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397 Articles

The Three Week Three Dollar Binary Watch

December 10, 2015 by 9 Comments

There’s a Maker Faire in three weeks, and your group wants to design and build a binary watch to give to attendees. You don’t have much time, and your budget is $3 per watch. What do you do? If you are [Parker@Macrofab] you come up with a plan, buy some parts, and start prototyping.

[Parker] selected the PIC16F527 because it had enough I/O and was inexpensive. A cheap crystal and some miscellaneous discrete parts rounded out the bill of materials. Some cheap ESD straps would serve for a band. He did the prototype with a PICDEM board and immediately ran into the bane of PIC programmers: the analog comparators were overriding the digital I/O pins. With that hurdle clear, [Parker] got the rest of the design prototyped and laid a board out in Eagle.

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Old-school Rotary Phone Gets GSM Upgrade

November 18, 2015 by 12 Comments

Sometimes, the answer to, “Why would you bother with a project like that?” is just as simple as, “Because it’s cool.” We suspect that was the motivation behind [Dirk-Jan]’s project to make portable versions of classic rotary telephones.

On style points alone, [Dirk-Jan] scores big. The mid-1950s vintage Belgian RTT model 56 phone has wonderful lines in its Bakelite case and handset and a really cool flip-up bail to carry it around, making it a great choice for a portable. The guts of the phone were replaced with a SIM900 GSM module coupled with a PIC microcontroller and an H-bridge to drive the ringer solenoids, along with a Li-ion battery and charger to keep it totally wireless – except for the original handset cord, of course. The video after the break show the phone in action both making and receiving calls; there’s something pleasing on a very basic level about the sound of a dial tone and the gentle ringing of the bell. And it may be slow, but a rotary dial has plenty of tactile appeal too.

Rotary-to-cell conversions are a popular “just because” project, like this conversion designed to allow an angry slam-down of the handset. The orange Siemens phone in that project is nice and all, but we really favor the ’50s look for a portable.

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Tiny PIC Clock Is Not A Tiny Bomb

October 13, 2015 by 100 Comments

It’s been a few weeks since the incident where Ahmed Mohamed, a student, had one of his inventions mistaken for a bomb by his school and the police, despite the device clearly being a clock. We asked for submissions of all of your clock builds to show our support for Ahmed, and the latest one is the tiniest yet but still has all of the features of a full-sized clock (none of which is explosions).

[Markus]’s tiny clock uses a PIC24 which is a small yet powerful chip. The timekeeping is done on an RTCC peripheral, and the clock’s seven segment displays are temporarily lit when the user presses a button. Since the LEDs aren’t on all the time, and the PIC only consumes a few microamps on standby, the clock can go for years on a single charge of the small lithium-ion battery in the back. There’s also a phototransistor which dims the display in the dark, and a white LED which could be used as a small flashlight in a pinch. If these features and the build technique look familiar it’s because of [Markus’] tiny MSP430 clock which he was showing around last year.

Both of his tiny clocks are quite impressive for their size, features, and power consumption. Some of the other clocks we’ve featured recently include robot clocks, clocks for social good, and clocks that are not just clocks (but still won’t explode). We’re suckers for a good clock project here, so keep sending them in!

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Before Arduino There Was Basic Stamp: A Classic Teardown

August 27, 2015 by 121 Comments

Microcontrollers existed before the Arduino, and a device that anyone could program and blink an LED existed before the first Maker Faire. This might come as a surprise to some, but for others PICs and 68HC11s will remain as the first popular microcontrollers, found in everything from toys to microwave ovens.

Arduino can’t even claim its prominence as the first user-friendly microcontroller development board. This title goes to the humble Basic Stamp, a four-component board that was introduced in the early 1990s. I recently managed to get my hands on an original Basic Stamp kit. This is the teardown and introduction to the first user friendly microcontroller development boards. Consider it a walk down memory lane, showing us how far the hobbyist electronics market has come in the past twenty year, and also an insight in how far we have left to go.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: PICs And Arduinos, Cats And Dogs Living Together

August 6, 2015 by 11 Comments

Half of our little corner of the Internet complains about the Arduino, how the pin headers of the Arduino standard don’t make any sense, how the Arduino IDE is rubbish, gives well-reasoned arguments why the Arduino language is hindering the next generation of embedded programmers, and laments the fact that everything is commoditized into Arduino-compatible packages. The other half of our little corner of the Internet uses Microchip PICs.

[Jarrett] is stubborn, and he wants to use a PIC with the distinctive Arduino pin layout. Thus was born PIC-On-The-Go. It’s a PIC18F4520 in the familiar goofy-pin package, made specifically for everyone who just wants to buckle down and get some work done.

This isn’t the only PIC-become-Arduino board out there; the Fubarino is a great board that speaks Arduino, but that doesn’t take advantage of our favorite Arduino shields. Either way, we’re surprised something like [Jarrett]’s project doesn’t exist yet, making it a great entry for The Hackaday Prize.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Homebrew ECU Increases Mazda Zoom

July 9, 2015 by 58 Comments

A big problem with most modern cars is the sheer number of parts and systems that are not user serviceable. This is a big departure from cars of just decades ago that were designed to be easily worked on by the owner. To that end, [Anthony] aka [fuzzymonkey] has tackled what is normally the hardest thing to work on in modern cars: the Engine Control Unit. (Older posts on this project can be found at [Anthony]’s old project log.)

Every sensor in any modern car is monitored by a computer called the Engine Control Unit (ECU), and the computer is responsible for taking this data and making decisions on how the car should be running. In theory a custom ECU would be able to change any behavior of the car, but in practice this is extremely difficult due to the sheer number of operations required by the computer and the very specific tolerances of a modern engine.

The custom ECU that Anthony has created for his Mazda MX-5 (a Miata for those in North America) is based on the PIC18F46K80 microcontroller, and there are actually two units involved. The first handles time-sensitive operations like monitoring the engine cam position and engine timing, and the other generates a clock signal for the main unit and also monitors things like cooling temperature and controlling idle speed. The two units communicate over SPI.

[Anthony]’s custom ECU is exceptional in that he’s gotten his car running pretty well. There are some kinks, but hopefully he’ll have a product that’s better than the factory ECU by allowing him to change anything from throttle response and engine timing to the air-fuel ratio. There have been a few other attempts to tame the ECU beast in the past, but so far there isn’t much out there.

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Beest Of An RC Toy

June 30, 2015 by 14 Comments

Sometimes hackers and makers hack and make stuff just because they can. Why spend hours in a CAD program designing a gazillion gears, brackets and struts? Why cut them all out on a homemade CNC? Why use a PIC and perf board to control everything? Because we can. Well, because [Est] can, rather. He put together this RC controlled beast of a toy with multiple legs and crushing claws.

It’s made out of 6 mm acrylic and threaded rod. The legs are controlled by two DC motors, while the mouth uses two geared steppers. The beast talks to the controller via a pair of 433 MHz transceivers using a protocol similar to how an IR remote talks to a television. A handful of LEDs lights up the clear acrylic, making it look extra scary.

This design is, of course, based on the Strandbeest concept from [Theo Jansen]. It’s a great robotics project because your project doesn’t suffer under its own weight. It’s more like a tracked machine. In fact, we saw a huge rideable version made of metal at BAMF this year. That’s one you just can’t miss!

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