Author Archives: Richard Baguley

Google Light Fields Trying to Get the Jump on Magic Leap

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Light Field technology is a fascinating area of Virtual Reality research that emulates the way that light behaves to make a virtual scene look more realistic. By emulating light coming from multiple angles entering the eye, the scenes look more realistic because they look closer to reality. It is rumored to be part of the technology included in the forthcoming Magic Leap headset, but it looks like Google is trying to steal some of their thunder. The VR research arm of the search giant has released a VR app called Welcome to Light Fields that uses a similar technique on …read more

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Reverse Engineering Opens Up the Samsung Gear VR Controller

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We love a bit of reverse engineering here at Hackaday, figuring out how a device works from the way it communicates with the world. This project from [Jim Yang] is a great example of this: he reverse-engineered the Samsung Gear VR controller that accompanies the Gear VR add-on for their phones. By digging into the APK that links the device to the phone, he was able to figure out the details of the Bluetooth connection that the app uses to connect to the device. Specifically, he was able to find the commands that were used to get the device to …read more

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Arduino Watchdog Has Bite And Doesn’t Need Treats

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My dog Jasper isn’t much of a watchdog: he’s too interested in sleeping and chasing my cats to keep an eye on things. Fortunately, [Vadim] has come up with a more reliable alternative with this simple Arduino watchdog. It’s designed to work with crypto coin mining rigs, but it could be easily adapted for other high-uptime uses, such as file servers or doomsday weapons.

The way it works is simple: a small program on the watched computer sends a command over the serial port: a polite “hello”. The Arduino watchdog picks this up and responds with an equally polite “HELLO”. …read more

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Resurrecting An Amiga CD32

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As an editor on Amiga magazines in a previous life, this is kind of bittersweet. [RetroManCave] was donated an Amiga CD32 games system, and it is trying to resurrect it. If you’ve not heard of it, the CD32 was a 1993 games console based on the Amiga home computer system. It was the last gasp for Commodore, the beleaguered company behind the Amiga. In this first video of a series, they take the system apart, take you through what’s inside and boot it up. The system boots, but there is some sort of problem with the video sync, and they …read more

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USB to Quad Serial Port Adapter Offers TTL, Isolated Ports

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[Felipe Navarro] wanted to add a few serial ports to his computer, but couldn’t find an adapter that suited his needs. So, he built his own.

His Quad Serial device is a nicely designed converter that offers four serial ports, two of which are isolated to avoid blowing up too much stuff if things go wrong. The other two are TTL ports, but with an interesting twist: feed them any voltage between 1.8 V and 5 V, and they will happily work with it, which is a lot easier than messing about with TTL to RS-232 converters.

It’s all built …read more

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Home Made 8-Bit CPU Is A Wiry Blinky Build

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It might look like a random pile of wires to some, but it is far from random: [Paulo Constantino] built this 8-bit CPU himself from scratch. He built his remarkable creation using wires and 74HC shift register chips, plus a selection of LEDs to show the various registers.

Running at a maximum of 5MHz, it has an 8-bit data and address bus, although the latter can be expanded to 16 bits. It’s not mining Bitcoin (yet), but it can do things like play the Mario theme. His latest addition is the addition of the ability to write data out to …read more

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MIT Makes Lego Lab For Microfluidics

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As any good hacker (or scientist) knows, sometimes you find the tools you need in unexpected places. For one group of MIT scientists, that place is a box of Lego. Graduate student [Crystal Owens] was looking for new ways to make a cheap, simple microfluidics kit. This technique uses the flow of small amounts of liquid to do things like sort cells, test the purity of liquids and much more. The existing lab tools aren’t cheap, but [Crystal] realized that Lego could do the same thing. By cutting channels into the flat surface of a Lego brick with a precise …read more

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Junk Build Printer Uses Pencil To Print

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Sometimes, it is interesting to see what you can build from the bits that you have in your junk drawer. [Dr West] decided to build a printer with spare parts including a hard drive, a scanner base and an Arduino. The result is a rather cool printer that prints out the image using a pencil, tapping the image out one dot at a time. The software converts the image into an array, with 0 representing white and 1 representing black. The printer itself works a bit like an old-school CRT TV: the scanner array moves the printer along a horizontal …read more

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Making A Covox Speech Thing Work On A Modern PC

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Long ago, when mainframes ruled the earth, computers were mute. In this era before MP3s and MMUs, most home computers could only manage a simple beep or two. Unless you had an add-on device like the Covox Speech Thing, that is. This 1986 device plugged into your parallel port and allowed you to play sound. Glorious 8-bit, mono sound. [Yeo Kheng Meng] had heard of this device, and wondered what it would take to get it running again on a modern Linux computer. So he found out in the best possible way: by doing it.

The Covox Speech Thing is …read more

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LED Stand For Lego Saturn V Boldly Goes Where No Lego Has Gone Before

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Hackers everywhere have spent the last couple of weeks building the remarkable Saturn V Lego models that they got for the holidays, but [Kat & Asa Miller] decided to go an extra step for realism: they built a stand with LED lights to simulate launch. To get the real feel of blast off, they used pillow stuffing, a clear acrylic tube and a string of NeoPixel LEDs. These are driven by an Adafruit Trinket running code that [Asa] wrote to create the look of a majestic Saturn V just lifting off the launchpad with the appropriate fire and fury.  They …read more

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