Feed aggregator
Filabot Reclaimer Recycles Plastics Into Filament
Tyler McNaney’s Filabot Reclaimer grinds, melts, and extrudes waste plastic into 3D printing filament. Filabot is a desktop extruding system, capable of grinding various types of plastics, to make spools of plastic filament for 3D printers. Not only is it user friendly, but it is also environmentally friendly. The Filabot [...]
DIY NES controller makes no changes to the design
We like this project for its sheer simplicity. After all, recreating the hardware in the controller for a modern gaming system is next to impossible. [Guillermo A. Amaral B.] had a bunch of parts sitting around and decided to try his hand at recreating an original Nintendo Entertainment System controller.
If you’re not familiar with the electronics inside this brand of retro gaming hardware you might be surprised to find that there’s barely any logic hardware at all. The chip in the middle of the board is a 4021 parallel to serial shift register. It connects to the buttons and uses the clock signal coming through the cable to pulse out the button states over a serial wire. So all that [Guillermo] did was lay out the chip with connects for each button.
In the image above his thumb is obscuring the 5-way switch used for directional control and select (center click). The yellow and green buttons serve as A and B, with the start button on the opposite side of the board due to a mistake in his board layout. He does have some future plans for this. He’s working on a Raspberry Pi project that will monitor and record the controller serial data so that you can play it back. It sounds like a player piano for video games.
Want to see a really small version of this? The same hardware in a smaller package was put together a couple of months ago to build the world’s smallest NES controller.
[via Adafruit]
Filed under: nintendo hacks
Great antenna for software defined radio is really easy to make
The University of Kent’s hackerspace, TinkerSoc, recently had a talk on software-defined radio using an incredibly inexpensive USB TV tuner. Of course this is nothing new to Hackaday readers, but they did manage to build one of the best antennas for their TV dongle. It’s a discone antenna, and is perfectly suited for tuning into a whole bunch of really cool things such as weather balloons and aircraft transponders.
The idea discone antenna looks exactly like its namesake; a metal disk attached to a metal cone. Of course with the frequencies the RTL software-defined radio deals with, it’s rarely necessary to build antennas out of sheet metal. The team at TinkerSoc built their discone out of galvanized garden wire and attached it to the input of their TV tuner.
All the dimensions for their discone antenna were gleaned from [ve3sqb]‘s antenna design programs. Since TinkerSoc designed their antenna for 110 MHz, it ended up being pretty large. For higher frequencies, though, a discone antenna become fairly small and more than portable enough for a mobile rig.
Filed under: radio hacks
Reverse engineering the Furby
Furby teardowns are a favorite of ours, and there’s nothing quite like flaying open a creepy talking deformed animatronic owl/hell beast. There’s a lot you can do with a set of screwdrivers and a pair of scissors, but it takes a real clever person to reverse engineer a Furby without any disassembly (Russian, here’s the translation).
The new Furby comes with an iOS and Android app that allows children to interact with the Furby by feeding it, giving it commands, and even translating the Furbish into English. These apps work by playing a WAV file encoded with commands that give the Furby something to eat, or tell it to dance a merry jig.
Commands are delivered with these WAV files by means of a 4-digit, 4-bit code, complete with checksums. There are ten bits the Furby actually responds on, meaning there are potentially 1024 different commands the Furby can accept.
[iafan] wrote a Perl script to listen in on the audio generated by the Android Furby app and correlated all the possible commands with actions taken by the Furby. Everything is up on a git, allowing anyone to play an audio file and control the Furby’s mood and actions.
With this it should be possible to remotely control a Furby, letting it dance whenever you receive an email, or making it angry whenever someone retweets you. It’s a lot more clever than just putting a Furby through a wood chipper, but considering how creepy these things are, we’re not going to say it’s better.
Filed under: toy hacks
Raspberry Pi becomes a guitar effects processor
One of the more interesting use cases for the Raspberry Pi is exploiting its DSP capabilities in interesting ways. There’s a lot of horsepower inside the Raspberry Pi, more than enough to do some very interesting things with audio, all while being powered by a small wall wart adapter. [Pierre] over on the Pure Data mailing list has a proof-of-concept working that uses the Raspi as a guitar effects processor. The results are very encouraging – [Pierre] is able to use his Raspi as a delay, pitch shifter, and of course a classic flanger, phaser, and chorus with a latency of about 16 ms.
