Thursday, November 30
Tis the Season for Terror with DIY Krampus
The holiday season is full of many sounds; walking through your neighborhood on a winter night you may hear time-honored songs, the tinkling of glasses, and the laughter of good company. But if the chilly wind also brings to your ear the panicked sounds of screaming children, you may have wandered a bit to close to [Tyler Garner]’s house.
Rather than old Saint Nick or a couple of reindeer, [Tyler] decided to top the roof of his home with a disturbingly well done rendition of everyone’s favorite Austro-Bavarian goat-demon, Krampus. While he did finish the build off with a store-bought Krampus mask, every other component was made with about a 60/40 ratio of hardware to craft store scores. While your holiday decorations this year may not include any spawns of hell, the general construction techniques and resourcefulness [Tyler] shows in this build may come in handy when Halloween rolls around again.
The “skeleton” of Krampus is made up of PVC pipes and fittings mounted on an MDF base. Not only do the PVC fittings make it easy to recreate the rough anatomy of a humanoid figure, but if you don’t glue them all together, you can take it apart later for storage. We might have gone with something a little heartier than MDF for the base, but at least [Tyler] added a few pieces of galvanized pipe at the bottom to give it a little weight down low.
Things start to get interesting when [Tyler] adds sections of drainage pipe to his PVC skeleton to give it a more girth, as he was finding the bare PVC didn’t have a realistic presence when the robes were thrown over them. [Tyler] also uses expanding spray foam to soften up areas such as the hunched back, which may look messy but has the dual advantages of being cheap and fast.
The figure’s robes are made up of a patchwork of burlap, waterproofed with a spray on liner intended for pickup truck beds. With the application of red and black spray paint and the customary white fringe, it really nails the look.
A particularly nice detail is the hoof peeking out from beneath the robes, which [Tyler] made out of painted air-dry clay. It’s an awesome detail, though almost impossible to see once Krampus is mounted on the roof. Maybe it’s just us, but we think putting so much effort into a nearly hidden feature of a project is the true mark of a master craftsman; this is a secret little hoof that [Bob Ross] himself would be proud of.
While we can’t say we’ve played host to holiday scamps like Krampus or Belsnickle before, Hackaday has certainly seen its fair share of festive hacks over the years.
Filed under: Holiday Hacks
Google’s new AIY Vision Kit Lets You Build And Hack Your Own Intelligent Pi-Powered Camera
The post Google’s new AIY Vision Kit Lets You Build And Hack Your Own Intelligent Pi-Powered Camera appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Mathieu Stephan : The Making of a Secure Open Source Hardware Password Keeper
Mathieu Stephan is an open source hardware developer, a Tindie seller who always has inventory, a former Hackaday writer, and an awesome all-around guy. One of his biggest projects for the last few years has been the Mooltipass, an offline password keeper built around smart cards and a USB interface. It’s the solution to Post-It notes stuck to your monitor and using the same password for all your accounts around the Internet.
The Mooltipass is an extremely successful product, and last year Mathieu launched the Mooltipass Mini. No, it doesn’t have the sweet illuminated touch-sensitive buttons, but it is a bit cheaper than its big brother and a bit more resistant to physical attacks — something you want in a device that keeps all your passwords secure.
Mathieu didn’t build the Mooltipass alone, though. This is an Open Source project that has developers and testers from around the globe. It may have started off as a Hackaday Post, but now the Mooltipass has grown into a worldwide development team with contributors across the globe. How did Mathieu manage to pull this off? You can check out his talk at the 2017 Hackaday Superconference below.
So, how do you collaborate with dozens of developers spread out across the globe from California to Switzerland to New Zealand? The best solution Mathieu found was to implement features by consensus, obviously to use GitHub for versioning and source control, and actually documenting the code. These are obvious solutions, but best practices aren’t exactly common practices.
Communication was handled in groups, not through direct contact like IM, email, or some sort of messaging service. Just about everything was done through Google Groups and a Trello board, a convenient tool that can put tasks on a calendar. It’s a system that works for the Mooltipass team, and unlike a lot of Open Source projects, it’s easy for newcomers to digest what’s actually going on.
But this is a hardware project and a secure hardware project at that. This means the Mooltipass needs to be tamper-evident and hard to get into. The first Mooltipass had a plastic version, but for the Mooltipass Mini, the team went with all aluminum. This required CNC, and for the Mooltipass Mini that meant Chinese machining shops. Mathieu actually traveled to China to get these Mooltipasses made, and found a few surprising facets of Chinese manufacturing. The cheapest supplier for the milled enclosures was actually the most reliable. You never know what you’re going to get, apparently. Assembly was an issue, and not just because of the language barrier. However, Mathieu found an interesting solution to the problem of assembly: make a video. It’s so simple, so obvious, but oh so clever.
