Tuesday, January 31
10 Charging Station Projects
The post 10 Charging Station Projects appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Cheap DIY FPV Micro-Drone
FPV drones are a fun but often costly hobby for beginners. Opting for a smaller drone will reduce the chance of damaging the drone when one invariably crashes and the smaller props are also a lot safer if there are any innocent bystanders. YouTuber and Instructables user [] wanted a cheap FPV capable drone that they could comfortably fly in-and-out of doors, so of course they built their own.
Once the drone’s frame was 3D printed, the most complex part about soldering four small-yet-powerful 8.5 mm motors to the Micro Scisky control board is ensuring that you attach them in the correct configuration and triple-checking them. A quick reshuffling of the battery connections and mounting the FPV camera all but completed the hardware side of the build.
Before plugging your flight controller into your PC to program, [Constructed] warns that the battery must be disconnected unless you want to fry your board. Otherwise, flashing the board and programming it simply requires patience and a lot of saving your work. Once that’s done and you’ve paired everything together, the sky — or ceiling — is the limit!
In their Instructable, [Constructed] provides a full list of the parts they purchased, as well as alternative options — like building the frame out of popsicle sticks if you lack 3D printer access — for anyone wanting to make their own. Definitely a far cry from the $415 price tag seven years ago.
Filed under: drone hacks
Awesome Prank or Circuit-Breaker Tester?
Many tools can be used either for good or for evil — it just depends on the person flipping the switch. (And their current level of mischievousness.) We’re giving [Callan] the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that he built his remote-controlled Residual Current Device (RDC) tripper for the purpose of testing the safety of the wiring in his own home. On the other hand, he does mention using it to shut off all the power in his house during an “unrelated countdown at a party”. See? Good and evil.
An RCD (or GFCI in the States) is a kind of circuit breaker that trips when the amount of current in the hot and neutral mains power lines aren’t equal and opposite, which would suggest that the juice was leaking out somewhere, hopefully not through someone. They only take a few milliamps of imbalance to blow so that nobody gets hurt. Making a device to test an RCD is easy; a resistor between hot and the protective ground circuit would do.
[Callan] over-engineers. He used a 50 W resistor where 30 W would do under the worst circumstances. A stealthy solid-state relay switches the resistor in, driven by an Uno and a Bluetooth module, so he can trip his circuit breakers from his smartphone, naturally.
He did find one circuit in his house with an unconnected protective earth line, so the device fulfilled its safety function. But it points out a weakness with this project as a prank device: he can only punk people who have properly installed circuit breakers, after all. Relative to the way we’ve tested our circuit breakers, this is a relatively safe project. But still, have a read through our nice guide on working with mains voltage if you’re insecure in your mains safety practices.
Filed under: home hacks
Dealmaster: Get a Dell Latitude 14 business notebook for just $599
Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a big list of deals to share with you. One of today's featured deals is the Dell Latitude 14 notebook with Windows 10 Pro, a Core i7 processor, and a 500GB hard drive for just $599. In addition, we have a number of smart TVs on sale, as well as monitors, gaming headsets, and more.
Check out the full list of deals below.
Featured
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Help archaeologists find new treasures by analyzing satellite data
©DigitalGlobe 2016
When archaeologists want to find lost monuments or hidden cities these days, they turn to satellite imagery. Patterns invisible to the eye on the ground become obvious from the air and help scientists decide where they should start digging. And now you can join those scientists by signing up for GlobalXplorer, a newly launched online community where members look at real satellite imagery from Peru to identify telltale patterns of ancient habitation.
GlobalXplorer is similar to other online citizen science efforts like Galaxy Zoo, where members identify galaxies from deep-field images. When you visit GlobalXplorer, you'll be shown one map tile from a satellite shot of Peru. Each tile is about 200 by 200 meters, and is one of roughly 120 million such tiles in the database. After a quick tutorial on the kinds of features to look for, you'll be asked to identify whether the tile contains evidence of looting (in the tutorial, you'll learn that looting holes produce a very distinctive pattern), illegal encroachment by developers, or a possible ancient structure. The more tiles you classify, the more you can level up and gain access to new data and more-difficult identification tasks.
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Launching A Kickstarter: Behind The Scenes
The post Launching A Kickstarter: Behind The Scenes appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Tiny Robot Clings To Leaves With Static Electricity
Flying is an energy-intensive activity. The birds and the bees don’t hover around incessantly like your little sister’s quadcopter. They flit to and fro, perching on branches and leaves while they plan their next move. Sure, a quadcopter can land on the ground, but then it has to spend more energy getting back to altitude. Researchers at Harvard decided to try to develop flying robots that can perch on various surfaces like insects can.
Perching on surfaces happens electrostatically. The team used an electrode patch with a foam mounting to the robot. This allows the patch to make contact with surfaces easily even if the approach is a few degrees off. This is particularly important for a tiny robot that is easily affected by even the slightest air draft. The robots were designed to be as light as possible — just 84mg — as the electrostatic force is not particularly strong.
