Monstrous USB Power Bank

September 27, 2017 by James Hobson 57 Comments

At some point, cleaning out the spare parts bin — or cabinet, or garage — becomes a necessity. This is dangerous because it can induce many more project ideas and completely negate the original purpose. [Chaotic Mind], considering the pile of batteries he’s collected over the past decade, decided that instead of throwing them out, he would recycle them into a grotesque USB power bank.

Inside the bulk of this power bank are an eye-popping 64 18650 Lithium Ion cells, mostly collected from laptop batteries, and wired in a parallel 8×8 pattern with an estimated capacity of over 100,000mAh(!!). The gatekeeper to all this stored energy is a two-USB power bank charger board from Tindie.

Ah — but how to package all this power? The handy man’s secret weapon: duct-tape!

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Customizable PCB Business Card

September 22, 2017 by John Baichtal 19 Comments

[Corey Harding] designed his business card as a USB-connectable demonstration of his skill. If potential manager inserts the card in a USB drive, open a text editor, then touches the copper pad on the PCB, [Corey]’s contact info pops up in the text box.

In addition to working as a business card, the PCB also works as a Tiny 85 development board, with a prototyping area for adding sensors and other components, and with additional capabilities broken out: you can add an LED, and there’s also room for a 1K resistor, a reset button, or break out the USB’s 5V for other uses. There’s an AVR ISP breakout for reflashing the chip.

Coolly, [Corey] intended for the card to be an Open Source resource for other people to make their own cards, and he’s providing the Fritzing files for the PCB. Fritzing is a great program for beginning and experienced hardware hackers to lay out quick and dirty circuits, make wiring diagrams, and even export PCB designs for fabrication. You can download [Corey]’s files from his GitHub repository.

For another business card project check out this full color business card we published last month.

Cronk The Gonk Droid

September 20, 2017 by James Hobson 7 Comments

The ‘Gonk’ droids from the Star Wars universe are easy to overlook, but serve the important function of mobile power generators. Here on Earth, [bithead942]’s life-size replica droid fulfills much the same purpose.

Cronk — functionally an oversized USB charging hub with a lot of bells and whistles — is remotely controlled by a modified Wii Nunchuck very controller similar to the one [bithead942] used to control his R2-D2. With the help of an Adafruit Audio FX Mini, an Adafruit Class D 20W amp, and two four-inch speakers, the droid can rattle off some sound effects as it blows off some steam(really, an inverted CO2 duster). An Arduino Mega acts as Cronk’s brain while its body is sculpted from cast-able urethane foam for its light weight and rigidity. It also houses a FPV camera, mic, and DVR so it can be operated effectively from afar.

And, it can dance!

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Review: Aneng LT-001 USB Soldering Iron

August 31, 2017 by Jenny List 38 Comments

When it comes to soldering irons, most of us are likely to be in agreement that there is a level of quality below which we will not descend. To do a decent job requires a decent tool, and when it comes to soldering that means a good quality temperature controlled iron with a decent power level and a quality bit. Anything else just isn’t worth considering.

But what if you look at it from the opposite angle? When it comes to soldering, just how low can you go? In that case probably the ultimate scraping of the soldering barrel comes courtesy of USB soldering irons, taking their juice from a five volt phone charger socket and providing tiny power levels you’d expect to be barely enough to work at all. Surely these are toys, not irons! Continue reading “Review: Aneng LT-001 USB Soldering Iron” →

USB + μC = Peril?

August 25, 2017 by John Baichtal 50 Comments

You hear about people finding USB drives and popping them into a computer to see what’s on them, only to end up loading some sort of malware onto their computer. It got me to thinking, given this notorious vulnerability, is it really a great idea to make electronics projects that plug into a computer’s USB port? Should I really contribute to the capitulation-by-ubiquity that USB has become?

A of couple years ago I was working on an innocuous project, a LED status light running off of USB. It ran off USB because I had more complicated hopes for it–some vague notion about some kind of notification thing and also it was cool to have access to 5 V right from the ‘puter. This was about the time that those little RGB LEDs connected to USB were all the rage, like blink(1), which raised $130,000 on Kickstarter. I just wanted to make a status light of some sort and had the parts, so I made it.

My version was a small rectangular PCB from OSHPark packing a Tiny85, with a 10 mm RGB LED providing pretty much all of the functionality — no spare pins broken out. Honestly, for the amount of code on it, even the Tiny85 was overpowered. I recall thinking at the time, could my creation be misused for evil? Could some wicked programmer include malware alongside my LED-lighting Arduino sketch?

It’s absurd, of course. My meager engineering skills ought not interest anyone. On the other hand, couldn’t some heartless poltroon, the hardware equivalent of a script kiddie, make my creation into a malware-spewing Typhoid Mary of a project? It has always been the realistic consequence of building anything–that it could be misused. I’d be thrilled to the point of giddiness if someone remade one of my projects into something cool, but I’d really hate for a USB light I designed to turn into some vector into someone’s computer. But how much of that is my responsibility?

