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Hack a Day
Trouble in the Golden State this week, as parts of California were subjected to planned blackouts. Intended to prevent a repeat of last year’s deadly wildfires, which were tied in part to defective electrical distribution equipment, the blackouts could plunge millions in the counties surrounding Sacramento into the dark for days. Schools have canceled classes, the few stores that are open are taking cash only, and hospitals are running on generators. It seems a drastic move for PG&E, the utility that promptly went into bankruptcy after being blamed for last year’s fires, but it has the support of the governor, so the plan is likely to continue as long as the winds do. One group is not likely to complain, though; California amateur radio operators must be enjoying a greatly decreased noise floor in the blackout areas, thanks to the loss of millions of switch-mode power supplies and their RF noise.
Good news, bad news for Fusion 360 users. Autodesk, the company behind the popular and remarkably capable CAD/CAM/CAE package, has announced changes to its licensing scheme, which went into effect this week. Users no longer have to pay for the “Ultimate” license tier to get goodies like 5-axis machining and generative design tools, as all capabilities are now included in the single paid version of Fusion 360. That’s good because plenty of users were unwilling to bump their $310 annual “Standard” license fee up to $1535 to get those features, but it’s bad because now the annual rate goes to $495. In a nice nod to the current userbase, those currently on the Standard license, as well as early adopters, will get to keep the $310 annual rate as long as they renew, and Ultimate users will see a $1040 price drop. As for the current base of freeloaders like yours truly, fear not: Fusion 360 is still free for personal, non-commercial use. No generative design or tech support for us, though.
You might have had a bad day at the bench, but was it as bad as Román’s? He tipped us off to his nightmare of running into defective Wemos D1 boards – a lot of them. The 50 boards were to satisfy an order of data loggers for a customer, but all the boards seemed caught in an endless reboot loop when plugged into a USB port for programming. He changed PCs, changed cables, but nothing worked to stop the cycle except for one thing: touching the metal case of the module. His write up goes through all the dead-ends he went down to fix the problem, which ended up being a capacitor between the antenna and ground. Was it supposed to be there? Who knows, because once that cap was removed, the boards worked fine. Hats off to Román for troubleshooting this and sharing the results with us.
Ever since giving up their “Don’t be evil” schtick, Google seems to have really embraced the alternative. Now they’re in trouble for targeting the homeless in their quest for facial recognition data. The “volunteer research studies” consisted of playing what Google contractors were trained to describe as a “mini-game” on a modified smartphone, which captured video of the player’s face. Participants were compensated with $5 Starbucks gift cards but were not told that video was being captured, and if asked, contractors were allegedly trained to lie about that. Contractors were also allegedly trained to seek out people with dark skin, ostensibly to improve facial recognition algorithms that notoriously have a hard time with darker complexions. To be fair, the homeless were not exclusively targeted; college students were also given gift cards in exchange for their facial data.
For most of us, 3D-printing is a hobby, or at least in service of other hobbies. Few of us make a living at it, but professionals who do are often a great source of tips and tricks. One such pro is industrial designer Eric Strebel, who recently posted a video of his 3D-printing pro-tips. A lot of it is concerned with post-processing prints, like using a cake decorator’s spatula to pry prints off the bed, or the use of card scrapers and dental chisels to clean up prints. But the money tip from this video is the rolling cart he made for his Ultimaker. With the printer on top and storage below, it’s a great way to free up some bench space.
And finally, have you ever wondered how we hackers will rebuild society once the apocalypse hits and mutant zombie biker gangs roam the Earth? If so, then you need to check out Collapse OS, the operating system for an uncertain future. Designed to be as self-contained as possible, Collapse OS is intended to run on “field expedient” computers, cobbled together from whatever e-waste can be scrounged, as long as it includes a Z80 microprocessor. The OS has been tested on an RC2014 and a Sega Master System so far, but keep an eye out for TRS-80s, Kaypros, and the odd TI-84 graphing calculator as you pick through the remains of civilization.
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Hack a Day
In a sure sign that we’ve arrived in the future, news from off-world is more interesting this week than Earth news. When the InSight probe landed on Mars last year, it placed the first operating magnetometer on the Red Planet. Since then, the sensitive instrument has been logging data about the planet’s magnetic field, and now there are reports that researchers have discovered a chain of pulsations in the magnetic field. Pulsations in planetary magnetic fields aren’t all that strange; pulse trains that occur only at Martian midnight are, though. Researchers haven’t got a clue yet about what this means. We assume they’ve eliminated artifacts like something on the lander being turned on at local midnight, so when they figure it out it should be fascinating.
In more news from the future, Boston Dynamics is trolling us again. We covered the announcement early this week that they’re putting their Spot quadruped robot on sale – sort of. Turns out you need to be selected to qualify based on the application you have in mind, plus have several Ferraris full of cash to spend. While everyone was watching the adorable antics of Spot as it wandered through improbably industrial vignettes, Boston Dynamics also released this slightly terrifying video of their Atlas robot running through a gymnastics routine. It starts with a headstand and a front roll and ends with a slipt leap and whatever the gymnastics equivalent of a figure skating axel jump is. Yes, it has a special roll cage attached to make the tumbles a bit smoother, but it’s still some remarkable stuff.
How are your RF design skills? If they’re good enough to design an RF power amp, you might want to check out this homebrew RF design challenge. Put on by NXP Semiconductors, the design must use one of their new LDMOS RF power transistors. They’ll send you samples so you can build your design, and you stand to win up to $3000 plus $1000 worth of NXP products. The contest opened back in May but is running through the middle of November, so you’d better hurry.
Speaking of RF, wouldn’t it be interesting to see a snapshot of the RF spectrum over the entire planet? ElectroSense thinks so, and they’re working on a crowdsourcing model to set up a globe-spanning network of connected RF sensors. The idea is similar to what FlightAware does for monitoring the locations of aircraft with a distributed network of ADS-B receivers. But where FlightAware only monitors a narrow slice of spectrum, ElectroSense wants it all – DC to 6 GHz. You can build a sensor from an SDR and a Raspberry Pi and start contributing to the effort, which only has a handful of sensors at the moment.
Has affordable metal 3D-printing finally arrived? For certain values of affordability, it soon will, when One Click Metal launches their new selective laser melting printer. Thomas Sanladerer did a video with the principals, and the prototype looks promising. SLM is not a new process, but patents on the core process recently ran out, so startups like One Click Metal are jumping into the market. Their printer won’t be cheap — you’ll still need to write a check with many zeroes — but with more players, the price should come down.
And finally, what’s this world coming to when a startup specializing in building giant fighting robots can’t make a go of it? MegaBots is shutting down, and while that’s certainly bad news for its founders and employees, it’s great news for anyone in the market for used battle bots. The company’s flagship bot, the 15-ton Eagle Prime, is currently up for auction on eBay. Bidding started at $1 with no reserve, but if you were looking for a steal, you’re a bit late. The high bid is currently $100,100, which is still an incredible buy considering it cost $2.5 million to build. You’ll have to pay for shipping, but you’ll have a super-destructive mecha of your own to drive around. And think how cool you’ll look rolling into some kid’s backyard birthday party. Presumably one you’ve been invited to.
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Of all the stories we’d expect to hit our little corner of the world, we never thought that the seedy doings of a now-deceased accused pedophile billionaire would have impacted the intellectual home of the open-source software movement. But it did, and this week Richard Stallman resigned from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, as well as from the Free Software Foundation, which he founded and served as president. The resignations, which Stallman claims were “due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations”, followed the disclosure of a string of emails where he perhaps unwisely discussed what does and does not constitute sexual assault. The emails were written as a response to protests by MIT faculty and students outraged over the university’s long and deep relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the late alleged pedophile-financier. This may be one of those stories where the less said, the better. If only Stallman had heeded that advice.
They may be the radio stations with the worst programming ever, but then again, the world’s atomic clock broadcasting stations can really keep a beat. One of the oldest of these stations, WWV, is turning 100 this year, and will be adding special messages to its usual fare of beeps and BCD-encoded time signals on a 100-Hz subcarrier. If you tune to WWV at 10 past the hour (or 50 minutes past the hour for WWVH, the time station located in Hawaii) you’ll hear a special announcement. There was also talk of an open house at the National Institute of Standards and Technology complete with a WWV birthday cake, but that has since been limited to 100 attendees who pre-registered.
