[James Dressman] emailed us about his two-year journey of getting a large CNC machine running in his home. He doesn’t currently have a webpage, however his story was so incredible that we just had to feature it.   [James] started by doing plenty of research online, and ordering a new CNC. The real fun started when he opened up a wall to fit the 2300 pound monster into his home. [James] found so much insect and water damage that he ended up rebuilding the entire rear half of his home.

Once the CNC was safely set up, the fun still wasn’t over. Not all family members are keen on having an industrial machine tool in the house. In [James'] case it was the smell of way oil that drove his wife nuts. This was all before spindle problems with the tool itself began to rear their ugly head. Illness and family tragedy put everything on hold for several months, however once [James] strength returned, he attacked the problems with renewed vigor. It was a long and winding road, but he now has a fully functional CNC.

But don’t just take our word for it. Continue after the break to see his photo album and to hear James tell the story in his own words.

Hello Hackaday!

Perhaps befitting our proximity to Halloween I offer a nightmarish tale that began in early 2011.  With aspirations of design and invention I quickly became discouraged with the lack of resources to inexpensively prototype parts.  This frustration mounted and forced me into the direction of trying to figure out how to make things myself.  After researching CNC mills and knowing nothing about them or machining in general I took the plunge and bought one brand new fearing my lack of knowledge to build one or buy used.  I taught myself everything I could on the internet in the 3 months it took to deliver.  Shortly after ordering it I realized I had to tear out a door going from the garage to the basement where it was reside.  This act uncovered some dark secrets about the house like termites and rotten supports holding up the floor of the back deck (which was the roof of the garage).  This forced me to try and remove the damaged material but the more I uncovered the worse it got until I decided to just completely tear out the existing deck/roof and rebuild it.  I also realized that the roof of the house overhanging the garage was in danger of collapse because the garage roof was the load bearing component of the columns holding the house roof up.  Essentially what started with moving the machine into the basement resulted in me ripping off the entire backside of the house and rebuilding it.  When it got here I had to tear out the wall and the door and later replace them to get it inside.  That was a good all nighter just to move it inside (this machine weighs in at around 2300lbs).

Once it was in the basement I began trying to use it.  First my wife couldn’t stand the smell of the way oil and I was forced to use it only when she wasn’t home and only with the windows open.  The noise also became a major issue as there are air ducts that go from directly over the machine all the way to the top floor right to her side of the bed.  I was initially practicing in wood but when I moved on to metal the demon in the machine started to emerge.

I noticed that the spindle seemed to have almost no power and often, strike that, always stalled causing me to break or chip my expensive carbide endmills.  I went around and around with the manufacturer.  They blamed me, my residential power, the electricians, the soil conductivity for my ground line, the ionosphere, everything but themselves.  I had electricians, engineers, CNC repair technicians, everybody you could think of to either come over and look at it, conduct tests, or consult over the phone.  I spent hundreds if not thousands just to try and find a fix.  They all said the spindle drive electronics were the problem.  The manufacturer denied all allegations.  Around and around we went for years.  There is sat in my basement a barely usable paperweight that was completely unsuitable for cutting metal.

Having nowhere to go I would occasionally get the bug and research aggressively for a week or so for some kind of fix but I would soon realize it was way beyond my capabilities to fix and there were no easy answers.  I resorted to fix trivial things that were within my grasp like designing and cutting a clear Lexan top enclosure to keep the coolant spray in the machine instead of all over the walls and the computer monitor…in the event I could ever use it.

Time went on, I had a child, then I got sick.  I spent 6 miserable months on chemo and finished on Thanksgiving day of last year.  A couple of weeks later, still feeling like death warmed over, I got drop kicked in the nuts.  We discovered our 12 month old had a rare and aggressive cancer and following a major surgery he spend a few months on chemo.  I’m happy to report he is doing just fine now.  Shortly after he finished his treatments I was informed that I was being laid off.

