Updated Mouse Ring Does It With A Joystick

December 10, 2024 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Have you ever wished for easy mouse controls to go along with your VR headset experience? Or maybe you just want a cooler way to mouse in general. In any case, look no further than [rafgaj78]’s Bluetooth Mouse Ring project.

This is version two, which of course comes with several improvements over version one. The biggest change is from tactile buttons to a joystick input. [rafgaj78] also did away with the power switch, using deep-sleep mode instead. Version two is easier to assemble and offers improved ergonomics, as well as a range of ring sizes.

Like the first version, this ring runs on a Seeed Xiao nRF52840 and is programmed in CircuitPython. There are two modes to choose from. In one mode, the joystick does left and right mouse click and wheel up and down, while the push action recovers the micro from deep sleep. In the other mode, the joystick axis is a mouse pointer mover, and you push down to left click.

We really like this sleek design, and [rafgaj78] has great instructions if you want to build your own. This isn’t the first cool mouse ring we’ve seen, and it certainly won’t be the last.

Cute Brass Lunar Lander Is A Neat Little Environment Monitor

January 19, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 8 Comments

Sometimes form can make a project more attractive than its simple function. [Mohit Bhoite]’s free-form builds are great examples of this. His latest effort is a gorgeous little device that displays environmental readings, and it’s shaped like a lunar lander. (Nitter) Just exquisite!

The device is based around a Seeedstudio XIAO nRF52840 dev board. It’s hooked up to a BME280 sensor which delivers temperature, humidity and air pressure readings from the immediate environment. These readings are displayed on a tiny 128×32 OLED display, along with the current time. Power is via a compact 14250 lithium cell.

So far, so simple, but the real magic is in the housing. It’s a wireframe lunar lander lookalike which [Mohit] put together using brass wire and some careful soldering. It adds so much to the build, which wouldn’t be nearly as attractive if just assembled on a PCB. It’s not his first rodeo, either. He previously built a cute device (Nitter) with an animated face in 2019 using similar techniques; it used a CCS811 gas sensor to detect air quality.

Often, we find ourselves falling most in love with devices that please the eye. [Mohit] certainly demonstrates a great skill in building things that fit this brief. Sometimes, it only takes a bit of thought and careful application of the mind to bring a beautiful aesthetic to your projects, and the results can be most rewarding. Try his Hackaday Supercon talk if you want to learn more. Continue reading “Cute Brass Lunar Lander Is A Neat Little Environment Monitor” →

A montage of a "death stranding" lamp in two different color modes, purple on the left and blue on the right

Illuminate Your Benched Things With This Death Stranding Lamp

January 29, 2023 by Abe Connelly 4 Comments

[Pinkman] creates a smart RGB table lamp based off of the “Odradek device” robot arm from the video game “Death Stranding”.

[Pinkman] adds a XIAO BLE nRF52840 Sense device, with Bluetooth support, microphone and TinyML capability. The nRF52840 is used to push data to the five WS2812 strips, one for each “blade” of the lamp, and also connects to a TTP223 capacitive touch controller to add touch input detection. The TinyML portion of the nRF52840 allows for custom keyword training to turn on the lamp with voice commands ([Pinkman] uses “Bling Bling”). [Pinkman] has also provided Bluetooth control, allowing the color and pattern to be changed from a phone application.

The lamp is 3D printed with the build being based off of [Nils Kal]’s Printables files. Each of the five blades has a white 3D-printed diffusor plate to help ease out the hot spots for the LED strip. The lamp is fully adjustable in addition to having cavities, channels and access points for “invisible” wiring. [Pinkman] has also upgraded the original 3D files to allow for the three wires needed to drive the WS2812, instead of the two wires that [Nils] had allotted in the original.

[Pinkman] has all of the code, STL files and training data available for download, so be sure to check it out. Lamps are a favorite of ours and we’ve featured our fair share, including 3D printed Shoji lamps and RGB wall lamps.

Video after the break!

Continue reading “Illuminate Your Benched Things With This Death Stranding Lamp” →

Osprey Keyboard Lets The NRF52840 Spread Its Wings

December 8, 2022 by Kristina Panos 14 Comments

While most people don’t care whether they use one finger or ten, some people want to better themselves by learning how to touch-type. And honestly, there’s no easier way to do that than by getting into the ergo keyboard game. Even if you consider yourself a touch-typist already, an ortholinear or column-staggered keyboard may teach you otherwise, as you find yourself trying to type ‘c’ with your index finger (for example) and failing miserably.