For the machinists and wannabes out there, the Internet’s machine shop channels all pitched in this week on something called #tipblitz19, where everyone with a lathe or mill posted a short video of their favorite shop tip. There’s a ton of great tip out there now, with the likes of This Old Tony, Abom79, Stefan Gotteswinter, and even our own Quinn Dunki contributing timesaving – and finger saving – tips. Don’t stop there though – there’s a playlist with 77 videos at last count, many of them by smaller channels that should be getting more love. Check them out and then start making chips.
Most of us know that DLP chips, which lie behind the lens of the projectors that lull us to sleep in conference rooms with their white noise and warm exhaust, are a series of tiny mirrors that wiggle around to project images. But have you ever seen them work? Now you can: Huygens Optics has posted a fascinating video deep-dive into the workings of digital light processors. With a stroboscopic camera and a lot of fussy work, the video reveals the microscopic movements of these mirrors and how that syncs up with the rotation of a color filter wheel. It’s really fascinating stuff, and hats off to Huygens for pulling off the setup needed to capture this.
And speaking of tiny optics, get a load of these minuscule digital cameras, aptly described by tipster David Gustafik as “disturbingly small.” We know we shouldn’t be amazed by things like this anymore, but c’mon – they’re ridiculously tiny! According to the datasheet, the smaller one will occupy 1 mm² on a PCB; the larger stereo camera requires 2.2 mm². Dubbed NanEye, the diminutive cameras are aimed at the medical market – think endoscopy – and at wearables manufacturers. These would be a lot of fun to play with – just don’t drop one.
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Hack a Day
It’s probably one of the first lessons learned by new drivers: if you see a big, red fire truck parked by the side of the road, don’t run into it. Such a lesson appears not to have been in the Tesla Autopilot’s driver education curriculum, though – a Tesla Model S managed to ram into the rear of a fire truck parked at the scene of an accident on a southern California freeway. Crash analysis reveals that the Tesla was on Autopilot and following another vehicle; the driver of the lead vehicle noticed the obstruction and changed lanes. Apparently the Tesla reacted to that by speeding up, but failed to notice the stationary fire truck. One would think that the person driving the car would have stepped in to control the vehicle, but alas. Aside from beating up on Tesla, whose AutoPilot feature seems intent on keeping the market for batteries from junked vehicles fully stocked, this just points out how far engineers have to go before self-driving vehicles are as safe as even the worst human drivers.
The tech press is abuzz today with stories about potential union-busting at Kickstarter. Back in March, Kickstarter employees announced their intent to organize under the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU). On Thursday, two of the union organizers were fired. Clarissa Redwine, who recently hosted a Hack Chat, was one of those released; both she and Taylor Moore are protesting their terminations as an illegal attempt to intimidate Kickstarter employees and keep them from voting for the union. For their part, Kickstarter management says that both employees and two more were released as a result of documented performance issues during the normal review cycle, and that fourteen employees who are in favor of the union were given raises during this cycle, with three of them having been promoted. There will no doubt be plenty more news about this to come.
Would you pay $900 for a Nixie clock? We wouldn’t, but if you choose to buy into Millclock’s high-end timepiece, it may help soften the blow if you think about it being an investment in the future of Nixie tubes. You see, Millclock isn’t just putting together an overpriced clock that uses surplus Russian Nixies – they’re actually making brand new tubes. Techmoan recently reviewed the new clock and learned that the ZIN18 tubes are not coming from Czech Republic-based Dalibor Farný, but rather are being manufactured in-house. That’s exciting news for Nixie builders everywhere; while Dalibor’s tubes are high-quality products, it can’t hurt to have a little competition in the market. Nixies as a growth industry in 2019 – who’da thunk it?
We ran across an interesting project on Hackaday.io the other day, one that qualifies as a true hack. How much house can you afford? A simple question, but the answer can be very difficult to arrive at with the certainty needed to sign papers that put you on the hook for the next 30 years. Mike Ferarra and his son decided to answer this question – in a circuit simulator? As it turns out, circuit simulators are great at solving the kinds of non-linear simultaneous equations needed to factor in principle, interest, insurance, taxes, wages, and a host of other inflows and outflows. Current sources represent money in, current sinks money paid out. Whatever is left is what you can afford. Is this how Kirchoff bought his house?
And finally, is your parts inventory a bit of a mystery? Nikhil Dabas decided that rather than trying to remember what he had and risk duplicating orders, he’d build an application to do it for him. Called WhatDidIBuy, it does exactly what you’d think; it scrapes the order history pages of sites like Adafruit, Digi-Key, and Mouser and compiles a list of your orders as CSV files. It’s only semi-automated, leaving the login process to the user, but something like this could save a ton of time. And it’s modular, so adding support for new suppliers is a simple as writing a new scraper. Forgot what you ordered from McMaster, eBay, or even Amazon? Now there’s an app for that.
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Hack a Day
We start this week with very sad news indeed. You may have heard about the horrific fire on the dive boat Conception off Santa Cruz Island last week, which claimed 33 lives. Sadly, we lost one of our own in the tragedy: Dan Garcia, author of the wildly popular FastLED library. Dan, 46, was an Apple engineer who lived in Berkley; his partner Yulia Krashennaya died with him. Our community owes Dan a lot for the work he put into FastLED over the last seven years, as many an addressable LED is being driven by his code today. Maybe this would be a good chance to build a project that uses FastLED and add a little light to the world, courtesy of Dan.
In happier news, the biggest party of the hardware hacking year is rapidly approaching. That’s right, the 2019 Hackaday Superconference will be upon us before you know it. Rumor has it that there aren’t that many tickets left, and we haven’t even announced the slate of talks yet. That’s likely to clean out the remaining stock pretty darn quickly. Are you seriously prepared to miss this? It seems like a big mistake to us, so why don’t you hop over and secure your spot before you’re crying into your Club-Mate and wondering what all the cool kids will be doing in November.
Of course one of the highlights of Superconference is the announcement of the Hackaday Prize winner. And while we naturally think our Prize is the best contest, that doesn’t mean there aren’t others worth entering. MyMiniFactory, the online 3D-printing community, is currently running a “Design with Arduino” competition that should be right up the alley of Hackaday readers. The goal is simple: submit a 3D-printed design that incorporates Arduino or other electronics. That’s it! Entries are accepted through September 16, so you’ve still got plenty of time.
Sometimes you see something that just floors you. Check out this tiny ESP32 board. It doesn’t just plug into a USB port – it fits completely inside a standard USB Type A jack. The four-layer board sports an ESP32, FTDI chip, voltage regulator, an LED and a ceramic antenna for WiFi and Bluetooth. Why would you want such a thing? Why wouldn’t you! The board is coming soon on CrowdSupply, so we hope to see projects using this start showing up in the tipline soon.
Here’s a “why didn’t I think of that?” bench tip that just struck us as brilliant. Ever had to probe a board to trace signal paths? It’s a common enough task for reverse engineering and repairs, but with increasingly dense boards, probing a massive number of traces is just too much of a chore. Hackaday superfriend Mike Harrison from “mikeselectricstuff” makes the chore easier with a brush made from fine stainless wires crimped into a ring terminal. Attached to one probe of a multimeter, the brush covers much more of the board at a time, finding the general area where your trace of interest ends up. Once you’re in the neighborhood you can drop back to probing one pad at a time. Genius! We’d imagine a decent brush could also be made from a bit of coax braid too.
Another shop tip to wrap up this week, this one for woodworkers and metalworkers alike. Raw materials are expensive, and getting the most bang for your buck is often a matter of carefully laying out parts on sheet goods to minimize waste. Doing this manually can be a real test of your spatial relations skills, so why not automate it with this cut list optimizer? The app will overlay parts onto user-defined rectangles and snuggle them together to minimize waste. The program takes any units, can account for material lost to kerfs, and will even respect grain direction if needed. It’s built for wood, but it should prove useful for sheet metal on a plasma cutter, acrylic on a laser, or even PCBs on a panel.
