Saturday, September 30
Weekend Watch: Gaming Terrain with Vee, The Crafting Muse
The post Weekend Watch: Gaming Terrain with Vee, The Crafting Muse appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
LED Princess Dress Also Lights Up Girl’s Face
We’re pretty sure that [Luke] took Uncle of the Year last Halloween when he made an RGB LED princess dress for his niece. He recently found the time to document the build with a comprehensive how-to that’s just in time for Halloween ’17.
[Luke] made the system modular so that his niece could use it with any dress. The RGB LED strips are actually fastened down the inside of a petticoat — a fluffy, puffy kind of slip that’s worn underneath the dress. The LEDs face in toward the body, which helps diffuse the light. [Luke] first attached the strips with their own adhesive and then spent a lot of time sewing them down so they stayed put. At some point, he found that hot glue worked just as well.
The coolest part of this project (aside from the blinkenlights of course) is the power source. [Luke] used what he already had lying around: an 18V Ryobi battery pack. He wired a step-converter to it using a printed cap from Shapeways that’s designed to connect metal clips to the battery contacts. This cap really makes these packs useful for a lot of projects that need long-lasting portability.
These batteries are rated for 240W, which is overkill considering the load. But there’s a reason: it keeps heat to a minimum, since the electronics are hidden inside a cute little backpack. Speaking of cute, you can see his niece model the dress after the break.
Filed under: led hacks, wearable hacks
To better grok how all 37 trillion human cells work, we need new tools
Since 2016, a new version of that herculean effort is underway, known as the Human Cell Atlas.
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Enresoning An iPhone 8 Ring
The iPhone 8 was just released last week, and that means some people were standing in line in front of an Apple store for hours waiting to get their hands on the latest and greatest glowing rectangle. [Patrick Adair] had a better idea: he would stand in front of an Apple store for four hours, then do something productive with his new smartphone. With the help of a waterjet, some resin, a lathe, and some very fine grades of sandpaper, he created the Apple Ring.
Setting aside the whole process of actually acquiring an iPhone 8 on launch day, the process of turning an iPhone into a ring is more or less what you would expect. First, the iPhone was cut into ring-shaped pieces on a waterjet cutter. Special care was taken to avoid the battery, and in the end [Patrick] was able to get a nice chunk ‘o phone that included the camera lens.
This ring piece was then embedded in clear resin. For this, [Patrick] used Alumilite epoxy, a pressure pot, and a toaster oven to cure the resin. Once the phone parts were firmly encased for the rest of eternity, the ring blank moved over to the lathe. The center of the ring was bored out, and the process of sanding, polishing and gluing in all the tiny parts that fell out during the process commenced. The end result actually looks pretty great, and even though it’s probably a little too bulky, it is a remarkable demonstration of the craft of turning.
You can check out [Patrick]’s video below, along with a video from the Waterjet Channel showing the deconstruction of a glowing rectangle.
Thanks [Morris] for the tip!
Filed under: misc hacks
Essential Phone review: Impressive for a new company but not competitive
We have a new contender in the smartphone space. "Essential" is a new OEM that came seemingly out of nowhere, announced by Andy Rubin a mere nine months ago. Rubin is the co-founder and former CEO of Android Inc., a little company that was snatched up by Google in 2005 and went on to build the world's most popular operating system. Rubin left Google, and Essential is his new startup with ambitions in the smartphone and smart home markets. Amazon, Tencent, and Foxconn have already invested in Essential, and the latest round of funding values the company at more than a billion dollars—and this was before it even shipped a product.
With the launch of the "Essential Phone," we finally have that first product: a high-end, $700 smartphone running the operating system Rubin helped create. The phone more or less leaves Android alone, and, with the backing of hardware manufacturer Foxconn, most of the innovation here is in the hardware.
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MIDI to CV/Gate The Easy Way
Let’s say you’ve got a modular synthesizer. You’re probably a pretty cool person. But all your cool laptop DJ friends keep showing off their MIDI-controlled hardware, and you’re getting jealous. Well, [little-scale] has the build for you.
