Author Archives: John Baichtal

Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Bike Shoe

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Shoes are some of the most complex pieces of equipment you can buy. There’s multiple materials ranging from foam to weird polyesters in a simple sneaker, and if you dig into shoes for biking, you’ll find some carbon fiber. All these layers are glued together, stitched, and assembled into a functional piece of exercise equipment, with multiple SKUs for each size. It’s really amazing.

Accordingly, [marcs] created N+ Open Bike Shoe Platform, the purpose of which is to create open source,  customizable, and repairable shoe platform based on 3D printing, though with other techniques like rubber molding and sewing fabric …read more

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Making Braille Signs out of PCBs

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[jg] recently passed some damaged Braille signs and took on the challenge of repairing them. Informed by his recent work on PCB lapel pins, [jg] immediately thought of using circuit boards for this project. He’d noticed that round solder pads made for uniform hills of solder, and this reminded him of the bumps in Braille.

He began by reading up on the standards of the Braille Authority of North America, which stipulates a dot height of 0.6mm. He loaded up the PharmaBraille font system and laid it out the dots in photoshop, then and imported it into KiCad and laid …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Radio Telescope Interferometer

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Radio telescopes are one of the dark arts of science. Not only do you have to deal with RF wizardry, the photons you’re detecting are so far out of the normal human experience that you really don’t know what you’re looking at. It’s hard, but that’s the point — there’s a lot to learn with a radio telescope.

[alfazoOm]’s entry in the 2017 Hackaday Prize seeks to counteract a two-part problem: first, there is a dearth of educational radio interferometers in Latin America. Secondly, in Colombia, there’s only so much clear sky so radio astronomy is the preferred technique. Even …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Arduino Video Display Shield

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The Arduino is the standard for any introduction to microcontrollers. When it comes to displaying video, the bone stock Arduino Uno is severely lacking. There’s just not enough memory for a framebuffer, and it’s barely fast enough to race the beam. If you want video from an Arduino, it’s either going to be crappy, or you’re going to need some magic chips to make everything happen.

[MagicWolfi]’s 2017 Hackaday Prize entry consists of an video display shield that would be so easy to use that, according to the project description, it could be a substitute for the classic Blink sketch. …read more

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The Most Useless Tools You Can’t Seem to Part With

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I’m a tool person. No matter how hard I try, I eventually end up with a bunch of tools that I just can’t bear to banish from my workshop. Why? I’m gonna keep it 100%: it’s the same emotion behind hoarding — fearing that you might need a thing later and not be able to have it.

The stuff costs money, and if you have to script to buy a bunch of tools pertaining to Project X, you expect to still have and probably need those very same tools — even if they have to sit in a box on …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: CNC Mill Lets Kids Engrave on the Fly

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The manufacturing revolution has already begun, and there are 3D printers, CNC machines, and laser cutters popping up in garages and workspaces all around the world. The trouble with these machines is that they’re fiddly to use, and you don’t want a kid playing around with them.

[moritz.messerschmidt]’s Hackaday Prize entry is a desktop Badgemaker that engraves acrylic name badges for kids. Under the hood, an Arduino with a custom-built shield with 3 SilentStepStick stepper drivers on it operates the three NEMA-11 motors. Meanwhile, the kids interact with a 7” touchscreen powered by a Raspberry Pi.

Once the kid selects …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Thingspeak IoT Heart Rate Monitor

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[Naman Chauhan]’s 2017 Hackaday Prize entry consists of a heartbeat detection and monitoring system that centers around everyone’s favorite WiFi board, the ESP8266. The monitor is hooked up to the patient’s finger, keeping track of his or her vitals and publishing the data on the cloud.

By using Thingspeak to manage the data, [Naman] leverages the platform’s data visualization and analytical features. Also, by making the data accessible on the cloud, he offers an intriguing opportunity to help friends and relatives to monitor the data. If you think about it, if you had a loved one in the hospital, wouldn’t …read more

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Using an Arduino to Re-Create a Computer’s Keyboard Decoder

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[Max Breedon] found an old Apple IIe clone twenty years ago. He recently dug this Epson AP-200 out of the salvage heap and quickly discovered that the keyboard decoder chip was fried. The old chip was way too obscure to source a replacement — and soon this post will be the top Google result for the string, ‘C35224E’ — so he busted out his trusty UNO and created a replacement keyboard decoder.

Unlike the Apple II, where all the keyboard decoding happens on the keyboard, this clone used a dedicated chip on the main board. Although it’s a rare part …read more

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Making Music with the Wind

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[Niklas Roy] built a windmill-powered music box for his backyard, and it was so awesome all the neighbors wanted to take a picture of it. Someone even liked it so much that he stole [Niklas]’s windmill in the middle of the night. (We kind of don’t blame them, it’s a gorgeously clean build.)

In the past few weeks [Niklas] has been mass-producing 20 windmills for the KIKK Festival 2017 to be held in November in Namur, Belgium. The windmills will operate in a cluster, and all play “Für Elise” when the wind blows. However, each one is driven independently and …read more

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Reading 16 Rotary Encoders at the Same Time

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We’re digging these daisy-chainable encoders built by [fattore.saimon]. Each module consists of a rotary encoder attached to a PCB with a PIC16F15386 on the back. As we’ve covered in the past, the Microchip released their feature-rich PIC16 microprocessor just this year, and it’s great to see them start to crop up in projects. With 4 address jumpers on the back of each PCB, [fattore.saimon] is able to connect up to 16 of the encoders on the bus. The modules also have male and female plugs so he can connect them physically as well, to simplify wiring. Each module also has …read more

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