It’s estimated that perching electrostatically for a robot of this size uses approximately 1000 times less power than during flight. This would be of great use for surveillance robots that could take up a vantage point at altitude without having to continually expend a great deal of energy to stay airborne. The abstract of the research paper notes that this method of perching was successful on wood, glass, and a leaf. It appears testing was done with tethers; it would be interesting to see if this technique would be powerful enough for a robot that carries its own power source. Makes us wonder if we ever ended up with tiny flyers that recharge from power lines?
We’re seeing more tiny flying robots every day now – the IMAV 2016 competition was a great example of the current state of the art.
[via Gizmodo, thanks Itay for the tip!]
Filed under: robots hacks
The BAC Mono is basically a Formula 3 car for the road
Jim Resnick
It was a day I dreaded at the last minute, but not for any expected reason. Driving BAC's single-seat track-day weapon, the Mono, on a course I'd never seen before was child's play compared to the filter through which I'd have to do it. I threw my back out 36 hours prior, with the long muscles in my back clenching up stiff and unyielding like mandolin strings. Merely walking upright required an unsightly posture for which I was both embarrassed and pissed off. There wasn't enough ibuprofen in the world.
But the Mono didn't care, and that's what mattered. Much more race car than road car, the BAC Mono comes from that specialized region of the automotive fringe that seeks the closest thing to an actual thoroughbred professional race car, but for mere enthusiasts who missed the professional racing driver boat and have normal careers as bankers, lawyers, software engineers, or journalists. The demographic for track-day specials like the Mono is nonsensical until you realize that the entire family of car diseases—and the track-day strain of it in particular—cares not for demographics. Cater to the passionate and the passionate will come.
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A look at the new battery storage facility in California built with Tesla Powerpacks
Megan Geuss
ONTARIO, CALIF.—East of LA, a natural gas peaker plant surrounded by fields of cows got a new, futuristic neighbor. Under a maze of transmission lines, a 20MW battery storage facility made of nearly 400 closet-sized batteries sitting on concrete pads now supplies 80MWh to utilities.
The project is an anomaly not just because it’s one of the largest energy storage facilities on the grid in California today, but because it was built in record time—the project was just announced in September when regulators ordered utility Southern California Edison to invest in utility-scale battery storage, a year after a natural gas well in Aliso Canyon, California sprung a leak and released 1.6 million pounds of methane into the atmosphere. The leak prompted a shutdown of the natural gas storage facility, one of the largest west of the Mississippi. Regulators were concerned that such a shutdown would cause energy and gas shortages, although that worry has not come to fruition entirely, and SoCal Gas has begun tentatively withdrawing gas again in recent weeks.
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Driving the Tesla Model S through the countryside—watch out for autopilot
Sebastian Anthony
Reading about the Tesla Model S has become rather repetitive. Yes, it's an electric car. Yes, supercharging is free (well, for those who bought a car before 2017). Yes, autopilot is really cool (but really quite scary on country roads). And yes, the P90D (now the P100D) 0-60mph acceleration is truly insane.
But, when you get right down to it, how important are those things for everyday use, and how many of them are just technorgiastic concepts that drive lots of headline clicks?
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What if Different Artists Made This Sculpture? Using Drones to Find Out
The post What if Different Artists Made This Sculpture? Using Drones to Find Out appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
How DJ Sures Built EZ-Robot from the Ground Up
The post How DJ Sures Built EZ-Robot from the Ground Up appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Your Arm Is The Ideal Controller
With interest and accessibility to both wearable tech and virtual reality approaching an all-time high, three students from Cornell University — [Daryl Sew, Emma Wang, and Zachary Zimmerman] — seek to turn your body into the perfect controller.
That is the end goal, at least. Their prototype consists of three Kionix tri-axis accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors (at the hand, elbow, and shoulder) to trace the arm’s movement. Relying on a PC to do most of the computational heavy lifting, a PIC32 in a t-shirt canister — hey, it’s a prototype! — receives data from the three joint positions, transmitting them to said PC via serial, which renders a useable 3D model in a virtual environment. After a brief calibration, the setup tracks the arm movement with only a little drift in readings over a few minutes.
[Sew, Wang and Zimmerman] see their project as an easy-to-implement alternative to the high-end systems currently extant in the gaming, virtual reality, fitness and medical industries. We can’t wait ’till we can combine this with tracking individual fingers.
If seeing this project has warmed you up to the topic of rapid prototyping, check out [Ben Krasnow’s] advice on the topic from his SuperCon talk. We’d also like to point out [Bodo Hoenen’s] talk about a system that uses electromyography to pick up the movement of the muscles in the arm.
Filed under: hardware, Virtual Reality
DIY Roll Bender Keeps it Simple and Sturdy
If you’ve ever tried to bend a metal pipe or bar over your knee, you’ll know that even lightweight stock requires quite a bit of force. And the force needs to be properly directed, lest the smooth bend you seek become a kink or a crease. When your hands and knees no longer fill the bill, try [MakeItExtreme]’s sturdy and simple roll bender.
