Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Adding IceZero To The Raspberry Pi

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[Kevinhub] noticed there were quite a few FPGA hats for the Raspberry Pi. Instead going out and buying one of these boards like a filthy commoner, he decided to spin up his own FPGA Pi accessory. This IceZero FPGA board combines the best features from other FPiGA boards, and does it in a form factor that fits right on top of the minuscule Pi Zero.

If you think slapping a Lattice FPGA onto a Pi has been done before, you’re right. Here’s a hat for the Pi using an iCE5LP4K-SG48, an FPGA with 3520 LUTs. The CAT Board from Xess  …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: Making and Breaking Hardware with Bunnie

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This Friday, February 10th, at 9am PST, Hackaday.io will be graced with one of the greatest hardware creators in recent memory. [Bunnie Huang] will be talking about making and breaking hardware in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat.

[Bunnie] is a nearly peerless hardware hacker. He literally wrote the book on hacking the XBox, developed the Chumby, and developed the Novena, an open source Laptop. He’s torn down the Form 2 3D printer, explored the iPhone’s hackability with [Edward Snowden], wrote the book you want to have on your carryon when flying into Hong Kong, and recently released The Hardware Hacker, …read more

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DIY Thermal Camera That’s Better And Cheaper Than a FLIR

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A few years ago, FLIR unleashed a new line of handheld thermal imagers upon the world. In a manufacturing triumph, the cheapest of these thermal imaging cameras contained the same circuitry as the one that cost six times as much. Much hacking ensued. Once FLIR figured out the people who would be most likely to own a thermal imaging camera can figure out how to upload firmware, the party was over. That doesn’t mean we’re stuck with crippled thermal imaging cameras, though: we can build our own, with better specs than what the big boys are selling.

[Max] has been …read more

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A Six-Voice Synth Built On The Raspberry Pi

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Over the last few decades, audio synthesizers have been less and less real hardware and more and more emulations in software. Now that we have tiny powerful computers that merely sip down the watts, what’s the obvious conclusion? A six-voice polyphonic synthesizer built around the Raspberry Pi.

The exquisitely named ‘S³-6R’ synthesizer is a six-voice phase modulation synthesizer that outputs very high resolution (24-bit and 96 kHz) audio. It’s the product of R-MONO Lab, who have displayed interesting musical devices such as a recorder-based pipe organ in the past. This build is a bit more complex, offering up some amazing …read more

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Bringing The Best Laptop Ever Made Back To Life

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Eight or nine years ago, Apple was on top of the world. The iPhone just revolutionized phones, Apple was still making computers, and these computers were actually repairable. Of the late 2008/early 2009 MacBook Pro, iFixit said, “What an incredible machine. We are very impressed by the ease with which the new MacBook Pro came apart. This machine should be a joy to work on”. Apple has come a long way since then.

[DocDawning] has a bit of a Mac hoarding problem, and frequently pays $20 for broken laptops of this vintage. Most of the time, the fix is simple: …read more

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Reverse Engineering Ikea’s New Smart Bulbs

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Over in Sweden, Czech, Italy, and Belgium, Ikea is launching a new line of ‘smart’ light bulbs. These countries are apparently the test market for these bulbs, and they’ll soon be landing on American shores. This means smart Ikea bulbs will be everywhere soon, and an Internet of Light Bulbs is a neat thing to explore. [Markus] got his hands on a few of these bulbs, and is now digging into their inner workings (German Make Magazine, with a Google Translate that includes the phrase, ‘capering the pear’).

There are currently four versions of these Ikea bulbs, ranging from a …read more

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Hackaday Links: February 5, 2017

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A lot of people around here got their start in electronics with guitar pedals. This means soldering crappy old transistors to crappy old diodes and fawning over your tonez, d00d.  Prototyping guitar pedals isn’t easy, though, and now there’s a CrowdSupply project to make it easier The FX Development Board is just that — a few 1/4″ jacks, knobs, pots, power supply, and a gigantic footswitch to make prototyping guitar pedals and other musical paraphernalia easy. Think of it as a much more feature-packed Beavis Board that’s still significantly cheaper.

How do Communicators in Star Trek work? Nobody knows. Why …read more

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Olimex Announces Their Open Source Laptop

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A few months ago at the Hackaday | Belgrade conference, [Tsvetan Usunov], the brains behind Olimex, gave a talk on a project he’s been working on. He’s creating an Open Source Hacker’s Laptop. The impetus for this project came to [Tsvetan] after looking at how many laptops he’s thrown away over the years. Battery capacity degrades, keyboards have a fight with coffee, and manufacturers seem to purposely make laptops hard to repair.

Now, this do it yourself, Open Source Hardware and hacker-friendly laptop is complete. The Olimex TERES I laptop has been built, plastic has been injected into molds, and …read more

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Building A Wavetable Synth

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Every semester at one of [Bruce Land]’s electronics labs at Cornell, students team up, and pitch a few ideas on what they’d like to build for the final project. Invariably, the students will pick what they think is cool. The only thing we know about [Ian], [Joval] and [Balazs] is that one of them is a synth head. How do we know this? They built a programmable, sequenced, wavetable synthesizer for their final project in ECE4760.

First things first — what’s a wavetable synthesizer? It’s not adding, subtracting, and modulating sine, triangle, and square waves. That, we assume, is the …read more

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Building A Wavetable Synth

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Every semester at one of [Bruce Land]’s electronics labs at Cornell, students team up, and pitch a few ideas on what they’d like to build for the final project. Invariably, the students will pick what they think is cool. The only thing we know about [Ian], [Joval] and [Balazs] is that one of them is a synth head. How do we know this? They built a programmable, sequenced, wavetable synthesizer for their final project in ECE4760.

First things first — what’s a wavetable synthesizer? It’s not adding, subtracting, and modulating sine, triangle, and square waves. That, we assume, is the …read more

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