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Hack a Day
Doesn’t the Z-axis on 3D-printers seem a little – underused? I mean, all it does is creep up a fraction of a millimeter as the printer works through each slice. It would be nice if it could work with the other two axes and actually do something interesting. Which is exactly what’s happening in the nonplanar 3D-printing methods being explored at the University of Hamburg. Printing proceeds normally up until the end, when some modifications to Slic3r allow smooth toolpaths to fill in the stairsteps and produce a smooth(er) finish. It obviously won’t work for all prints or printers, but it’s nice to see the Z-axis finally pulling its weight.
If you want to know how something breaks, best to talk to someone who looks inside broken stuff for a living. [Roger Cicala] from LensRentals.com spends a lot of time doing just that, and he has come to some interesting conclusions about how electronics gear breaks. For his money, the prime culprit in camera and lens breakdowns is side-mounted buttons and jacks. The reason why is obvious once you think about it: components mounted perpendicular to the force needed to operate them are subject to a torque. That’s a problem when the only thing holding the component to the board is a few SMD solder pads. He covers some other interesting failure modes, too, and the whole article is worth a read to learn how not to design a robust product.
In the seemingly neverending quest to build the world’s worst Bitcoin mining rig, behold the 8BitCoin. It uses the 6502 processor in an Apple ][ to perform the necessary hashes, and it took a bit of doing to port the 32-bit SHA256 routines to an 8-bit platform. But therein lies the hack. But what about performance? Something something heat death of the universe…
Contributing Editor [Tom Nardi] dropped a tip about a new online magazine for people like us. Dubbed Paged Out!, the online quarterly ‘zine is a collection of contributed stories from hackers, programmers, retrocomputing buffs, and pretty much anyone with something to say. Each article is one page and is formatted however the author wants to, which leads to some interesting layouts. You can check out the current issue here; they’re still looking for a bunch of articles for the next issue, so maybe consider writing up something for them – after you put it on Hackaday.io, of course.
Tipline stalwart [Qes] let us know about an interesting development in semiconductor manufacturing. Rather than concentrating on making transistors smaller, a team at Tufts University is making transistors from threads. Not threads of silicon, or quantum threads, or threads as a metaphor for something small and high-tech. Actual threads, like for sewing. Of course, there’s plenty more involved, like carbon nanotubes — hey, it was either that or graphene, right? — gold wires, and something called an ionogel that holds the whole thing together in a blob of electrolyte. The idea is to remove all rigid components and make truly flexible circuits. The possibilities for wearable sensors could be endless.
And finally, here’s a neat design for an ergonomic utility knife. It’s from our friend [Eric Strebel], an industrial designer who has been teaching us all a lot about his field through his YouTube channel. This knife is a minimalist affair, designed for those times when you need more than an X-Acto but a full utility knife is prohibitively bulky. [Eric’s] design is a simple 3D-printed clamshell that holds a standard utility knife blade firmly while providing good grip thanks to thoughtfully positioned finger depressions. We always get a kick out of watching [Eric] design little widgets like these; there’s a lot to learn from watching his design process.
Thanks to [JRD] and [mgsouth] for tips.
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Hack a Day
By the time this goes to press, DEFCON 27 will pretty much be history. But badgelife continues, and it’d be nice to have a way of keeping track of all the badges offered. Martin Lebel stepped up to the challenge with a DEF CON 27 badgelife tracker. He’s been tracking the scene since March, and there are currently more than 170 badges, tokens, and shitty add-ons listed. Gotta catch ’em all!
Nice tease, Reuters. We spotted this story about the FAA signing off on beyond-visual-line-of-sight, or BVLOS, operation of a UAV. The article was accompanied by the familiar smiling Amazon logo, leading readers to believe that fleets of Amazon Prime Air drones would surely soon darken the skies with cargoes of Huggies and Tide Pods across the US. It turns out that the test reported was conducted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks along an oil pipeline in the Last Frontier state, and was intended to explore medical deliveries and pipeline surveillance for the oil industry. The only mention of Amazon was that the company reported they’d start drone deliveries in the US “in months.” Yep.
Ever wonder what it takes to get your widget into the market? Between all the testing and compliance requirements, it can be a real chore. Nathaniel tipped us off to a handy guide written by his friend Skippy that goes through the alphabet soup of agencies and regulations needed to get a product to market – CE, RoHS, WEEE, LVD, RED, CE for EMC. Take care of all that paperwork and you’ll eventually get a DoC and be A-OK.
A French daredevil inventor made the first crossing of the English Channel on a hoverboard on Sunday. Yes, we know it’s not an “actual” hoverboard, but it’s as close as we’re going to get with the physics we have access to right now, and being a stand-upon jet engine powered by a backpack full of fuel, it qualifies as pretty awesome. The report says it took him a mere 20 minutes to make the 22-mile (35-km) crossing.
We had a grand time last week around the Hackaday writing crew’s secret underground lair with this delightful Hackaday-Dilbert mashup-inator. Scroll down to the second item on the page and you’ll see what appears to be a standard three-panel Dilbert strip; closer inspection reveals that the text has been replaced by random phrases scraped from a single Hackaday article. It looks just like a Dilbert strip, and sometimes the text even makes sense with what’s going on in the art. We’d love to see the code behind this little gem. The strip updates at each page load, so have fun.
And of course, the aforementioned secret headquarters is exactly what you’d picture – a dark room with rows of monitors scrolling green text, each with a black hoodie-wearing writer furiously documenting the black arts of hacking. OpenIDEO, the “open innovation practice” of global design company IDEO, has issued a challenge to “reimagine a more compelling and relatable visual language for cybersecurity.” In other words, no more scrolling random code and no more hoodies. Do you have kinder, gentler visual metaphors for cybersecurity? You might win some pretty decent prizes for your effort to “represent different terms and ideas in the cybersecurity space in an accessible and compelling way.”
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Hack a Day
The Chicago Pile led to the Manhattan Project, which led to the atomic bomb. In Germany, there were similar efforts with less success, and now we have physical evidence from the first attempted nuclear reactor in Germany. In Physics Today, there’s a lovely historical retrospective of one of the ‘fuel cubes’ that went into one of Germany’s unsuccessful reactor experiments. This is a five-centimeter cube that recently showed up in the hands of a uranium collector. In the test reactor, six hundred of these cubes were strung along strings and suspended like a chandelier. This chandelier was then set inside a tub surrounded by graphite. This reactor never reached criticality — spectroscopy tells us the cube does not contain fission products — but it was the best attempt Germany made at a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.
The biggest failing of the Arduino is the pinout. Those header pins aren’t all on 0.1″ centers, and the board itself is too wide to fit on a single solderless breadboard. Here’s the solution to that problem. It’s the BreadShield, an Arduino Uno-to-Breadboard adapter. Plug an Uno on one end, and you get all the pins on the other.
There’s a new listing on AirBnB. this time from NASA. They’re planning on opening the space station up to tourism, starting at $35,000 USD per night. That’s a cool quarter mil per week, launch not included. The plan appears to allow other commercial companies (SpaceX and whoever buys a Boeing Starliner) to accept space tourists, the $35k/night is just for the stop at the ISS. Costs for launch and landing are expected to be somewhere between $20 and $60 Million per flight. Other space tourists have paid as much: [Dennis Tito], the first ‘fee-paying’ space tourist, paid $20M for a trip to the ISS in 2001. [Mark Shuttleworth] also paid $20M a year later. Earlier space ‘tourists’ paid a similar amount; Japanese journalist [Toyohiro Akiyama] flew to Mir at a cost of between $12M and $37M. Yes, the space station is now an AirBnB, but it’s going to cost twenty million dollars for the ride up there.
We’re getting into conference season, and there are two hardware cons coming up you should be aware of. The first is Hardwear.io, keynoted by [Christopher Tarnovsky], famous for DirecTV hacks. There will be other talks by [@TubeTimeUS] on cloning the Sound Blaster and [John McMaster] on dropping acid. All of this is going down this week at The Biltmore in Santa Clara, CA. The second upcoming conference of note is Teardown, the hardware conference put on by Crowd Supply. That’s in Portland, June 21-23, with a presence from the Church of Robotron.
