Monthly Archives: March 2017

An Introduction to Differential I²C

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

A few weeks back, we talked about the no-nos of running I²C over long wires. For prototyping? Yes! But for a bulletproof production environment, this practice just won’t make the cut. This month I plucked my favorite solution from the bunch and gave it a spin. Specifically, I have put together a differential I²C (DI²C) setup with the PCA9615 to talk to a string of Bosch IMUs. Behold: an IMU Noodle is born! Grab yourself a cup of coffee and join me as I arm you with the nuts and bolts of DI²C so that you too can run I²C …read more

Continue reading →

Posted in i2c, IMU, Skills | Leave a comment

Gaming Beyond Retropie

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Looking for something a bit more from your Raspberry Pi? Tired of the usual console and arcade games? Eltech’s Exagear Desktop is a virtual machine that runs on your Raspberry Pi and allows you to run x86 games. [Dmitry]’s done a write-up about running more modern games on your Raspberry Pi.

Up until now, the Pi has been a great platform for retro gaming. By running MAME or EmulationStation, you can play classic arcade games as well as the great console games you played as a kid. Exagear Desktop goes one further, allowing you to use Wine to play more …read more

Continue reading →

Posted in Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 3, retro gaming, wine | Leave a comment

Linux-Fu: Applications on the Web

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Did you know you can run remote Linux GUI programs in a browser with HTML5 support? It’s even secure because you can use SSH tunneling and that little trick means you don’t even need to open additional ports. If this sounds like gibberish, read on, it’s actually pretty easy to get up and running.

I recently was a guest on a Houston-based podcast, and the hosts asked me if the best thing about writing for Hackaday was getting to work with the other Hackaday staff. I told them that was really good, but what I like best was interacting with …read more

Continue reading →

Posted in linux, linux hacks, remote desktop, Skills, ssh, tunnel, xpra | Leave a comment

The Right Circuit Turns Doppler Module into a Sensor

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Can you buy a working radar module for $12? As it turns out, you can. But can you make it output useful information? According to [Mathieu], the answer is also yes, but only if you ignore the datasheet circuit and build this amplification circuit for your dirt cheap Doppler module.

The module in question is a CDM324 24-GHz board that’s currently listing for $12 on Amazon. It’s the K-band cousin of the X-band HB100 used by [Mathieu] in a project we covered a few years back, but thanks to the shorter wavelength the module is much smaller — just an …read more

Continue reading →

Posted in high pass filter, misc hacks, op-amp, radar, radio hacks, sensor, speed, velocity | Leave a comment

Make a PVC Drill Press

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

There are two types of people in this world: people who think that PVC is only suitable for plumbing, and people who don’t even know that you can use PVC to carry water. Instructables user [amjohnny] is clearly of the latter school. His PVC Dremel drill press is a bit of an oldie, but it’s still a testament to the pipefitter’s art. And you can watch it in action in the video embedded below.

Things we particularly like about this build include the PVC parallelogram movement, springs around tubes to push the Dremel head back up, and the clever use …read more

Continue reading →

Posted in pcb drill, PVC, shop, tool hacks | Leave a comment

The $2 32-Bit Arduino (with Debugging)

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the Arduino. But if I had two serious gripes about the original offering it was the 8-bit CPU and the lack of proper debugging support. Now there’s plenty of 32-bit support in the Arduino IDE, so that takes care of the first big issue. Taking care of having a real debugger, though, is a bit trickier. I recently set out to use one of the cheap “blue pill” STM32 ARM boards. These are available for just a few bucks from the usual Chinese sources. I picked mine up for about $6 …read more

Continue reading →

Posted in stm32duino | Leave a comment

Sudo Make Me a Sandwich

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

How do you like your Ham and Cheese sandwich? If you answered “I prefer it beefy”, look no further than [William Osman]’s Vin Diesel Ham and Cheese Sandwich! [Osman]’s blog tagline is “There’s science to do” but he is the first to admit this is science gone too far. When one of his followers, [Restroom Sounds], commented “Please sculpt a bust of [Vin Diesel] using laser cut cross-sections of laser sliced ham”, he just had to do it.

His friend [CameraManJohn] modeled the bust using Maya and [Osman] has provided links to download the files in case there’s the remote …read more

Continue reading →

Posted in laser, laser hacks, sandwich, vin Diesel | Leave a comment

Review: Centre For Computing History

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

With almost everything that contains a shred of automation relying on a microcontroller these days, it’s likely that you will own hundreds of microprocessors beside the obvious ones in your laptop or phone. Computing devices large and small have become such a part of the fabric of our lives that we cease to see them, the devices and machines they serve just work, and we get on with our lives.

It is sometimes easy to forget then how recent an innovation they are.  If you were born in the 1960s for example, computers would probably have been something spoken in …read more

Continue reading →

Posted in history, megaprocessor, museum, reviews | Leave a comment

Endstops That Stay Out of the Way

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

In the course of building a new delta printer, [thehans] decided he needed his own endstop design that used minimal hardware. Endstops are just switches that get hit when the printer moves at the extreme of an axis, but [thehans] wanted something with a bit of refinement for his BigDelta 3D Printer build.

The result is a small unit that cradles a microswitch and needs only a single zip tie that mounts flush, resulting in a super tidy looking piece. In addition, it mounts on the delta’s v-slot rails such that the mount does not take up any of the …read more

Continue reading →

Posted in openscad, parametric, zip strap | Leave a comment

Sir, It Appears We’ve Been Jammed!

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

In a move that would induce ire in Lord Helmet, [Kedar Nimbalkar] has recreated Instructables user spacehun’s version of WiFi jammer that comes with a handful of features certain to frustrate whomever has provoked its wrath.

The jammer is an ESP8266 development board — running some additional custom code — accessed and controlled by a cell phone. From the interface, [Nimbalkar] is able to target a WiFi network and boot all the devices off the network by de-authenticating them. Another method is to flood the airspace with bogus SSIDs to make connecting to a valid network a drawn-out affair.

This …read more

Continue reading →

Posted in jammer, wifi, wireless hacks | Leave a comment