[ebastler] chose the best of all routes and decided to build his own perfect keyboard, called the Osprey. It’s a wireless, column-staggered 40% that runs on ZMK firmware, which of course is open-source, as is the PCB itself and the thick and travel-ready printed enclosure. Although [ebastler] has yet to implement either one of these additional inputs, the Osprey also supports a thumbstick and a track pad.

Brain-wise, it’s a bare nRF52840 chip along with a TI BQ24075 for battery charging. The interesting thing about this implementation is that [ebastler] used and abused Nordic sample schematic #4, which utilizes both DC-DC converter stages of the chip. We can’t wait to see what this trailblazing build will mean for the community!

Palm Portable Keyboard Goes Wireless

February 8, 2022 by Kristina Panos 20 Comments

Long ago when digital portables where in their infancy, people were already loath to type on tiny keyboards, stylus or not. So Palm made a sweet little portable keyboard that would fold up and fit in your cargo pocket. And what do we have now for luxury typing on the go? Rubber roll-up jelly keebs? That’s a hard no from this scribe.

But why mess with the success of the the Palm Portable Keyboard? It just needs to be updated for our times, and that’s exactly what [Xinming Chen] did with their PPK Bluetooth adapter.

Inspired by the work of [cy384] to make a USB adapter as well as [Christian]’s efforts with the ESP32, [Xinming Chen] points out that this version is more power efficient, easier to program, and has a built-in Li-Po charging circuit. It also uses the hardware serial port instead of the software serial, which saves brainpower.

There’s really not much to this build, which relies on the Adafruit Feather nRF52840 and will readily work with Palm III and Palm V keyboards. Since the PPK is RS-232 and needs to be TTL, this circuit also needs a voltage level inverter which can be made with a small handful of components. We love that there’s a tiny hidden switch that engages the battery when the adapter clicks on to the connector.

The schematic, code, and STL files are all there in the repository, so go pick up one of these foldy keebs for cheap on the electronic bay while they’re still around. Watch the demo video unfold after the break.

Want an all-in-one solution for typing on the go? Check out the history of tiny computers.

Continue reading “Palm Portable Keyboard Goes Wireless” →

It’s Doom, This Time On A Bluetooth LE Dongle

November 20, 2021 by Jenny List 4 Comments

By now most readers should be used to the phenomenon of taking almost any microcontroller and coaxing it to run a port of the 1990s grand-daddy of all first-person shooters, id Software’s Doom. It’s been done on a wide array of devices, sometimes only having enough power for a demo mode but more often able to offer the full experience. Latest to the slipgate in this festival of pixelated gore is [Nicola Wrachien], who’s achieved the feat using an nRF52840-based USB Bluetooth LE dongle.

Full details can be found on his website, where the process of initial development using an Adafruit CLUE board is detailed. A 16MB FLASH chip is used for WAD storage, and an SPI colour display takes us straight to that cursed base on Phobos. The target board lacks enough I/O brought out for connection to screen and FLASH, so some trickery with 7400 logic is required to free up enough for the task. Controls are implemented via a wireless gamepad using an nRFS1822 board, complete with streamed audio to a PWM output.

The result can be seen in the video below the break, which shows a very playable game of both Doom and Doom 2 that would not have disgraced many machines of the era. This was prototyped on an Adafruit Clue board, and that could be the handheld console you’ve been looking for!

Continue reading “It’s Doom, This Time On A Bluetooth LE Dongle” →

Hackable Smart Watch Is Also Open Source

October 5, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 16 Comments

When they first came to market, many detractors thought that smart watches would be a flop or that there wouldn’t be much use for them. Over the past few years, though, their sales continue to increase as people find more and more niche uses for them that weren’t previously considered. The one downside to most of these watches is unsurprisingly their lack of openness and hackability, but with some willpower and small circuit components there are a few options available for those of us who like to truly own our technology.

This smartwatch is the SMA Q3, the next version of this smartwatch that we saw at the beginning of last year. Like its predecessor, it boasts a sunlight-readible display powered by a Bluetooth SoC, but this time uses the upgraded nRF52840. All of the standard smartwatch features are available, but this version also includes SWD pins on the back, and additionally has support for Bangle.js and can run some of the apps from the app loader. Some details still need to be worked out for this specific hardware, but there are some workarounds available for the known problems.

The project is also on Kickstarter right now but is well past its funding goals. We’re excited to see adoption of an open-source smartwatch like this, and to that end all of the hardware details and software are freely available on the project’s page, provided you can order some of the needed parts from overseas. If you’re looking for something a little more BASIC, though, we have you covered there as well.