Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Wired Wireless Over Coax

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If it’s stupid and it works, then it’s not stupid. There’s no better evidence of that than [Tobias]’ networking setup.

He recently had to distribute Ethernet through a building, and there are a few ways to do that. You can use regular ‘ol twisted pair, or fiber, but in this case running new cables wasn’t possible. WiFi would be the next obvious choice, the distance was just a bit too far for ‘regular’ WiFi links. Ethernet over power lines was an option, but there are amateur radio operators in the house, and they put out a bunch of interference and …read more

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An Open Controller For Woodwind Instruments

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Engineers, hackers, and makers can most certainly build a musical gadget of some kind. They’ll build synths, they’ll build aerophones, and they’ll take the idea of mercury delay line memory, two hydrophones, and a really long tube filled with water to build the most absurd delay in existence. One thing they can’t seem to do is build a woodwind MIDI controller. That’s where [J.M.] comes in. He’s created the Open Woodwind Project as an open and extensible interface that can play sax and clarinet while connected to a computer.

If you want to play MIDI, there are plenty of options …read more

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US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty; International Shipping Prices Expected to Rise

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The United States has announced plans to withdraw from a 144-year postal treaty that sets lower international shipping rates. The US claims this treaty gives countries like China and Singapore an unfair advantage that floods the US market with cheap packages. The BBC reports the withdraw of this treaty will increase shipping costs from China by between 40% and 70%.

The treaty in question is the Universal Postal Union, which established that each country should retain all money it has collected for international postage. The US Chamber of Commerce has said this treaty, ‘leads to the United States essentially paying …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: Visual Synthesis

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For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be discussing generating analog video for visual synthesis. What’s on the front porch?

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be Jonas Bers, an audiovisual artist and performer. For their work they used hacked video mixers, a hand-built video synthesizer, and various pieces of restored/modded lab equipment and military surplus devices. Jonas has also developed the CHA/V, the Cheap, Hacky, A/V, an open source, DIY, audiovisual video synthesizer. This video synth has been built by people around the world, and has been the subject of international workshops in fancy art schools. …read more

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Can A Motorized Bicycle Run On Trees?

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Some of the earliest automobiles weren’t powered by refined petrochemicals, but instead wood gas. This wood gas is produced by burning wood or charcoal, capturing the fumes given off, and burning those fumes again. During World War II, nearly every European country was under gasoline rations, and tens of thousands of automobiles would be converted to run on wood gas before the war’s end.

In the century or so since the first car rolled on wood gas, and after hundreds of books and studies were published on the manufacturing and development of wood gas generators and conversion of internal combustion …read more

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These Twenty Projects Won The Musical Instrument Challenge In The Hackaday Prize

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The Hackaday Prize is the greatest hardware competition on the planet. It’s the Academy Awards of Open hardware, and over the past few months we’ve challenged makers and artists to create the Next Big Thing. All things must come to an end, though, and last week we wrapped up the final challenge in the Hackaday Prize. The results were fantastic, with over one hundred entries to the Musical Instrument Challenge. Now, we’re ready to announce the winners.

Over the past few months, we’ve been running a series of five challenges, and picking the best twenty projects to come out of …read more

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Circuit Bending A TV For Better Input

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If you haven’t noticed, CRTs are getting hard to find. You can’t get them in Goodwill, because thrift stores don’t take giant tube TVs anymore. You can’t find them on the curb set out for the trash man, because they won’t pick them up. It’s hard to find them on eBay, because no one wants to ship them. That’s a shame, because the best way to enjoy old retrocomputers and game systems is with a CRT with RGB input. If you don’t already have one, the best you can hope for is an old CRT with a composite input.

But …read more

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The Incredible Judges Of The Hackaday Prize

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The last challenge of The Hackaday Prize has ended. Over the past few months, we’ve gotten a sneak peek at over a thousand amazing projects, from Open Hardware to Human Computer Interfaces. This is a contest, though, and to decide the winner, we’re tapping some of the greats in the hardware world to judge these astonishing projects.

Below are just a preview of the judges in this year’s Hackaday Prize. In the next few weeks, we’ll be sending the judging sheets out to them, tallying the results, and in just under a month we’ll be announcing the winners of the …read more

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Hackaday Links: October 14, 2018

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Here’s something of interest of 3D printing enthusiasts. How do you print lightweight 3D objects? [Tom Stanton] does a lot of stuff with 3D printing and RC airplanes, so yeah, he’s probably the guy you want to talk to. His solution is Simplify3D, printing two layers for whatever nozzle diameter you have, some skills with Fusion360, and some interesting design features that include integrated ribs.

Moog released their first polyphonic analog synth in 35 years. It’s massive, and it costs eight thousand dollars.

There’s a RISC-V contest, sponsored by Google, Antmicro, and Microchip. The goal is to encourage designers to …read more

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Mergers And Acquisitions: Apple Buys Most of Dialog

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Apple is buying a $600 million stake in Dialog Semiconductor in a deal Dialog is describing as an asset transfer and licensing deal.

Dialog’s current portfolio is focused mainly on mobile devices, with Bluetooth wearables-on-a-chip, CODEC chips for smartphones, and power management ICs for every type of portable electronics. Power managment ICs are by far the most visible component, although they do have the very interesting GreenPAK, a sort of mixed-signal FPGA-ish thing that is one of the more interesting chips to be come online in the last few years. Apple of course are a Trillion dollar company that once …read more

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