The Teensy 3.6 is the current top-of-the-line Teensy from PJRC, and it’s [little-scale]’s weapon of choice here. With USB-MIDI and two 12-bit DACs on board, it’s made creating an interface between the worlds of analog and digital music into a remarkably simple job. Control voltages for pitch and velocity are pushed out over the analog pins, while pin 29 is used for gate signals.
It’s a testament to the amount of development that has gone into the Teensy platform that such projects can be built with virtually no off-board components. The build is a further step forward in simplicity from [little-scale]’s previous work, using a Teensy 2 with an offboard DAC to generate the output voltages.
Here at Hackaday, we’ve always been big fans of adding computer control to analog hardware. This CNC mod to a guitar pickup winding machine is a great example.
Filed under: musical hacks
Teletype Machine Resurrected
A teleprinter is, at its heart, an automatic typewriter. It’s electrically controlled and has some smarts to be able to decode an incoming message and has something that will move the keys. These printers have been in use since the late 1800’s and [AethericLtd] have refurbished an old 1930’s design and given it a bit of steampunk flair.
As is common with older mechanical devices that have been sitting for extended periods of time, the first thing this machine needed was a bath. The machine was separated into its three main parts and soaked in a degreasing solvent. The keyboard was the dirtiest, so it got an overnight soak. Since little of the mechanism was electrical, most of it could be submerged which helped with the cleaning.
The next step in the restoration was lubrication. In order to do a proper job, the manuals (which were available online) were consulted and synthetic motor oil used for lubrication. Once all the hundreds of parts were oiled, [AethericLtd] started working on the wiring. The original wiring in this machine was called Deltabeston – a type of wire by General Electric which uses asbestos insulation. To play it safe, that wire was left alone. The selector magnet required only 4 volts to pull up, but 4 volts wasn’t enough to run the machine. The power supply used was a 120 VDC, 200 mA supply through a 2 KΩ, 10 W resistor.
Once everything was back together and working, [AethericLtd] could take machine out and show it off. The website describes not only the restoration process but also the setup, how to connect to the machine and how to communicate with the machine. Great work! If you are interested in these machines, there have been a few Teleprinter projects on the site before: this one has been modified to connect to a modern modem, and this one prints out tweets.
Filed under: hardware, repair hacks
Reuleaux Coaster
What’s better than a cool build? A cool build with valuable advice! Add a few flashy pictures and you have [Martin Raynsford]’s Reuleaux triangle coasters blog post. [Martin Raynsford] wanted to share his advice about the importance of using jigs and we’re sold. He was able to make 100 coasters in a single day and if he’s like us, after number ten, the work gets a little hurried and that is when mistakes are made.
Jig is a broad term when it comes to tooling but essentially, it holds your part in place while you work on it. In this case, a jig was made to hold the coaster pieces while they were glued together. [Martin Raynsford] didn’t need any registration marks on the wood so even the back is clean. If you look closely, the coaster is two parts, the frame and the triangle. Each part is three layers and they cannot separated once the glue dries. If any part doesn’t line up properly, the whole coaster is scrap wood.
This robot arm engraved 400 coasters in a day but maybe you would prefer if you simply had your beer delivered to your new coasters.
Filed under: Beer Hacks
Friday, September 29
Tips of the Week: Rolling Epoxy Putty in Flour, Cooling Plastic-Drilling with Water, Clever Uses of Black Hot Glue
The post Tips of the Week: Rolling Epoxy Putty in Flour, Cooling Plastic-Drilling with Water, Clever Uses of Black Hot Glue appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Simultaneous AP & Client on the Pi Zero W
The Raspberry Pi Zero W is a great platform for IoT projects, with a smattering of GPIO and onboard WiFi. However, security is an important consideration when it comes to the Internet of Things and it can be beneficial to keep your IoT devices on a separate network for safety’s sake. [Albert] wanted to do this all on board the Pi Zero W, and figured out how to get it acting as an access point and a client all at the same time.