The Mooltipass and the Mooltipass mini are great examples of what can be done with Open Hardware. But what’s next? There’s a next-generation Mooltipass in the works that promises to be even more secure. This next-generation Mooltipass mini will have Bluetooth with a hardware option to disable it, the same Smart Card interface, and a secure microcontroller. It promises to be the best way to save your passwords, and we can’t wait to see what comes out of the lab from the Mooltipass team.
Filed under: cons, Hackaday Columns, Security Hacks
Next Week’s Bay Area Meetups
Next week we’ll be at a few awesome hardware meetups around the Bay Area, and we want you to head out and join us.
Speakers for this meetup will include [Mitch Altman], hacker extraordinaire and owner of far, far too many TV remotes. He’ll be talking about hardware successes and failures in his own businesses. Also headlining the event will be [Clarissa Redwine] from Kickstarter. She’ll be talking about crowdfunding hardware, and the fact that making a thousand of something is a million times harder than making one of something.
The day after, on December 7th, we’re also going to be opening the doors at the San Francisco Supplyframe office to host the Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic. These Didactics are fun and popular, and you don’t need to go to the South Bay. Food and drink will be served, and there’s a sweet Rick and Morty mural in the alley across the street.
On deck for this month’s Didactic is [Tiffany Tseng], lead UX designer at Autodesk. Her work involves creating and implementing the design decisions that go into Eagle CAD. If you’re wondering why the icons changed a few years ago, she is not the person to talk to; that happened before the Autodesk mothership bought Eagle. If you’re wondering how the awesome push and shove routing actually works, [Tiffany] is the person to talk to.
Also at the Didactic will be [Asaad Kaadan]. He’s a robotics engineer working on cinematic tools for his day job and is currently exploring a very, very cool modular electronics project called Hexabitz. He’ll be talking about Hexabitz and designing for modular electronics.
Filed under: News
Edible Innovations: Meet the Foodies of Maker Faire Bengaluru
The post Edible Innovations: Meet the Foodies of Maker Faire Bengaluru appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Build Your Own Zoo with a Colorful Assortment of 3D Printed Animals
The post Build Your Own Zoo with a Colorful Assortment of 3D Printed Animals appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Maker Spotlight: Celeste Flores
The post Maker Spotlight: Celeste Flores appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Life on Contract: How Much Do I Charge?
If you’re comfortable with the technical side of becoming a consultant or contractor but are unsure what to charge for your services, you’re not alone. “How much do I charge?” is a tough question, made even tougher by the fact that discussing money can be awkward, and at times virtually taboo.
As a result it’s not uncommon for the issue to get put off because it’s outside one’s comfort zone. Technical people in particular tend to suffer from an “if you build it, they will come” mentality; we get the technical side of things all figured out and just sort of assume that the rest — customers, money, and so forth — will fall into place afterward. If you’re lucky, it will! But it’s better to do some planning.
The short and simple answer of how much to charge is a mix of “it depends” and “whatever the market bears” but of course, that’s incredibly unhelpful all by itself. It’s time to make the whole process of getting started a bit less opaque.
A stubborn determination to solve my own problems has given me plenty of opportunity to make mistakes and commit inefficiencies over the years; I’ve ended up with a process that works for me, but I also happen to think it is fairly generally applicable. Hopefully, sharing the lessons I’ve learned will help make your own process of figuring out what to charge easier, or at least make the inevitable blunders less costly.
Treat It Like a Technical Problem
Approach the money question methodically, and begin thinking of it early. The longer you put it off, the more tempting it will be to latch on to the first number you encounter and run with it. It’ll feel like progress, but the problem won’t have been solved, it will simply have passed out of your control.
Here are the factors that will most directly influence how much you should charge for your work:
- What your service or product is, and what the market for it is like.
- An objective value of your own work (ideally expressed as an hourly rate.)
- The level of responsibility and risk involved in the work you do.
The good news is that you don’t need to get it all done perfectly right out the gate. You’ll make mistakes and commit inefficiencies; just try to make them in ways that you can learn from, and aim to not make the same mistake twice. First get something workable to start with, and optimize from there.
Define What It Is You Do
First you must define the service or services you provide. Describe what service or services it is you propose to do for clients, and define them in terms of the kind of work that actually gets done. If you do more than one kind of work, stick to one at a time for this process.
Determine The Value of Your Work
Your value will be an objective “fair market rate” for the kind of work you are doing, modified by any special knowledge or particular advantages you bring to the table. That modified rate is the number you will use as a baseline when deciding what to charge, and it will also give structure to any job-specific negotiations. Below are two ways to find the going market rate for whatever service you plan to offer; use whichever best applies to your situation.