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Hack a Day
The future of the musical instrument industry is in tiny, cheap, handheld synthesizers. They’re sold as ‘musical toys’. They bleep and bloop, and that’s about it. Korg may have just released the minimum viable product for this category, and thus the most popular product for this category. On the surface, the Korg Nu:Tekt doesn’t look like much, just a box with three knobs, a speaker, a (crappy) keyboard, and a few buttons. I/O includes MIDI in, Sync in and out, audio in, and headphones out. What’s inside is what counts. There’s a high-powered ARM core (STM32F446, a Cortex-M4 running at 180 MHz) and a ton of RAM. What’s the play here? It’s compatible with the Korg Prologue/Minilogue SDK, so you can put the same sounds from the flagship synthesizer on a tiny box that fits in your pocket. Things are starting to get weird, man. This is a toy, with the same sounds as the ‘pro’ level synth. Let it be known that the synth market is the most interesting segment of consumer electronics right now.
Bird, that ride share scooter startup, is now selling their scooters. It costs thirteen hundred dollars. Alternatively, you can pick some up for cheap at your city’s impound lot. Or for the low, low, price of free.
Razer, the company that makes garish computer peripherals aimed at ‘gamers’ and other people who are sucked deep into the existential turmoil of disempowerment, depression, and playing video games all day, are building a toaster. Gamers aren’t known for eating food that isn’t prepared by their mom, but the Razer consumer community has been clamoring for a professional gaming toaster since it was first teased on April Fool’s Day three years ago. You only eat so many cold Pop Tarts straight out of the box, I guess.
Everyone loves cupcake cars, and this year we’re in for a treat! We’re ringing the bell this weekend with the 6th annual Hackaday x Tindie meetup for the Bay Area Maker Faire. We got a few things going on here. Next Thursday we’ll be greeted with talks by The Only Makers That You Want To Meet. That’s HDDG, the monthly San Francisco meetup happening at the Supplyframe office, and it’s going to be packed to the gills this month. Don’t miss it. Next Saturday, we’re renting a bar close to the Faire. The 6th Annual Hackaday x Tindie MFBA Meetup w/ Kickstarter is usually at an Irish pub in San Mateo, but we’re getting a bigger venue this year. You’ll be able to move around in this venue.
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Hack a Day
Way back in the day, if you were exceptionally clever, you could just solder more RAM to your computer. You did this by taking a DIP, stacking it on top of an existing RAM chip, bending out the enable pin, and soldering everything down. Wire the enable pin to an address pin, and you have more RAM. [Eric] wanted to get a game running on a Tandy 1000A, but that computer just doesn’t have enough RAM. The solution was to stack the RAMs. It’s a human centipede of deadbugging skills.
We’ve mentioned this before, but I just received another copy …read more
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Hack a Day
Do not aim laser at remaining eye Over on the reddits, [CarbonGod] thought he had a slightly overpowered laser pointer. His red laser pointer had a label that said it outputs less than 5 mW. The only problem is it melted black plastic and heated a thermocouple up to 140°F. [CarbonGod] is begging, borrowing, or [...]
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Hack a Day
It’s Christmas Eve, the perfect time to interact with your extended familial units, eat cookies, nog things up a little, and watch Die Hard. Christmas Eve also means it’s a low-effort day here at Hackaday, so here’s a few cool things we’ve run across in the past few weeks. A Round OLED Display That right there [...]
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Cardboard box computer [Alistair] chapman had a Laptop with a broken screen sitting in his parts bin. He knew he had an LCD panel on hand that would probably work with it, but it wouldn’t fit in the case. His solution was to transplant all the computer parts into a cardboard box from a motherboard. [...]
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PS1 hombrew competition The PlayStation Development Network is hosting a six-month long competition to develop homebrew games for the original PlayStation.We don’t get many homebrew games for old systems in our tip line, so if you’d like to show something off, send it in. This is how you promote a kickstarter [Andy] has been working [...]
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Hack a Day
EMC2 CNC keyboard labels If you’ve got a dedicated computer running EMC2 for CNC control you may be interested in these keyboard labels. [Rich] mentions that they use the labels for their engraver at the Connecticut Hackerspace. Just print them out and glue them in the face of the keys. Dev board seminars and freebies [...]
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Hack a Day
HDD Grinder As [unicorn] described it, “this is no big thing.” We would agree, but a grinder made from a hard disk drive at least deserves to be in a [HAD] links post. Here’s the original source. The No-Video Game What do you get when take [Sub Hunt] and take away the ability to see [...]
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Hack a Day
Another way to break out dual pin headers [Uwe] wrote in to share his technique for breaking out dual pin headers. He uses two single pin headers, a piece of protoboard, and a dual row pin socket to make an adapter. This is removable where the other method we saw this week was not. Web-based [...]
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Hack a Day
Yeah, it’s like Twitter but actually cool Thingiverse – still the best place on the Internet to find cool 3D models to print out – has gone all Web 3.0 with their new Dashboard feature. Basically, you can think of this as Thingiverse’s version of Twitter. The dashboard allows you to see the latest updates from people [...]
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Hack a Day
Wait, you’re using a Dremel to cut PCBs? Cutting copper-clad board or – horrors – depanelizing PCBs is a pain if you don’t have the right tool. Over at Hub City Labs they’re using a small, cheap metal shear & break. Bonus: it can cut and bend sheet metal, so the Hub City folks can [...]
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Hack a Day
So you happen to have a really beefy transformer sitting around in your living room. What are you going to do with it? Short stuff across it to watch it glow of course! This video is exactly that. While we flip flopped between “what is this guy doing?” and “ooooh, look at it glow!”, we [...]
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Capacitive touch plants Here’s a proof of concept for using plants as a capacitive touch sensor. The sensor is simply a hunk of double-sided copper clad board attached to a microcontroller. But it seems to be able to sense what part of the plant is being touched. [Thanks Fabien] Adding wireless charging to a Nokia [...]
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Upgrading a desktop with a diamond cutting wheel [Michail] needed a new graphics card. The only problem was his motherboard didn’t have any free PCI-E x16 slots available. Unable to find a PCI-E x1 card, he did what any of us would do and broke out the Dremel. Yes, he got it working, but don’t do [...]
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Cheap ergonomic mouse If your had keeps cramping while using the computer mouse why not grab a hunk of wood and a couple of buttons to make your own ergonomic input device? C# GUI for Arduino testing Here’s a Windows GUI for controlling Arduino. [Rohit] put it together using C#. It should make development very simple [...]
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And then Obi-wan said, “you were supposed to be the chosen one!” Yesterday, a little bird told us Makerbot will be moving to a closed source model for their newest printer. This was confirmed, and now [Zach Smith] a.k.a. [Hoeken] – creator of the RepRap Research Foundation and co-founder of Makerboth Industries is weighing in with [...]
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Very tiny keyboard The idea behind the iControlPad2 is pretty simple – just take the slide-out keyboard from a phone, discard the phone part, add two analog sticks and a D-pad, and put Bluetooth in it. It makes for a very small keyboard perfect for controlling a Raspi, a home media server, or even a phone [...]
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Xbee sensors at Lowe’s? Lowe’s, the home improvement big box store, is selling some home automation items which might be Xbee compatible. They’re being sold under the brand name Iris. There is some debate as to whether they’re Xbee, or just 802.15.4 hardware. Either way they might be worth checking out for your wireless projects. Father [...]
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Xbee sensors at Lowe’s? Lowe’s, the home improvement big box store, is selling some home automation items which might be Xbee compatible. They’re being sold under the brand name Iris. There is some debate as to whether they’re Xbee, or just 802.15.4 hardware. Either way they might be worth checking out for your wireless projects. Father [...]
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MakerSlide, European edition We’re all familiar with the MakerSlide, right? The linear bearing system that has been turned into everything from motorized camera mounts to 3D printers is apparently very hard to source in Europe. A few folks from the ShapeOko forum have teamed up to produce the MakerSlide in the UK. They’re running a crowdsourced project [...]
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C’mon, you know you’re not really going to do much today. You might as well spend that time learning some skills instead of watching funny cats. The Cornell ECE lectures on microcontrollers (ECE 4760 and ECE5760), taught by [Bruce Land], are available online for free. Not only do you get to enjoy these two [...]