[Albert] starts off with a fresh install of Raspbian Stretch, and sets the Pi up in OTG mode. This allows access to the Pi over a USB serial terminal. This is great for productivity when working on headless networking projects, as it can be frustrating trying to work with an SSH session that keeps dropping out when you change settings.
After creating a second named device (ap0) to go along with the one created automatically by the kernal (wlan0), DNSmasq is installed to act as a DHCP server for the AP. Hostapd is then installed to control the AP settings. Following this, like anything in Linux, a flurry of configuration files are edited to get everything humming along and starting up automatically after a reboot. For some reason, things don’t start up smoothly, so [Albert] has a cron job that fires 30 seconds after bootup and toggles the interfaces off and on again, and that’s done the trick.
It’s a useful hack, as it allows the Pi Zero to act as a hub for IoT devices, while also creating a bridge between them and the internet. Traffic can be managed to stop random internet users flicking your lights on and off and overspeeding your dishwasher.
We’ve seen the Pi Zero used for just about everything under the sun so far. If you’re just starting your own IoT build, perhaps you’d like to use the Pi Zero as a streaming camera?
Filed under: Raspberry Pi
Snow Crash, Lazarus, and Ringworld shows are coming to Amazon Prime
Assuming all three remain true to their source material, each will be a very different vision of the future. Ringworld takes place nearly a thousand years from now in a post-scarcity culture. Written in 1970 and the first of a long-running series of books, the titular Ringworld is a vast habitat in space.
In Ringworld, our hero is a bored 200-year old hired by some aliens to investigate this artificial world—a 600 million-mile (950 million km) ribbon orbiting a Sun-like star. It's been awhile since I've read the book but it's easy to see how previous attempts to adapt it for the screen have ended in failure. But with an Amazonian budget and and ever-more capable CGI, now might be the perfect time to try.
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Android users rejoice! Linux kernel LTS releases are now good for 6 years
A major change in the maintenance lifecycle of Linux kernels is coming. During a Linaro Connect 2017 presentation on Android's Project Treble, Googler Iliyan Malchev announced that Linux LTS (Long Term Support) kernels were switching from a two-year lifecycle to a whopping six years of support.
The free and open source Linux kernel powers most of the devices around us. It's not only present in computers and servers, it also powers most of the ARM devices on earth, so it's present in Android devices, the Internet of things, and almost anything else you can call "smart." Major new versions of the Linux kernel arrive about every 70 days. Not everyone wants to upend their existing system every 70 days to upgrade to the new kernel, though, so to help with this, the Linux kernel has traditionally had a "Long Term Support (LTS)" kernel, which is supported for two years. Rather than do a major kernel bump, devices can keep running an LTS kernel and regularly get bug and security fixes, which aren't as disruptive as full releases.
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Earth Rovers Explore Our Own Planet
While Mars is currently under close scrutiny by NASA and other space agencies, there is still a lot of exploring to do here on Earth. But if you would like to explore a corner of our own planet in the same way NASA that explores Mars, it’s possible to send your own rover to a place and have it send back pictures and data for you, rather than go there yourself. This is what [Norbert Heinz]’s Earth Explorer robots do, and anyone can drive any of the robots to explore whatever locations they happen to be in.
A major goal of the Earth Explorer robot is to be easy to ship. This is a smaller version of the same problem the Mars rovers have: how to get the most into a robot while having as little mass as possible. The weight is kept to under 500g, and the length, width, and height to no more than 90cm combined. This is easy to do with some toy cars modified to carry a Raspberry Pi, a camera, and some radios and sensors. After that, the robots only need an interesting place to go and an Internet connection to communicate with Mission Control.
[Norbert] is currently looking for volunteers to host some of these robots, so if you’re interested head on over to the project page and get started. If you’d just like to drive the robots, though, you can also get your rover fix there as well. It’s an interesting project that will both get people interested in exploring Earth and in robotics all at the same time. And, if you’d like to take the rover concept beyond simple exploration, there are other machines that can take care of the same planet they explore.
