Collaborate Disseminate
Sometimes it’s necessary to make do with whatever parts one has on hand, but the results of squashing a square peg into a round hole are not always as elegant as [Juan Gg]’s programmable DC load with rotary encoder. [Juan] took a design for a programmable DC load and made …read more
Continue reading Spot This DIY Electronic Load’s Gracefully Hidden Hacks
We’ve been told that standing at a desk is good for you, but unless you’re some kind of highly advanced automaton you’re going to have to sit down eventually no matter what all those lifestyle magazines say. That’s where desks like the IKEA SKARSTA come in; they use a crank on the front to raise and lower the desk to whatever height your rapidly aging corporeal form is still capable of maintaining. All the health benefits of a standing desk, without that stinging sense of defeat when you later discover you hate it.
But who wants to turn a crank …read more
In the era of touch screens and capacitive buttons, we’d be lying if we said we didn’t have the occasional pang of nostalgia for the good old days when interfacing with devices had a bit more heft to it. The physical clunk and snap of switches never seems to get old, and while you can always pick up a mechanical keyboard for your computer if you want to hear that beautiful staccato sound while firing off your angry Tweets, there’s a definite dearth of mechanical interface devices otherwise.
[Jeremy Cook] decided to take matters into his own hands (literally and …read more
If you have a brushless motor, you have some magnets, a bunch of coils arranged in a circle, and theoretically, all the parts you need to build a rotary encoder. A lot of people have used brushless or stepper motors as rotary encoders, but they all seem to do it by using the motor as a generator and looking at the phases and voltages. For their Hackaday Prize project, [besenyeim] is doing it differently: they’re using motors as coupled inductors, and it looks like this is a viable way to turn a motor into an encoder.
The experimental setup for …read more
[Raphaël Yancey] wanted to be able to jam to Bounce FM and Radio:X all the time, without having to steal a car or a street sweeper in San Andreas. As people who like to put on the sad piano building music from The Sims and write Hackaday posts, we can totally relate.
But this isn’t just another one of those jam-a-Pi-into-a-vintage-radio-and-call-it-a-sandwich projects (not that there’s anything wrong with those). This thing acts like a real radio. All the stations play continuously whether you’re tuned in or not, and they bleed into each other as you go up and down the …read more
Continue reading GTA: San Andreas Radio Earns Six-Star Wanted Level
We always think it is interesting that a regular DC motor and a generator are about the same thing. Sure, each is optimized for its purpose, but inefficiencies aside, you can use electricity to rotate a shaft or use a rotating shaft to generate electricity. [Andriyf1] has a slightly different trick. He shows how to use a stepper motor as an encoder. You can see a video of the setup below.
It makes sense. If the coils in the stepper can move the shaft, then moving the shaft should induce a current in the coils. He does note that at …read more
Rotary encoders are the bee’s knees. Not only do you get absolute positioning, you can also use a rotary encoder (with a fancy tact button underneath) for an easy UI for any electronics project. There’s a problem with rotary encoders, though: it’s going to use Gray code or something weird, and getting a rotary encoder to work with your code isn’t as easy as a simple button.
For his Hackaday Prize project, [fattore.saimon] has come up with the solution for using multiple rotary encoders in any project. It’s a board that turns a rotary encoder into an I2C device. Now, …read more
Undoubtedly, the ESP8266’s biggest selling point is its WiFi capability for a ridiculously low price. Paranoid folks probably await the day its closed-source firmware bits will turn against humanity in a giant botnet, but until then, hobbyists and commercial vendors alike will proceed putting them in their IoT projects and devices. One of those devices is the Yeelight desk lamp that lets you set its color temperature and brightness via mobile app.
[fvollmer] acquired such a lamp, and while he appreciated its design and general concept, he wasn’t happy that it communicates with external servers. So he did the only …read more
Continue reading Dumb Down Your Xiaomi Smart Lamp With A Custom Firmware
It’s easy to have a soft spot for “mini” yet perfectly functional versions of electronic workbench tools, like [David Johnson-Davies]’s Tiny Function Generator which uses an ATtiny85 to generate different waveforms at up to 5 kHz. It’s complete with a small OLED display to show the waveform and frequency selected. One of the reasons projects like this are great is not only because they tend to show off some software, but because they are great examples of the kind of fantastic possibilities that are open to anyone who wants to develop an idea. For example, it wasn’t all that long …read more
Continue reading Tiny Function Generator on the ATtiny85, Complete with OLED
[Erich] is the middle of building a new competition sumo bot for 2018. He’s trying to make this one as open and low-cost as humanly possible. So far it’s going pretty well, and the quest to make DIY parts has presented fodder for how-to posts along the way.
One of new bot’s features will be magnetic position encoders for the wheels. In the past, [Erich] has used the encoder disks that Pololu sells without issue. At 69¢ each, they don’t exactly break the bank, either. But shipping outside the US is prohibitively high, so he decided to try making his …read more