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PS3 Controller Cell Phone Mount Although the details of this build are quite scarce, not much is needed considering all that this cell phone/PS3 controller “mount” is made of is 3 binder clips and a few rubber bands. A very ingenious solution. Overengineered Throwie On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve spent way too [...]
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An Octopart for RC equipment When [Zach] started building a quadcopter he found it very difficult to source the required parts. Thus was born CompareRC, an aggregation of several online RC retailers. There’s over 150,000 parts in the database, all searchable and sortable by lowest price. Segway iPad Skype teleconferencing robot It’ll be a while until robots completely eliminate the need for [...]
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License plate tablet rack [Hunter Davis] used an old license plate as a tablet stand. It loops around the leg of his laptop table and has a cutout for the power cord of the tablet. More power power wheels It may look stock, but this power wheels is hiding a new frame, motors, and tires. [...]
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Oh cool we’re famous Last weekend, the Tech Team Radio Show over in Stoke-on-Trent interviewed our boss man [Caleb]. It’s a really wonderful interview, and I’m not saying that because [Caleb] signs my check. The entire show is up on Mixcloud and you can listen to the interview beginning at about 20 minutes. By the way, the [...]
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Ever wonder what CPU dev boards look like? In the realm of highly confidential hardware, it doesn’t get much more secret than upcoming CPUs coming out of Intel. Somehow, a few CPU dev boards wound up on eBay, and [Leon] was cool enough to save all the pictures (Polish, Google translation, or translate in the sidebar). [...]
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Hey, it’s the 43rd anniversary of men first walking on the moon. Here’s some stuff we found to celebrate that. Fun trivia: for Apollo 11, [Neil] and [Buzz] didn’t go more than 200 feet from the LEM. This is so incredibly sad Remember Heathkit? A lot of cool kit-based electronics came from them. They’re out of business, [...]
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Apollo 13 DJ controller Follow Up [Adam] had a really impressive DJ controller build featured here recently. Many of you had more questions about the internals and such, so this post should clarify a few things. He’s still got a few more updates to make, but promises to reveal all if given enough time! Noise [...]
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Testing LEDs Over at the Albuquerque, NM hackerspace Quelab, [Alfred] needed to test a bunch of surface mount LEDs. He ended up building a pair of 3D printed tweezers with a pair of needles attached to the end and a space for a coin cell battery. It works and Quelab got a new tool. Woo Raspberry [...]
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Opening really old lock boxes [Barry Wels] is a locksmith. One day, he got a call from a museum that had a few 17th century strong boxes that needed to be opened. After a little probing with an endoscope, he decided they could be picked with a little bit of spring steel. So, what’s in [...]
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For when you want something huge machined Turn your volume down for this video. It’s the HSM-Modal CNC mill carving a full-sized car out of styrofoam, applying clay to the foam core, and machining the clay at 50 meters per minute. Yes, we’ve seen this machine before, but never in action. It only took a little [...]
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Portal gag-video These guys make your own video editing chops look just plain sad. They put together a video demonstrating the portal gun in real life. Unleashing the beast We have this problem all the time. The noise regulations were preventing [Massimiliano Rivetti] from letting the true voice of his Ferrari be heard. He hacked into the [...]
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Amazing 3D rendering in real-time Ah, the 90s. A much simpler time when the presenters on Bad Influence! were amazed by the 3D rendering capabilities of the SGI Onyx RealityEngine2. This giant machine cost £250,000 back in the day, an amazing sum but then again we’re getting nostalgic for old SGI hardware. Well, Mega is taken… let’s call it Grande [...]
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Hack a Day
Amazing 3D rendering in real-time Ah, the 90s. A much simpler time when the presenters on Bad Influence! were amazed by the 3D rendering capabilities of the SGI Onyx RealityEngine2. This giant machine cost £250,000 back in the day, an amazing sum but then again we’re getting nostalgic for old SGI hardware. Well, Mega is taken… let’s call it Grande [...]
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When pigs fly…. close enough. There are too many jokes to be made about this one. It’s a quadcopter made out of a dead cat. [Bert Jansen], the artist behind this, calls him Orville. He died from natural causes, and what better way to remember a feline friend that liked chasing birds? Refurbishing an Apple ][ That [...]
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Teensy CNC mill The guys at Inventables put together a neat CNC router kit that looks very interesting. It uses Makerslide linear bearings and CNC’d parts to make a surprisingly cheap frame for something that can engrave wood and metal. Inventables is running a Kickstarter-esque preorder to fund this production run but right now they’re 30 [...]
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Turning anything into a touch sensor Makey Makey is a small board with a USB plug and bunch of contact points for alligator clips. Plug the Makey into your computer and attach just about anything to the contacts, and you can make anything into a video game controller, a keyboard, a piano, or pretty much [...]
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Amazing ass… for a robot Yep, Japan still has the creepy robotics market cornered. Case in point is this robotic posterior. Don’t worry, they’ve included a dissection so you can see how the insides work too. [via Gizmodo] Time-lapse camera module results As promised, [Quinn Dunki] sent in a link to the photo album from [...]
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Three days of work in 5 minutes [Celso] bought himself a Ultimaker kit and put together a time-lapse video of him putting it together. There’s a lot of work that goes into these machines, but being able to print a nearly perfect cube on the first run is nearly magical. How about a CNC mill, [...]
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More old computers on FPGAs! [Andy] loves his Memotech MTX computer. It’s an oldie with a Z80 running at 4MHz; the perfect target for an FPGA port. The ReMemotech has everything the old one has – cassette interface and all – and can run up to six times faster than the original. Also found in [...]
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Introducing Hackaday: how it’s made edition Ever wonder how the make the forms for marine propellers? Now you have. It turns out they use a bunch of plywood, Bondo, and sandpaper. Awesome viewing for a coffee break. Finally a new way to hurt yourself! [Darrell]‘s solder flux pen was filled and capped at sea level. When [...]
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Sandcasting at the beach [mkb] sent in a video he found of [Max Lamb] sandcasting a stool at a beach in England. The material is pewter, or >90% tin with a little bit copper and antimony thrown in for good measure. While we’re sure there will be a few complaints from environmentalists, it’s still a cool [...]
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This hurts our head You know you can ‘freeze’ drops of water in mid-air by flashing a LED at the right time, right? Well, according to this video you don’t even need a strobing light; just use the frame rate of the camera. Much cooler if you don’t know how it works, in our humble opinion. [...]
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Need some gears? Got a timing belt? [filespace] sent in a neat build he stumbled upon: making gears with plywood and a timing belt. Just cut out a plywood disk and glue on a section of timing belt. There’s some math involved in getting all the teeth evenly placed around the perimeter, but nothing too bad. [...]
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A Remote Sphero-Control Trackball Sphero is a cool little ball that can roll around under the control of a smartphone. Although super-cool by itself, in this application it’s been hacked into a sort of trackball to drive a remote control car! Arduino Voice Control [Sebastian] Wrote in to tell us about this article about using [...]
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6:01
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Hack a Day
Don’t get your dirty fingers on the glass [Poke] sent in a video of him using Android devices with a wiimote and PS3 controller. The build uses the Joystick2Touch and the USB Joystick Center app. Root is required, but this will be very useful when tv-sized Android devices start showing up. Wonderful restoration work [John] sent in [...]
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12:22
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Hack a Day
Shamrock hat [Josh] whipped up a shamrock themed hat by adding an outline of green LEDs to this bowler. Just remember, don’t drink and solder. Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone! Battery-powered Xmas lights can be more useful [Karl] took a string of mostly useless battery-powered Christmas lights and found a good use for them. He replaced [...]
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12:01
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Hack a Day
We’re throwing money at our monitor and nothing’s happening! Sometimes we get hacks sent into our tip line that are outrageously awesome, but apart from a YouTube video we’ve got nothing else to write about. So begins the story of the flying Back to the Future DeLorean quadrocopter. Sadly, the story ends with the video as well. [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
Solder Your Pin headers Straight If you’re worried about how to solder your pin headers straight, why not try this simple trick and put them into a breadboard before soldering? Etiquette for Open Source Projects If you use or develop open source projects, it’s worth checking out [Phillip Torrone]‘s Unspoken rules of Open Source article. [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
The Earth orbits the Sun every 365.256 days. Because this number isn’t a whole number, an extra day is tacked onto February every four years, unless the year is evenly divisible by 100, except in cases where the year is divisible by 400, or something like that. To commemorate this calendar hack, here’s some stuff that has rolled [...]
