Author Archives: Anool Mahidharia

This Computer Is As Quiet As The Mouse

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[Tim aka tp69] built a completely silent desktop computer. It can’t be heard – at all. The average desktop will have several fans whirring inside – cooling the CPU, GPU, SMPS, and probably one more for enclosure circulation – all of which end up making quite a racket, decibel wise. Liquid cooling might help make it quieter, but the pump would still be a source of noise. To completely eliminate noise, you have to get rid of all the rotating / moving parts and use passive cooling.

[Tim]’s computer is built from standard, off-the-shelf parts but what’s interesting for us …read more

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Nuclear Synchroscope Gets New Life

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The Synchroscope is an interesting power plant instrument which doubles up as two devices in one. If the generator frequency is not matched with the grid frequency, the rotation direction of the synchroscope pointer indicates if the frequency (generator speed) needs to be increased or decreased. When it stops rotating, the pointer angle indicates the phase difference between the generator and the grid. When [Chris Muncy] got his hands on an old synchroscope which had seen better days at a nuclear power plant control room, he decided to use it as the enclosure for a long-pending plan to build a …read more

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DIY SSR For Mains Switching

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Typical power strips have their sockets tightly spaced. This makes it cumbersome to connect devices whose wall warts or power bricks are bulky — you end up losing an adjoining socket or two. And if the strip has a single power switch, you cannot turn off individual devices without unplugging them.

Planning to tackle both problems together, [Travis Hein] built himself some custom Dual SSR Controlled Socket Outlets for his workbench. He also decided to add remote switching ability so he could turn off individual sockets via a controller, Raspberry Pi, smartphone app or most ideally, a nice control panel …read more

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The Solid State Weather Station

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Building personal weather stations has become easier now than ever before, thanks to all the improvements in sensors, electronics, and prototyping techniques. The availability of cheap networking modules allows us to make sure these IoT devices can transmit their information to public databases, thereby providing local communities with relevant weather data about their immediate surroundings.

[Manolis Nikiforakis] is attempting to build the Weather Pyramid — a completely solid-state, maintenance free, energy and communications autonomous weather sensing device, designed for mass scale deployment. Typically, a weather station has sensors for measuring temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed and rainfall. While most of …read more

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Soundproofing A CNC Mill Conversion

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The Proxxon MF70 is a nice desktop sized milling machine with a lot of useful add-on accessories available for it, making it very desirable for a hacker to have one in his or her home workshop. But its 20000 rpm spindle can cause quite the racket and invite red-faced neighbors. Also, how do you use a milling machine in your home-workshop without covering the whole area in metal chips and sawdust? To solve these issues, [Tim Lebacq] is working on Soundproofing his CNC mill conversion.

To meet his soundproof goal, he obviously had to first convert the manual MF70 to …read more

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Build Your Own Android Smartphone

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Let’s get this out of the way first – this project isn’t meant to be a replacement for your regular smartphone. Although, at the very least, you can use it as one if you’d like to. But [Shree Kumar]’s Hackaday Prize 2018 entry, the Kite : Open Hardware Android Smartphone aims to be an Open platform for hackers and everyone else, enabling them to dig into the innards of a smartphone and use it as a base platform to build a variety of hardware.

When talking about modular smartphones, Google’s Project Ara and the Phonebloks project immediately spring to mind. …read more

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8-bit game uses our favourite IC and Zero lines of code

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If a hacker today wanted to build a simple game, he or she could whip it up using an Arduino board and a few other bits and pieces in about an hour, only to be greeted with “where’s the hack?” But when you look at [OiD]’s SPEBEG (Single Player Eight Bit Electronic Game), you’ll understand why building anything using old-skool 70s tech is so awesome and educational.

The SPEBEG is a simple 8-bit game where you aim with the joystick at the target and fire to gain points. As your score increases, so does the game speed. It doesn’t need …read more

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Robot Radar Module

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For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Ted Yapo] is building a Robot Radar Module breakout board. His design uses the A111 60 GHz pulsed coherent radar (PCR) sensor from Acconeer AB (New Part alert!) .

The A111 is a low power, high precision sensor ideal for use in object detection or gesture sensing applications. The BGA package is tiny – 5.5 mm x 5.2 mm, but it does not appear very difficult for a hacker to assemble. The sensor includes an integrated baseband, RF front-end and Antenna in Package so you don’t have to mess with RF layout headaches. Acconeer claims …read more

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Soda Can Art

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A can of soda costs about half a dollar, and once you’re done with the sugary syrup, most cans end up in the trash headed for recycling. Some folks re-use them for other purposes, but we’re guessing no one up-cycles them quite like artist [Noah Deledda] does. He turns them into pieces of Soda Can art that sell for anywhere between $2000 to $3000 a pop.

Don’t be fooled by that smashing hit in the GIF. It’s just some trick photography that [Noah] did to impress people. If you looked at the end product without the back story first, you’d …read more

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Building Badges The Hard Way

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What’s a hacker to do to profess his love for his dearest beloved? [Nitesh Kadyan] built his lady-love this awesome LED pendant – the LED BLE Hearty Necklace Badge.

The hardware is pretty vanilla by today’s hacker standards. An ATMega328p  does most of the heavy lifting. An HM-11 BLE module provides connection to an Android mobile app. Two 74HC595 shift registers drive 16 columns of red LEDs and a ULN2803 sinks current from the 8 rows. The power section consists of a charger for the 320mAh LiPo and an LDO for the BLE module. All the parts are SMD with …read more

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