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Monthly Archives: December 2018
Generating Power with Wind, Water, and Solar
It is three weeks after the apocalypse. No zombies yet. But you do need to charge your cell phone. How do you quickly make a wind turbine? If you’ve read this project, you might reach for a few empty water bottles. This educational project might not charge your phone without some extra work, but it does illustrate how to use water bottles to make a workable air scoop for turning a crank and possibly generating electricity.
That takes care of the wind and water aspects, but how did we get solar? According to the post — and we agree it …read more
Posted in how-to, solar hacks, turbine, water bottle, wind, wind power, Wind turbine
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FPGA used VHDL for Fractals
Over on GitHub, [ttsiodras] wanted to learn VHDL. So he started with an algorithm to do Mandelbrot sets and moved it to an FPGA. Because of the speed, he was able to accomplish real-time zooming. You can see a video of the results, below.
The FPGA board is a ZestSC1 that has a relatively old Xilinx Spartan 3 chip onboard. Still, it is plenty powerful enough for a task like this.
The project doesn’t directly drive a display. It does the math, stores the results in the board’s onboard RAM and then sends a frame to the PC using the …read more
Posted in fpga, fractal, mandelbrot, vhdl, xilinx, zestsc1
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Easily Deboss Notebooks with a 3D Printed Stamp
While it’s arguably a bit closer to the “Arts & Crafts” region of the making spectrum upon which we don’t usually tread on account our l33t sense of superiority, we’ve got to admit that the quick and easy notebook customization demonstrated by [Sean Hodgins] is very compelling. We don’t put ink to dead trees with nearly the frequency we used to, but when we do it might as well be Hemingway-style with a little black Hackaday emblazoned notebook.
As demonstrated in the video after the break, the process starts by designing the stamp in your CAD package of choice. For …read more
Posted in 3d Printer hacks, art, die, emboss, leather, notebook, stamp
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Furby Plus Borges Equals Borgy
What do you get if you cross a Furby with a master of 20th Century literature? The Borgy. Argentinian hacker [Roni Bandini] found an old Furby and decided to hack it by altering its personality. His inspiration was the Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges, one of the pioneers of surrealist writing. The idea is that, at random times during the day, the Borgy will share a bit of wisdom from Borges to inspire and enlighten.
[Roni] hacked the Furby to replace the speaker with a more powerful one, and built a base to hold the larger speaker and a switch …read more
Posted in Borges, furby, Magical Reality, news
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An over-engineered LED Sign Board
Never underestimate the ability of makers in over thinking and over-engineering the simplest of problems and demonstrating human ingenuity. The RGB LED sign made by [Hans and team] over at the [Hackheim hackerspace] in Trondheim is a testament to this fact.
As you would expect, the WS2812 RGB LEDs illuminate the sign. In this particular construction, an individual strip is responsible for each character. Powered by an ESP32 running FreeRTOS, the sign communicates using MQTT and each letter gets a copy of the 6 x 20 framebuffer which represents the color pattern that is expected to be displayed. A task …read more
Posted in ESP32, led hacks, opencv, Raspberry Pi, ws2812b
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Negative Voltage Pushes AVR to New Heights
If we say that a hacker is somebody who looks at a “solved” problem and can still come up with multiple alternative solutions, then [Charles Ouweland] absolutely meets the grade. Not that we needed more evidence of his hacker cred given what we’ve seen from him before, but he recently wrote in to tell us about an interesting bit of problem solving which we think is a perfect example of the principle. He wanted to drive a salvaged seven segment LED display with an AVR microcontroller, but there was only one problem: the display needs 15V but the AVR is …read more
Posted in AVR, diode, Ground, led hacks, MCU, Microcontrollers, MOSFETS, negative rail, relative
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NTP Morse Code Clock Powered by ESP8266
We’ve featured a great many unique clocks here on Hackaday, which have utilized nearly every imaginable way of conveying the current time. But of all these marvelous timepieces, the Morse code clock has the distinct honor of simultaneously being the easiest to construct and (arguably) the most difficult to read. As such, it’s little surprise we don’t see them very often. Which makes this latest entry into the field all the more interesting.
[WhisleyTangoHotel] has taken the basic concept of the Morse clock, which at its most simplistic could be done with a microcontroller and single LED, and expanded it …read more
Posted in classic hacks, clock, clock hacks, ESP8266, led, Microcontrollers, morse code, ntp
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VexRISC-V Exposed
If you want to use FPGAs, you’ll almost always use an HDL like Verilog or VHDL. These are layers of abstraction just like using, say, a C compiler is to machine language or assembly code. There are other challenges to the throne such as SpinalHDL which have small but enthusiastic followings. [Tom] has a post about how the VexRISC-V CPU leverages SpinalHDL to make an extremely flexible system that is as efficient as plain Verilog. He says the example really shows off why you should be using SpinaHDL.
Like a conventional programming language, it is easy to find niche languages …read more
Wearable Speeder Bikes Are Ready For A Night Out
While Hackaday is about as far from a fashion blog as you can possibly get, we have to admit we’re absolutely loving the [bithead942] Winter 2018 Collection. His wife and daughter recently got to model his latest must have design: wearable Star Wars speeder bikes; and judging by the video after the break they were certainly some of the best dressed at the Thanksgiving parade.
[bithead942] started the build by taking careful measurements of a vintage speeder bike model kit his wife had, which allowed to accurately recreate the iconic look of the vehicles as they were seen in Return …read more
Posted in chicken wire, cosplay, PVC, speeder bike, star wars, wearable hacks
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Artistic Images Made With Water Lens
It’s said that beauty and art can be found anywhere, as long as you look for it. The latest art project from [dmitry] both looks in unassuming places for that beauty, and projects what it sees for everyone to view. Like most of his projects, it’s able to produce its artwork in a very unconventional way. This particular project uses water as a lens, and by heating and cooling the water it produces a changing image.
The art installation uses a Peltier cooler to periodically freeze the water that’s being used as a lens. When light is projected through the …read more
Posted in arduino, art, cooler, ice, lens, peltier, projection, Raspberry Pi, water
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