Turning Everything Into A Tap Controller

August 21, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

Our entire life is staring at glowing rectangles, and all our surroundings are hard, flat surfaces. [Ben] had the idea to turn those flat surfaces into a generic tap interface controller, and his project for the Hackaday Prize might just do that.

Some of the prior art that went into this project includes Ping Pong Plus Plus, an augmented-reality-ish implementation of ping pong that puts projected light wherever a ping pong ball hits the table. The game does this by mounting piezos to the bottom of a table and just a slight bit of math to determine where on the table the ball hit. There’s also MicLoc, a door lock that responds to knocking.

With this prior art, it’s all about microcontrollers and peripherals, and for that, [Ben] turned to the STM32F303RE, which sports four very fast ADCs and op-amps. There’s a lot of DMA usage on there, and the code is using a ton of signal processing. The important bit here is finding the difference between whatever the tabletop equivalent to an earthquake’s P-waves and S-waves are — [Ben] only wants the first bit of a waveform that travels through the table longitudinally, not the much louder vibrations of the entire table.

If [Ben] manages to put this together, an entire wall could be a light switch or a dimmer. You could add a secret knock to your door, and your desk could control your computer. It’s a promising idea, and the engineering that’s going into this project is just fantastic.

PTPM Energy Scavenger Aims For Maintenance-Free Sensor Nodes

August 1, 2018 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

[Mile]’s PTPM Energy Scavenger takes the scavenging idea seriously and is designed to gather not only solar power but also energy from temperature differentials, vibrations, and magnetic induction. The idea is to make wireless sensor nodes that can be self-powered and require minimal maintenance. There’s more to the idea than simply doing away with batteries; if the devices are rugged and don’t need maintenance, they can be installed in locations that would otherwise be impractical or awkward. [Mile] says that goal is to reduce the most costly part of any supply chain: human labor.

The prototype is working well with solar energy and supercapacitors for energy storage, but [Mile] sees potential in harvesting other sources, such as piezoelectric energy by mounting the units to active machinery. With a selectable output voltage, optional battery for longer-term storage, and a reference design complete with enclosure, the PPTM Energy Scavenger aims to provide a robust power solution for wireless sensor platforms.

Propane-Powered Plasma Rifle

October 12, 2017 by Dan Maloney 34 Comments

It may not be a “phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range,” and it doesn’t even use plasma in the strict definition, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless. It’s a propane-powered bottle-launching rifle, and it looks like a lot of fun.

[NighthawkInLight] sure likes things that go pop, like his watermelon-wasting air-powered cannon and cheesy-poof pop gun. This one has a little more oomph to it, powered as it is by a propane torch. The principle is simple: fill a soda bottle with propane, ignite the gas, fun ensues. The details are a little more subtle, though, and allowances need to be made to keep back pressure from preventing the projectile from filling with fuel. [NighthawkInLight] overcomes this with some clever machining of the barrel. The final production version in the video below is needlessly but delightfully complex, with a wooden stock and a ~~coil of clear vinyl tubing~~ helical plasma accumulator before the barrel; the last bit is just for show, and we have to admit that it looks pretty good.

Unless you count the pro tip on using CPVC pipe to make custom fittings, this one is nothing but fun. But we don’t have a problem with that.

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Follow The Bouncing Ball Of Entropy

September 1, 2017 by Brian McEvoy 9 Comments

When [::vtol::] wants to generate random numbers he doesn’t simply type rand() into his Arduino IDE, no, he builds a piece of art. It all starts with a knob, presumably connected to a potentiometer, which sets a frequency. An Arduino UNO takes the reading and generates a tone for an upward-facing speaker. A tiny ball bounces on that speaker where it occasionally collides with a piezoelectric element. The intervals between collisions become our sufficiently random number.

The generated number travels up the Rube Goldberg-esque machine to an LCD mounted at the top where a word, corresponding to our generated number, is displayed. As long as the button is held, a tone will continue to sound and words will be generated so poetry pours forth.

If this take on beat poetry doesn’t suit you, the construction of the Ball-O-Bol has an aesthetic quality that’s eye-catching, whereas projects like his Tape-Head Robot That Listens to the Floor and 8-Bit Digital Photo Gun showed the electronic guts front and center with their own appeal.

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A Cool Mist That Dries Your Clothes

April 23, 2017 by Mike Szczys 77 Comments

This one is both wild enough to be confused as a conspiracy theory and common sense enough to be the big solution staring us in the face which nobody realized. Until now. Oak Ridge National Laboratory and General Electric (GE), working on a grant from the US Department of Energy (DOE), have been playing around with new clothes dryer technology since 2014 and have come with something new and exciting. Clothes dryers that use ultrasonic traducers to remove moisture from garments instead of using heat.