There are a few steps necessary to get low latency with the Raspi’s audio interface. [Pierre] is running his Pi headless, and allocated more RAM to the CPU.
If you’d like to try this out for yourself, [Pierre] has a tutorial for setting up Pure Data with the Raspberry Pi. He’ll be updating his blog soon with more tutorials and verified USB audio interfaces later.
Check out the processor in action after the break.
Filed under: musical hacks, Raspberry Pi
How To (Or How Not To) Make A Coil Gun
With all the recent publicity surrounding guns, Mehdi Sadaghdar (and his eyebrows) of Electroboom decided it'd be a good idea to show the world how to build one, in the form of a coil gun.
Introducing Maker Media, Inc
I case you missed the news late last week, O'Reilly Media made an important announcement: Maker Media, Inc. has been spun off as its own company. All parties involved are thrilled by this evolution of our business.
High-Power Motor Controller
This looks intriguing, the Paragon, an Arduino motor controller designed to be robust enough even to control an electric car, evidently designed to run a Power Racing Series car. The maker, Alex McLees, is a founding member of Madison, WI hackerspace Sector 67. [via PPPRS]Filed under: Arduino
MAKE Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup
Home Projection Screen with Exposed Brick Frame
Instructables user Falkenberg posted process photos of converting a wall into a projection screen with a beautiful exposed brick frame. With the help of a friend who’s a professional painter, they stripped through the layers of paint, wallpaper, and plaster down to the brick wall and cleaned the bricks with [...]
A breakout board for a tiny WiFi chip
A few weeks ago, we caught wind of a very tiny, very inexpensive WiFi chip TI is producing. Everything required of an Internet connection – TCP/IP stack, configuration utilities, and your WEP, WPA, and WPA2 security tools is included in a single tiny chip, making this a very cool device for an Internet-connected microcontroller project. There’s only one problem: TI put this chip in a really, really weird package, and there aren’t any breakout boards for it.
That is, until now. [Vince] was convinced to spend some time in Altium to design a breakout board for this tiny WiFi chip. Now, if you can get your hands on a sample of the CC3000 from TI, you can breadboard out a circuit with the help of [Vince]‘s design.
Included in [Vince]‘s git are the board files for this breakout board, schematics, and the necessary parts if anyone has the inclination to make an Eagle library. If anyone wants to spin a few of these boards and put them up on a Tindie Fundraiser, that’d be fine by us, and [Vince] would probably appreciate that as well.
Filed under: hardware, wireless hacks
Tell Siri to Open your Garage Door with Raspberry Pi
We all know Siri as the lovable (?) Iphone assistant you can talk to if you need mundane info like the nearest Mexican restaurant or the tallest actor to ever appear in movies. But now, Raspberry Pi Forum user DarkTherapy has figured out how to order Siri to open his garage door.
Turning the Stellaris Launchpad into a logic analyzer
If you have a Stellaris Launchpad sitting around, have a go at using it as a logic analyzer
The Stellaris logic analyzer is based upon this earlier build that took code from a SUMP comparable Arduino logic analyzer and ported it to the much faster and more capable Stellaris Launchpad with an ARM Cortex 4F processor.
This build turns the Launchpad into a 10 MHz, 8-channel logic analyzer with a 16 kB buffer comparable with just about every piece of software thanks to the SUMP protocol. Even though the ARM chip in the Launchpad isn’t 5 Volt tolerant, only pins 0 and 1 on Port B are limited to 3.6 Volts. All the other pins on Port B are 5 Volt tolerant.
Not a bad piece of work to turn a Launchpad that has been sitting on your workbench into a useful tool.
Filed under: tool hacks
It’s-a Me, Makio!
I'm working on a project for Make Volume 35 which — spoiler alert — helps you make molds of your choice and use that to cook Patti-Goop in a self-made oven. The other night, we made some Mario-themed Patti-Goop accessories for Makey the Robot, and when we put them on, Makey transformed into Makio!
