Collaborate Disseminate
Some people invent with the intent of seeking fame and prestige. Few inventors seem to truly care about other people the way that Garrett Augustus Morgan did. His inventions saved many lives, including those of a few people who were rescued by Garrett himself after an explosion tore through a …read more
Continue reading Garrett Augustus Morgan Made the World Safer
[beshur]’s 2-year-old is obsessed with transportation, so he lifted a few DUPLO blocks from the bin and made this toy traffic light as a birthday present. Hey, might as well get him used to the realities of traffic, right? It also makes for a good early hacker lesson: why buy …read more
Getting an old traffic light and wiring it up to do its thing inside your house isn’t exactly a new trick; it’s so common that it wouldn’t normally pass muster for these hallowed pages. Even using one up to show the real-time status of your build or system resource utilization …read more
Continue reading Arduino Traffic Light Sings The Song Of Its People
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the classic animated shorts of the 1940s will recognize the traffic signal in the image above. Yes, such things actually existed in the real world, not just in the Looney world of [Bugs Bunny] et al. As sturdy as such devices were, they don’t last forever, though, which is why a restoration of this classic Acme traffic signal was necessary for a California museum. Yes, that Acme.
When you see a traffic signal from the early days of the automotive age like this one, it becomes quickly apparent how good the modern equivalent …read more
Continue reading Old Time Traffic Signal Revived with a Raspberry Pi Controller
When working on software development in a team environment, it’s important to know the status of your build at all times. Jenkins can display build automation info on a screen but where’s the fun in that? A popular office project is to build some kind of visual display of a project’s status, and [dkt01] has done just that with this stack light build monitor.
In this day and age of online shopping, random bits of industrial hardware are just an eBay away, so it’s easy to find some cool lamps or indicators for any project. [dkt01] sourced a standard 24V …read more
Continue reading Jenkins Given an Industrial Stack Light for Build Reporting
In a bout of frustration I recently realized that the roads have all updated — most people have no idea how — and this sometimes hurts the flow of traffic. This realization happened when an unfortunate person stopped in a left turn lane well before the stop line. The vehicle didn’t trigger the sensor, so cycle after cycle went by and the traffic system never gave the left turn lane a green light, thinking the lane was unoccupied. Had the driver known about this the world would have been a better place. The first step in intelligent automation is sensing, …read more
Traffic lights are so ubiquitous that we hardly give them a second thought, except to curse their existence when they impede us on our daily drive. But no matter how much it seems like traffic lights have the ability to read our minds and tell when we’re running late, they’re really not much more than a set of lights and a programmable controller. Simple in practice, but as usual, the devil is in the details, and for a system that needs to work as close to 100% of the time as possible, the details are important. Let’s explore the inner …read more
Today on Hackaday Dictionary, we’re going to talk about the two basic types of control systems: open-loop and closed-loop. We’ll describe the differences between them and explore the various advantages and disadvantages of each. And finally, we’ll talk about what happens when you try to draw a line between the two.
Control systems are literally all around us. They’re illuminating our rooms, laundering our unmentionables, and conspiring to make us late for work. Most of us probably use or interact with at least five control systems before we’re even out the door in the morning. Odds are …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Dictionary: Open- and Closed-Loop Systems
