Hackaday Prize Entry: NetBOOT Powercycles Your Modem When You Can’t

August 22, 2015 by Kevin Dady 20 Comments

Many people have their home network setup with a dynamic dns service in order to remote access their files, printers, or Pi based security camera systems. Many people also suffer from less than stellar internet connectivity and find themselves unable to access their home system due to a stalled signal.

netBOOT is an Arduino based device that automatically resets your modem for you, when you are unable to. Core of the system is a standard issue ATMEGA328p based Arduino board combined with a W5100 Ethernet module, and a relay module. The software on the Arduino periodically pings a list of IP addresses and listens for a response. If none is found within 3 tries the relay module, which is connected inline with the DC power of your modem, is clicked open for 10 seconds and then returned closed. Once your modem has rebooted and re-synced everything should be good to go.

We don’t remember seeing this feature in the list of specs for Google’s new OnHub. The ability to reset bad connections seems like a feature that should be built into future-thinking routers, right?

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Door Bell Used To Reset WiFi Router

May 2, 2015 by Rich Bremer 48 Comments

We’ve all have had to reset our routers or modems at some point because they were acting up. The typical scenario is; unplug the device, wait 30 seconds, plug it back in and wait for it to boot back up. While not hard, this can be an annoyance, especially if accessing the router or power cord is inconvenient. [Taylor] wrote in to tell us about his wireless router that seems to need to be reset more than he’d like. Although the simplest solution may be to get a new router, he thought it would be fun to do something a little more exciting by making a wireless reset controller.

[Taylor] started with an ordinary power strip. He spliced in a relay to the hot side of the AC line, connected to the common and normally-closed pins of the relay. That way, when the relay is not activated, the power strip is powered. Next, a wireless doorbell was re-purposed to act as the transmitter and receiver. The speaker was removed and the output lines connected to a mono-stable 555 timer circuit that [Taylor] made. When the circuit receives a signal from the door bell speaker lines, it will activate the relay for about 30 seconds. Since the relay was wired to supply voltage to the power strip when not activated, activating the relay cuts the power for 30 seconds effectively resetting the router. Now, whenever the router needs a reset, doing so is as easy as pushing the door bell button from anywhere in the house.

Photonic Reset Of The Raspberry Pi 2

February 8, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 102 Comments

For the past month, the Raspberry Pi 2 has only been available to the Raspi Foundation, and for about 2 weeks, select members of the media who have worn the Raspi 2 on a necklace like [Flavor Flav] wears a clock. That’s not many people with real, working hardware and when a product is released, the great unwashed masses will find some really, really weird bugs. The first one to crop up is a light-sensitive reset of the Raspberry Pi 2.

[PeterO] on the Raspberry Pi forums took a few pictures – with flash – of a running Raspberry Pi 2. It took a little bit of deduction to realize that a camera flash will either reset or turn the Raspi 2 off. Yes, this is weird, and experiments are ongoing.

A short video from [Mike Redrobe] confirms the finding and a reddit thread offers an explanation. U16, a small chip located in the power supply part of the Raspi 2, is sensitive to light. Putting enough photons will cause the Pi to shut down or restart.

There’s still some research to be done, however, I can confirm a cheap green laser pointer will reset a Raspberry Pi 2 when the beam is directed at the U16 chip. This is the chip that is responsible, and this is not an EMP issue. This is a photon/light issue with the U16 chip. The solution to this bug is to either keep it in a case, or put a tiny amount of electrical tape over the chip.

Thanks [Arko] for staying up until an ungodly hour and sending this to me.

Hackaday Links: November 16, 2014

November 16, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

There have been a few people asking us to do our full teardown of a crowdfunding campaign, this time for Bleen. We’ll get to that, but here’s the TL;DR version: 208 people just threw money away, and right now Indiegogo is ~$3000 richer for doing nothing.

Insipired by a Hacklet, [Chris] documented his retro console build. He started out like most people do with a Raspberry Pi, but found emulating newer consoles like the N64 consumed too much processor time. He moved his build over to custom-assembled hardware with an AMD Micro-ATX board, a drive, and a USB gamepad. It’s beautiful, and much, much more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.

SD card in your Pi died? Of course it did. The problem is you’re not shutting down your Pi correctly. [satya] whipped up a quick project to fix that. One button, a bit of Python, and a shell script is all you need for a one-button shutdown for your Raspberry Pi.