If you’ve ever seen a cool mist humidifier you’ll know how this works. A piezo element generates ultrasonic waves that atomize water and humidify the air. This is exactly the same except the water is stored in clothing, rather than a reservoir. Once it’s atomized it can be removed with traditional air movement.

This is a totally obvious application of the simple and inexpensive technology — when the garment is laying flat on a bed of transducers. This can be implemented in a press drying system where a garment is laid flat on a bed or transducers and another bed hinges down from above. Poof, your shirt is dry in a few seconds.

But individual households don’t have these kinds of dryers. They have what are called drum dryers that spin the clothes. Reading closely, this piece of the puzzle is still to come:

They play [sic] to scale-up the technoloogy to press drying and eventually a clothes dryer drum in the next five months.

We look at this as having a similar technological hurdle as wireless electricity. There must be an inverse-square law on the effect of the ultrasonic waves to atomize water as the water moves further away from the transducers. It that’s the case, tranducers on the circumference of a drum would be inefficient at drying the clothing toward the center. This slide deck hints that that problem is being addressed. It talks about only running the transducers when the fabric is physically coupled with the elements. It’s an interesting application and we hope that it could work in conjunction with traditional drying methods to boost energy savings, even if this doesn’t pan out as a total replacement.

With a vast population, cost adds up fast. There are roughly 125 M households in the United States and the overwhelming majority of them use clothes dryers (while many other parts of the world have a higher percentage who hang-dry their clothing). The DOE estimates $9 billion a year is spent on drying clothes in the US. Reducing that number by even 1/10th of 1% will pay off more than tenfold the $880,000 research budget that went into this. Of course, you have to outfit those households with new equipment which will take at least 8-12 years through natural attrition, even if ultrasonics hit the market as soon as possible.

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Raspberry Pi-Based Game Boy Emulator

March 12, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

The most popular use for a Raspberry Pi, by far, is video game emulation. We see this in many, many forms from 3D printed Raspberry Pi cases resembling the original Nintendo Entertainment System to 3D printed Raspberry Pi cases resembling Super Nintendos. There’s a lot of variety out there for Raspberry Pi emulation, but [moosepr] is taking it to the next level. He’s building the smallest Pi emulation build we’ve ever seen.

This build is based on the Pi Zero and a 2.2″ (0.56 dm) ili9341 TFT display. This display has a resolution of 240×320 pixels, which is close enough to the resolution of the systems the Pi Zero can emulate. The Pi Zero and display are attached to a beautiful purple breakout board (shared on OSH Park) along with a few 5-way nav switches, a charger for a Lipo battery, and a few other bits and bobs.

Right now, [moosepr] is experimenting with adding sound to his board. It’s easy enough to get sound out of a Pi Zero — it’s just PWM coming from a few pins — but audio also needs an amp, a speaker, and more space on the board. To solve this problem, [moose] found a few piezo transducers from musical greeting cards. These are designed to be thin and as loud as possible, and attaching these directly to the PWM pins providing audio might just work. This is a project to keep an eye on, if only to see if cheap piezos work for low-fi audio in retro emulators.

3D Print Your E-Drum Pads

January 16, 2017 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

The concept behind DIY electronic drum kits is fairly simple — small piezoelectric elements are used to generate a voltage when the drumpads are struck. That’s easy enough, but the mechanical design can be a difficult problem to approach. To solve that, [ryo.kosaka.10] decided to design an E-drum pad made with paper & 3D printed parts.

As far as E-drum triggers go, it follows the basic rules — a piezo element used as a trigger with some foam used for damping. For the striking surface, a Tama-brand mesh drum head is used. Being an off-the-shelf drum head, it has a good feel and playability. But the shell is where the creativity really shines through. While the top and bottom parts are 3D printed in the usual way, the main shell of the drum is made with several layers of thick paper laminated together with glue. This creates a surprisingly strong, sturdy shell and is also much faster and less wasteful than waiting for a similar part to 3D print.

To round out the guide, instructions are given on how to wire the piezo triggers up for either a regular E-drum sound module or an Arduino. It’s a nice touch, as those inexperienced with E-drums may not be entirely familiar with how they work – this way, anyone can give the project a try.

Keen for something bigger? Back in 2014 we saw this awesome 5-piece e-drum kit built out of buckets.