1. Find People Who Do Similar Work, See What They Charge
The simplest method is to find people in the same area who do the same or similar work, and find out how much they charge. If you’re fortunate, you’ll have people you can simply ask and receive frank answers and feedback. Otherwise, you’ll probably find people are a bit cagey about discussing money. Jack Chapman gives a useful tactic in his book Negotiating Your Salary for getting this kind of information from people: offer something in return. Tell them you are doing a local survey of how much people in the industry charge for their services, and if they agree to talk to you, you’ll share the anonymous results of your survey with them. Use Google Forms to create a simple survey you can email out individually. When you have results (five or six will do), share the anonymized report with the respondents. The basic transaction of offering something in return — even if it’s just sharing what you learn — is a useful one for interacting with people, especially ones with whom you have no existing relationship.
2. Find Jobs With Similar Levels of Responsibility and Risk, Find Out What Those Pay
Perhaps your work is too unique, unusual, specialized, or cross-disciplinary to have peers or be easily defined, and the previous method isn’t useful. In that case, use this next method instead. Find jobs in the same or related industry with similar levels of responsibility and risk to the work you will be doing. Find and record the salary ranges for those jobs (sites like glassdoor.com or indeed.com come in handy) and work from those numbers. Even if the work descriptions don’t match, jobs of similar responsibility and risk are usually comparable in terms of compensation within an industry.
3. Modify Based on Any Specific Personal Value You Add
The data you gathered should give you a range of values to work with. Make an average of these researched values for a rough baseline. Then modify based on the following:
Do you have any extra value you personally bring to the table? (Things that can’t be quantified, like “grim dedication to a task” don’t count.) Think in terms of efficiency you can add or what risks you can remove due to specialized knowledge, training, experience, contacts, or other advantages. The more advantages you have, the more your rate should be towards the upper end of the ranges you researched.
- Modification can be in the negative if there is anything you lack that would add inefficiency to your work or increase risk for the client. Ask yourself how well-understood the unknowns in the work you’ll be doing are. Generally, the less comfortable you are with facing the unknowns, the less experienced you are and the more you should adjust toward the lower end of the rates you researched.
- If the rates you researched are for employee salaries, the rate you charge should be higher than those. The reason is that as a consultant you are responsible for some or all of the following: tools, training, workspace, vehicle, equipment, taxes, insurance, health benefits, and other costs. These are costs that an employer normally pays on behalf of employees, and which they avoid by hiring a consultant. How much higher should your rate be as a result? It depends on too many different things to address fully here, but between 1.2 and 1.6 times a comparable employee’s hourly wage is a reasonable range to land in.
- What the market will bear depends on the local market. A service priced at $100/hour in City A may only go for $60/hr in City B. If the rates you have researched are not from your area, look up the cost of living difference between their region and yours, and modify their numbers by that amount. It’s not optimal, but it is a reasonable way to adjust for regional differences.
4. Market Rate + Added Value = Your Baseline Rate
It’s important to remember that the goal here is to identify a reasonable hourly rate that allows you to get started, while avoiding being an obvious blunder that leads to slight embarrassment. Refining what you do and what you charge for your work will be an ongoing process throughout your career.
In summary, your individual value should be a baseline hourly rate derived from what similar work costs in your area (nearer the upper end if you are a seasoned expert, nearer the lower end if you are not), modified by any special advantages or knowledge you bring to bear. That hourly rate should be higher than a comparable employee’s hourly rate, for the reasons explained earlier.
If you feel that you could justify your value to a client by explaining how you arrived at your rate, why it makes sense, and can show the research you did to back that up, then you’re set.
Adjust Your Work and Rate When Needed
Having a base rate for your services is important, but the process of proposing work and a price to meet a client’s needs will usually involve some negotiation. That’s out of scope for this article, but don’t be afraid to get creative with your pricing and services. For example, if low cost is most important to your client, they may be willing to do some of the work (like assembly, testing, or finishing) themselves. Find out what the client considers important, and target those areas with your creativity. You may also be able to negotiate an exchange of services or use of equipment to make up a shortfall.
Those are just a few creative ways to reduce costs without lowering your prices or rates. Be wary of simply dropping your prices unless you have thought carefully about it.
Keep Records So You Know Where to Improve
Keep records and data of what you decide, and why. The reason is simple: your goal is to do more of what works, and reduce or eliminate the things that don’t. Without data, you will have no way to know what is and isn’t working, and your decisions will have to come from subjective, unreliable things like habits and right-feeling hunches.
Don’t hesitate to experiment if you think you can learn something from doing so. It may be necessary to try different things to find what works, especially if you’re providing a new kind of service. For example, a colleague of mine provides drone footage of real estate for realtors. He began by charging the same rate that drone photographers in a major metropolitan city across the country charged. He soon discovered that what people were willing to pay over there was very different from what they’d pay here. He eventually dialed in to what the local market was willing to bear, but only as a result of careful adjustments based on data.
Focus on determining a price for your services that is at least sustainable first, then seek to optimize. None of your errors will be forever, and it will all get easier with practice and experience.
Consider the Forgotten and the Unexpected
Always ask yourself what you may have forgotten, and try to account for the unexpected. If the job will require materials, who pays for them? Will the cost be included in the rate? How will you be reimbursed? Will the project require different kinds of work, such as shop time and programming time, and will you charge for them at the same rate or different rate? What if something goes unexpectedly wrong and you have to start over?