As we watched the video below, we had a little déjà vu — hadn’t the [MakeItExtreme] crew built a roll bender for their shop before? Turns out they had, but in reviewing that video, we can see why they gave it a second shot. This build is a model of simplicity compared to the previous. With a frame fabricated from just a few pieces of steel I-beam, this version is far more approachable than its big brother and just about as capable. The three forming rollers ride in stout pillow blocks and can be repositioned for different bending radii. A 2-ton hydraulic bottle jack provides the force needed to direct the stock through the rollers, which are manually powered. In a nice touch, the incomplete tool was used to create the rim of the large-diameter handwheel for the drive roller.
The tools keep piling up at [MakeItExtreme]’s open air workshop — we even get a glimpse of their heavy-lift electromagnet that we recently featured. As always, we love the fit and finish on these builds, and watching the time-lapse videos is like a condensed class in metalworking.
Filed under: tool hacks
GSM Sniffing on a Budget with Multi-RTL
If you want to eavesdrop on GSM phone conversations or data, it pays to have deep pockets, because you’re going to need to listen to a wide frequency range. Or, you can just use two cheap RTL-SDR units and some clever syncing software. [Piotr Krysik] presented his work on budget GSM hacking at Camp++ in August 2016, and the video of the presentation just came online now (embedded below). The punchline is a method of listening to both the uplink and downlink channels for a pittance.
[Piotr] knows his GSM phone tech, studying it by day and hacking on a GnuRadio GSM decoder by night. His presentation bears this out, and is a great overview of GSM hacking from 2007 to the present. The impetus for Multi-RTL comes out of this work as well. Although it was possible to hack into a cheap phone or use a single RTL-SDR to receive GSM signals, eavesdropping on both the uplink and downlink channels was still out of reach, because it required more bandwidth than the cheap RTL-SDR had. More like the bandwidth of two cheap RTL-SDR modules.
Getting two RTL-SDR modules to operate in phase is as easy as desoldering a crystal from one and slaving it to the other. Aligning the two absolutely in time required a very sweet hack. It turns out that the absolute timing is retained after a frequency switch, so both RTL-SDRs switch to the same channel, lock together on a single signal, and then switch back off, one to the uplink frequency and the other to the downlink. Multi-RTL is a GnuRadio source that takes care of this for you. Bam! Hundreds or thousands of dollar’s worth of gear replaced by commodity hardware you can buy anywhere for less than a fancy dinner. That’s a great hack, and a great presentation.
Thanks [dnet] for the tip!
Filed under: phone hacks
Hacking Together a Serial Backpack
A serial backpack is really nothing more than a screen and some microcontroller glue to drive it. And a hammer is nothing more than a hardened weight on the end of a stick. But when you’re presented with a nail, or a device that outputs serial diagnostic data, there’s nothing like having the right tool on hand.
A simple screen with a serial port is a great device to have on hand, and it makes a great project. We’ve seen them around here before, of course. And while you could just order one online, why not make your own? Who knows what kind of crazy customizations you might dream up along the way.
Filed under: Microcontrollers
Sticking With The Script For Cheap Plane Tickets
When [Zeke Gabrielse] needed to book a flight, the Internet hive-mind recommended that he look into traveling with Southwest airlines due to a drop in fares late Thursday nights. Not one to stay up all night refreshing the web page indefinitely, he opted to write a script to take care of the tedium for him.
Settling on Node.js as his web scraper of choice, numerous avenues of getting the flight pricing failed before he finally had to cobble together a script that would fill out and submit the search form for him. With the numbers coming in, [Grabrielse] set up a Twilio account to text him once fares dropped below a certain price point — because, again, why not automate?
[Gabrielse]’s patience paid off and he managed to snag tickets for thirty-six freaking dollars apiece. Saving money and learning a few tricks — what’s not to love? Of course, he was also generous enough to provide a GitHub link to his code and some instructions to boot.
Next step, automating your Android games.
[via /r/programming]
Filed under: software hacks
Monday, January 30
At SpaceX headquarters, 27 teams test out half-size Hyperloop pods
Megan Geuss
HAWTHORNE, Calif.—On a hot, Southern California Sunday, 27 teams gathered to show off their model Hyperloop pods. But only three won a chance to load their pods into a low-pressure environment created in a 0.75 mile (1.25 km) Hyperloop test tube built by SpaceX next to the company’s headquarters. Those teams—from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, WARR (a student group within Munich Technical University), and Delft University of Technology—were determined to have some of the most sophisticated pods, capable of levitation, braking, and running on their own power.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk popularized the idea of the Hyperloop—a theoretical pod system that runs in low-pressure tubes, hovering along a track using magnetic skis to minimize friction. As Musk imagined it in 2013, the system would send pods up to 760 mph. But the CEO decided that he didn’t want to work on the project himself, so he made his ideas available to anyone interested in running with it. That spawned several startups as well as this competition for students and other private research teams.
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