Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Let’s Put A Hackerspace In Prison

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The Hack42 Hackerspace in Arnhem, Netherlands is one of the best hackerspaces we’ve ever seen. After taking over a decommissioned military base, the Hack42 crew has filled a compound rimmed with razor wire with eclectic gizmos, tools, and a community that keeps growing the space. At this year’s EMF camp, Hack42 member [jos] laid out his plan to found the ultimate Hackerspace. He’s going to put a hackerspace in prison to create the ultimate hacker village, a monument to technomancy, and an anti-panopticon panopticon.

[jos] recently noticed a very large, very old prison — currently used to house refugees — …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Automated Hydroponics

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This team project for the Hackaday Prize is a solution to a rather important problem. Imagine growing plants for use as biomarkers for pollution. It’s a great idea, but how do you grow the plants in the first place? This team is building a space-saving hydroponic system that packs the most green into the least amount of space. It’s simple, and can be built almost entirely with parts from the local home supply store.

The design of this hydroponic system is based on a few PVC pipes, arranged vertically, joined together with a few 90 degree bends. In each course …read more

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Hackaday Links: August 28, 2016

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E-paper looks awesome, but it’s a pain to work with. You need only look at the homebrew implementations of e-paper drivers and the mess of SMD components for proof of that. [jarek] wanted to play around with e-paper and developed this tiny little driver for a Teensy. It’s a fun toy, and the simplest possible circuit necessary to drive this particular e-paper module.

I am once again asking if anyone knows where to buy this computer case. No, not a complete system – I just want the case, folding keyboard, and monitor integrated into an mATX enclosure.

Back in 1985, …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Real Life XEyes

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There’s a lot of tech that goes into animatronics, cosplay, and costumes. For their Hackaday Prize entry, [Dasaki] and [Dylan] are taking the eyes in a costume or Halloween prop to the next level with animatronic eyes that look where the wearer of this crazy confabulation is looking. It’s XEyes in real life, and it promises to be a part of some very, very cool costumes.

The mechanics of this system are actually pretty simple — it’s just a few servos joined together to make a pair of robotic eyes move up and down, and left to right. This entire …read more

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Making A Thinkpad Great Again

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The Thinkpad X220 is almost a perfect laptop. The X220 is small, light, was the last small Thinkpad to use 35W CPUs, has great Linux support, incredible battery life, and can be found used very inexpensively. For the Thinkpad Mafia, the X220 is a badge of honor, but it does have one glaring drawback: the LCDs in these laptops are capped at 1366×768 resolution.

A few wizards in Japan and China have taken up the X220 and developed an adapter to give this tiny laptop the display it deserves. Mentions of a FHD mod – the Lenovo-speak for a Thinkpad …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A CNC Scribe For Making Circuit Boards

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We’re interested in any device that can make a PCB out of a copper-clad board, and this entry for the Hackaday Prize might be the simplest machine for PCB fabrication yet. It’s called the Projecta, and it’s a simple way to turn Eagle and KiCad files into a real circuit board.

For the home PCB fabricator, there are two ways to go about the process of turning a copper clad board into a real circuit board. The first is a CNC machine. Drop a piece of FR4 under a cutter, and you’ll get a circuit board and a lot of …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Printer For Alternative Photography

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Film photography began with a mercury-silver amalgam, and ended with strips of nitrocellulose, silver iodide, and dyes. Along the way, there were some very odd chemistries going on in the world of photography, from ferric and silver salts to the prussian blue found in Cyanotypes and blueprints.

Metal salts are fun, and for his Hackaday Prize entry, [David Brown] is building a printer for these alternative photographic processes. It’s not a dark room — it’s a laser printer designed to reproduce images with weird, strange chemistries.

Cyanotypes are made by applying potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate to some sort …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A CPU For Balloons

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Launching a high altitude balloon requires a wide breadth of knowledge. To do it right, you obviously need to know electronics and programming to get temperature, pressure, and GPS data. You’ll have to research which cameras will take good pictures and are easily programmable. It’s cold up there, and that means you need some insulation to keep the batteries warm. If you ever want to find your payload, you’ll also need an amateur radio license.

There’s a lot of work that goes into launching high altitude balloons, and for his Hackaday Prize entry, [Jeremy] designed a simple embedded data recorder …read more

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Ask Hackaday: Calling All 68k Experts

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This is a tale of old CPUs, intensive SMD rework, and things that should work but don’t.

Released in 1994, Apple’s Powerbook 500 series of laptop computers were the top of the line. They had built-in Ethernet, a trackpad instead of a trackball, stereo sound, and a full-size keyboard. This was one of the first laptops that looked like a modern laptop.

The CPU inside these laptops — save for the high-end Japan-only Powerbook 550c — was the 68LC040. The ‘LC‘ designation inside the part name says this CPU doesn’t have a floating point unit. A few months …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Charlieplexed Wristwatch

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If there’s one thing we like, it’s blinky stuff, and you’re not going to get anything cooler than a display made of tiny SMD LEDs. That’s the idea behind this wristwatch and Hackaday Prize entry. It’s a tiny board, loaded up with an ATmega, a few buttons, and a bunch of LEDs in a big charlieplexed array.

The big feature of this display is the array of LEDs. This is a 16×5 array of 0603 LEDs packed together as tightly as possible. That’s a tiny, high-resolution LED display, but even with the ATmega88 microcontroller powering this board, all the LEDs …read more

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