So there we were, sick, huge medical bills (even with insurance), and unemployment.  This is not a sob story though because I decided I was going to strangle every drop of life out of this machine and make it work.

I refocused my resolve and began researching everything I could about spindle motor technology and soon decided on one.  Knowing very little about electronics or how to implement it but yet knowing that others have done it and succeeded I decided to replace all of the spindle drive electronics as well as the motor.  Doing so would require knowledge of all the proprietary interfaces to the existing machine electronics, so with no input or communication from the manufacturer I began reverse engineering all of the existing components with a multimeter to determine what signals did what and how.  I read everything I could about electricity and circuitry over the past few months, took measurements to see what type and size motor would fit, what drive to control the motor, and what signals each accepted and generated.

I built a circuit on a breadboard I bought from radio shack to test the proof of concept and with each small thing that worked I would realize that “oh hey I also need to do this, and that, and that, and that, and oh yeah that too.”  The circuit started growing in capability.  At some point I just decided to make the circuit do everything the old set up did to be a seamless transition as well as some added capabilities.  The motor drive I chose was a VFD which famously produces huge amount of electrical noise and consequently this blasted my circuit.  I had to borrow an oscilloscope from a friend and get some professional consultation to overcome that problem but was ultimately successful.  I rebuilt the circuit a number of times when I thought of a way to make it simpler or neater or more elegant.  I’m going to use it for awhile in breadboard format to make sure it all all works like it should then I intend to have a circuit board printed so i can offer it to virtually every other user of this machine whose spindle motor and drive are to put it bluntly, crap.

In the meantime; concerned about the noise and smell I originally was going to build a room around it in the basement and soundproof it, but later decided to move it to the garage.  This would require installing a garage door, running electricity to it, insulating it, and climate controlling it, all of which I did this past summer then ripped the door out again and moved it back outside.

The new motor required a custom designed and machined motor mount to fit on the machine, which I very gingerly did using the old motor.  Just prior to this I also began having axis motion issues and someone had suggested I use an “smoothstepper” which is an external pulse generator that plugs into the ethernet port.  I bought one but then realized that the supplied integrated computer on the mill had the ethernet port caulked shut.  After carefully picking out the graciously supplied caulk I then hit another snag, the LAN was disabled in the BIOS permanently.  Not only did the manufacturer physically disable the ethernet port, they actually hacked the BIOS to deny that it be used ever.  Re-flashing the BIOS had no effect.  After some late nights online I found a way to “unhack” it in DOS with a bootable thumb drive and re-enable it.  I’ve also replaced some of the axis motor drivers, and the lights, which were all failing.

Perhaps this entry is slightly premature because I have encountered some other ghosts in the machine that I am attempting to exercise before everything is installed and working perfectly.  I have done everything piecemeal and got it to work exactly as intended it’s just that now I’m in the home stretch and about to put it all together but have run out of time.  Monday I leave town to have surgery, and it involves a rather lengthy recovery so it will have to wait.  I got so far just to leave in the final hour, but I’m confident it will work and I will be successful in cleansing whatever curse this beast has brought into our lives.  This story is 100% true and if anything is waaaaay under embellished for the sake of brevity.  This was years of me banging my head against a wall that also happened to be pissing on me with hot flaming malevolence, a ton of hard work, and more than I ever wanted to know about electrons.  It has become a near legendary saga amongst those who know me.  Almost literally every step forward resulted in 10 steps back, there were times where I was afraid to do anything for what it might unleash.  It has solidified my belief that the universe is alive…and it is pissed off.  At least I got my reverse engineering degree out of it and the bottom line is that I will now have a reliable and powerful spindle instead of the jokey tool breaker that was in there before.

