Hackszine.com: Electronics Archives

Archive: Electronics

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April 18, 2008

Tresling - arm wrestling game controller

Meet Tresling, a newfangled competitive sport which combines the physical challenge of arm wrestling with the mental intensity of Tetris. This video has been making the rounds. It's so over the top, I can't help but appreciate it:

The site is scant on details, but as far as I know, this represents the first arm-wrestling human computer interface. The NES brought us guns and running pads. The Wiimote a tennis racket, fishing pole, and boxing glove. If you can get past the initial craziness of Tresling, it's actually an interesting hack in that it's a completely new category of game play made possible by a clever homebrew controller.

Tresling: Arm Wrestling + Tetris

April 17, 2008

SwashBot - robot from a helicopter

CrabFu's latest project, the SwashBot, is a 3-legged radio controlled robot built from RC helicopter guts. The three servos that would normally affect the swashplate control the position of the three legs. Instead of tilting or raising the swashplate, the control inputs move the robot from side to side or up and down in a surprisingly organic-looking way. Here's a video:

I think what I like best about this is its simplicity. You could make one of these guys in an afternoon using the parts from a standard RC helicopter, some hot glue, and a few extra servo horns. I'm not sure how the helmet was made, which is arguably what makes this little bot look so bad ass, but the guts would only take a few hours to put together. Pure genius.

CrabFu's SwashBot [via Makezine]
More of CrabFu's Steam Toys

April 15, 2008

Turn an ATX power supply into a lab PSU

With a couple hours of work, it's pretty simple to pull the power supply from an old PC relic and turn it into a pretty decent bench system for powering your electronics projects. The standard ATX power supplys that you find in desktop computers have regulated 5 and 12 and 3.3 Volt outputs with sufficient power for most small project needs. You probably have a few of these just collecting dust in the basement, which means you could have a test bench PSU for quite a bit less than the 80 bucks you'd drop for one on
eBay.

WikiHow and Instructables both have a decent howto on the subject. As always, be careful when working with high voltage electronics. Nobody wants "almost saved $80" on their epitaph, so mind those capacitors.

Convert a Computer ATX Power Supply to a Lab Power Supply
ATX -> Lab Bench Power Supply Conversion

April 1, 2008

USB CapsLocker and Sun keyboard simulation

Of all the April Fools pranks that I came across today, the Stealth USB CapsLocker was my favorite. The tiny AVR-driven USB device sends random caps lock keypresses to a PC via a USB interface. The user will see their caps lock light come on from time to time and think they've accidentally hit that most useless key on the keyboard.

Then they might see the Caps Lock light turn on by itself. Next is a sequence of reboots, bashing the keyboard on the desk, clicking through the Control Panel, possibly even replacing the keyboard. Unless they notice the tiny little device sitting in one of the USB ports on the back of their computer, nothing will help.

Equally as cruel, but slightly less technical, would be to switch someone's keyboard mapping to be like the old Sun keyboards (with the control and caps lock key positions swapped).

Be careful, though. There might be some cranky old unix guru who actually appreciates this configuration.

Stealth USB CapsLocker
EasyLogger - example AVR USB keyboard input device
Remap Caps Lock

March 31, 2008

Robosapien has a coil gun

This custom coil gun for V2 robosapiens is outstanding. The video was posted to youtube over a year ago, but I just noticed it now, so let's all just sit back, enjoy, and pretend it's super fresh. Mmmkay?

It looks like Marcus based his coil gun on the bic-pen and disposable camera capacitor design that's been floating around. To that, he added a servo controlled auto-reload mechanism, complete with a LED "armed" indicator light. The final package, with laser sight, should terrorize pop cans and Teddy Ruxpin with a half-Joule of kinetic robo-chaos. The CoilOsapien site below has complete build instructions, in case you'd like to make your own.

CoilOsapien

March 29, 2008

Little drummer bot

Yellow Drum Machine is a tiny musical robot who's sole purpose in simulife is to motor around looking for suitable surfaces to drum a beat on.

Notice how the robot first plays on the object it finds (or is forced to find by the angry cameraman), plays a small beat, and records the beat it plays on it. Then this recorded beat is played again, and it starts to play on the object (an belt tracks and everything else it has),and also playing this sampled beat :)
...

Why? Well.. I was sitting thinking what I should do for my next robot, what it should do.. Listening to music.. making a rythm with some robot-parts.. Thought; "Hey, I will make a robot that drives around and plays on stuff"

It's a pretty simple robot, which could make this a fun little weekend project. The main components are a Picaxe brain, an ultrasonic rangefinder for position sensing, and 6 gear motors for moving and drumming. It's funny how the simple addition of a speaker and drum kit transforms a simple obstacle avoider into a soul machine.

Yellow Drum Machine

March 27, 2008

Shredz64: Guitar Hero for C64

Toni Westbrook authored a new C64 game called Shredz64, bringing the best game of all time to the best computing platform of all time:

You can use the real Guitar Hero controller using the PSX64 PS2-to-DB9 converter which Toni also created. This takes the game controller input and maps it to the appropriate up, down, left, right and potentiometer lines for the Commodore.

Shredz64 uses the internal SID audio processor to play any of your favorite SID tunes. In addition to the built-in songs, you can import new SID files and even create new levels by editing note tracks (using the game controller, naturally).

I'm speechless.

Shredz64

March 22, 2008

Easter egg anemometer

Here's something fun to do with the kids tomorrow after they've finished emptying those big plastic eggs of jelly beans and malted milk balls.

