Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Hackaday Links: May 14, 2017

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Maker Faire Bay Area is next weekend, and you know what that means: we’re having a meetup on Saturday night. If you’re in the area, it’s highly recommended you attend. It’s a blinky bring-a-hack with booze. You can’t beat it. I heard the OPShark is showing up. All hail the OPShark. You’re gonna want to RSVP if you’re going k thx.

It only took twelve years, but [ladyada] finally got herself on the cover of Make.

Nvidia has the Jetson, an extremely powerful single board computer + GPU meant for machine learning, imagifying, and robotics applications. If you want to …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Femtocell Repeater

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For a Hackaday Prize entry, [TegwynTwmffat] is building a cell phone signal repeater. This sort of device is commercially available, but the options are either expensive or, as with some units available for $30 on DealExtreme, obviously noncompliant with RF regulations. This project intends to create a cost-effective, hackable device that works properly and conforms to the right regulations.

The core of this system is a LimeSDR transceiver. This is a board we’ve seen before, and it has a few interesting features. Basically, the core of the LimeSDR is a programmable RF transceiver with coverage from 100kHz to 3.8GHz. There’s …read more

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From Amritsar to Busselton; More World Create Day Stories

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A few weeks ago, we took Hackaday IRL and into hackerspaces around the globe. This was World Create Day, a community effort to come together and build something that matters. Think of it as the pre-game for the Hackaday Prize, our online competition to change the world by building hardware. The groups at these hacker meetups have sent in pictures and reported on what they created. What happened during this worldwide hacker meetup? So much awesome stuff.

The SupplyFrame Design Lab

Did you know Hackaday has its own Hackerspace? It’s true! We have an eight-foot ShopBot, a Tormach, we just …read more

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Another Printer With An Infinite Build Volume

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Very rarely do we see a 3D printer that is more than just a refinement of what’s currently standard practice. [Prusa]’s single-hotend, four-color printer makes the list, but that came out a while ago. The novel 32-bit controller board found in last year’s $200 Monoprice printer has the potential to change a cottage industry. Save those two exceptions, innovation in 3D printing really isn’t seeing the same gains we saw in 2010 or 2011.

A company out of the Netherlands, Blackbelt 3D, is bringing out the most innovative 3D printer we’ve seen since last March. It’s an infinite volume 3D …read more

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3D Printing A Synthesizer

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Before there were samplers, romplers, Skrillex, FM synths, and all the other sounds that don’t fit into the trailer for the new Blade Runner movie, electronic music was simple. Voltage controlled oscillators, voltage controlled filters, and CV keyboards ruled the roost. We’ve gone over a lot of voltage controlled synths, but [Tommy] took it to the next level. He designed a small, minimum viable synth based around the VCO in an old 4046 PLL chip

For anyone who remembers [Elliot]’s Logic Noise series here on Hackaday, this type of circuit should be very familiar. The only thing in this synth …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Source Electrospinning

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Electrospinning is the process of dispensing a polymer solution from a nozzle, then applying a very high voltage potential between the nozzle and a collector screen. The result is a very, very fine fiber that is stretched and elongated down to nanometers. Why would anyone want this? These fibers make great filters because of their large surface area. Electrospinning has been cited as an enabling technology for the future of textiles. The reality, though, is that no one really knows how electrospinning is going to become a standard industrial process because it’s so rare. Not many labs are researching electrospinning, …read more

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Just In Time For Summer: A Remote Controlled Snowblower

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It’s May, and you know what that means: we’re winding down from a worldwide celebration of the worker, pollen is everywhere, Hackaday readers in the southern hemisphere are somehow offended, and somewhere, someone is finishing up a remote-controlled snow blower build.

In this nine-part, two-hour-long video series, [Dave] covers the planning and fabrication of one of the most coveted of all cold weather yard instruments. It’s a remote-controlled snow blower. Just think: instead of bundling up to go blow the driveway off, [Dave] can get all the snow off his driveway from the comfort of his living room window. Sure, …read more

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Precision Pressure In A Piston

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[Scott] is building a DIY yeast reactor for his aquarium. What’s a yeast reactor? [Scott] wants to pump carbon dioxide into his aquarium so his aquatic plants grow more. He’s doing this with a gallon of sugary, yeasty water bubbling into a tank of plants and fish. In other words, [Scott] is doing this whole thing completely backward and utilizing the wrong waste product of the yeast metabolism.

However, along the way to pumping carbon dioxide into his aquarium, [Scott] created a very high precision pressure sensor. It’s based on a breakout board featuring the MS5611 air pressure sensor. This …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Coaxial Drones

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[Glytch] has been building drones since before they were called drones. Instead of submitting his time machine into the Hackaday Prize, he’s throwing his pocket sized, 3D printable coaxial drone into the ring.

His focus is on designing small and very portable drones, preferably one that has folding arms and can fit into a backpack. His portfolio even includes a clone of the DJI Mavic, the gimbaled camera-carrying consumer drone known for its small volume when folded.

Navi — [Glitch]’s entry for the Hackaday Prize — is a complete departure from quadcopters with folding arms. It’s simple to use, and …read more

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A Full Stack GPS Receiver

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The usual way of adding GPS capabilities to a project is grabbing an off-the-shelf GPS module, plugging it into a UART, and reading the stream of NEMA sentences coming out of a serial port. Depending on how much you spend on a GPS module, this is fine: the best modules out there start up quickly, and a lot of them recognize the logical AND in ITAR regulations.

For [Mike], grabbing an off-the-shelf module is out of the question. He’s building his own GPS receiver from the ground up using a bit of hardware and FPGA hacking. Already he’s getting good …read more

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