Extracting data with USB HID
High security workstations have some pretty peculiar ways of securing data. One of these is disabling any USB flash drives that may find their way into a system’s USB port. Security is a cat and mouse game, so of course there’s a way around these measures. [d3ad0ne] came up with a way of dumping files onto an SD card by using the USB HID protocol.
We’ve seen this sort of thing before where a microcontroller carries an executable to extract data. Previously, the best method was to blink the Caps Lock LED on a keyboard, sending one bit at a time to a micocontroller. [d3ad0ne]‘s build exploits the USB HID protocol, but instead of 1 bit per second, he’s getting about 10kBps.
To extract data from a system, [ d3ad0ne] connects a Teensy microcontroller to the USB port. After opening up Notepad, [ d3ad0ne] mashes the Caps Lock key to force the Teensy to type out a script that can be made into an executable. This executable is a bare-bones application that can send any file back over the USB cable to the Teensy where it’s stored on an SD card. Short of filling the USB ports in a workstation with epoxy, there’s really no way to prevent secure files from leaking out of a computer.
Filed under: security hacks
Falconer’s Bubble Photography
Photographer Tom Falconer lives in one of the most beautiful places on Earth: Truckee, California, in the Lake Tahoe area. Couple his location with his mad photography skills, and it’s no wonder his Flickr sets are among my favorites on the web. Tom takes particularly incredible bubble photos and has [...]
Adding shoulder buttons to an RC transmitter
[Gerard] does puppeteering and animatronics work, and to remotely control his creations and characters he uses an off-the-shelf remote control radio. It’s you basic 6-channel setup, but [Gerard] wanted a way to control eye blinks and other simple actions with the press of a button. Sure, he could use the toggle switches on his transmitter, but he wanted something that wouldn’t require turning a servo on and off again. To fix this problem, [Gerard] added shoulder buttons to his transmitter with only a little bit of soldering.
[Gerard]‘s transmitter uses toggle switches to send a signal on channels five and six. To add his push buttons, he simply drilled a hole in the plastic enclosure, installed a pair of push buttons, and wired them in parallel to the toggle switches.
Now [Gerard] has momentary switches on channels five and six, perfect for making his creations blink. Since the buttons are wired in parallel with the switches, flicking the switches to the ‘on’ position in effect takes the button out of the circuit, just in case the transmitter gets jostled around.
Filed under: hardware, radio hacks
Gizmo Board, a tiny x86 dev board
With the Raspberry Pi and sever other ARM dev boards seeing their time in the lime light, it’s no surprise other chip manufacturers would want to get in on the action. AMD is releasing a very tiny x86 dev board called the Gizmo, a four-inch square board that shrinks a desktop computer down to the palm of your hand.
The Gizmo is powered by a dual-core x86 Brazos CPU running at 1 GHz with an included Radeon HD 6250 graphics engine. Also on the board is 1GB of DDR3 RAM, a SATA, Ethernet, USB, VGA, Audio, PCI and PCIe ports, and a ton of GPIO pins that include ADCs and DACs. All this in a four-inch square package that boasts about twice the performance of a Raspberry Pi.
While the price of the Gizmo – $200 for an explorer kit - will probably preclude it from being as popular as a Raspberry Pi or other ARM board, sometimes you just need an x86 platform to do the job. With the powerful graphics potential of the Gizmo, we could easily see this board being used in a few computer vision or autonomous robot builds.
Filed under: hardware
Pinoccio – An Ecosystem for the Internet of Things
[Pinoccio] is currently an Indeigogo crowd-sourced project that aims use the real-world programmability of the Arduino through the internet using a wifi connection. One could rightly point out that this can already be done through the use of a wifi shield. Before ruling this device out, just “shush your shussins” and consider that it’s designed specifically for interfacing with “things” over the internet. This can replace several components (see 1:10 in the video after the break) and should be less of a hassle.
Additionally, with a shield on one of these devices, several other [Pinoccio] boards can communicate with the Internet using this as a hub in a mesh network. This is similar to how the many “smart” electrical meters work, with a grid router being a central hub for communications. Additionally, this board has a built in temperature sensor and a RGB (instead of a single-color) LED, so you can do some interesting stuff with it right out of the box. Assuming this project gets funded, which seems likely at this point, we’re excited to see the projects that get built using it!
Filed under: Microcontrollers, wireless hacks
Pages
