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Saturday, December 28th, 2013
| Time | Event |
| 12:01a | Hacking a Christmas Tree for Less Blinkyness
What good is a fiber optic self-lighting Christmas tree if it flashes so fast it will put you into an epileptic attack? The answer is “Not very good”, if you ask [Mads Nielsen] a.k.a [EcProjects]. So [EcProjects ] started a little project to slow the Christmas tree’s blinkyness down to a more reasonable rate. The task didn’t seem too difficult at first but turned into a quality tutorial building a variable frequency H-bridge motor control. After opening the base of the tree [EcProjects] found a 12 volt AC geared synchronous motor turning a multi colored translucent plastic disk. A bright spotlight was shining upwards through the turning disk into the ends of hundreds of small fiber optics. This mechanism dumps loads of multi colored light out the ends of the fibers at the tips of the Christmas tree branches as the disk turns. His goal was to slow down the motor; however, the rotation was based on the 50 Hz mains signal. In order to continue using this motor a lower frequency AC power source was needed. What follows in the video is an excellent lesson on how an AC synchronous motor works plus how to build a variable frequency control and H-bridge using some transistors, resistors and CMOS 4069 inverter chip. In the end the frequency drive could only be lowered to about 30 Hz before the synchronous motor would stall and reverse using his design. [EcProjects] was bold enough to include several fails which always provides more opportunity for learning and is greatly appreciated. If you believe you have a better solution please share your idea in the comments. I’m sure the first proposal will include an Arduino and servo modified for continuous rotation, but any solutions would be fascinating including modifications to his design. You can join us after the break to watch the video.
Filed under: Holiday Hacks   |
| 3:01a | Fubarino Contest: Bluetooth Control for PC PSU
[Mike] wanted to have remote control of the power on his computer. But Wake-on-LAN wasn’t really all that interesting to him. Instead he set out to build this Bluetooth controller which manipulates the motherboard directly (PDF). Having been a winner of the Trinket Contest he based the project on that board which is seen on the left. There is also an RN-42 Bluetooth module and a couple of TI TS5A3157 analog switches. Once the prototype is finished the entire thing will run off of standby power and be located inside the case of his computer. The breadboard version just switches a couple of LEDs, but that will end up connecting to the pins for the power buttons once installed. The video after the break shows off the easter egg. The device is controlled by [Mike's] custom Android app. Every 42nd time he sends a power command the device calls back with our URL. This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!
Filed under: computer hacks, contests   |
| 6:01a | Raspberry Pi Car Deck
You can get all sorts of cheap car stereo decks from China, but where’s the fun in that? [Sentcool] is an IT specialist and electrician, and he decided he wanted something a bit more unique for his car — so he built this awesome Raspberry Pi car setup! He’s using a Raspberry Pi Model B R2, a standard LCD car display (from China), a small 12V audio amplifier and an NF filter. The image above is from the first test of all the components together. He originally wanted to use a touch screen, but thought it might be too expensive for the project, so instead he’s carefully soldered switches onto some ribbon cable for the Pi’s GPIOs. Don’t you just love stripping ribbon cable? From there it was just a matter of creating a nice wooden face plate and jamming everything into the center console of his car. It looks pretty good although the buttons could use some work — Don’t worry though, [Sentcool] is already thinking about upgrading it. See more after the break!
Filed under: Raspberry Pi   |
| 9:01a | Fubarino Contest: Serial Data Transmission
[Jesus] is helping his cousin learn about microcontrollers. Right now they’re on the subject of serial communications, which turned into a nice way to add a Hackaday Easter Egg. Using and FTDI chip in conjunction with the PIC 18F4550 (it’s a little soon for them to tackle implementing USB directly) the serial data is shown in a terminal window. At the same time the binary value of each byte is flashed on the PORTD LEDs. When the chip receives the characters “hack” it immediately echos back the recommendation to check out the awesomeness that is Hackaday. He posted the code used in this example as a Gist. This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!
