The Delta router + 4th axis

deltarouter

Barton Dring wrote a post on his blog detailing his Delta router build, he made it for ORD Camp:

This year there happened to be a session on creativity with constraints. The question we debated for an hour was, do constraints help or hurt the creative process. Constraints can move you out of your comfort zone and maybe that is a big part of creativity. The topic was perfect for me because I had intentionally challenged myself with a few constraints on this project.

  • Use non captive stepper motors. Not a lot of people have seen these in use, they are cool to watch and they simplify the design.
  • Limit myself to 3 unique fabicated parts. People keep thinking deltas are more complicated than . This was to demonstrate the simplicity. Go ahead, design a Cartesian machine with only 3 unique fabricated parts. All other parts had to be commonly available parts.
  • Use stock reprap software. I could only touch the configuration files.

Check out the video after the break. Continue reading “The Delta router + 4th axis”

KMel Robotics flying robots play instruments

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KMel Robotics flying robots that can play instruments:

Just a reminder about how this all works: each one of these robots has its position measured down to the millimeter (or better) at a very high frequency using an external localization system. The individual hexrotors themselves are being centrally controlled by a computer somewhere else, sort of like a puppeteer system.

Via Hacked Gadgets.

Check out the video after the break.

Continue reading “KMel Robotics flying robots play instruments”

A small GPS Arduino watch/clock

clock

Here’s Oscar Liang another Arduino GPS project, he writes:

Garlow stands for GPS Arduino Rechargeable Logger OLED Watch. The device gives GPS information which is logged on SD card and shown on a OLED display. It can be carried as a watch or simply used as a GPS data logger. The whole system is based on Arduino Nano, with a Lipo power management module which enables USB battery recharge.

Check out the video after the break. Continue reading “A small GPS Arduino watch/clock”

A simple posture sensor

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Here’s a simple cure for your posture and the back pain blues, a posture sensor by Wingman:

The simplest distance sensors are ultrasonic or infrared sensors. I went with a SR-HC04 because it is cheap and sufficiently precise. There are no special requirements to the controller so I am using an Attiny85. A small piezo speaker provides acoustic feedback to the user. The only thing left is the power supply for which 5V are needed because of the ultrasonic sensor. You could easily use an USB port but I did not want to rely on a computer, 3 button cells deliver around 4,5V and should work for a few days.

Taylor Chiropractic & Wellness has been helping people ease their chronic back pain.

Hacker Camp Shenzhen Day 1: Surviving Shenzhen, Chinese Lesson, Market

By ian

Ian @ Dangerous Prototypes discusses survival in Shenzhen and Huaqiangbei Electronics Market etiquette, Jin @ FlyLin gives a short Chinese lesson. Morning discussions from Hacker Camp Shenzhen 2014, Thursday April 3rd.

Presentations, pictures, and overview here.

Via Hacker Camp Shenzhen mini-site: Hacker Camp Shenzhen Day 1: Surviving Shenzhen, Chinese Lesson, Market

Digispark Pro – tiny, Arduino ready, USB and mobile dev board

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Ihsan informs us of Digitstump’s  inexpensive, tiny Arduino IDE ready, USB and mobile dev board, the Digispark Pro:

Serial over USB debugging, USB programmable, 14 i/o, SPI, I2C, UART, USB Device Emulation, Mobile Development Ready, Optional BT, BLE, Mesh, and Wi-Fi.
The super small, dirt cheap, always open source, Arduino compatible, USB (and Mobile and Wireless!) development (and production) platform, and follow-up to the original Digispark.
Easier to use, more pins, more program space, more features, more reliable – supporting the entire existing Digispark ecosystem of 25+ shields and adding Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, BLE shields and more! Ready for all your projects – including mobile hardware development! All still super affordable!
The Digispark Pro Ecosystem is the cheapest, Arduino compatible development platform for Mobile and Wireless hardware development.

You can visit their Kickstart page for more info.

Check out the video after the break.

Continue reading “Digispark Pro – tiny, Arduino ready, USB and mobile dev board”

Proto I/Os Arduino

ProtoArduino29

Ricardo of  Electropepper  writes about their latest project:

 Now i want to show you my most recent project, an arduino shield aimed for prototyping, it has 8 LEDs, four buttons a buzzer and a temperature sensor, like everything else in my website its all open source, you can check the project here

Via the contact form.

Check out the video after the break.

Continue reading “Proto I/Os Arduino”

The final key – Hardware password manager

Final-Key-Hardware-Password-Manager

The final key – Hardware password manager by cyberstalker.dk

The Final Key is a piece technology that solves a problem. The Final Key is a hardware password manager with encryption and focus on combining portability, compatibility security and easy of use. It is a hobbyproject of mine and not under any commercial distribution, you are also free to build your own clones if you like the idea. The Final Key is based around a 16 MHz Atmel ATmega3U4 microprocessor and 64 KiB of EEPROM for storage.
You connect to The Final Key using any serial terminal, and “triggers” the account you want to log into. Then you can focus the username/password field of the website/application you want to log into, and then you press the button and The Final Key acts as a keyboard and types your credentials directly into the receiving application.

Via Hacked Gadgets.

Cleanly de-soldering a pin header

boldport has written an article describing a technique he’s used for removing the header cleanly:

Know that sinking feeling after realising that you’ve soldered that 40-pin header on the wrong side of the board? I’ve come up with a technique that works for me for removing the header cleanly and I describe it in the video.

Hacker Camp Shenzhen Day 3: Big Hacker Shaokao (BBQ)

By ian

Time flies! No one believes this is the last day of Hacker Camp Shenzhen. There’s just one event left. A Hacker Shaokao (BBQ), and every hacker in Shenzhen is invited. Once again, we gathered at Exit C of Science museum metro stop, where every event started throughout the whole workshop. See the hacker BBQ chaos below the break!

