Collaborate Disseminate
We’re all used to general purpose microcontroller boards such as the Arduino or its many imitators, but perhaps we don’t see as much of their industrial cousins. A programmable logic …read more Continue reading An Affordable And Programmable PLC
[Florian] and his engineering team at Munich-based bmc::labs has developed a clever set of prototyping boards for vehicle hacking and rapid product development, collectively called the bmc::board or bmc::mini. These stackable …read more Continue reading Small Open Source Vehicle Hacking Platform
If you’ve ever had a particularly nasty fracture, your doctor may have prescribed the use of an electronic bone growth stimulator. These wearable devices produce a pulsed electromagnetic field around the bone, which has been shown to speed up the natural healing process in a statistically significant number of patients. …read more
It might not be the kind of thing you’ve given much thought to, but if you’ve ever used a desktop 3D printer, it was almost certainly being controlled by an 8-bit CPU. In fact, the common RAMPS controller is essentially just a motor driver shield for the Arduino Mega. Surely …read more
[Isabelle Simova] is building Hoverbot, a flexible robotics platform using Ikea plastic trays, JavaScript running on a Raspberry Pi and parts scavenged from commonly available hoverboards.
Self-balancing scooters a.k.a. Hoverboards are a great source of parts for such a project. Their high torque, direct drive brushless motors can drive loads of 100 kg or more. In addition, you also get a matching motor controller board, a rechargeable battery and its charging circuit. Most hoverboard controllers use the STM32F103, so flashing them with your own firmware becomes easy using a ST-link V2 programmer.
The next set of parts you need to …read more
Continue reading Turning That Old Hoverboard Into A Learning Platform
It started with a cheap, punch-card programmable manual music box. Thirty-one hobby servos later, it ended as an automated MIDI music box, with a short pit stop as a keyboard-driven MIDI device.
If you think you’ve seen the music box in [mitexela]’s video below before, you’re right. [Martin], musician, inventor, and father of the marvelous marble music machine, took an interest in these music boxes and their programming a while back. Like [Martin], [mitexela] started his music box project with punch card programming, but he quickly grew tired of the bothersome process, even after automating production with a laser cutter. He decided …read more
Continue reading Servos Do the Plucking in this MIDI Music Box
While regular Hackaday readers already know how to blink a LED with a microcontroller and have moved onto slightly more challenging projects such as solving the Navier-Strokes equations in 6502 assembly, that doesn’t mean there’s not space for newbies. [Rik] has published a great tutorial on abusing DMA for blinkier glowy things. Why would anyone want to learn about DMA techniques? For blinkier glowy things, of course.
This tutorial assumes knowledge of LED multiplexing and LED matrices, or basically a bunch of LEDs connected together on an XY grid. The naive way to drive an 8×8 grid of LEDs is …read more
In the last episode, I advocated a little bit for Forth on microcontrollers being a still-viable development platform, not just for industry where it’s usually seen these days, but also for hackers. I maybe even tricked you into buying a couple pieces of cheap hardware. This time around, we’re going to get the Forth system set up on that hardware, and run the compulsory “hello world” and LED blinky. But then we’ll also take a dip into one of the features that make Forth very neat on microcontrollers: easy multitasking.
To work!
Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth runs on a great number …read more
Continue reading Moving Forth with Mecrisp-Stellaris and Embello
Dev boards sporting a powerful ARM microcontroller are the future, despite what a gaggle of Arduino clones from China will tell you. Being the future doesn’t mean there’s not plenty of these boards around, though. The LeafLabs Maple has been around since 2009, and is a fine board if you want all that Processing/Wiring/Arduino goodies in a in an ARM dev board. The Maple has been EOL’d, and that means it’s time for a few new boards that build on what LeafLabs left behind.
This Hackaday Prize entry is for an almost-clone of the Leaflabs Maple Mini. It sports a …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: A Cheap STM32 Dev Board
DEF CON 24 is still about two weeks away but we managed to get our hands on a hardware badge early. This is not the official hardware — there’s no way they’d let us leak that early. Although it may be unofficial in the sense that it won’t get you into the con, I’m declaring the AND!XOR badge to be officially awesome. I’ll walk you through it. There’s also a video below.
Over the past several years, building your own electronic badge has become an impromptu event. People who met at DEF CON and have been returning year after year …read more
Continue reading Hands-on the AND!XOR Unofficial DEF CON Badge
