Author Archives: Adam Fabio

Hacklet 125 – DIY Laptops

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In the old days of the 1970’s, the only way to get your own computer was to build one from scratch. Thanks to an army of hackers like [Woz], PC’s are no commodity objects that can be bought for a couple of hundred dollars. The magic of building your own still is there though – especially when we’re talking about portable machines. Laptops, notebooks, netbooks take quite a bit of skill to assemble. Stuffing a keyboard, screen, and battery into a small clamshell case takes a bit of planning. Our last look at DIY laptops was exactly 100 Hacklets ago, …read more

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Staring at the Sun: Erasing an EPROM

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Flash memory is the king today. Our microcontrollers have it embedded on the die. Phones, tablets, and computers run from flash. If you need re-writable long term storage, flash is the way to go. It hasn’t always been this way though. Only a few years ago EPROM was the only show in town. EPROM typically is burned out-of-circuit in a programming fixture. When the time comes to erase the EPROM, just pop it under an ultraviolet (UV) bulb for 30 minutes, and you’re ready to go again. The EPROM’s quartz window allows UV light to strike the silicon die, erasing …read more

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Hacklet 124 Running Robots and The Claw

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You never know what you’ll find when you open the projects feed on Hackaday.io. Most weeks, The Hacklet follows a theme of some sort. Sometimes I find projects that just look so cool that I have to get the word out about them.

Such is the case with this week’s first project, Mr. Runner created by [Alex Martin]. Mr. Runner is a quadruped robot that really looks the part. In fact, I’d say it looks like it’s ready to jump off the bench top. Like many of us, [Alex] has been inspired by Boston Dynamics, specifically their Wildcat robot. Wildcat …read more

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Hacklet 123 – Watches

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Time and tide wait for no man. Chaucer may be right, but a man (or woman) wearing a watch can get ahead of time before it sneaks up on them. People aren’t ever satisfied with just the time though. They want the date, the phase of the moon. [Woz] summed it up pretty well when he said “I want the entire smartphone, the entire Internet, on my wrist”.   Hackers love watches too, which means there are plenty of watch projects out there. Some of them even tell time. This week we’re looking at some of the best watch projects on …read more

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Hacklet 122 – Spectrometers

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There is always something interesting to find when browsing the projects on Hackaday.io. I’m always amazed at how much hackers can get done in their basements and home labs. One surprising trend I’ve found is the sheer number of spectrometer projects people across the globe are working on. I’ve always known what a spectrometer is, but I never knew so many hackers would want them. The numbers don’t lie though – plenty of hackers around the world want to measure the spectra of light — be it to test out a new LED, or determine the structure of an object. …read more

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Interactive Dynamic Video

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth millions. However, computers still aren’t very good at analyzing video. Machine vision software like OpenCV can do certain tasks like facial recognition quite well. But current software isn’t good at determining the physical nature of the objects being filmed. [Abe Davis, Justin G. Chen, and Fredo Durand] are members of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. They’re working toward a method of determining the structure of an object based upon the object’s motion in a video.

The technique relies on vibrations which can be captured …read more

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Books You Should Read: The Soul of A New Machine

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If there was one book that describes what it means to be in the trenches of a cutting edge design, that book is The Soul Of a New Machine. Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer prize-winning book has been an inspiration to thousands over the years.

Soul is the story of the creation of the Data General Eclipse MV/8000, code-named Eagle. Eagle was Data General’s first 32-bit minicomputer. If you’re not a retrocomputing aficionado, minicomputers were a major industry back in the 70’s and 80’s. Starting in 1964 with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8, minis provided a low-cost means for companies …read more

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A Refrigerator Cooled by Rubber Bands

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Ever noticed that a rubber band gets warmer when it’s stretched? The bands also get cooler when allowed to snap back to relaxed length? [Ben Krasnow] noticed, and he built a rubber band cooled refrigerator to demonstrate the concept. The idea of stretching a rubber band to make it hotter, then releasing it to make it cooler seems a bit counter intuitive. Normally when things get smaller (like a gas being compressed) they get hotter. When pressure is released the gas gets cooler. Rubber bands do the exact opposite. Stretching a rubber band makes it hot. Releasing the stretched band …read more

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Roomba vs Poop: Teaching Robots to Detect Pet Mess

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Imagine this: you come home after a day at work. As you open the door, your nose is the first alert that something is very, very wrong. Instead of the usual house smell, your nose is assaulted with the distinctive aroma that means your dog had an accident. The smell is stronger though — as if Fido brought over a few friends and they all had a party. Flipping the lights on, the true horror is revealed to you. This was a team effort, but only one dog was involved.

At some point after the dog’s deed, Roomba, your robot …read more

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D.Va For Real: Playing An FPS With Flight Sticks

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[Rudeism] loves playing Blizzard’s hit game Overwatch. He wanted to make his gaming experience a bit more realistic though. One of the characters is D.Va, who according to game lore is a member of the South Korean Mobile Exo-Force (MEKA). D.Va pilots her MEKA in game using two joysticks. Overwatch is a standard FPS with WASD and mouse controls, so the realism ends at the screen.

[Rudeism] didn’t let that stop him. He used two flight sticks to create the  ultimate D.Va experience. [Twitch recording link – language warning] A commercial software package called Xpadder allowed him to map movements …read more

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