Filed under: robots hacks
Welcome to the Maker Culture in Turkey
The post Welcome to the Maker Culture in Turkey appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
The Hackers and the Hurricane
When natural disasters strike, particularly if they are in some of the less remote parts of the world, we see them unfolding in real-time on our television screens. They become a 24-hour rolling news exercise in disaster titillation, each fresh horror ghoulishly picked over by breathless reporters live-telecasting from windswept streets, and endlessly rehashed by a succession of in-studio expert guests.
Then once the required image of a dusty child being pulled from the rubble or a tearful mother describing her daughter being swept away is in the can, a politician somewhere is found in bed with a model or a tinpot dictator rattles his sabre, and the world moves on. The BAFTA or the Emmy is a certainty for this one, did you see the anguish!
Meanwhile on the ground, the situation remains the same. There is no power, no sanitation, no communications, no food, and help seems very far away. In the wake of the recent hurricane season across the Caribbean, there are millions of people whose worlds have been wrecked, and several international governments have faced significant criticism for their lethargic response.
In our world of hardware hackers and makers, we are on the whole practical people. We exist to make, and do, rather than to endlessly talk. Seeing the plight of the victims of Irma, Jose, or Maria leaves us wanting to do practical things to help, because that’s what we do. But of course, we can do nothing, because we’re thousands of miles away and probably lack whatever skills or training are in demand on the islands.
It’s heartening then to hear of just a few moments when our wider community has managed to be in the right place at the right time to offer some help. We’ve had a couple in our tips line lately we’d like to share.
[Csp3r] writes about the Derbycon conference held in Louisville, at which [Carlos Perez] and [Jose Quinones Borreros], information security specialists from Puerto Rico, were in attendance. They mentioned a need for emergency radios, and the community at the conference came together to raise money for much more than just a few radios. $15,000 was raised in all, spent on radios, solar chargers, generators, flashlights, USB battery packs, and tools. This amounted to a significant bulk, so Hackers For Charity helped secure some space on an aid flight to the island.
Then [Bruce Perens, K6BP] writes about a request from the American Red Cross to the ARRL for 50 radio amateurs to help with their relief efforts in Puerto Rico. They will perform the role you might expect of enabling essential communications, as well as to quote the ARRL: “help record, enter, and submit disaster-survivor information into the ARC Safe and Well system”. This is a request unprecedented in its scale, and reflects the level of damage across the island.
For most of us, the best we can do when helping out with these events will be to drop coins into an OXFAM or Red Cross collecting tin and leave it to the experts. But as we’ve noted above, for just a few of us the opportunity to do something a bit more useful presents itself. If you find yourself in that position, make it count!
We’ve looked at the role of amateur radio in public service before, and we’ve even featured it in one or two projects. This emergency box for example has all you’d need to provide this type of service.
Cyclone Catarina image from the ISS, [Public domain].
Filed under: Current Events, Featured, news
Prank Your Friends with This Chirping, Blinking Throwie
The post Prank Your Friends with This Chirping, Blinking Throwie appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Casa Jasmina Explores the Meaning of the Maker Home of the Future
The post Casa Jasmina Explores the Meaning of the Maker Home of the Future appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
OLED hacked power bank
In a feat of over-engineering, [Everett Bradford] hacked his power bank to add power monitor via an OLED display to show live current, voltage, temperature, and capacity information. The idea came when he learned about the INA219 chip. The INA219 is a current shunt and power monitor IC with an I²C or SMBUS compatible interface. The device is able to monitor both shunt voltage drop and bus supply voltage, with programmable conversion times and filtering. A programmable calibration value, combined with an internal multiplier, enables direct readouts of current in amperes. An additional multiplying register calculates power in watts.