If you think I’m the only one who thinks this, go to SparkFun or Adafruit and count all of the boards with microcontrollers and USB A male plugs. Even the tiny boards like the Huzzah and Gemma use USB cables, rather than plugging directly into the computer. Granted, they are microcontrollers that realistically would be connected to a project and it might not be possible to physically move them into position and plug them in. Also requiring a charging cable does not in any way make a microcontroller board work any differently than one plugged right into the computer. I’m left wondering if I’m spazzing out over nothing, and there’s nothing we can do about our tendency to treat any electronic gizmo with a shiny case as being safe to plug into the same computer we use to pay bills.

If there is no data transfer taking place, and I’m just getting power, wouldn’t it be enough to disable (or not connect) the data pins of the USB on the circuit board? Or maybe we really have no business connecting a data connection to a microcontroller if we’re not reflashing the chip with fresh code–think I’m paranoid? Maybe you should just get power from a wall wart and leave the USB cord in the drawer. It’s one thing to urge our friends and family to steer clear of mystery plugs, but as engineers and tinkerers, do we not owe the community the benefit of our knowledge?

Of course, Hackaday contains numerous examples of USB projects, including canary for USB ports, tips on protecting your ports with two microcontrollers, a guide to stopping rubber ducky attacks, and removing security issues from untrusted USB connections. Also, has anyone used the USB condom?

Friends, let me know your thoughts on the subject. Am I a freak to steer clear of USB-powered project like my dumb LED? Leave your comments and weigh in with your opinions.

Someone Finally Did It With A 555

August 22, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 73 Comments

[Jarunzel] needed a device that would automatically click the left button on a mouse at a pre-set interval. For regular Hackaday readers, this is an easy challenge. You could do it with an ATtiny85 using the VUSB library, a few resistors and diodes, and a bit of code that emulates a USB device that constantly sends mouse clicks over USB every few seconds. You could also do it with a Raspberry Pi Zero, using the USB gadget protocol. Now, this mouse-clicking gadget would be connected to the Internet (!), programmable with Node or whatever the kids are using these days, and would have some major blog cred. If you’re feeling adventurous, this mouse clicker gadget could be built with an STM32, Cypress PSoC, or whatever microcontroller you have in your magical bag of hacker tricks.

Then again, you could also do it with a 555 timer.

The reason [Jarunzel] couldn’t use any of the fancy hackertools for this build is because the system wouldn’t accept two mouse devices. No matter, because Maplin has a neat kit with a 555 timer and a relay. The relay is wired up across the microswitch in the mouse, and setting the values correctly makes the mouse click about once per second, with a click duration of about 100ms. Good enough.

With the kit built, wired into the mouse, a small app built to test the device, and a nice project box constructed, [Jarunzel] had exactly what he needed. There’s even a video of this mouse clicker in action. You can check out that riveting footage below.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Low Cost KVM

August 5, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

Back in the old days, when handing someone a DB serial cable when they asked for a DE serial cable would get you killed, KVM switchers were a thing. These devices were simple boxes with a few VGA ports, a few PS/2 ports, and a button or dial that allowed your input (keyboard and mouse) and output (video) to be used with multiple computers. Early KVMs were really just a big ‘ol rotary switch with far, far too many poles. Do you remember that PS/2 wasn’t able to be hot plugged? The designers of these KVMs never knew that.

Today, KVM switchers are a bit more complicated than a simple rotary switch. We’re not dealing with VGA anymore — we have HDMI muxes. We’re also not dealing with PS/2 anymore, and USB requires a bit of microelectronics to switch from one computer to another. For one of his many Hackaday Prize entries, [KC Lee] is designing a low-cost HDMI switch and USB mux. It works, it’s cheap, and if you need to switch a keyboard, mouse, and monitor between boxes, it’s exactly what you need.

First off, the HDMI switching. Designing a switch for HDMI would usually take some obscure parts, intricate routing, and a lot of prototyping time. [KC] found a way around this: just hack up a $5 HDMI switch. This cheap HDMI switch is as simple as it gets, with an HDMI mux doing the heavy lifting and an 8-pin microcontroller to handle the buttons and a selector LED.

For the USB, there are a few more design choices. For USB 1.x switching, [KC] figures he can get away with a 74HC4052 dual 4:1 analog mux. Yes, he’s doing digital with analog chips, the heathen. There are drawbacks to this: everything could break, and it’s only USB 1.x, anyway. For a USB 2.0 KVM, there are a few more professional options. The OnSemi NCN9252 is a proper USB 2.0 mux, and in the current design.