Everything gets easier with experience, but the best thing you can do right now to mitigate job related surprises is to learn to accurately estimate project time. By following a good project estimation process, you’ll avoid many common pitfalls.
For examples of the kind of unexpected issues that can crop up when doing a job, the experience of building a few hundred Hackaday Superconference 2017 badges had many good ones.
Got tips or knowledge of your own to share on how to price your work? Stories about early success or blunders? Don’t be shy, tell us about them in the comments.
Filed under: Business, Featured
Classic Furby plus Alexa Equals… Furlexa
[Zach Levine] wrote in to share a project just completed: a classic Furby packing a Raspberry Pi running Alexa: he calls it Furlexa.
The original Furby product wowed consumers of the 90s. In addition to animatronic movements, it also packed simulated voice learning technology that seemed to allow the Furby to learn to speak. It wasn’t like anything else on the market, and even got the toy banned from NSA’s facilities in case it could spy on them. Elegantly, the robot uses only one motor to move all of its parts, using a variety of plastic gears, levers, and cams to control all of the robot’s body parts and to make it dance.
Over the past twenty years the Furby has earned the reputation as one of the most hackable toys ever — despite its mystery microcontroller, which was sealed in plastic to keep the manufacturer’s IP secret. [Zach] replaced the control board with a Pi Zero. He also replaced the crappy mic and pizeo speaker that came with toy with a Pimoroni Speaker pHat and a better mic.
While classic Furbys have a reputation for hackability, the new ones aren’t immune: this Infiltrating Furby is based on a recent model of the toy.
Filed under: Toy Hacks
Rubies Are a 3D Printer’s Best Friend
Watching a 3D printer work always reminds us of watching a baker decorate a cake. Gooey icing squeezes out of a nozzle and makes interesting shapes and designs. While hot plastic doesn’t taste as good as icing, it does flow easily through the printer’s nozzle. Well… normal plastic, anyway. These days, advanced 3D printers are using filament with wood, metal, carbon fiber, and other additives. These can provide impressive results, but the bits of hard material in them tend to wear down metallic nozzles. If this is your problem and you are tired of replacing nozzles, you should check out the Olsson Ruby Nozzle.
Ruby, in this case, isn’t just a name. The nozzle has a small bit of ruby with a 0.4mm hole in the center — or they have a few other sizes. We suppose diamond would even be better, but ruby is so much more affordable. We haven’t tried these ourselves, but [3D Printing Nerd] has an interesting video review you can see below.
We assume the ruby — which is just aluminum oxide — is lab-created and not a natural stone. Another common option is to go with hardened steel nozzles, but Olsson claims the brass nozzles conduct heat better which gives their product an advantage. [Nerd] shows how the ruby nozzle could print PLA after printing with carbon fiber filament with no ill effects.The nozzles fit like a common E3D nozzle, so they’ll go on a lot of printers.
At around $100, these are not cheap. As [Nerd] points out, though, it could be the last nozzle you buy. The hard steel nozzles run about $25, but if you are printing with tough filament, you will buy more than one. If you buy four, you might as well get the ruby nozzle and enjoy the better performance, as well. On the other hand, if the nozzle costs 80% of what you paid for your printer and you don’t print exotic plastic, this is probably overkill. You can get a lot of cheap brass nozzles on eBay for $100.
We covered a comparison of a lot of exotic filament before if you want some ideas on what to try with a ruby nozzle. Of course, the nozzle is only part of the equation. When we talked about carbon fiber filament, we noted that it can cut into your extruder gears as well.
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks
Rage Against the Dying of the Light with a Raspi Night Vision Camera
One of the most interesting things about hacking is the difference between the vision we have at the beginning and the reality of we’ve built at the end. What began as a simple plan to build a night vision VR headset turned into a five-month adventure for [facelessloser] that culminated in this great-looking camera. He thought it would be easy, but almost every aspect presented some kind of challenge. The important thing is that he kept at it.
One of the major issues [facelessloser] encountered was power. He found that the Pi (Zero W), the screen, and the IR LEDs draw between 1.5 and 2A altogether. He was able to solve this one by using the charging board from a 2A power bank paired with a 1200mAh Li-Po built for the high draw required by vaping. If not for space issues, he might have used a 18650 or two.
Another challenge he faced was storing the video and images. He’d considered setting up the Pi as an access point to view them from a phone browser, but ultimately extended a USB port with an OTG cable to use flash drives. With a bit of Python he can watch for the drive to mount and then write to it. If the flash drive suddenly disappears, the Pi starts saving to the SD card.
There are two videos after the break, a walk through and a night vision demo. You’ll see a bit of a lag happening in the demo video—that’s because [facelessloser] is running the feed through PyGame first. No matter what nightlife you want to peep, it might be nice to add automated zoom with a rangefinder or get a closer look with some PiNoculars.