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5:36
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Hack a Day
Wii Nunchuk controlled Monotron Adding a bit of motion control to your music synthesizer turns out to be pretty easy. Here’s an example of a Wii Nunchuk used to control a Monotron. [Thanks John] Hackers on the Moon and other space related goals Yep apparently a non-government backed expedition to the moon is in the [...]
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8:01
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Hack a Day
Industrial control robot band Remember Animusic, a series of videos featuring computer-generated, highly implausible instruments? Intel made their own to demo their industrial control tech. From the looks of things, we’re putting money on a bunch of MIDI triggers bolted onto plastic panels; now it’s slightly less impressive and the reason we’re looking at xylophones on eBay right now. [...]
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7:26
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Hack a Day
This is why digital picture frames were invented [Petros] sent in this video of his visualization of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. He did this with openFrameworks and also made a version that reacts to sound. Is anyone else reminded of that one scene in Vincent and the Doctor? A boat’s a boat, but a mystery box [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
Most useless machine We love ‘em, and we hope you do too. Here’s [Phase2plus'] take on the most useless machine. Scratching like it’s 1989 [Nick] spent three bucks at the thrift store and ended up buying days worth of fun with this cassette player. He hacked it to scratch like vinyl. 3D printed jawbone This [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
The only thing he needs now is a micro and RTC For [Dino]‘s 44th Hack A Week extravaganza, he made powered window blinds in five minutes. It’s a simple build with a small gear motor and a bit of tubing to adapt the shaft to the control rod of the blinds. Good job [Dino]. BecauseCamelCaseWillKillYourPinkieFinger The [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
Open source engraving [Scott] wanted to do some v-carving with a CNC router, but couldn’t find software to generate GCode that didn’t cost hundreds of dollars. He ended up doing the sensible thing and wrote his own that will generate tool paths from CXF fonts. We’ll be bookmarking this for when our router project is done. Improving [...]
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5:01
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Hack a Day
Finally the 13-year-old on Battlefield 3 will get their comeuppance [Shawn] sent in his fully adjustable auto-fire mod for an XBox360 controller. It’s pretty simple – just an ATtiny85 soldered to a button with a pot to adjust the rate and switch to turn it on and off. It could have been done with a 555, [...]
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5:01
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Hack a Day
Finally the 13-year-old on Battlefield 3 will get their comeuppance [Shawn] sent in his fully adjustable auto-fire mod for an XBox360 controller. It’s pretty simple – just an ATtiny85 soldered to a button with a pot to adjust the rate and switch to turn it on and off. It could have been done with a 555, [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
An 8×8 LED Matrix Game Grows Up: [Pixel Land] is an iPhone game similar to [Super Mario Brothers] using a virtual array of 8×8 pixels. This wouldn’t normally be interesting, but we’ve actually featured “this” game as an 8×8 LED matrix game. How to Drill Golf or Ping-Pong Balls: Drilling golf or ping-pong balls is [...]
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11:08
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Hack a Day
They can put a man on the moon, but they can’t put a man in LEO Yeah, we’re enraged by that headline. Anyway, NASA put up a whole bunch of projects and made them open source. From the looks of it, there’s plenty of cool stuff: genetic algorithm libs, toolkits for astrodynamics simulations (on the Goddard site), [...]
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13:33
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Hack a Day
Now make it life size Here’s a scale model of the classic Playstation game Wipeout. It uses quantum levitation, superconductors, liquid nitrogen, and incredibly detailed models of the cars in Wipeout. They’re able control the speed and direction of the cars electronically. Somebody get on making one of these I can drive. Never mind, it’s totally [...]
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14:00
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Hack a Day
The worst computer keyboard, ever [Gerardus] found an old BBC Master Compact computer for $15. The only problem is the computer didn’t have a keyboard. It’s not a problem if you can make a keyboard out of an old breadboard. It’s not a Model M, but it works. Emergency ribbon cable repair [Thomas] works in [...]
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5:00
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Hack a Day
Ah, Christmas. That wonderful time of year when you can roll out of bed to the screams and wails of children, grab a hot cocoa, and spend several hours arguing with an 8-year-old about which LEGO set to build first. Simply magical. While you’re waiting for the Doctor Who Christmas special to come on, settle [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
The “Little Drummer Boy” On a Scanner and Drum: There’s little more information on this hack, however, it’s quite interesting seeing an automated drum and a scanner playing a familiar Christmas tune. Check out the video of the duet in action! A Radial Engine Model: Through the process of experimentation, two “radial engine models” were [...]
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11:10
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Hack a Day
Free-form Christmas ornament Here’s [Rob]‘s free form circuit that’s a Christmas ornament for geeks. It looks great, but sadly isn’t powered through a Christmas light strand. It’s just as cool as the skeletal Arduino we saw. Prototyping with flowers Well this is interesting: protoboard that’s specifically made to make SMD soldering easier. The guys at elecfreaks [...]
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6:11
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Hack a Day
Drilling square holes We’re still a bit baffled by the physics of this, but apparently it’s possible to drill a square hole with a round bit. This video shows square holes being milled using a cutter which is offset from the center of the bit. [Thanks Jordan] LED Motorcycle headlight driven by mains [William] found a [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
LED Neurons [Alexandra Olivier] put up an art installation at Wellesley College that looks like a bunch of neurons built out of LEDs. The neurons are connected to a couple PIR sensors and ‘fire’ whenever movement is detected. The result is a lot like being inside a brain. Fitting, then, that the installation is called [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
Honey, would you like some cheese? WHIRRRRRRRRR [The Timmy] broke his manual cheese grater. It would be a waste to throw away a perfectly functional tool that’s only missing a handle, so he kicked it up a notch with a cordless drill. Now [Tim], “can grate with incredible speed and power for even the toughest of cheeses.” Anyone [...]
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6:27
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Hack a Day
Finally an Arduino shield that does nothing The folks at Evil Mad Scientist labs have finally created the Googly Eye Shield for Arduinos. With it’s pass-through .100 headers, it adds googly eyes to your Arduino projects. Of course, instead of in addition to the googly eyes you could add a breadboard, making it somewhat useful. A million fake [...]
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10:13
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Hack a Day
Experimentations with haptics [Chris] sent in two videos (1, 2) documenting his experiments with haptic feedback. He’s recording the position of a DC motor and can either play it back or send it to another motor. It’s very similar to the kissing robot we saw earlier this year, but we’re not making any judgments. Mobile Emergency [...]
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6:31
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Hack a Day
Build details for Raspberry Pi prototype With the launch of Raspberry Pi approaching the development team released the details about the prototypes from about five years ago. The board was originally based on an ATmega644 and built on some perfboard. ‘Zero Energy Device’ challenge We call BS on the title of this one, but the [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
An accidental radial engine Hack A Day’s very own [Jeremy Cook] was trying to figure out how to push four ‘arms’ out one at a time. What he came up with is a very nice model of a radial engine. Everything was cut on a CNC router and a motor from an air freshener provides [...]
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14:05
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Hack a Day
Spinning DNA animation using sprites [James Bowman] shows a way to use sprites to simulate parts of DNA moving in 3 dimensional space. The animations are driven by an Arduino board and Maple board, which allows a comparison of the processing differences between the two. [Thanks Andrew] Tiny Pong This Pong game is so small (translated), [...]
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9:01
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Hack a Day
Playing Snake on a MIDI controller While you’re waiting for your bandmates to finish arguing/making out/their beer, you can play Snake on your MIDI controller. Luis wrote a Snake game for an Akai APC40 controller. Everything is built with Processing and should provide a great distraction from (for?) your 14-year-old groupies. Cheap & simple PCB [...]
