female pin sockets. These cards aren’t keyed in any way, and they must be placed in the backplane in a certain order. The circuits are extremely simple; just a mix of op-amps, 74- and 54-series logic (no, we can’t figure that one out, either), buffers, and inverters. The latest date code was some time in the early 80s, and all the boards had a conformal coating on them. There’s a weird connector on the outside of the black box [Katie] promises to document on her hackaday.io profile.

Also at the event were a few folks from NYC Resistor, a few people from the IoTGotham meetup, some of the crew from littleBits. Somewhere in the pictures below is a Ms. PacMan/Galaga cabinet. Yes, I tested the bee overflow cheat, it works, but the high score was above 500,000.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An EM Drive

May 8, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 136 Comments

As far as engineering feats of the 21st century go (as long as they turn out to be real), we’re looking at two things. Lockheed Martin might build a working, power generating fusion reactor in the next decade. That will solve every problem on the planet. The second is even more spectacular. It’s called the EM drive, and it will take humans to the stars. It violates the laws of physics, but it somehow works, and there’s a project on hackaday.io to replicate it.

The first thing to know about the EM drive is that it doesn’t use propellent. Instead, it simply dumps microwaves into a cavity and somehow produces thrust. This violates [Newton]’s third law of motion, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Every rocket engine ever, from the Saturn V to ion thrusters on spacecraft now cruising around the solar system, use some sort of propellent. The EM drive does not; it simply dumps microwaves into a closed cavity. It breaks the tyranny of the rocket equation. If you strap a nuclear reactor to an EM drive, you’ll be seeing attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, and C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate.

Despite violating the laws of physics, Chinese researchers found this device produces thrust, and these experiments were replicated at Eagleworks at Johnson Space Center. No one can tell you why it works, but somehow it does, at least in the few tests completed so far.

If the EM drive isn’t just an experimental aberration, this is how we’re going to get to Alpha Centauri. Whoever explains how the EM drive works will get the Nobel, and [movax] over on hackaday.io is building one out of a broken microwave oven. It’s a fantastic project for the Hackaday Prize, and even if it doesn’t work, it makes for a great story for the grandkids.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Pinball Simulator Makes The Neighbors Happy

May 5, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

There are a lot of simulators out there if you want to try something out that would be otherwise impossible. Great examples are flight simulators for simulating the piloting of a fighter jet, or goat simulators for simulating the life of a goat who destroys a town. [Erland] wanted a pinball machine, but like planes and goats, found it was impractical to get a real one because it would probably upset his neighbors in his apartment. Instead, he set out to build a pinball simulator.

The cabinet is miniature-sized compared to a regular pinball machine so it can more easily fit in the apartment. It utilizes three monitors, a 24″ one in portrait mode for the main playing area, a 20″ one for the back screen, and a smaller one for the “dot matrix” style scoreboard. Once the woodwork was completed, a PC was put together to control everything and an Arduino was installed to handle the buttons and output USB commands to the PC.

Of course, we’ve featured many other pinball simulators before, but this one is no slouch when it comes to features either. It is very well crafted and the project is very well documented, and the miniature size sets it apart as well. However, if you want to go a step further with your pinball simulator, you might want to check out this augmented reality pinball system.

Measuring Temperature On An AVR Without A Sensor

May 2, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

There are a few AVR microcontrollers with onboard temperature sensors. These temperature sensors are neither accurate nor precise, but they do work for a few use cases. [Thomas] came up with a little bit of code that runs on all AVR microcontrollers, and is at least as accurate as the sensors in the rare AVRs that have them.

Although not all AVRs have a temperature sensor, they do all have RC oscillators, and these RC oscillators are temperature sensitive. By combining the RC oscillator and watchdog timer, [Thomas]’ code can get a vague idea if it’s getting hotter or colder.

To prove his code works, [Thomas] took an ATtiny13A chip loaded up with a few bits of code and placed a heated coin on it. The chip was programmed to turn on an LED when it detected a rise in temperature, and predictably, the LED lit up. With a coin chilled in a bowl of ice water, another bit of code ran, flashing the LED.

While we’re sure it’s neither accurate nor precise, it does have its uses – overheating protection or a simple thermostat. You can check out a video of the code in action below.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: BS Free USB

May 2, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

Take a look at some old electronics magazines, or even a few blog posts from 10 years ago, and you’ll notice something strange: parallel ports. Those big ‘ol DB25 were the way to get bits out of a computer and into a microcontroller. There was a reason for this: it was exceptionally easy to do.

