Author Archives: Inderpreet Singh

Backchannel UART without the UART

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Anyone who has worked with a microcontroller is familiar with using printf as a makeshift debugger. This method is called tracing and it comes with the limitation that it uses up a UART peripheral. Believe it or not, there are 8051 variants out there that come with only one serial block and you are out of luck if your application needs it to communicate with another device.

[Jay Carlson] has a method by which he can piggyback these trace messages over an on-chip debugger. Though the newer ARM Cortex-M software debugger already has this facility but [Jay Carlson]’s hack is …read more

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3D printed Math Grenade

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Calculator hacks are fun and educational and an awesome way to show-off how 1337 your skills are. [Marcus Wu] is a maker who likes 3D printing and his Jumbo Curta Mechanical Calculator is a project from a different era. For those who are unfamiliar with the Curta, it is a mechanical calculator that was the brainchild of Curt Herzstark of Austria from the 1930s. The most interesting things about the design were the compactness and the complexity which baffled its first owners.

The contraption has setting sliders for input digits on the side of the main cylindrical body. A crank …read more

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3D printed Math Grenade

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Calculator hacks are fun and educational and an awesome way to show-off how 1337 your skills are. [Marcus Wu] is a maker who likes 3D printing and his Jumbo Curta Mechanical Calculator is a project from a different era. For those who are unfamiliar with the Curta, it is a mechanical calculator that was the brainchild of Curt Herzstark of Austria from the 1930s. The most interesting things about the design were the compactness and the complexity which baffled its first owners.

The contraption has setting sliders for input digits on the side of the main cylindrical body. A crank …read more

Continue reading 3D printed Math Grenade→

Hacking iBeacons For Automating Routines

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Every self-respecting hacker has an automation hack somewhere in his/her bag of tricks. There are a lot of modern-day technologies that facilitate the functionality like GPS, scripting apps, and even IFTTT. In an interesting hack, [Nick Lee] has combined iBeacons and a reverse engineered Starbucks API to create an automated morning routine.

By creating a mobile app that scans for iBeacons, [Nick Lee] was able to reduce the effort made every morning while heading to his office. When the app encounters a relevant beacon, a NodeJS app sitting in the cloud is triggered. This consequently leads to desired actions like …read more

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Make Some Noise with the Typewriter Keyboard

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Are you an angry programmer? Do you get the frequent urge to smash the return key or space bar after finishing every single line of code? Well then [Konstantin Schauwecker]’s typewriter keyboard is just the thing for you. In his project, [Konstantin] hacked a German Olympia Monica typewriter into a USB keyboard.

The project uses no less than 50 photo interrupters mounted on a custom PCB that mounts directly under the typewriter itself. The circuit board is so designed that the hammer arms take a position in obstructing the opto-interrupters. Every time a key is pressed, the corresponding device sends …read more

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Make Some Noise with the Typewriter Keyboard

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Are you an angry programmer? Do you get the frequent urge to smash the return key or space bar after finishing every single line of code? Well then [Konstantin Schauwecker]’s typewriter keyboard is just the thing for you. In his project, [Konstantin] hacked a German Olympia Monica typewriter into a USB keyboard.

The project uses no less than 50 photo interrupters mounted on a custom PCB that mounts directly under the typewriter itself. The circuit board is so designed that the hammer arms take a position in obstructing the opto-interrupters. Every time a key is pressed, the corresponding device sends …read more

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Hacking Touch Screens to Count Pulses

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Heart rate sensors available for DIY use employ photoplethysmography which illuminates the skin and measures changes in light absorption. These sensors are cheap, however, the circuitry required to interface them to other devices is not. [Petteri Hyvärinen] is successfully investigating the use of capacitive touchscreens for heart rate sensing among other applications.

The capacitive sensor layer on modern-day devices has a grid of elements to detect touch. Typically there is an interfacing IC that translates the detected touches into filtered digital numbers that can be used by higher level applications. [optisimon] first figured out a way to obtain the raw …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: DIY DLP

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The 3D printing revolution is upon us and the technologies associated with these machines is evolving every day. Stereolithography or SLA printers are becoming the go-to printer for high-resolution prints that just can’t be fabricated on a filament-based machine. ADAM DLP 3D printer project is [adambrx]’s entry into the Hackaday Prize and the first step in his quest for higher quality prints on a DIY budget.

[adambrx]’s current iteration employs a Raspberry Pi 3 and a UV DLP Projector, all enclosed in a custom frame assembly. The logs show the evolution of the printer from an Acer DLP to the …read more

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Wooden Laptop Enclosure: New Life for Old Thinkpad

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Technology is designed to serve us and make our lives better. When a device gets outdated, it is either disposed of or is buried in a pile of junk never to be seen again. However, some individuals tend to develop a certain respect for their mechanical servants and make an effort to preserve them long after they have become redundant.

My relationship with my first laptop is a shining example of how to hold onto beloved hardware way too long. I converted that laptop into a desktop with a number of serious modifications which helped me learn about woodworking along …read more

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12-Foot Guitar Takes The Stage

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Musical festivals are fun and exciting. They are an opportunity for people to perform and show-off their art. The Boulevardia event held this June in Kansas City was one such event, where one of the interactive exhibits was a 12-foot guitar that could be played. [Chris Riebschlager] shares his experience making this instrument which was intended to welcome the visitors at the event.

The heart of this beautiful installation is a Bare Conductive board which is used to detect a touch on the strings. This information is sent over serial communication to a Raspberry Pi which then selects corresponding WAV …read more

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