A while ago, [Jan] built an ARM-based modeling MIDI synth that sounds a lot like the old Junos of the 80s. It’s build around the one 8-pin DIP ARM that’s being manufactured, placed between a MIDI jack and a 1/4″ jack. That’s pretty much all the components. [Gritty] plugged it into a Teensy that’s connected to a sequencer. It sounds awesome.

Everyone loves the Spark Core – there are a few floating around the office here. Now there’s a new Spark. It’s called the Photon, and they’re packaging it as a module. There’s an STM32F2 microcontroller and a BCM43362 Wi-Fi transceiver packaged in a nice, FCC certified module. Very cool.

Fail Of The Week: Reset Issues With 595 And HD44780

February 27, 2014 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

fotw-reset-issues-595-character-lcd

We really like to see hardware hackers stepping out of the safe and polished boundaries of available Arduino libraries. One example of this is a project which [Matteo] thought worked: using a shift register to drive a character LCD. This can be a desirable way to do things, because it takes the GPIO usage down from six to just three connections. If you don’t remember seeing that one earlier this month take another look. The gist of it is that [Matteo] hacked one function in the LiquidCrystal library to make it happen.

What makes this a truly great fail is that the problem was not immediately apparent, and is difficult to reliably reproduce. The LCD is unstable depending on how the Arduino board is reset. When connecting the Arduino to a computer the screen doesn’t work until you press the reset button. But press the reset button repeatedly and you get a non-functional screen plus the gibberish seen above.

There’s not much to go on here, but we think it’ll be a lot of fun to state your theory on the malfunction and suggesting for testing/fixing the issue. This could be a lot of things, the controller on the display getting mixed-up, the 595 missing an edge (or something along those lines). Do you fix this with hardware (ie: capacitor to avoid voltage dip), a software issue (need a longer delay after startup), or a combination of the two?

Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which runs every Wednesday. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.

Hackaday Links: Sunday, April 14th, 2013

April 14, 2013 by Mike Szczys 43 Comments

We figure we have to start off this week’s links post talking about PETMAN. Boston Dynamics shows off the humanoid robot donning a full chemical suit. It’s a lot scarier than when we first saw it as a couple of legs a few years ago [Thanks Joshua].

Seeing something like that might drive you back to smoking cigarettes. But since that’s pretty bad for your health perhaps you just need a mechanical chain-smoking machine to take the edge off. That thing can really suck ’em down! [Thanks Mike]

Last week’s links included a bit about the Raspberry Pi 2.0 board version’s reset header. [Brian] wrote in to share a link for adding reset to a 1.0 revision board.

Speaking of RPi, [Elvis Impersonator] is using it to automate his garage door with the help of Siri.

In shop news, [Brad] needed to sharpen a few hundred pencils quickly and ended up melting the gears on his electric sharpener. Transplanting the parts to his drill press gave him more power to get the job done in about six minutes.

And finally, you can forget how to decipher those SMD resistor codes. Looks like surface mount resistors might be unmarked like their capacitor brethren. We were tipped off by [Lindsey] who got the news by way of [Dangerous Prototypes and Electronics Lab]

Hackaday Links: January 24th, 2013

January 24, 2013 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

Raspberry Pi’s answer to the iMac

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If you always wanted a sweet looking all-in-one computer like an iMac, but without OSX this one’s for you. [Michael Davis] glued everything you need for a Raspberry Pi computer to the back of an LCD monitor.

Dancing Japanese robot shows high creepiness factor

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You’ve just got to see this one to believe it. Someone choreographed some seriously lifelike dance moves for this robot. [Thanks – via Dr. GIY’s blog]

Helper script to install MSPGCC

links-mspgcc-install-script

The repositories available to Ubuntu are nice, but if you want to get the newest version of the GCC toolchain for MSP430 microcontrollers you’re going to need to do the compilation yourself. [Jose] is trying to make the process a bit easier with this helper script which download and installs MSPGCC Uniarch.

Easy reset for WRT-54G routers

The whole point of the router reset button being hard to press is so you don’t hit it by accident. But the difficulty of getting to it drove [Noah] crazy so he added his own easy to reach replacement.

Camera stabilization tips

links-camera-stabilizers

This is a public service to amateur videographers. You don’t need expensive equipment to make a video without nausea inducing shakes. Try out these simple camera stabilization tips. You can use a tripod as a counterweight, or a piece of 2×4 to give the point-and-shoot a dual grip.