Now, we have USB to deal with, and that means VIDs and PIDs, drivers, enumeration, and a whole bunch of cruft that makes blinking an LED a surprisingly complicated process. [Colin O’Flynn]’s project for the 2015 Hackaday Prize aims to fix that with BSU – BS Free USB.

Instead of USB to serial chips attached to another microcontroller, [Colin] is using a few microcontrollers with a built-in USB interfaces. These chips are loaded up with firmware and controlled with a simple API on the computer side. If you want to blink a pin, just add a library to your project and set the pin high. Want some SPI on your computer? That’s just setting a few pins as MOSI, MISO, and SCK and typing in a few bytes. It’s basically a $2 Bus Pirate that you can stick into any project.

If [Colin]’s name sounds familiar in the context of The Hackaday Prize, it’s because he won second place with the ChipWhisperer last year. While a tiny USB thing isn’t quite as cool as a tool to break embedded encryption, the BSU certainly seems more useful to millions of hardware tinkerers around the world.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hacklet 45 – Reverse Engineering Projects

May 1, 2015 by Adam Fabio 18 Comments

Sooner or later, all of us end up putting on our reverse engineering hats and digging in to a device. It might be that you’re trying to keep an old piece of equipment running – the manufacturer is long defunct, and parts are no longer available. It might be that sweet new router with locked down firmware. Or, it might just be that you’re curious. Whatever the reason, reverse engineering is a rewarding endeavor. Some of our favorite reverse engineering projects read like spy novels. Instead of cloak and dagger, it’s encryption and soldering iron. This week’s Hacklet focuses on some of the best reverse engineering projects on Hackday.io!

We start with [Henryk Plötz] and Reverse-Engineering a low-cost USB CO₂ monitor. Carbon monoxide detection and measurement devices are household safety items these days, and have become rather cheap. Carbon dioxide measuring devices are less common, and as expected, more expensive. [Henryk] found a device for around 80€ which did what he needed. The included USB connector was supposedly just for power, but when plugging it in, the device enumerated on his Linux box. The accompanying windows software displayed live data from the detector, but there wasn’t much information on the protocol. Time to bust out Ida pro, and go to town on that software! [Henryk] did battle with his CO₂ monitor”s software and was justly rewarded.

Next up is [Bob Blake] and Reverse Engineering the Maverick ET-732. [Bob] loves barbecue, but hates to babysit his smoker. Thankfully there are wireless temperature sensors out there built just for that purpose, but they have limited range and you can’t have multiple receivers around the house. [Bob] aimed to fix all of that by sending his Maverick wireless thermometer data to the web, so he could check in on his cooking from anywhere. First he had to reverse engineer the protocol used by the sensor. A spectrum analyzer told [Bob] that the sensor transmit frequency was 433.92 MHz, which is common for low-cost transmitters like this. [Bob] actually had some compatible receivers at his office, so he was quickly able to capture some data with his Saleae logic analyzer. The real fun came in figuring out exactly how the data was organized!

A chance Ebay sale netted [Technics] a sweet head mounted magnifier, but no way to control it. Reverse engineering a Life Optics M5 documents [Technics] efforts to get his new headgear working. The Life Optics M5 is actually a re-branded version of the Leica HM500 head mounted zoom microscope. These devices were originally designed for medical use. They provide a stereo view to the surgeon or dentist using them, as well as sending a video feed to be displayed for the rest of the team to use or record. Cracking open the M5’s head-mounted box revealed several modules, but no obvious means of controlling zoom or focus. Scoping out a few of the mystery wires did reveal what looks to be a 9600 baud serial data stream though. This is a brand new project, and we’re waiting for [Technics] next update to see if he gets to do some soldering with his new toy!

BIOS password protection – it’s the bane of any used laptop buyer’s existence. Sometimes removing these passwords are as easy as popping out the CMOS battery, other times, not so much. [q3k] found themselves in the latter situation with a bundle of Toshiba R100 laptops. and no way to start them up. [q3k] didn’t give up though – they broke out the soldering iron and started Reverse engineering Toshiba R100 BIOS. The R100 is a Pentium M era machine – old but still usable for many hacking purposes. Dumping the ROM BIOS of the laptop didn’t yield the information [q3k] needed, so they moved on to the TLCS-870 controller, and built a really nice board with a Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA to help with the effort. It turns out that the 870 is just used for power management. – [q3k] has now turned their attention to a Renesas microcontroller which might be just the droid they are looking for!