Author Archives: Steven Dufresne

Performing A Chip Transplant To Resurrect A Dead Board

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[Uri Shaked] accidentally touched a GPIO pin on his 3.3 V board with a 12 V alligator clip, frying the board. Sound familiar? A replacement would have cost $60, which for him wasn’t cheap. Also, he needed it for an upcoming conference so time was of the essence. His only option was to try to fix it, which in the end involved a delicate chip transplant.

The board was the Pixl.js, an LCD board with the nRF52832 SoC with its ARM Cortex M4, RAM, flash, and Bluetooth LE. It also has a pre-installed Espruino JavaScript interpreter and of course the …read more

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Degaussing Coil To Restore Gameplay Like It’s 1985

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You may think that cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs and monitors have gone the way of the dinosaur, but you’d be wrong. Many still have them for playing video games at home or in arcades, for vintage computing, and yes, even for watching television programs. [Nesmaniac] uses his TV for playing Super Mario Bros but for several years it had a red area in the top right corner due to a nearby lightning strike. Sadly, it stood out particularly well against the game’s blue background. His solution was to make a degaussing coil.

We have an article explaining degaussing in …read more

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DIY Wire Bender Gets Wires All Bent Into Shape

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It’s been a while since we’ve shown a DIY wire bending machine, and [How To Mechatronics] has come up with an elegant design with easy construction through the use of 3D-printed parts which handle most of the inherent complexity. This one also has a Z-axis so that you can produce 3D wire shapes. And as with all wire bending machines, it’s fun to watch it in action, which you can do in the video below along with seeing the step-by-step construction.

One nice feature is that he’s included a limit switch for automatically positioning the Z-axis when you first turn …read more

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DIY Wire Bender Gets Wires All Bent Into Shape

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It’s been a while since we’ve shown a DIY wire bending machine, and [How To Mechatronics] has come up with an elegant design with easy construction through the use of 3D-printed parts which handle most of the inherent complexity. This one also has a Z-axis so that you can produce 3D wire shapes. And as with all wire bending machines, it’s fun to watch it in action, which you can do in the video below along with seeing the step-by-step construction.

One nice feature is that he’s included a limit switch for automatically positioning the Z-axis when you first turn …read more

Continue reading DIY Wire Bender Gets Wires All Bent Into Shape→

Synthesizing Mother Nature’s Sounds Like You’ve Never Seen Before

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We’ve all heard the range of sounds to be made electronically from mostly discrete components, but what [Kelly Heaton] has achieved with her many experiments is a whole other world, the world of nature to be exact. Her seemingly chaotic circuits create a nighttime symphony of frogs, crickets, and katydids, and a pleasant stroll through her Hackaday.io logs makes how she does it crystal clear and is surely as delightful as taking a nocturnal stroll through her Virginia countryside.

The visual and aural sensations of the video below will surely tempt you further, but in case it doesn’t, here’s a …read more

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This Year’s Nobel Prizes Are Straight Out Of Science Fiction

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In the 1966 science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage, medical personnel are shrunken to the size of microbes to enter a scientist’s body to perform brain surgery. Due to the work of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, laser tools now do work at this scale.

Arthur Ashkin won for his development of optical tweezers that use a laser to grip and manipulate objects as small a molecule. And Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland won for coming up with a way to produce ultra-short laser pulses at a high-intensity, used now for performing millions of corrective laser eye …read more

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Using AI To Pull Call Signs From SDR-Processed Signals

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AI is currently popular, so [Chirs Lam] figured he’d stimulate some interest in amateur radio by using it to pull call signs from radio signals processed using SDR. As you’ll see, the AI did just okay so [Chris] augmented it with an algorithm invented for gene sequencing.

His experiment was simple enough. He picked up a Baofeng handheld radio transceiver to transmit messages containing a call sign and some speech. He then used a 0.5 meter antenna to receive it and a little connecting hardware and a NooElec SDR dongle to get it into his laptop. There he used SDRSharp …read more

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Is 2018 Finally the Year of Windows on the Robot?

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Microsoft is bringing ROS to Window 10. ROS stands for Robot Operating System, a software framework and large collection of libraries for developing robots which we recently wrote an introductory article about, It’s long been primarily supported under Linux and Mac OS X, and even then, best under Ubuntu. My own efforts to get it working under the Raspbian distribution on the Raspberry Pi led me to instead download a Pi Ubuntu image. So having it running with the support of Microsoft on Windows will add some welcome variety.

To announce it to the world, they had a small booth …read more

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An Enigma Wrapped In A Riddle Wrapped In A Vintage Radio

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Puzzle boxes are great opportunities for hacking. You can start with a box which was originally used for something else. You get to design circuitry and controls which offer a complex puzzle for the players. And you can come up with a spectacular reward for those who solve it. [thomas.meston’s] Dr. Hallard’s Dream Transmission Box, which he created for an original party game, has all those elements.

The box was a broken 1948 National NC-33 Ham Radio purchased on eBay after a number of failed bids. Most of it was removed except for the speaker. The electronics is Arduino based, …read more

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Sorting LEGO Is Like Making A Box Of Chocolates

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Did you know that chocolate candy production and sorting LEGO bricks have something in common? They both use the same techniques for turning clumps of chocolates or bricks into individual ones moving down a conveyor belt. At least that’s what [Paco Garcia] found out when making his LEGO Sorter.

However, he didn’t find that out right away. He first experimented with his own techniques, learning that if he fed bricks to his conveyor belt by dropping a batch of them in a line perpendicular to the direction of belt travel then no subsequent separation attempt of his worked. He then …read more

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