Filed under: contests   |
| 12:01p | The Magnetophone
The Magnetophone is the latest electro-acoustic instrument from [Aaron Sherwood]. This tower contains 14 strings, and 14 hand-wound electromagnets. By energizing each electromagnet with a square wave, the strings can be vibrated to create music. The brains of the device consist of an Arduino Mega attached to the top of the tower. The microcontroller has 6 timers, which allows for 6 notes to play at the same time. An open source tone library was used to generate square waves at the correct frequencies. These square waves are amplified by LM386 based circuits, which provide enough power to the coil to oscillate the string. By using square waves at specific frequencies, overtones of strings can be created. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen [Aaron] combine strings and electronics. His Glockentar used solenoids to strike strings. However, this project provides new possibilities by allowing the rate of oscillation to be controlled precisely. You can see the instrument in action after the break.
Filed under: musical hacks   |
| 3:01p | Fubarino Contest: Custom Mech Warrior Online Controller
Twenty-two keys, a push button, three flip-switches, and a touch screen all let [Dominic] take his Mech Warrior Online game to the next level. He found that there are so many key bindings in the game it ends up being a huge pain to try to adapt his behavior to a static keyboard layout. Not only does the controller give him a specialized keypad, but he designed the touch screen interface to act as on-the-fly remapping. It even looks like something that would be mounted in a Battle Mech cockpit! What we can’t understand is why he didn’t tell us about this sexy peripheral hack much sooner? What finally prompted him to tip us off about his project was the Fubarino Contest. Above you can see the easter egg he added to the controller. When the bottom five buttons on the touch screen are mapped to “31337″ (aka “elite) the Teensy 3.0 board that drives the controller will automatically load up Hackaday in his browser. This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes! Filed under: contests, peripherals hacks   |
| 6:01p | Making An ARM Powered MIDI Synthesizer
What you see in the picture above is a hand-made 4-oscillator synthesizer with MIDI input, multi-mode filter and a handful of modulation options. It was built by [Matt], an AVR accustomed electronics enthusiast who made an exception to his habits for this project. The core of the platform is a DIP packaged 32-bit Cortex-M0 ARM processor (LPC1114), stuffed with ‘hand’ written assembly code and compiled C functions. With a 50MHz clock speed, the microcontroller can output samples at 250kHz on the 12bit DAC while being powered by 3 AA batteries. Reading [Matt]‘s write-up, we discover that the firmware he created uses 4 oscillators (sawtooth or pulse shape) together with a low frequency oscillator (triangle, ramp, square, random shapes). It also includes a 2-pole state-variable filter and the ability to adjust the attack-release envelopes (among others). The system takes MIDI commands from a connected device. We embedded videos of his creation in action after the break.
Filed under: ARM, musical hacks   |
| 9:01p | Chameleon Emulates Contactless Smart Cards
Researchers at Ruhr University of Bochum in Germany have been busy working with RFID and related devices for quite some time now. They call the fruit of their labors Chameleon, a versatile Contactless Smart Card Emulator. Contactless Smart Cards are RFID style devices that also contain a smart card style memory. These cards are often used for payment, replacing mag strip style credit cards. Philips MIFARE Classic cards are a common example of contactless smart cards. The Chameleon is set up to emulate any number of cards using the common 13.56MHz frequency band. Adding a new card is as simple as loading up a new CODEC and application to the firmware. Currently Chameleon can emulate MIFARE cards using the ISO14443A. The Chameleon is completely open source, and can be built for around $25 USD. The heart of the system is an Atmel ATxmega192A3 microcontroller. The 192 is a great microcontroller for this task because it contains hardware accelerators for both DES and AES-128. An FTDI USB interface chip is used to provide an optional communication link between a host computer and the ATxmega. The link can be used for debugging, as well as manipulating data in real-time. A host PC is not necessary for use though – the Chameleon will operate just fine as a stand alone unit. We definitely like this project – though we’re going to be doubling down on the shielding in our RF blocking wallets. Filed under: security hacks, wireless hacks   |
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