Hackaday Links: July 16, 2017

July 16, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 86 Comments

[Carl Bass] has joined the board at Formlabs. This is interesting, and further proof that Print The Legend is now absurdly out of date and should not be used as evidence of anything in the world of 3D printing.

Here’s something cool: a breadboardable dev board for the Parallax Propeller.

Finally, after years of hard work, there’s a change.org petition to stop me. I must congratulate [Peter] for the wonderful graphic for this petition.

Want some flexible circuits? OSHPark is testing something out. If you have an idea for a circuit that would look good on Kapton instead of FR4, shoot OSHPark an email.

SeeMeCNC has some new digs. SeeMeCNC are the creators of the awesome Rostock Max 3D printer and hosts of the Midwest RepRap Festival every March. If you’ve attended MRRF, you’re probably aware their old shop was a bit on the small side. As far as I can figure, they’ll soon have ten times the space as the old shop. What does this mean for the future of MRRF? Probably not much; we’ll find out in February or something.

Rumors of SoundCloud’s impending demise abound. There is some speculation that SoundCloud simply won’t exist by this time next year. There’s a lot of data on the SoundCloud servers, and when it comes to preserving our digital heritage, the Internet Archive (and [Jason Scott]) are the go-to people. Unfortunately, it’s going to cost a fortune to back up SoundCloud, and it would be (one of?) the largest projects the archive team has ever undertaken. Here’s your donation link.

If you’re looking for a place to buy a Raspberry Pi Zero or a Pi Zero W, there’s the Pi Locator, a site that pings stores and tells you where these computers are in stock. Now this site has been expanded to compare the price and stock of 2200 products from ModMyPi, ThePiHut, Pi-Supply, and Kubii.

Automating Plant Care

July 11, 2017 by John Baichtal 15 Comments

[Daniyal]’s goal is to build an automated garden that allows him to grow plants in any environment he chooses. He’s got a good start with this rig, which is controlled by a Pi Zero connected via serial to an Arduino Mega clone, which in turn controls a bank of relays and sensors.

Monitoring the environment is a temperature and humidity sensor as well as a series of six soil moisture sensor spikes. The relays control the water pump(s?) and lights, allowing [Daniyal] to maintain specific conditions depending on what he’s growing.

[Daniyal] has ambitious goals for the project. The Pi has a camera on it, and he hopes to not only maintain the greenhouse from the Internet, but also figure out how to monitor plant growth automatically, so that the Pi can measure plant growth and adjust the conditions without his input.

We’ve covered a lot of very cool horticulture projects here on HaD, including radio-connected soil sensors, using G-cal to create an internet of lawns, and the Garden of Eden watering kit.

Making A Small-Scale Brewery With A Raspberry Pi And Python

July 9, 2017 by Jenny List 22 Comments

No doubt many Hackaday readers will have tried their hand at home brewing. It’s easy enough, you can start with a can of hopped malt extract and a bag of sugar in a large bucket in your kitchen and achieve a decent enough result. Of course, once you get the taste it’s a field of infinite possibilities, so many enthusiasts go further into the realm of beer making with specialty ingredients and carefully controlled mash tuns.

Such an inductee into the brewery arts is [Christopher Aedo], who has documented his automated brewing system driven by a Raspberry Pi running CraftBeerPi. And it’s an impressive setup, with boil kettle, mash tun, and heat exchanger, a 5KW heating element, and all associated valves, pipes, pumps, and sensors. This ensures consistency and fine control over temperature over the long-term at all stages of the brew, something that would be very difficult to achieve manually at this scale.

The whole brewery is mounted on a cart for portability and has been used for a lot of brew cycles of many different styles. We can’t help a touch of envy at the array of beer taps in his kitchen.

Over the years we’ve brought you a few brewing projects. Another Pi-based setup graced these pages in 2012, as did a brewery using a Lego Mindstorms controller. Top marks go though to the brewer who fought his beer belly through brewing machinery powered by an exercise bike.

Via Recantha.