With impressive miniaturization skills, [Everett] dissembles the Xiaomi Mi power bank and manages to add a custom power monitoring module and an OLED display. Not only that, he replaced the 4 LEDs that were the battery level indicators and actually consume more amps than his board plus the display. While active, the board consumes about 8mA. In sleep mode, it consumes less than 30µA.
The 32×64 OLED display and the custom-made circuit was assembled and tightly fitted into the original case. The power bank now gives readings of the battery charge level in a small graph, numeric current input/output, voltage and temperature. The seamless integration of the display into the power bank makes it look like something that could perfectly have come from a store. This is not your typical DIY power bank nor a gigantic 64 cells power bank. It is a precise and careful modification of an existing product, adding value, functionality, and dare I say it, style: an awesome hack!
We can see [Everett] process in the following video:
Filed under: hardware
How to Age and Distress Wood
The post How to Age and Distress Wood appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Pitmaster BBQ dashboard monitors your meat and veggies
Barbecue is all about temperature, about making sure that whatever is on the grill reaches the right temperature. At least, that is the part that makes sure you don’t poison people, because your food should get hot enough to kill any bacteria. [Chris Aquino] decided to take this a step further than simply sticking a thermometer into a hunk of meat by creating Pitmaster. This combination of hardware and software monitors the temperature of multiple chunks of food and alerts you when each is ready, all through a web interface.
Pitmaster is a project that demonstrates React, a new library for creating UIs that mashes together Javascript, HTML and various other technologies. [Chris] teaches React at DigitalCrafts.com and made Pitmaster as a demonstration of how to use it to quickly build a UI. It’s a neat build that runs on an Arduino and Raspberry Pi, with the first one monitoring the temperature of the multiple probes and the Pi keeping track of what food is on what sensor, then pushing this to a web interface. Each individual cooking job has a name and a temperature target attached to it, so you can keep track of as many cooking jobs as you have room or temperature sensors for.
Are there simpler ways to do this? Sure: anybody who is half decent with a barbecue can judge most foods by look and feel, but this system allows you to step away from the grill and still keep an eye on it. That could be important for longer jobs like smoking that require you to leave the food unattended. Plus, it’s a cool hack that shows how to use a new (and rather confusing) programming tool.
And didn’t we cover this just yesterday? Nope, that was yet another BBQ hack. (Are we becoming Grilladay?) Enjoy the last few weeks of warm weather while you can, hackers!
Filed under: cooking hacks
Thursday, September 28
Part Soldering Iron, Part Hand-Held Oscilloscope
If you are in the market for a temperature controlled soldering iron, an attractive choice of the moment is the TS-100 iron available by mail-order from China. This is an all-in-one iron with a digital temperature controller built into its handle, featuring a tiny OLED display. It’s lightweight, reasonable quality, and all its design and software are available and billed as open source (Though when we reviewed it we couldn’t find an open source licence accompanying the code.) This combination has resulted in it becoming a popular choice, and quite a few software hacks have appeared for it.
The latest one to come our way is probably best described as coming from the interface between genius and insanity without meaning to disparage the impressive achievement of its author. [Befinitiv] has implemented a working oscilloscope on a TS-100, that uses the soldering iron tip as a probe and the OLED as a display. It requires a small modification to the hardware to bring the iron contact into an ADC pin on the microcontroller, and there is currently no input protection on it so the iron could easily be fried, but it works.
It is strongly suggested in the write-up that this isn’t a production-ready piece of work and that you shouldn’t put it on your iron. At least, not without that input protection and maybe a resistive divider. But for all that it’s still an impressive piece of work, a working soldering iron that becomes a ‘scope on a menu selection. Take a look at the ‘scope-iron in action, we’ve posted a video below the break.
If you’re curious about the iron, you can read our TS-100 review. Alternatively if you have one and a ‘scope sounds too risky, how about putting Tetris on your iron?
Filed under: tool hacks
Dealmaster: Get a lightweight Dell business laptop for $600
Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is highlighted by discounts on a number of Dell laptops, desktops, and monitors. We've also got a roundup of your options for buying Amazon's latest round of Echo and Fire TV devices, savings on Luma's mesh Wi-Fi system, TV deals, and more.