The basic ingredients are plastic eggs, a small DC motor from an old CD player, and a cheapo multimeter. It's a quick afternoon project, and you'll be able to measure the wind's speed—a useful addition to your toolkit for backyard experiments.

Easter Egg Anemometer (Wind Speed Meter)

March 16, 2008

Art Bots 2008

The fifth international ArtBots exhibit is being held on September 19-21 in Dublin Ireland. Whether you're interested in creating a robotic work of art, or a robot capable of producing its own works of art, you have till May 1st to submit an entry.

I've seen the output from this robot talent show / art fair for a few years now, and I'm really excited to see what happens this year. Are any of you folks planning on entering or attending?

Shown above: One of Bruce Shapiro's "Ribbon Dancer" robots. When activated, the robots are able to perform intricate dance routines by moving a ribbon through the air in choreographed patterns. It's the robot equivalent of an Olympic floor routine.

ArtBots 2008 Call for Works
Ribbon Dancer Robots

March 15, 2008

HOWTO: Fast SMT soldering

I've only had to solder a couple of SMT chips, and though my attempts have worked out for me, it's always been a combination of frustration and fear that I'm damaging the IC. John Gammell sent this video to me in response to one of my newbie attempts. In it, he shows how a pro approaches an SMT job using the "vertical drag" method.

It looks like he fixes the IC to the board, applies flux to all the pins, and then quickly drags a bead of solder back and forth over the pins. It's pretty unbelievable how quickly and precisely he is able to do the job. Impressive stuff.

Professional SMT Soldering

March 13, 2008

Arduino Etch-A-Scetch clock

Check out Angela Yuan's Etch-A-Scetch Clock. An Arduino powers a few stepper motors that clear the screen once a minute and then draw the current time.

It looks like there is a laptop that is sending commands, presumably time updates, to the Arduino via processing. Her site is a little scant on details, but there are a few useful links that will give you a good start if you'd like to build your own.

Etch-A-Sketch Clock - Link

March 5, 2008

Neighborhood crime fighting robot

Someone in Atlanta created what appears to be a homemade Dalek to help deal with streetcorner criminal activity:

Rufus Terrill has had it with the drug dealers, petty thieves and vandals he says roam the streets outside his downtown Atlanta bar, O'Terrills. Instead of calling the police or hiring private security guards, Terrill built his own security robot.

Watching the video leaves me with a bit of an uncomfortable vigilante aftertaste, which is a little strange since I can sympathize with the difficulties living in an area like this. It's just not realistic to head down the street at night and ask people to leave.

All that aside, it's just an imposing looking tele-operated vehicle with a squirt gun and a speaker. The reality is that it's probably in more danger of being tipped over sideways than hurting anyone.

The real hack here is that (for better or worse) someone's invented a home-brew, tele-operated psychology counter-weapon. By removing the immediate threat of violence, the driver is able to communicate in a hostile environment. If you made the thing look like Ronald McDonald and had it sing the theme song to Barney instead of squirting water, the robot would probably be even more effective.

Robot keeps Midtown block safe - [via] Link, Video

February 25, 2008

Botanicalls Twitter: flora tweets

With Monday finally wrapping up, it's time to start thinking about next weekend. Why not spend it Twitter-enabling your house plants?

Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What's up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love.

I've managed to make it through the winter with only two plant casualties so far. There isn't a whole lot I can do about the scarcity of light in Minneapolis, but with a little Arduino hacking I could at least remove watering issues from the equation.

Botanicalls Twitter - Link

February 24, 2008

LED security camera disruptor

The German translation isn't perfect, but this site describes a privacy product that defeats security cameras. A simple IR LED array in a headband is able to oversaturate the pixels in the camera's CCD to the point where even adjacent pixels are effected, shrouding the wearer's face in a white halo.

Infrared Light Against Security Cameras - [via] Link

February 21, 2008

SIXAXIS hacks

Hackszine reader IraqiGeek writes:

I made an application that uses libusb-Win32 and PPJoy to map the Sony Sixaxis into a windows joystick with the accelerometers working and mapped.
Unfortunately, the gyro on my sixaxis seems to be faulty. So, while the code is already there to read the gyro data, it can't be used for anything.

The installation process is not exactly the shortest, but I've made a step-by-step how-to describing it.

I did a little digging and there are a couple of other noteworthy SIXAXIS hacks. In addition to IraqiGeek's driver, there is another Windows SIXAXIS driver that people are using with some success. I also was able to find a third Windows driver which contains full source, in case you want to do something more interesting than play games.

Speaking of more interesting, there also exists an open source library for Linux. If you check out the above video, you can see that a gumstix embedded computer is using the SIXAXIS input to control a number of servos.

The six R/C servos are connected to a Gumstix board with built-in Bluetooth module. Inertial measurements from the SIXAXIS are received directly through a PF_BLUETOOTH socket (not through the joystick API, due to HID descriptor issues). Heuristics explicitly discriminate between two types of motion (rotation or translation).

The author was even able to use this setup to control a small helicopter. Pretty cool stuff, I must say.

Anyone know if the SIXAXIS sensor data can be easily polled with an Arduino? Maybe this could be a be a cheap option for a 6DOF IMU.

Using the PlayStation 3 controller in Bluetooth mode with Linux - Link
SixAxis source driver for Windows - Link
Use your SIXAXIS on Windows (ps3sixaxis_en.exe)- Link
WinSIXAXIS (IraqiGeek's libusb/PPJoy driver) - Link