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15:05
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Hack a Day
Disposable coffee maker [Sepehr] didn’t have a coffee maker, and the local coffee shops were all out of joe. He got his fix by making a drip coffee maker out of disposable cups and knives. Flexible braille display Thin film technology is being developed to help the visually impaired. This flexible OLED display has embedded [...]
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14:01
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Hack a Day
Open-source Mars rover [Seth King] wasn’t satisfied with current robotics platforms that don’t work well outdoors. He started the Open Rover Kickstarter with the end goal of having a 6-wheel robot with a rocker-bogie suspension just like the Mars landers. We’re sure it’ll be an interesting platform. Adding a Flash to a key fob video [...]
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17:26
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Hack a Day
Well, if you hadn’t noticed the news there has been a little bit of a shakeup on the east coast. I just arrived home after being evacuated due to a 30 second rumble the likes of which has not been felt on the east coast in something like 114 years. In lieu of the not [...]
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14:00
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Hack a Day
Indestructible earbuds We’re still waiting for our [Lt. Uhura] style earbuds. But until then, can we interest anyone in a set that will stand up to some abuse? Solder Pot Scavenger [Felicitus] says we should get a solder pot and use it to scavenge for parts. His method looks pretty easy and it’s cheaper than buying a [...]
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11:22
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Hack a Day
It’s been suggested that the first self-replicating computer virus was a single IC that eventually expanded into multiple plastic component storage boxes. Organizing components by their values is a huge PITA as well. Here’s some solutions we’ve found: Photo Boxes [Mathew] sent in his organization scheme that uses 4×6 photo boxes. Better get those boxes [...]
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12:30
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Hack a Day
Plasma speakers Apparently if you run AC and DC currents through a welding torch flame you can use the resulting plasma as a loudspeaker. [Thanks Cody] Power metering The Google Power Meter API is no longer in development but that didn’t stop [Pyrofer] from finishing his metering hardware. It uses a reflectance sensor to read [...]
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6:06
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Hack a Day
Here’s another “useless machine” variant. The trick to this one is that it has dual “fingers” and can work either way. Which way it turns off is selectable via a switch on the side, and the fingers can both be turned on to “fight” each other. Check out the video here. This video depicts the [...]
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10:00
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Hack a Day
Tripod CNC Machining Setup: Here’s a strange “tripod” device using the EMC software package generally used for CNC machining. In this case it looks like something that (when scaled up) might control a sky-cam-like device that one would see at football games. The Off-Grid Container House: Project to make an off-grid container house. [...]
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6:07
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Hack a Day
Tim wrote in to tell us about this simple hack where he replaced the stock button lights with some really cool Blue LEDS on an ’87 BMW. He uses some capacitors, to achieve the effect that it takes a bit for the charge to drain out so the lights stay on for a bit after [...]
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6:00
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Hack a Day
Huge, fully functional NES game pad replica Students at Dutch TU Delft university recently built a huge replica of the original NES controller (Google Translation), which is fully functional and can be used to play games on a large display screen they also installed. How big is it, you ask? It’s about 6 meters wide [...]
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9:01
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Hack a Day
Custom EBike with a 200+ km range [Doctorbass] constructed an awesome electrical bike back in 2008 from a Mongoose bicycle. The bike boasts a top speed of 76km/h and a total range of 210 km on a single charge. Some car company needs to hire this guy STAT. [via Make] Build to order Xbox 360 [...]
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4:01
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Hack a Day
Remaking the first video game At the Revision 2011 demo compo, a museum project called [MEGA] won first place in the “Wild” category with their zero bit recreation of “tennis for 2”. Entirely made of analog electronics, the retro game completes its presentation on a round o-scope screen. You can see a video of it [...]
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17:11
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Hack a Day
iPad2 combination case [Jasn] wasn’t happy with Apple’s version of the iPad2 case, but an InCase Magazine Jacket didn’t meet his needs either. He broke the two apart and combined pieces of each to achieve his perfect tablet enclosure. MIDI power tools Enjoy the sounds of working in the shop thanks to [ArcAttack's] MIDI controlled [...]
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7:05
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Hack a Day
Induction cook top provides power too We’re familiar with induction cook tops but we never thought to power a microcontroller with one. [Thanks Hadez] Ping-Pong Uranium We’ve been big fans of the chain reaction demonstration using ping-pong balls and mouse traps ever since we saw [Mr. Wizard] do it back in the day. If you [...]
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15:01
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Hack a Day
Oven parts scrounging In response to last week’s post about parts scrounging with a heat gun, Hackaday forum member [BiOzZ] decided to try doing the same thing in his oven. It seems to work quite well, but we’re wondering if there should be any concerns over the lead content of the solder. Anyone care to [...]
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5:26
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Hack a Day
Sunlit LCD screen [A.J.] did some experiments and managed to replace his LCD backlight using fiber optics and the sun. Game Boy LCD Repair [Alan] found that he could fix dead columns on his Game Boy LCD screen with a little reflow work on the connector. 3DS Design Flaw? Anyone having problems with the way [...]
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6:00
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Hack a Day
Magnified glasses A late hacking session, and parts-on-hand came together as the inspiration for [BadWolf's] magnified glasses with LED lighting. Pendulum Printer This orb, when swung like a pendulum, prints images by dropping ink out the bottom. A processing sketch works in conjuction with a Wii Remote and an IR LED in the orb to [...]
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7:07
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Hack a Day
3D holographic fog display Some researchers in Japan are hard at work building a 3D volumetric fog display that would allow you to live out some of your Leia-related Star Wars fantasies. Using a column of fog and three projectors, they were able to create a display that looks three-dimensional from any angle. It might [...]
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13:02
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Hack a Day
SNES Arcade Cabinet [Daniel] let us know that he finished up a SNES arcade cabinet he has been working on for awhile. It looks so good, he says that his wife has even agreed to let him keep it in the house! DIY Overhead projector beamer [Liquider] sent us some information about a DIY beamer [...]
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5:02
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Hack a Day
Omnidirectional personal transport [Dan] sent us a link to this Honda U3-X personal transport device. It’s kind of like a Segway that can move in any direction but our head already hurts from the thought of going over backward on one of these. How light bulb filaments were developed Now that incandescent light bulbs are about [...]
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6:14
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Hack a Day
Odd project materials [Juliansr] wrote in to tell us about a site that sells bendable, moldable, stretchable, and other ‘able’ materials you might want to use in your next project. (2 * 9V) = Flashlight [Lasse] built a flashlight with two 9V batteries. One is a normal battery, the other has been gutted and is [...]
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7:07
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Hack a Day
PCB Stand Part PCB, part old IC, and held together with hot glue. It doesn’t take much to make this electronics stand, but it’ll certainly add to the geek level of your desk. Decorate with light This busy living room is actually decorated all in white. The patterns that give it life are on lend [...]
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6:19
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Hack a Day
New Project Hosting site [Paul] wrote in to tell us about his brand new hack hosting service, HackHut. Based on WordPress with some modifications, it is definitely worth keeping an eye on as new features emerge. Instructabliss Speaking of project hosting, Instructables are a common source of projects as well as complaints. Instructabliss by [Daid] [...]
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13:00
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Hack a Day
DIY driving controller It looks like this steering wheel, shifter, and foot pedal were all made from string and garbage. That being said, you can see it works quite well. The setup just pushed keys on the keyboard, which reminds us of the junky plastic add-ons for the Wii remote. [Thanks Toumal] Taping PCI express [...]
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12:00
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Hack a Day
Obligatory tech tree It’s hard to let a Christmas go by without looking in on a geeky Christmas tree project. Luckily, [Peter Davenport] decided to share his Arduino and LCD shield tree. Blinking USB dude If you’ve got a 555 timer and some commonly salvageable components give this blinking LED man a try. The version above is [...]
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7:00
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Hack a Day
The Clock Clock This digital display is made from several analog clocks with thick hands. Together they make something of a 7-segment display, which can be used to display the time. It reminds us of the “Shared Time” installation we covered previously. [Thanks Drum365 via Anonimiss Files] Quickly desolder lots of parts [Rhys Goodwin] is [...]
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14:31
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Hack a Day
You’ve probably been fantasizing about getting amazing gifts this December, like robots with servo-mounted laser pointers and authentic battle damage. It’s time to realize that it’s unlikely that this will happen. Stay calm. You can still get sweet hacky things if you just forward this gift-giving guide to your friends and loved ones. Join us [...]
