Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Hackaday Links: June 5, 2016

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CERN is having a hackathon. It’s in October, yes, but the registration is closing on the 15th of June. They’ve been doing this every year, and the projects that come out of this hackathon are as diverse as infrastructure-less navigation, cosmic ray detectors, and inflatable refrigerators.

Have one of those solder fume extractors? Here’s an obvious improvement. [polyglot] put a strip of LEDs around the frame of his solder fume extractor to put a little more light on the subject.

A few months ago, [Bunnie] started work on a book. It was the Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen. It’s …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Glow In The Dark Plotting

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We like big displays, whether they’re gigantic LED displays, CNC whiteboards, or a gigantic laser projectors. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [nilo] has come up with an easy way to create a huge graphical display. It might only work at night, but the Glowboard Plotter is still really cool.

[nilo]’s display is simply a very large glow in the dark sheet wrapped around two rollers, controlled by a stepper motor. By running the motor, the blank glow in the dark sheet slowly scrolls across.

To add some color to this display, [nilo] fixed 64 UV LEDs to one end of …read more

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A Barcade And Hackerspace, All In One

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Hamvention was last weekend, and just like Hackaday’s expedition to Maker Faire, it was only fitting to find a bunch of Hackaday fans and take over a bar. This was in Dayton, Ohio, and you would think the nightlife for Hamvention would be severely lacking. Not so, as downtown Dayton is home to Proto BuildBar, a bar, arcade, and hackerspace all wrapped into one.

We’ve heard about Proto BuildBar a few years ago when it first opened. The idea is relatively simple; instead of having a hackerspace, with alcohol and video games on the side, Proto BuildBar is first and …read more

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OpenThread, A Solution To The WiFi Of Things

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The term ‘Internet of Things’ was coined in 1999, long before every laptop had WiFi and every Starbucks provided Internet for the latte-sucking masses. Over time, the Internet of Things meant all these devices would connect over WiFi. Why, no one has any idea. WiFi is terrible for a network of Things – it requires too much power, the range isn’t great, it’s beyond overkill, and there’s already too many machines and routers on WiFi networks, anyway.

There have been a number of solutions to this problem of a WiFi of Things over the years, but none have caught on. …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Sniffing Defibrillator Data

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There’s a lot of implantable medical technology that is effectively a black box. Insulin pumps monitor blood sugar and deliver insulin, but you can’t exactly plug in a USB cable and download the data. Pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators are the same way. For these patients, data is usually transmitted to a base station, then sent over the Internet to help doctors make decisions. The patient never gets to see this data, but with a little work and a software defined radio, a team on Hackaday.io is cracking the code to listen in on these implanted medical devices.

The team behind …read more

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Hackaday Links: May 22, 2016

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Lulzbot’s TAZ 6 has been released. Lulzbot’s printers consistently place in the top three of any 3D printing list, and the TAZ 6 will likely be no exception. [James Bruton] was one of the lucky ones who got a review unit, and first looks are promising. The TAZ 6 has the auto bed leveling found in the Lulzbot Mini, and a ‘power tower’ for all the electronics. There are completely unconfirmed rumors (or someone told me and I forgot who) that the power tower will be available separately at some point.

The most impressive circuit we’ve seen this week month …read more

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A Dis-Integrated 6502

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The 6502 is the classic CPU. This chip is found in the original Apple, Apple II, PET, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Atari 2600, and 800, the original Nintendo Entertainment System, Tamagotchis, and Bender Bending Rodriguez. This was the chip that started the microcomputer revolution, and holds a special place in the heart of every nerd and technophile. The 6502 is also possibly the most studied processor, with die shots of polysilicon and metal found in VLSI textbooks and numerous simulators available online.

The only thing we haven’t seen, until now, is a version of the 6502 built out of discrete …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Cute Synthesizer

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For electronics aficionados, there are few devices cooler than music synthesizers. The first synths were baroque confabulations of opamps and ladder filters. In the 70s and 80s, synths began their inexorable march toward digitization. There were wavetable synths that stored samples on 27-series EPROMs. Synths on a chip, like the MOS 6581 “SID chip”, are still venerated today. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Tim] is building his own synthesizer from scratch. It isn’t a copy of an old synth, instead it’s a completely modern synthesizer with a classic sound.

[Tim] is a former game developer and has already released a …read more

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New Part Day: A BeagleBone On A Chip

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The current crop of ARM single board computers have a lot in common. Everything from the Odroid to the Raspberry Pi are built around Systems on a Chip, a piece of silicon that has just about everything you need to build a bare minimum board. You won’t find many hardware hackers playing around with these chips, though. That would require putting some RAM on the board, and some other high-speed connectors. Until now, the only people building these ARM boards were Real Engineers™, with a salary commensurate of their skills.

This is now about to change. Octavo Systems has launched …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Programmable Calculator With Nixie Tubes

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For [Robert]’s entry into The Hackaday Prize, he’s starting off with some basic questions. What’s better than a Nixie tube? More Nixies. What’s better than a calculator? An RPN calculator. What do you get when you combine the two? A calculator that is absurdly large, even by 1970s desk calculator standards, uses a lot of power, and takes up too much space. Sounds good to us.

Nixies, at least when there are a lot of them, are tricky devices. They only draw about 50mA of current, but they only light up when above 150V. That’s only about seven watts, and …read more

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