Filed under: Raspberry Pi
Zigbee-Based Wireless Arduinos, Demystified
Hackday regular [Akiba] is working on a series of video tutorials guiding newbies into the world of the 802.15.4 wireless protocol stack — also known as ZigBee. So far, his tutorials include a “getting started with chibiArduino”, his own Arduino-based wireless library, as well as a more basic tutorial on how radio works.
[Akiba] already made a name for himself though a large number of wireless projects, including his Saboten sensor boards, which are ruggedized for long-term environmental monitoring. The Saboten boards use the same wireless stack as his Arduino-compatible wireless development boards, his Freakduino products. The latest version features an ATmega 1284P with 8x the RAM and 4x the flash of the older, 328P-based Freakduinos. It comes in both 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz and there’s also a special 900 Mhz “Long Range” variant. The boards include some great power-saving features, including switchable status LEDs and on-board battery regulation circuity allowing one to run a full year on two AA cells while in sleep mode. They also have a USB stick configuration that is great for Raspberry Pi projects and for running straight from the PC.
For more [Akiba] goodness, check out our colleague [Sophi]’s SuperCon interview with him as well as our coverage of his Puerto Rico lantern project.
Filed under: Wireless Hacks
Intellibuoy Keeps Track of the Water
With world oceans ranging in cleanliness from pretty nasty to OMG, we need to get a handle on what exactly is going on. High School students from Hackensack, NJ built the Intellibuoy, a floating water quality sensor. The buoy has an anemometer and digital rain gauge up top, as well as a LED beacon to comply with maritime regulations.
Flotation is provided by a framework of sealed 3/4″ and 3″ PVC pipes that look strong enough to protect the electronics from a casual boat-bump. High above the water (under ideal conditions) there is the waterproof control box, packing two Arduino UNOs which listen to the sensors. A turbidity sensor measures how much silt is in the water; the other sensors measure Ph, dissolved oxygen, and temperature. The sensor pod is suspended inside a double ring of PVC for maximum protection. Each ‘Duino also has a SD card shield that stores the data of the respective sensors.
Without beating up on the team too much, we think their idea of retrieving sensor data by cut-and-pasting it from the serial monitor via a plugged-in laptop is probably not the best solution. Easy data retrieval has got to be super important, and if the project were to be implemented over a wide scale, they’d want a solution a non-technical person could implement — a “disk drive” maybe?
We love how sealed PVC has become the go-to method for protecting electronics against moisture, as well as simply for flotation — this submersible ROV we previously posted is a good example.
Filed under: green hacks
Wednesday, November 29
April Wilkerson’s Workshop Gift Guide
The post April Wilkerson’s Workshop Gift Guide appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Maker Faire Rome Welcomes Young Makers with Massive Kids Area
The post Maker Faire Rome Welcomes Young Makers with Massive Kids Area appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Sneakier, more persistent drive-by cryptomining comes to a browser near you
Researchers have discovered a new technique that lets hackers and unscrupulous websites perform in-browser, drive-by cryptomining even after a user has closed the window for the offending site.
Over the past month or two, drive-by cryptomining has emerged as a way to generate the cryptocurrency known as Monero. Hackers harness the electricity and CPU resources of millions of unsuspecting people as they visit hacked or deceitful websites. One researcher recently documented 2,500 sites actively running cryptomining code in visitors’ browsers, a figure that, over time, could generate significant revenue. Until now, however, the covert mining has come with a major disadvantage for the attacker or website operator: the mining stops as soon as the visitor leaves the page or closes the page window.
Now, researchers from anti-malware provider Malwarebytes have identified a technique that allows the leaching to continue even after a user has closed the browser window. It works by opening a pop-under window that fits behind the Microsoft Windows taskbar and hides behind the clock. The window remains open indefinitely until a user takes special actions to close it. During that time, it continues to run code that generates Monero on behalf of the person controlling the Website.
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Gesture Keyboard for Universal Input
Keyboards are currently the most universally accepted computer input devices. They may be wired, wireless, or virtual, but the chances are that you’re within a few centimeters of a keyboard right now. [Federico Terzi] built a prototype from an Arduino and an accelerometer which conceptually resembles writing in Palm’s old Graffiti, though this version is performed in mid-air with a handheld instead of a little square at the bottom of an LCD screen. He can also operate wirelessly with a Bluetooth module and battery.
The task of the Arduino is to take data from the accelerometer and feed it to the computer whenever a 12mm switch is pressed. Each letter is individually learned by his Python code and scikit-learn’s Support Vector Machine. There’s nothing holding a user back from giving single-letter commands to your favorite programs. For example, it would be possible to give a thumbs-up in meatspace when you want to upvote or covering your ears could mute the audio.
We love keyboard hacks like this mechanical macro keyboard, a minimal and elegant USB Morse key(board), and Brian Benchoff’s open love-letter to mechanical keyboards.
