Richard Baguley – Page 11 – WindowsTechs.com

Electric Wheelbarrow Makes Hauling Big Loads Easier

Posted on September 19, 2018 by Richard Baguley

Gardening involves a depressing amount of physical activity: haul this over here, dump it there and then cover it with this. Things like wheelbarrows are still damn hard work, especially for people like who are somewhat physically compromised. That’s why we love this build from [Karl Gesslein]. He usually makes electronic bikes, adding motors to bicycles to roam the streets faster. But this time he applied his expertise to a wheelbarrow. He added a 3000W motor to the wheelbarrow, which drives the front wheel when triggered by the accelerator on the handle.

The project is a bit more sophisticated than …read more

Continue reading Electric Wheelbarrow Makes Hauling Big Loads Easier→

BladeRF 2.0 Micro is Smaller, More Powerful

Posted on August 30, 2018 by Richard Baguley

When it was launched in 2013, the BladeRF was one of the most powerful of the new generation of Software Defined Radios. Now, Nuand, the producers of the BladeRF are looking to up the ante again with the BladeRF 2.0 Micro. This new version has a huge list of changes and improvements, including a more bad-ass FPGA processor and support for receiving and transmitting from 47 MHz all the way up to 6 GHz, with 2x MIMO support and an impressive 56 Mhz of bandwidth. It also retains backwards compatibility with the original BladeRF, meaning that any software written to …read more

Continue reading BladeRF 2.0 Micro is Smaller, More Powerful→

Quadcopter Ditches Batteries; Flies on Solar Power Alone

Posted on August 26, 2018 by Richard Baguley

It seems kind of obvious when you think about it: why not just stick a solar panel on a quadcopter so it can fly on solar power? Unfortunately, physics is a cruel mistress, and it gets a bit more complex when you look at problems like weight to power ratios, panel efficiency, and similar tedious technical details. This group of National University of Singapore students has gone some way to overcome these technical issues, though: they just built a drone that is powered from solar power alone, with no batteries or other power source.

Their creation is a custom-built quadcopter …read more

Continue reading Quadcopter Ditches Batteries; Flies on Solar Power Alone→

The First Vending Machine Hacked Liquor Laws: The Puss and Mew

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Richard Baguley

It is fair to say that many technologies have been influenced by human vices. What you may not realize is that vending machines saw their dawn in this way, the first vending machine was created to serve booze. Specifically, it was created to serve gin, the tipple of choice of the early 18th century. it was created as a hack to get around a law that made it harder to sell alcoholic drinks. It was the first ever vending machine: the Puss and Mew.

England in the early 18th century was a drunken place. Because there were few reliable safe …read more

Continue reading The First Vending Machine Hacked Liquor Laws: The Puss and Mew→

Multi-switch Useless Box Is Useless In Multiple Ways

Posted on August 18, 2018 by Richard Baguley

We’ve probably all seen (and built) a useless box, in which you flip a switch that activates a servo that pops out a finger and flips the switch off. [Coffeman500] decided to take this a step further by building a useless box with multiple switches. Flip one, the finger pops out to flip it back. Flip several switches, and the finger pops out and flips each back in turn.

It’s a smart build that [coffeeman500] says is his first electronics build. The compulsively switching brain of this is an ATmega328 driving an A4988 stepper motor driver, with one stepper moving …read more

Continue reading Multi-switch Useless Box Is Useless In Multiple Ways→

PCB Junk Drawer Turned Into Blinky Mosaic

Posted on August 17, 2018 by Richard Baguley

We’ve all got a box full of old PCBs, just waiting to be stripped of anything useful. [Dennis1a4] decided to do something with his, turning it into an attractive mosaic that he hung on the wall of his new workshop. But this isn’t just a pile of old PCBs: [Dennis1a4] decided to use the LEDs that were on many of the old boards, creating a blinky junk build. That’s kind of neat in itself, but he then decided to go further, building in an IR receiver so he could control the blinkiness, and a PIR sensor that detected when someone …read more

Continue reading PCB Junk Drawer Turned Into Blinky Mosaic→

Talking To Alexa With Sign Language

Posted on July 26, 2018 by Richard Baguley

As William Gibson once noted, the future is already here, it just isn’t equally distributed. That’s especially true for those of us with disabilities. [Abishek Singh] wanted to do something about that, so he created a way for the hearing-impaired to use Amazon’s Alexa voice service. He did this using a TensorFlow deep learning network to convert American Sign Language (ASL) to speech and a speech-to-text converter to interpret the response. This all runs on a laptop, so it should work with any voice interface with a bit of tweaking. In particular, [Abishek] seems to have created a custom bit …read more

Continue reading Talking To Alexa With Sign Language→

Dual Source Laser Cutter Built Like a Tank, Cuts Most Anything

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Richard Baguley

Laser cutters aren’t the sort of thing that you might think about making at home, but there’s no reason not to if you are careful and do your research. That’s what [Daniele Ingrassia] did with the Laser Duo, an open source laser cutter that has two light sources for cutting various materials. His final product is not a small device: it has a press-formed aluminum case that looks more like a World War I tank than a piece of precision machinery. But that’s for a good reason: you don’t mess about with lasers, especially the 130 Watt CO2 and 75 …read more

Continue reading Dual Source Laser Cutter Built Like a Tank, Cuts Most Anything→

Interactive Mandelbrot Set Viewer Runs on FPGAs

Posted on July 15, 2018 by Richard Baguley

The Mandelbrot Set is a mathematical oddity where a simple function creates an infinitely complex landscape that you can literally zoom into forever. Like most people, I’ve downloaded Mandelbrot set viewers and marveled at the infinite whorls and spirals, and then waited while each frame took minutes or hours to render as I zoomed in. [Michael Henning], [Max Rademacher] and [Jonathan Plattner] decided to throw some modern computational muscle at this problem by building an interactive Mandelbrot set viewer using a laptop and two FPGA boards.

The three are students at Cornell, and this was their final project for the …read more

Continue reading Interactive Mandelbrot Set Viewer Runs on FPGAs→

Teardown Of Sonos And Amazon Smart Speakers Reveals Interesting Engineering Details

Posted on July 12, 2018 by Richard Baguley

Taking things apart is always fun, and this What Cracking Open a Sonos One Tells Us About the Sonos IPO”>excellent writeup of a teardown of a Sonos and Amazon smart speaker by [Ben Einstein] shows what you can learn. [Ben] is a Venture Capitalist and engineer, so much of his write up focuses on what the devices say about how the company spends money. There are plenty of things to learn for hackers, though: he details how the Sonos One uses a PCI daughterboard for wireless communications, while the Amazon Echo has a programmable radio on the main board.