Author Archives: John Baichtal

Hackaday Prize Entry: MOLBED Braille Display

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Electromechanical braille displays, where little pins pop up or drop down to represent various characters, can cost upwards of a thousand dollars. That’s where the Modular Low-cost Braille Electro Display, aka MOLBED, steps up. The project’s creator, [Madaeon] aims to create a DIY-friendly, 3D-printable,  and simple braille system. He’s working on a single character’s display, with the idea it could be expanded to cover a whole row or even offer multiple rows.

[Madeon]’s design involves using Flexinol actuator wire to control whether a pin sticks or not. He designed a “rocker” system consisting of a series of 6 pins that …read more

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The Narrowing Gap Between Amateur and Professional Fabrication

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The other day I saw a plastic part that was so beautiful that I had to look twice to realize it hadn’t been cast — and no, it didn’t come out of a Stratysys or anything, just a 3D printer that probably cost $1,500. It struck me that someone who had paid an artisan to make a mold and cast that part might end up spending the same amount as that 3D printer. It also struck me that the little guys are starting to catch up with the big guys.

Haz Bridgeport, Will Mill

Sometimes it’s just a matter of …read more

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Building a Working Game of Tetris in Conway’s Game of Life

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If you haven’t been following along with Conway’s Game of Life, it’s come a long way from the mathematical puzzle published in Scientific American in 1970. Over the years, mathematicians have discovered a wide array of constructs that operate within Life’s rules, including many that can be leveraged to perform programming functions — logic gates, latches, multiplexers, and so on. Some of these creations have gotten rather huge and complicated, at least in terms of Life cells. For instance, the OTCA metapixel is comprised of 64,691 cells and has the ability to mimic any cellular automata found in Life.

A …read more

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Cheap And Easy Motion Tracking

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[Koppany Horvarth] set out to create a dirt-cheap optical tracking rig for VR that uses only two cameras and a certain amount of math to do its thing. He knew he could do theoretically, and wouldn’t cost a lot of money, but still required a lot of work and slightly absurd amount of math.

While playing around with a webcam that he’d set up to run an object-tracking Python script and discovered that his setup tended to display a translucent object with a LED inside of it as pure, washed-out white. This gave [Koppany] the idea that he could use …read more

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Capsela is Dead, Long Live Capsela

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In the magical 80s, there was a building set that stood apart from the rest. Capsela, originally created by Mitzubishi Pencil Company (the Uniball folks) looked like a series of clear plastic spheres with gears and motors inside. The signature Capsela modules served as both enclosure and functional component. The set came with a variety of gear options like planetary gear, worm gear, and clutch capsules. You could use chain drives and propellers. A lot of the parts were water-resistant, and part of the toy’s shtik was that you could make boats out of it with pontoons keeping most of …read more

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Capsela is Dead, Long Live Capsela

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In the magical 80s, there was a building set that stood apart from the rest. Capsela, originally created by Mitzubishi Pencil Company (the Uniball folks) looked like a series of clear plastic spheres with gears and motors inside. The signature Capsela modules served as both enclosure and functional component. The set came with a variety of gear options like planetary gear, worm gear, and clutch capsules. You could use chain drives and propellers. A lot of the parts were water-resistant, and part of the toy’s shtik was that you could make boats out of it with pontoons keeping most of …read more

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Sneakers: a Love-Fest

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“A TURNIP KILLS ELVIS” begins the opening credits, an intriguing beginning to a smart and still timely film that was released around 25 years ago. If you’ve never seen the movie, I’m about to spoil the hell out of it.

Sneakers features the title characters, hackers who work the 1992 gig economy as freelance penetration testers. They work for Martin Bishop, a hippie hacker Obi Wan who works San Francisco’s gray market, doing good deeds and helping banks improve their security.

While there is a fair amount of cheese in Sneakers, a lot of the problems the characters face …read more

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What’s the Best Way to Learn Electronics?

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What’s the best way to learn electronics? It’s a pithy question to ask a Hackaday audience, most of whom are at least conversant in the field already. Those who already have learned often have just their own perspective to draw upon—how they themselves learned. Some of you may have taught others. I want to explore what works and what doesn’t.

Hobbyists Learn Differently Than Students

One thing I can say straight off is that students learn differently than people who learn at home. Hobbyists have the advantage of actually being interested, which is a quality a student may not enjoy. …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Room-Tracking Red Vines Flinger

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[Vije Miller]’s Arduino Licorice Launcher is based on the simple and logical premise that one must always have a voice-activated Red Vines catapult in the workshop. When he calls out to the robot, it turns to aim at him and flings a piece of licorice at his head.

The chassis is CNCed out of quarter-inch MDF and the spring-loaded catapult arm is managed by two servos, one to tension the arm and one to secure it until it’s triggered.  Third and fourth servos aim the catapult and dispense another piece of licorice from the magazine. His robot adapts a radio …read more

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Sub-$20 Arduino-Based Telemetry System

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[William Osman] set out to prove that unlike expensive commercial data logging rigs, he could get the same results for under twenty bucks. He wanted to build a wireless three-axis accelerometer for a race car project, allowing engineers to make modifications to the suspension based on the data collected.

The hardware consists of an Arduino Pro Mini connected to a three-axis accelerometer, and an nRF24L01 wireless module. Power is supplied by the race car’s 12 V, changed to 5 V by a linear regulator with the Pro Mini in turn supplying 3.3 V. The base station consists of an Arduino …read more

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