Author Archives: Steven Dufresne

Inventing The Microprocessor: The Intel 4004

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We recently looked at the origins of the integrated circuit (IC) and the calculator, which was the IC’s first killer app, but a surprise twist is that the calculator played a big part in the invention of the next world-changing marvel, the microprocessor.

There is some dispute as to which company invented the microprocessor, and we’ll talk about that further down. But who invented the first commercially available microprocessor? That honor goes to Intel for the 4004.

Path To The 4004

We pick up the tale with Robert Noyce, who had co-invented the IC while at Fairchild Semiconductor. In July …read more

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Stepper Motor Robot Arm Has Smooth Moves

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[Tobias Kuhn] had watched a YouTube video about a robot arm which used servo motors, and wanted to try making one himself. But he found it hard to get slow or smooth movements out of the servos. Even removing the microcontroller and trying to work with the servo’s driver-IC and potentiometer from an Arduino Nano didn’t get him satisfaction.

Then he found the very affordable 28BYJ-48 stepper motor. After some experimenting, he came up with a smooth moving robot arm with four steppers controlled from an Arduino Mega and A4988 stepper motor drivers. Rather than write a bunch of stepper  …read more

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Neural Networking: Robots Learning From Video

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Humans are very good at watching others and imitating what they do. Show someone a video of flipping a switch to turn on a CNC machine and after a single viewing they’ll be able to do it themselves. But can a robot do the same?

Bear in mind that we want the demonstration video to be of a human arm and hand flipping the switch. When the robot does it, the camera that is its eye will be seeing its robot arm and gripper. So somehow it’ll have to know that its robot parts are equivalent to the human parts …read more

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Pi Weather Lamp Puts Lava Lamps To Shame

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Representing the weather on an LED lamp in a manner that’s easy to interpret can be difficult, but [Gosse Adema]’s weather/matrix lamp makes it not only obvious what the weather is but also offers a very attractive display. For rain, drops of light move downward, and for wind, sideways. The temperature is shown using a range of colors from red to blue, and since he is situated in the Netherlands he needed snow, which he shows as white. A rainy, windy day has lights moving both down and sideways with temperature information as the background.

To implement it he mounted …read more

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Pi Weather Lamp Puts Lava Lamps To Shame

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Representing the weather on an LED lamp in a manner that’s easy to interpret can be difficult, but [Gosse Adema]’s weather/matrix lamp makes it not only obvious what the weather is but also offers a very attractive display. For rain, drops of light move downward, and for wind, sideways. The temperature is shown using a range of colors from red to blue, and since he is situated in the Netherlands he needed snow, which he shows as white. A rainy, windy day has lights moving both down and sideways with temperature information as the background.

To implement it he mounted …read more

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Edgytokei: Time On The Edge

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Taking inspiration from Japanese nunchucks, [ekaggrat singh kalsi] came up with a brilliant clock that tells time using only hour and minute hands, and of course a base for them to sit on. The hands at certain parts of the hour seem to float in the air, or as he puts it, to sit on their edges, hence the name, the Edgytokei, translating as “edge clock”.

The time is a little difficult to read at first unless you’ve drawn in a clock face with numbers as we’ve done here. 9:02 and 9:54 are simple enough, but 9:20 and 9:33 can …read more

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This Boombox Hack is Lit

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Old boomboxes make great hacks. Their design is iconic; yes they look dated but that really just builds on the nostalgic urge to have one hanging around. Plus their big cases simply invite adding things inside in a way impossible with contemporary electronics.

[Danc0rp] hacked his JVC M70 boombox to make the speakers glow with animated light, bumping VU meters, and a pulsing horizontal bar above the tape deck. The effect is superb. The cones of the speakers act like a projection surface and the grilles hide the LEDs until they activate, and enhance the effects once unleashed. It is …read more

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Barbara McClintock: Against The Genetic Grain

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The tale of much of Barbara McClintock’s life is that of the scientist working long hours with a microscope seeking to solve mysteries. The mystery she spent most of her career trying to solve was how all cells in an organism can contain the same DNA, and yet divide to produce cells serving different functions; basically how cells differentiate. And for that, she got a Nobel prize all to herself, which is no small feat either.

Becoming a Scientist

McClintock was born on June 16, 1902, in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. From age three until beginning school, she lived with her …read more

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Google’s AIY Vision Kit Augments Pi With Vision Processor

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Google has announced their soon to be available Vision Kit, their next easy to assemble Artificial Intelligence Yourself (AIY) product. You’ll have to provide your own Raspberry Pi Zero W but that’s okay since what makes this special is Google’s VisionBonnet board that they do provide, basically a low power neural network accelerator board running TensorFlow.

The VisionBonnet is built around the Intel® Movidius™ Myriad 2 (aka MA2450) vision processing unit (VPU) chip. See the video below for an overview of this chip, but what it allows is the rapid processing of compute-intensive neural networks. We don’t think you’d use …read more

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Connecting Cherry MX Key Switches To LEGO Just Got Easier

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Here on Hackaday, we like keyboard hacks. Given how much time we all spend pounding away on them, they’re natural hacks to come up with. If you’re pulling the circuitry from an existing keyboard then chances are the keys are pressed either by pushing down on rubber domes (AKA the membrane type), or on mechanical switches. [Jason Allemann] has just made it easier to do keyboard hacks using LEGO by building one for a circuit board with mechanical Cherry MX key switches. That involved designing parts to connect LEGO bricks to the switches.

For those custom parts, he recruited his …read more

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