Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Ask Hackaday: Saving The World With Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Men

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This is a solution to global warming. This solution will also produce electricity, produce rain in desertified areas, and transform the Sahara into arable land capable of capturing CO2. How is this possible? It’s simple: all we need to do is build a five-kilometer tall, twenty-meter wide chimney. Hot air, warmed by the Earth’s surface, will enter the base of the chimney and flow through turbines, generating electricity. From there, air will rise through the chimney, gradually cooling and transferring energy from the atmosphere at Earth’s surface to five kilometers altitude. This is the idea behind the Super Chimney, It’s …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: JavaScript on Microcontrollers

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Microcontrollers today are much more powerful and much more capable than the 8051s from back in the day. Now, they have awesome peripherals and USB device interfaces. It’s about time a slightly more modern language was used to program these little chips.

During this Friday’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about JavaScript on microcontrollers. [Gordon Williams] will be joining us to talk about Espruino. This is a tiny JavaScript interpreter that runs on the little embedded chips, has a debug interface, and allows you to program your board on any platform without any external programming hardware.

[Gordon] is …read more

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Someone Finally Did It With A 555

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[Jarunzel] needed a device that would automatically click the left button on a mouse at a pre-set interval. For regular Hackaday readers, this is an easy challenge. You could do it with an ATtiny85 using the VUSB library, a few resistors and diodes, and a bit of code that emulates a USB device that constantly sends mouse clicks over USB every few seconds. You could also do it with a Raspberry Pi Zero, using the USB gadget protocol. Now, this mouse-clicking gadget would be connected to the Internet (!), programmable with Node or whatever the kids are using these days, …read more

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Laser Etching PCBs

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A while ago, [Marco] mounted a powerful laser diode to a CNC machine in an attempt to etch copper clad board and create a few PCBs. The results weren’t that great, but the technique was promising. In a new experiment, [Marco] purchased a very cheap laser engraver kit from China, and now this technique looks like it might be a winner.

[Marco] sourced his laser engraver from Banggood, and it’s pretty much exactly what you would expect for a CNC machine that costs under $200. The frame is aluminum extrusion, the motors are off-the-shelf steppers, the electronics are just Pololu-like …read more

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Monoprice Mini Delta Review

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For the last year or so, Monoprice has been teasing their follow-up to the fantastic $200 MP Select Mini. This is the $150 mini delta printer. We got a look at it last January at CES, it was on display at the Bay Area Maker Faire last May. Now there’s one on the Hackaday review desk.

Over the last few years, 3D printing has settled down into what most of us expected way back in 2010. No, not everyone wants, or arguably needs, a 3D printer on their desks. This is a far cry from the hype of a few …read more

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Hackaday Links: August 20, 2017

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Foam core, dollar tree foam board, Adams foam board, or whatever we’re calling a thin sheet of foam sandwiched between two pieces of poster board, is an invaluable hacker’s tool. Everyone should have a few sheets on hand, and not just because each sheet is a dollar each at any Dollar Store. [Eric] has been working on a technique to create compound curves in foam board, and the results look great. It’s a true three-dimensional plane with weird curves, and certainly has applications for something.

The Apollo Lunar Module is the first, and only manned space-only spacecraft ever made. The …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Engine Control Units and Arduinos

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The modern internal combustion engine is an engineering marvel. We’re light-years ahead of simple big blocks and carburetors, and now there are very fast, very capable computers sensing adjusting the spark timing, monitoring the throttle position, and providing a specific amount of power to the wheels at any one time. For the last few years [Josh] has been building a fully-featured engine management system, and now he’s entered it in the Hackaday Prize.

The Speeduino project is, as the name would suggest, built around the Arduino platform. In this case, an Arduino Mega. The number of pins and PWMs is …read more

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Multiple Monitors With Multiple Pis

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One of the most popular uses for the Raspberry Pi in a commercial setting is video walls, digital signage, and media players. Chances are, you’ve probably seen a display or other glowing rectangle displaying an advertisement or tweets, powered by a Raspberry Pi. [Florian] has been working on a project called info-beamer for just this use case, and now he has something spectacular. He can display a video on multiple monitors using multiple Pis, and the configuration is as simple as taking a picture with your phone.

[Florian] created the info-beamer package for the Pi for video playback (including multiple …read more

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Superconference Interview: Ben Krasnow

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Ben Krasnow is a consummate prototyper. He’s built a machine that makes the perfect chocolate chip cookie, he has a ruby laser, and he produces his own liquid nitrogen in-house because simply filling up a dewar is too easy. If you need a prototype, Ben is the guy to talk to.

Ben gave a talk at last year’s Hackaday Superconference on prototyping quickly and verifying technical hypotheses. The philosophy can be summed up simply as, ‘Build First, and Ask Questions Later’. This philosophy served him well when he wanted to see if backscatter x-ray machines were actually more effective than …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: Graphical Programming Languages with Bojan Mitov

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There is a long history of Visual or Graphical Programming Languages, and most of them make more sense than the name of Microsoft’s Visual Basic, C#, and Visual Studio IDE. Some people don’t like to code, and for them, graphical programming languages replace semicolons and brackets with easy-to-understand boxes and wires.

This Friday, we’re going to be talking about graphical programming languages with [Bojan Mitov]. He’s a software developer, founder of Mitov Software, and the creator of Visuino, a graphical programming language for the embedded domain. Everything from the Arduino to Teensy, ESP8266, ESP32, the chipKIT, and Maple Mini are …read more

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