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6:37
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Hack a Day
PBS Newshour did a piece on robots. They talked about NASA’s bot pictured above, Asimo, Big Dog, PR2, Robbie the robot and a few others. We didn’t see anything new, but we really do like the coverage getting out there. We also never need an excuse to watch that guy kick big dog around for [...]
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10:15
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Hack a Day
We know you just got a links post a couple hours ago, but more people tipped us off to some great Halloween stuff and we just couldn’t wait. [Michael] came up with this fantastic idea for a flying ghost. He’s using a twin prop tilt rotor design to fly his ghost all over the neighborhood. [...]
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Hack a Day
Happy Halloween to one and all. Let’s celebrate the holiday with some related links. [Brandon] carved the Hackaday logo into his Jack-’o-Lantern. But that’s not all, inspired by EMSL’s Jack-’o-Lantern, as well as our own offering, he added LEDs. Three of them occupy the flesh behind the eyes and nose, fading in and out thanks [...]
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12:00
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Hack a Day
Square Gears This video demonstrates square gears and other oddly shaped cogs. We can’t think of a use but it’s interesting none-the-less. [via Tinkernology] Cooking with Lasers It’s late and you’ve been at the workbench for quite some time. But why go to the kitchen for a snack? Grab a couple of 1 watt lasers, [...]
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14:00
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Hack a Day
Cards you should crank These greeting cards must be the product of a mechanical engineer run amok. They come with a crank and are designed to entertain with their simple, yet elegant movements. [Thanks Phil] Magnetic card stripe reader [JP] built an Arduino based magnetic card reader. It uses off-the-shelf parts but if you don’t [...]
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13:10
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Hack a Day
Old timey pics with a new timey camera Update: We’ve already looked at this one… see the full article for all the details. One way to get old-looking photographs is to use a vintage camera. Then again you can just connect a 1908 lens to a modern dslr with great results. [Thanks MS3FGX] Cheap iPad mounting [...]
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12:00
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Hack a Day
Sugar rocket We’re told that this rocket is sugar powered. It’s quite a bit bigger than the homemade sugar motors we saw last week and it makes for quite a show. [Thanks Estqwerty] Wooden PC construction The finished look of this wooden PC case seems very familiar to us but we’re not sure we’ve seen [...]
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13:00
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Hack a Day
6502 Gate Simulator Ever wondered what’s going on inside that chip as the program executes? Now you can take a look at the die itself with this visual gate simulator for the 6502 processor. [Thanks Puli and Svofski] Copper corrosion [Moogle] cracked open his DockStar to find corroded copper. It seems that Seagate left a [...]
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16:50
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Hack a Day
Hotel room door lock picking Here’s further proof that you should never leave anything of value in your hotel room. We’re not worried about someone getting in while the room is occupied. But these methods of defeating the chain lock and opening the door without a keycard (YouTube login required) do show how easy it is [...]
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15:26
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Hack a Day
EL back-lit keyboard A couple bucks worth of EL wire gives a nice green glow to [Mark Shasha's] T400 Elite. Hopefully [Jeri Ellsworth] has some time to pull those how-to videos together so that we can make our own EL wire to replicate this hack. Mini kaboom This tiny cannon is right out of Night at the [...]
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15:00
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Hack a Day
Creepy or not? Do you find these faces creepy or cute? They can display a huge range of facial gestures and the German engineers who designed them were trying to avoid the uncanny valley. That’s the point at which human features on a robot seem quite real, but are off in just the right way as [...]
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11:00
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Hack a Day
PCB Group Orders [Phil] wrote in to let us know about the DorkbotPDX group orders. The site makes group PCB orders until a cutoff date or the panel is full. You get three copies of your design with no setup fee for just $5/square inch including domestic postage. Not a bad price. We aren’t affiliated [...]
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Hack a Day
Radio Receiver If you never got the chance to build one as a kid [JoOngle] takes you through the steps to build your own radio receiver. Details are a bit scarce but it’s nothing your friend Google can’t help you out with. Fixing a Blackberry trackball If your Blackberry trackball stops working well you can [...]
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8:27
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Hack a Day
Precision CRT manufacture Here’s a great video from Tektronix about building a precision cathode ray tube. The tube manufacture method was developed to use in oscilloscopes and we’d guess it dates back to the early 1960′s. [Thanks Bill] Snake on an LED matrix We would have done a full post o this beautifully built LED matrix but [...]
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6:00
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Hack a Day
Nixie Voltmeter Clock [Gmglickman] built a clock out of an old digital voltmeter. The Fluke 8300A came out in 1969 and is featured in their 60 years of innovation slideshow. What makes it a cool clock? The Voltmeter’s display is made up of Nixie tubes. Easy optical encoder wheel generator If you need to print [...]
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7:00
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Hack a Day
Painting with light [Jo0ngle] wanted a fun toy and an easy conversation piece. He painted a square on the back of his door with some glow-in-the-dark paint. Now he can draw on it using a blu-ray laser or a UV flashlight. Either way, the effect is quite pleasing. [Thanks Justin] Resistor decoder rings This resistor [...]
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8:02
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Hack a Day
Take a few moments and browse this gallery from the Library of Congress. Tasked with the job of preserving the roughly 150 million historical items, they are constantly developing new methods using bleeding edge technology. There is an odd balance of some of the oldest documents in tandem with some of the newest technology evident [...]
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6:00
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Hack a Day
Cell phone chopper control Control your tiny inexpensive helicopter with a Nokia N900. The chopper uses an infrared remote control, just like a television. Getting this to work was just a matter of figuring out the IR commands and writing an app for the phone to spit them out. Fade to black; inconspicuously Lost interest [...]
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9:00
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Hack a Day
Remote motion control
This project walks though a method of controlling motors with an accelerometer when the two are physically separated. Two Arduinos are used, with the user interface and the motor control connected via Ethernet. This must be useful for something; maybe it should be the next step once you get your accelerometer up and [...]
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9:10
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Hack a Day
Cardboard record player
[Yen] tipped us off about this cardboard record player. It’s a marketing tool that you receive in the mail. Inside the cardboard packaging is a record and the packaging itself can be folded into a player.
Hackable handheld
The NanoNote is a tiny handheld housing a lot of power for a small price. It ships [...]
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8:22
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Hack a Day
137 years of the magazine Popular Science are now being hosted online by Google. You can peruse at your leisure, though you’ll have to search by keyword. We don’t see a date or issue browsing option. The cover art alone is worth your time, even if you’re not a fan of the articles. Many of us have fond [...]
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11:08
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Hack a Day
Powerplant control room panoramas:
There are two power plants presented in 360 degree panoramas here. All those dials and switches just get us giddy. The one pictured above was built in 1918 and is still in operation. Not only are the control rooms here, but several other locations around the facility too.
Energy recycling prosthetic foot:
At first, [...]
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7:24
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Hack a Day
$30,000?
Is it art or is it a puzzle? Well, it functions as a game but it’s certainly a work of art and priced accordingly. The Superplexus was featured in Make Mazine and Hammacher Schlemmer sells it for thirty grand (you can’t just click to add it to your cart though). Think of the work that [...]
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15:05
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Hack a Day
Bot gives head to passersby
This free range robot was spotted at this year’s Kinetica Art Fair. You can place your hand above it and it will stop and pour you a beer. That’s if you consider 7/8 of a glass of head ‘a beer’.
Photo booth adds fun – consumes floor space
Face it, photo booths are [...]
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6:26
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Hack a Day
Marble Junker
Here’s a quick and dirty kinetic sculpture. It’s a track for a steel marble to roll around in with a magnet on a rotating wheel to pick it up and start it over again. Not every hack has to be a beautiful masterpiece, they just need to be fun. Of course, if this were [...]
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12:44
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Hack a Day
Everyone Remembers Free day right? [The Ideanator's] Bus Pirate came in such a nice red box – he decided to make it his permanent case.
[Chico] is in the middle of making a CNC, but decided to make some music with the steppers in the mean time.
What looks like an old wooden box is actually [Ludvig's] [...]