Thank you, [Juan Pablo] for the tip.
Filed under: Arduino Hacks, Peripherals Hacks
Dealmaster: Get an Echo Dot for $30 and more leftover Cyber Monday deals
Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. While Black Friday and Cyber Monday proper are gone, more than a few of the deals they brought are still active, including discounts on Amazon's Echo Dot, Sonos speakers, Bose's QuietComfort 25, and various Dell and Lenovo laptops. You can take a look at the full list below.
Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.
Featured Deals
Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Friday Hack Chat: Reverse Engineering the Digital Compact Cassette
In the early 1990s, several different digital magnetic tape formats came onto the scene. The MiniDisc was magneto-optical, yes, but back in the day it was amazing for recording bootlegs. DAT also appeared in the early 90s, and it was a godsend for recording studios. There was another format introduced in 1992, the Digital Compact Cassette. It was backward compatible with standard audio cassettes, an important feature, because no one would want to replace their entire cassette-based music collection with a new-fangled digital format. That would be just lunacy.
Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Jac Goudsmit], prolific creator on Hackaday.io, with projects ranging from the L-Star Software Defined 6502 Computer to a GPS Controlled FischerTechnik Clock. [Jac] grew up on a PET 2001, and in the years since he’s worked on projects ranging from motion control systems for lithography equipment, pick and place machines, and even at a Radio Shack. In this Hack Chat, he’ll be discussing the history of the Digital Compact Cassette, the behind the scenes on how stereo PCM is recorded to tape, and other topics like the difference between CS/EE careers in the Netherlands and the USA.
Click that speech bubble to the left, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.
You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.
Filed under: Hackaday Columns
Manly Leg Lamp Puts a Twist on the Classic Christmas Story Light
The post Manly Leg Lamp Puts a Twist on the Classic Christmas Story Light appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Ask Hackaday: How On Earth Can A 2004 MP3 Player Read An SDXC Card?
What were you doing in 2004? Can you even remember 2004? Maybe it’s like the old joke about the 1960s, if you can remember it, you weren’t really there, man. Cast your mind back, [Lance Armstrong] was winning the Tour de France, and SpaceShipOne made it into space.
[Gregg Eshelman], wrote to us to say that in 2004 he bought an MP3 player. Ask your parents about them, they were what hipsters used before they had cassette tapes: portable music players that everyone thought were really cool back then, onto which music didn’t come from the Internet but had to be manually loaded from a computer.
Jokes about slightly outdated consumer electronics aside, [Gregg]’s player, a GPX MW3836, turned out to be a really good buy. Not only does it still work, it packs an unexpected bonus, it reads 64Gb SD cards when they are formatted as FAT32. This might not seem like a big deal at a cursory glance, but it’s worth considering a little SD card history.
Back when the GPX was made, the maximum capacity of an SD card was 2Gb, a figure that must have seemed huge when the standard was created, but by the middle of the last decade was starting to look a little cramped. The GPX player is designed to only read these original 2Gb cards. In the years since then there have been a couple of revisions to the standard, SDHC, and SDXC, which have given us the huge cards we are used to today. Many other devices from the 2Gb SD era, made before SDHC and SDXC existed, cannot read the modern cards, yet [Gregg]’s GPX can.
Hackaday’s readership constantly amaze us with the sheer breadth of their knowledge and expertise, so we are sure that among you reading this piece will be experts on SD card standards who can shed some light on this mystery. Why can a player designed for the original SD card standard read the much newer cards when other contemporary ones can not? [Gregg] would love to know, and now our curiosity has been whetted, so would we.
If you think you’ve heard [Gregg]’s name before, it might be for his expertise in resin casting automotive parts.
SD card image: Andreas Frank (CC BY 2.5).
Filed under: Ask Hackaday
Two Teens Restore a 1974 Super Beetle
The post Two Teens Restore a 1974 Super Beetle appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Mad Science and Sterling Engines at the DTLA Mini Maker Faire
The post Mad Science and Sterling Engines at the DTLA Mini Maker Faire appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
This Lego R/C Creation Is Just Plane Cool
The post This Lego R/C Creation Is Just Plane Cool appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Coin Cell Challenge: Use Coin Cell, Win Prizes
Today, we’re calling all hackers to do the most with a single coin cell. It’s the Coin Cell Challenge, and we’re looking for everything from the most low-power electronics to a supernova in a button cell battery.
Electronics are sucking down fewer and fewer amps every year. Low power is the future, and we’re wondering how far we can push the capabilities of those tiny discs full of power. The Coin Cell Challenge is your chance to plumb the depths of what can be done with the humble coin cell.
This is a contest, and as with the tradition of the Open 7400 Logic Competition and the recent Flashing Light Prize, we want to see what the community can come up with. The idea is simple: do something cool with a single coin cell and you’ll secure your fifteen minutes of fame and win a prize.