Atari 2600 In A Game Cartridge

July 8, 2017 by John Baichtal 21 Comments

[PJ Evans] had a ruined game cartridge lying around, just waiting for a project. As Activision’s F-14 Tomcat game for the Atari 2600 console, it seemed ripe for use as a project enclosure of some sort. When he came across a couple of 9-pin D-sub joystick ports, he had an idea. He realized his Rasperry Pi Zero could fit inside the cartridge. Add a power button, TV color selector, difficulty switch, as well as select and reset buttons, and you have an emulator.

[PJ]’s Pi Zero had more than enough GPIO pins to accommodate all of those buttons and switches plus a bunch more for the joysticks. Why not put the emulator inside a game cartridge? In terms of software [PJ] looked into Adafruit’s Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi resource, which has tons of suggestions for setting up game emulators. He decided on the RetroPie operating system to help him map out all of the pins, with Stella doing the actual Atari 2600 emulation.

Thanks, @seb_ly]!

We Dig This LEGO Excavator Conversion

July 4, 2017 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

[Frank] was lucky enough to score a bucket wheel excavator LEGO set as a birthday present, and we won’t lie – we’re jealous. However, out of the box, the kit is somewhat limited; there is only one motor to animate the entire machine and it can’t be fully remote controlled. But don’t worry — [Frank] set out to change that (Google Translation).

The first part of the build was to add motors to control the different functions of the excavator. One motor was added for each of the two tracks to allow the machine to drive forwards, backwards, and turn. Two more motors were added to raise and lower the digging buckets, and spin the tower. Finally, the original motor was left in place to turn the conveyor.

With that done, [Frank] then used a Raspberry Pi 3 to control all the hardware, being sure to house the new electronics in LEGO for an original look. The Raspberry Pi might be a lot of muscle to simply control a few motors, but it made it quick and easy for [Frank] to implement a Wiimote as a controller over Bluetooth. You can check out a couple demo videos in his most recent update.

It’s a great project, and we’d love to see the Raspberry Pi put to good use by allowing control over the Internet so we can dig in the sand over lunch breaks. We’ve seen some great LEGO hacks before, like this method of modifying cheap gear motors to work with LEGO parts.

Australian Raspberry Pi Tutorials

July 2, 2017 by Al Williams 20 Comments

There’s a new and very detailed video tutorial about the Raspberry Pi available from the Australian firm Core Electronics. There are 30 videos and 5 chapters in total. A few of the introduction videos are short, but the detail videos range from 3 to 16 minutes.

The instructor [Michael] starts out at the very beginning — loading NOOBS on the Pi — and then moves on to Python, shell scripting, and building GUI applications with TkInter. It also covers using Particle Pi for IoT applications that integrate with IFTTT.

We do realize that most people reading Hackaday have probably used a Raspberry Pi at least once or twice. However, we also know that we all get asked to recommend material for beginners, or — in some cases — we are using material to teach classes in schools or hackerspaces.

Continue reading “Australian Raspberry Pi Tutorials” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Elephant AI

June 22, 2017 by John Baichtal 9 Comments

[Neil K. Sheridan]’s Automated Elephant Detection System was a semi-finalist in last year’s Hackaday Prize. Encouraged by his close finish, [Neil] is back at it with a refreshed and updated Elephant AI project.

The purpose of Elephant AI is to help humans and elephants coexist by eliminating contact between the two species. What this amounts to is an AI that can herd elephants. For this year’s project, [Neil] did away with the RF communications and village base stations in favor of 4G/3G-equipped, autonomous sentries equipped with Raspberry Pi computers with Go Pro cameras.

The main initiative of the project involves developing a system able to classify wild elephants visually, by automatically capturing images and then attempting to determine the elephant’s gender and age. Of particular importance is the challenge of detecting and controlling bull elephants during musth, a state of heightened aggressiveness that causes bulls to charge anyone who comes near. Musth can be detected visually, thanks to secretions called temporin that appear on the sides of the head. If cameras could identify bull elephants in musth and somehow guide them away from humans, everyone benefits.

This brings up another challenge: [Neil] is researching ways to actually get elephants to move away if they’re approaching humans. He’s looking into nonlethal techniques like audio files of bees or lions, as well as ping-pong balls containing chili pepper.

Got some ideas? Follow the Elephant AI project on Hackaday.io.