Continue reading “Hacker Camp Shenzhen Day 3: Big Hacker Shaokao (BBQ)”

Hacker Camp Shenzhen Day 3: Office Hunting, Labor Supply, Starting a Business

By ian

Day 3, the final day of Hacker Camp Shenzhen. If you’re in love and you’ve decided to stay, Ian @ Dangerous Prototypes shows how to find a home and office. Presentation here.

Continue reading “Hacker Camp Shenzhen Day 3: Office Hunting, Labor Supply, Starting a Business”

chipKIT Project 4: Digital light meter

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Raj of Embedded Lab has a series of chipKIT tutorials.  This 4th project of a series will show you how to build a digital light meter using the chipKIT Uno32 board and the BH1750 digital light sensor:

A light meter is used to measure the intensity of illumination in a given area. It is widely used in schools, warehouses, factories, hospitals, office buildings, museums, art-galleries, parking garages, stadiums, and many more, to measure and maintain proper lighting levels. The intensity of illumination is usually expressed in Lux or foot-candles. As the 4th project in our chipKIT tutorial series, today we are going to build a digital light meter using the chipKIT Uno32 board and the BH1750 digital light sensor. This project uses Digilent’s chipKIT Basic I/O shield for displaying the measured light intensity in Lux, foot-candles, and Watts/m^2 units.

16F1509 ramp generator using the internal 5-bit DAC

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Charles Douvier of PNW/Electronics writes:

Turns out the DAC is probably the easiest peripheral I’ve used on the PIC. It took me longer to wait for the PICKit to update from 18F configuration to 16F. BUT.. if you’re having issues.. here you go:
A simple voltage follower (or however you want to buffer the output) is needed on the DAC output. It’s not designed to drive anything.
Don’t expect screaming speeds out of this thing…it’s just not going to happen. I ran mine up to 1.3KHz, which is more than enough for what I’m trying to accomplish. If you put an A/D converter in you could use that to control your ramp speed and you’d have yourself a nice driver for your VCO input on test equipment with properly conditioned output.

#FreePCB via Twitter to 2 random RTs

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Every Tuesday we give away two coupons for the free PCB drawer via Twitter. This post was announced on Twitter, and in 24 hours we’ll send coupon codes to two random retweeters.

Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week:

  • Hate Twitter and Facebook? Free PCB Sunday is the classic PCB giveaway. Catch it every Sunday, right here on the blog
  • Tweet-a-PCB Tuesday. Follow us and get boards in 144 characters or less
  • Facebook PCB Friday. Free PCBs will be your friend for the weekend

Some stuff:

  • Yes, we’ll mail it anywhere in the world!
  • Check out how we mail PCBs worldwide video.
  • We’ll contact you via Twitter with a coupon code for the PCB drawer.
  • Limit one PCB per address per month please.
  • Like everything else on this site, PCBs are offered without warranty.

We try to stagger free PCB posts so every time zone has a chance to participate, but the best way to see it first is to subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.

Hacker Camp Shenzhen Day 2: Export, Import, Shipping, Sourcing Agents

Hacker Camp Shenzhen, day 2, down to business with talks about sourcing agents, shipping, exporting, and importing. Guest speakers include Connie @ ArcBotics, Tully @ Samarai Circuits & Factory For All, and local sourcing agent Hanlai.

Continue reading “Hacker Camp Shenzhen Day 2: Export, Import, Shipping, Sourcing Agents”

Creating a Spotify remote with an Arduino and LCD shield


Steven from Hackshed writes about their latest project.

We have put together a Spotify remote using an Arduino and LCD Shield; it uses a .NET application as a controller and communicates with the Arduino to take input via push buttons and output to the LCD.

Project details are available from Hackshed.co.uk.

Optical mouse video output hack

The $5 mouse that you just tossed in the garbage might have had some hackable life still in it. As Conor Peterson shows us most optical mice are actually quite simply in operation with most of the hard work being done by the low resolution camera sensor. With a bit of Arduino code he was able to read out the serial image data directly from the mouse and display it on the monitor.

Via Hacked Gadgets.

Reverse engineer wireless temperature / humidity / rain sensors, part 1

Reverse_Engineer

Ray Wang writes:

I just wrote a series of three posts about how I reverse engineered a few off-the-shelf wireless temperature, humidity sensors and rain gauge, and used an Arduino to listen to and decode the sensor data. The tools involved are quite simple: an Arduino and a 433MHz RF receiver. I also used a sniffing circuit, sound card, and Audacity audio recording software to capture and identify the signal timings initially. The Arduino programs I wrote are provided in each post. Thanks!

Continue to Part 2 and Part 3.

Via the contact form.

Hak5 video: quadcopter with WiFi enabled Linux computer and RTL-SDR


What happens when you send up a quadcopter equipped with a Linux box, WiFi and an RTL-SDR dongle? Darren and company from Hak5 decided to find out. Their project used the SDR to receive ADS-B signals from aircraft hundreds of miles away.

The Hak5 team took a quadcopter up on top of a high mountain, attached to it a WiFi Pineapple (a small WiFi equipped Linux computer), an RTL-SDR dongle and a coax collinear antenna and then flew it up high. They ran dump1090, a Linux based ADS-B decoder on the WiFi pineapple and then broadcast the decoded information back to a laptop on the ground.

Although the results were less than favorable, it is still an interesting project to explore. Their poor results may be due to a nearby RF broadcast tower which could have been overloading the dongle, or EMF from the quadcopter motors.