Three Challenges
To kick this contest off, we’re opening up three challenges to all contenders to the world heavyweight champion of button cell exploits. The first, the Lifetime Award, will go to whoever can run something interesting the longest amount of time on a coin cell. The Supernova Award is the opposite – what is the most exciting thing you can do with a button cell battery, lifetime be damned? The Heavy Lifting Award will go to the project that is the most unbelievable. If you think you can’t do that with a coin cell battery — lifting a piano or starting a car, for example — odds are you probably can. We want to see it.
Prizes and Rules
All Hackaday hardware hacking challenges need prizes, and for this one, we’re rolling out the red carpet. We’re offering up cash prizes for the top coin cell hacks. There are three $500 USD cash prizes, one for each winner of the Lifetime, Supernova, and Heavy Lifting awards. We’re not stopping there, because the top twenty builds overall will each receive $100 in Tindie credit, where the winners can cash in on some artisanal electronics sold by the people who design them.
What do you have to do to get in on this action? First, you need to build something. This something must be powered by nothing more than a single coin cell battery and must include some type of electronics. We also want this to be Open Source, and you’ll need to start a project on hackaday.io. The full rules are available over here, but don’t wait — the deadline for entry is January 8th, 2018.
We’re excited to see what the community comes up with, and who will find a production coin cell that’s the size of a dinner plate. This is going to be a great contest with overheating coin cells and tiny bits of metal flying across the room. This is going to be a contest filled with blinkies and wireless devices that run for far, far too long. Someone is going to misread the rules and tape together a meter tall pile of coin cells. It’s going to be awesome, so start your project now.
Filed under: contests, Hackaday Columns, Original Art
UK team unearths rare, Iron Age party cauldrons in Leicestershire
ULAS
Archaeologists were called to Glenfield Park, Leicestershire, just before a development company broke ground on a massive project to build a warehouse and distribution center. People walking in the grassy field between two towns on the fringes of Leicester had found what seemed to be ancient artifacts. Previous digs in the area had uncovered a few Iron Age items, so it seemed likely there might be something more to find. Indeed there was. Much more. In fact, according to University of Leicester Archaeological Services' John Hancock, new excavations revealed a 2000-year-old feasting center full of rare, valuable items, including 11 ceremonial cauldrons.
Archaeologists had uncovered a party town.
Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
MeatBagPnP Makes You the Automatic Pick and Place
It’s amazing how hackers are nowadays building increasingly complex hardware with SMD parts as small as grains of sand. Getting multilayer PCB’s and soldering stencils in small quantities for prototyping is easier than ever before. But Pick-and-Place — the process of taking parts and stuffing them on the PCB in preparation for soldering — is elusive, for several reasons. For one, it makes sense only if you plan to do volume production as the cost and time for just setting up the PnP machine for a small run is prohibitive. And a desktop PnP machine isn’t yet as ubiquitous as a 3D printer. Placing parts on the board is one process that still needs to be done manually. Just make sure you don’t sneeze when you’re doing it.
Of course the human is the slow part of this process. [Colin O’Flynn] wrote a python script that he calls MeatBagPnP to ease this bottleneck. It’s designed to look at a row in a parts position file generated from your EDA program and highlight on a render of the board where that part needs to be placed. The human then does what a robotic PnP would have done.
A bar code scanner is not necessary, but using one does make the process a bit quicker. When you scan a code on the part bag, the script highlights the row on the spreadsheet and puts a marker on the first instance of it on the board. After you’ve placed the part, pressing the space bar puts a marker on the next instance of the same value. The script shows it’s done after all parts of the same value are populated and you can then move on to the next part. If you don’t have a bar code scanner handy, you can highlight a row manually and it’ll tell you where to put that part. Check it out in the video below.
Of course, before you use this tool you need some prior preparation. You need a good PNG image of the board (both sides if it is double-sided) scaled so that it is the same dimensions as the target board. The parts position file generated from your EDA tool must use the lower left corner of the board as the origin. You then tell the tool the board dimensions and it scales up everything so that it can put the red markers at the designated XY positions. The script works for single and double-sided boards. For a board with just a few parts, it may not be worth the trouble of doing this, but if you are trying to manually populate a complex board with a lot of parts, using a script like this could make the process a lot less painful.
The project is still fresh and rough around the edges, so if you have comments or feedback to offer, [Colin] is listening.
[Colin]’s name ought to ring a bell — he’s the hacker who built ChipWhisperer which took 2nd Prize at The Hackaday Prize in 2014. The MeatBagPnP project is a result of having worked at building increasingly complex boards manually and trying to make the process easier. In addition to the walk-through of how the script works after the break we’ve embedded his other video from three years back when he was stuffing parts — including BGA’s — the hard way and then reflowing them in a Chinese oven with hacked firmware.