You can find the rest of the deals below.
Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.
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The Google Assistant comes to Android TV, starting with the Nvidia Shield
The Google Assistant is rolling out to one more form factor, as Google announced today that Android TV is finally getting its flagship voice command system.
For now it's only on one device, the Nvidia Shield TV, but Google has said it's also coming to the Sony Bravia TV line in "the coming months." If you're wondering why this isn't debuting on a Google-made Android TV device, it's because one doesn't exist. Since the end of the Nexus Player's run in 2016, Google hasn't offered a first-party Android TV device.
Voice commands are handled from the remote, which has a microphone built-in. Users can either press the mic button and issue a command, or just say "Ok Google" while the box is on. On Android TV, the Google Assistant specializes in navigation and content searching. You can ask it to play shows by name and, as long as you're subscribed to the right content providers, the shows will just play. There are general remote control commands like "pause" and "unpause," and you also get access to the full suite of other Google Assistant commands, like controlling smart home devices (great for turning off the lights before a movie), asking questions, and accessing third-party voice apps.
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Retrotechtacular: An Oceanographic Data Station Buoy For The 1960s
When we watch a TV weather report such as the ones that plaster our screens during hurricane season, it is easy to forget the scale of the achievement they represent in terms of data collection and interpretation. Huge amounts of data from a diverse array of sources feed weather models running on some of our most powerful computers, and though they don’t always forecast with complete accuracy we have become used to their getting it right often enough to be trustworthy.
It is also easy to forget that such advanced technology and the vast array of data behind it are relatively recent developments. In the middle of the twentieth century the bulk of meteorological data came from hand-recorded human observations, and meteorologists were dispatched to far-flung corners of the globe to record them. There were still significant areas of meteorological science that were closed books, and through the 1957 International Geophysical Year there was a concerted worldwide effort to close that gap.
We take for granted that many environmental readings are now taken automatically, and indeed most of us could produce an automated suite of meteorological instruments relatively easily using a microcontroller and a few sensors. In the International Geophysical Year era though this technology was still very much in its infancy, and the film below the break details the development through the early 1960s of one of the first automated remote ocean sensor buoys.
Perhaps our last sentence conjures up a vision of something small enough to hold, from all those National Geographic images of intrepid oilskin-clad scientists launching them from the decks of research vessels. But the technology of the early 1960s required something a little more substantial, so the buoy in question is a (using the units of the day) 100 ton circular platform more in the scale of a medium-sized boat. Above deck it was dominated by an HF (shortwave) discone antenna and its atmospheric instrument package. Below deck (aside from its electronic payload) it had a propane-powered internal combustion engine and generator to periodically charge its batteries. In use it would be anchored to the sea floor, and it was designed to operate even in the roughest of maritime conditions.
The film introduces the project, then looks at the design of a hull suitable for the extreme conditions like a hurricane. We see the first prototype being installed off the Florida coast in late 1964, and follow its progress through Hurricane Betsy in 1965. The mobile monitoring station in a converted passenger bus is shown in the heart of the foul weather, receiving constant telemetry from the buoy through 40 foot waves and 110 mph gusts of wind.
We are then shown the 1967 second prototype intended to be moored in the Pacific, this time equipped with a computerised data logging system. A DEC PDP-8 receives the data mounted in the bus, and are told that this buoy can store 24 hours at a stretch for transmission in one go. Top marks to the film production team for use of the word “data” in the plural.
Finally we’re told how a future network of the buoys for presumably the late 1960s and early 1970s could be served by a chain of receiving stations for near-complete coverage of the major oceans. At the height of the Cold War this aspect of the project would have been extremely important, as up-to-the-minute meteorological readings would have had considerable military value.
The film makes an engaging look at a technology few of us will ever come directly into contact with but the benefits of which we will all feel every time we see a TV weather forecast.
Thanks [KB1LQC] for the tip.
Filed under: Retrotechtacular