Filed under: Software Hacks, Tool Hacks
High-Speed Drones Use AI to Spoil the Fun
Some people look forward to the day when robots have taken over all our jobs and given us an economy where we can while our days away on leisure activities. But if your idea of play is drone racing, you may be out of luck if this AI pilot for high-speed racing drones has anything to say about it.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has been working for the past two years to develop the algorithms needed to let high-performance UAVs navigate typical drone racing obstacles, and from the look of the tests in the video below, they’ve made a lot of progress. The system is vision based, with the AI drones equipped with wide-field cameras looking both forward and down. The indoor test course has seemingly random floor tiles scattered around, which we guess provide some kind of waypoints for the drones. A previous video details a little about the architecture, and it seems the drones are doing the computer vision on-board, which we find pretty impressive.
Despite the program being bankrolled by Google, we’re sure no evil will come of this, and that we’ll be in no danger of being chased down by swarms of high-speed flying killbots anytime soon. For now we can take solace in the fact that JPL’s algorithms still can’t beat an elite human pilot like [Ken Loo], who bested the bots overall. But alarmingly, the human did no better than the bots on his first lap, which suggests that once the AI gets a little creativity and intuition like that needed to best a Go champion, [Ken] might need to find another line of work.
Thanks for the heads up, [Caroline].
Filed under: drone hacks
Gamify Your Workout with the Wearable Console Controller
‘Tis soon to be the season when resolutions falter and exercise equipment purchased with the best of intentions is cast aside in frustration. But with a little motivation, like making your exercise machine a game console controller, you can maximize your exercise gear investment and get in some guilt-free gaming to boot.
Honestly, there is no better motivation for keeping up with exercise than taking classes, but not many people have the discipline — or the pocketbook — to keep going to the gym for the long haul. With this in mind, [Jason] looked for a way to control PS4 games like Mario Karts or TrackMania with his recumbent bike. In an attempt to avoid modifying the bike, [Jason] decided on a wearable motion sensor for his ankle. Consisting of an Uno, an MPU9250 accelerometer, and a transmitter for the 433-MHz ISM band, the wearable sends signals to a receiver whenever the feet are moving. This simulates pressing the up arrow controller key to set the game into action. Steering and other game actions are handled by a regular controller; we’d love to see this expanded to include strain gauges on the recumbent bike’s handles to allow left-right control by shifting weight in the seat. Talk about immersive gameplay!
While we like the simplicity of [Jason]’s build and the positive reinforcement it provides, it’s far from the first exercise machine hack we’ve seen. From making Google Street View bike-controlled to automatically logging workouts, exercise machines are ripe for the hacking.
Filed under: Misc Hacks, Wearable Hacks
The Chemistry and Engineering of DIY Photochromic Glass
[Ben Krasnow] is no stranger to exploring the more arcane corners of hackerdom, and the latest video on his “Applied Science” channel goes into a field few DIYers have touched: homemade glass, including the photochromic variety.
That DIY glassmaking remains a largely untapped vein is not surprising given what [Ben] learned over the last months of experimenting. With searing temperatures bordering on the unobtainable, volatile ingredients that evaporate before they can be incorporated, and a final product so reactive that a platinum crucible is the best vessel for the job, glassmaking is not easy, to say the least. Glassmaking doesn’t scale down from an industrial process very well, it seems. Nonetheless, [Ben] came up with a process that could be replicated using common enough ingredients and a simple electric kiln modded with a PID controller for pinpoint temperature setting. And while Luxottica has nothing to worry about yet, he did manage to get some clearly if subtly photochromic samples, despite the challenges.
Without a doubt, [Ben] crossed over into “mad scientist” territory a while back, and we think it’s great. What other way is there to describe a guy who has an electron microscope, a high-power ruby laser, a CT scanner, and a cookie making robot in his basement? Whatever you call it, we like the results.
Filed under: chemistry hacks, Misc Hacks
Tricked-Out Tablet Becomes Workbench Tool
The workbench of the typical electronics hobbyist today would probably be largely recognizable by Heathkit builders back in the 60s and 70s. But where the techs and tinkerers of yesteryear would have had a real dead-tree SAMS Photofact schematic spread out on the bench, today you’ll get more use out of a flat-screen display for data sheets and schematics, and this handy shop Frankentablet might be just the thing to build.
Tablets like the older Nexus 9 that [enginoor] used as the basis for this build have a little bit of a form-factor problem because unlike a laptop, a tablet isn’t very good at standing up on its own. To fix that, they found a suitable silicone skin for the Nexus, and with some silicone adhesive began bedazzling the back of the tablet. A bendy tripod intended for phones was added, and with the tablet able to stand on its own they maximized the USB port with a right angle adapter and a hub. Now the tablet has a USB drive, a mouse, and a keyboard, ready for perusing data sheets online. And hackers of a certain age will appreciate the eyeball-enhancing potential of the attached USB microscope.
[enginoor]’s bench tablet is great, but we’ve seen full-fledged bench PCs before too. Take your pick — wall mounted and floating, or built right into the workbench.
Thanks to [ccvi] for the tip.
Filed under: Tablet Hacks, Tool Hacks