Here is the forum where I detailed many of my efforts, my name is SWATH:

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/mikinimech/

I’ve also documented many of the issues and fixes on my You tube channel here :

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGZPaStGbEBZw3QcAgtORVQ

Here is a very time consuming project that I worked on during last summer: an ARM Cortex M4 based platform with plenty of communication interfaces and on-board peripherals. The particular project for which this board has been developed is not really HaD material (one of my father’s funny ideas) so I’ll only describe the platform itself. The microcontroller used in the project is the ATSAM4E16C from Atmel, which has 1Mbyte of flash and 128Kbytes of SRAM. It integrates an Ethernet MAC, a USB 2.0 Full-speed controller, a sophisticated Analog to Digital Converter and a Digital to Analog Converter (among others).

Here is a list of the different components present on the board so you can get a better idea of what the platform can do: a microphone with its amplifier, a capacitive touch sensor, two unipolar stepper motors controllers, two mosfets, a microSD card connector, a Bluetooth to serial bridge, a linear motor controller and finally a battery retainer for backup power. You can have a look at a simple demonstration video I made, embedded after the break. The firmware was made in C and uses the Atmel Software Framework. The project is obviously open hardware (Kicad) and open software.

If you’re interested in one platform and don’t want spending many hours soldering it, I even made a profitless fundraiser (even though I need a better camera and a better accent!).

[Kurt] likes to know what’s going on with his network. He already uses bandwidth checking software on his DD-WRT capable router, but he wanted a second opinion. So he built his own network monitor. [Kurt] started by building a passive Ethernet tap. He then needed a network interface chip that would serve his purposes. The common Wiznet chips used with Arduinos didn’t allow enough manipulation of raw packet data, so he switched to a Microchip ENC624J600 (PDF). The Microchip controller allowed him to count the bytes in the raw Ethernet packets.

With the Ethernet interface complete, [Kurt] turned his attention to a microcontroller to run the show. He started with an Arduino, but the lack of debugging quickly sent him to an Atmega128 in Atmel Studio. After getting the basic circuit working, [Kurt] switched over to a PIC24F chip. With data finally coming out of the circuit, he was able to tell that his original back-of-the-napkin calculations for bandwidth were wrong. [Kurt] created a PCB to hold the microcontroller, then wrote a Python program to plot the data output from his circuit. The bandwidth plot matched up well with the plot from DD-WRT. Now he just needs a giant LED matrix to show off his current network stats!

It should come as no surprise your optical mouse contains a very tiny, very low resolution camera. [Franci] decided to take apart one of his old mice and turn that tiny optical sensor into a webcam.

Inside [Franci]‘s Logitech RX 250 is an ADNS-5020 optical sensor. This three wire SPI device stuffed into an 8-pin package is a 15×15 pixel grayscale image sensor. [Franci] started this project by bringing out the Arduino and Ethernet shield. After soldering a pull-up resistor to the image sensor’s reset pin, connecting the rest of the circuit was as simple as soldering a few wires to the Arduino.

The Arduino sketch sends the image data for each pixel to a computer over a serial connection. A bit of javascript and a touch of HTML takes this pixel data and turns it into a webpage with a live view of whatever is directly under [Franci]‘s mouse.

Video of the mousewebcam in action below.

TI’s LaunchPad boards have a history of being both low cost and fully featured. There’s a board for each of TI’s major processor lines, and all of them support the same “BoosterPack” interface for additional functionality. Today, TI has announced a new LaunchPad based on their new Tiva C ARM processors, which is designed for connectivity.

The Tiva C Series Connected LaunchPad is based on the TM4C129x processor family. These provide an ethernet MAC and PHY on chip, so the only external parts required are magnetics and a jack. This makes the Connected LaunchPad an easy way to hop onto ethernet and build designs that require internet connections.

This development board is focused on the “Internet of Things,” which it seems like every silicon manufacturer is focusing on nowadays. However, the real news here is a low cost board with tons of connectivity, including ethernet, two CANs, 8 UARTs, 10 I2Cs, and 4 QSPIs. This is enough IO to allow for two BoosterPack connectors that are fully independent.

For the launch, TI has partnered with Exosite to provide easy access to the LaunchPad from the internet. A pre-loaded demo application will allow you to toggle LEDs, read button states, and measure temperature over the internet using Exosite. Unlike some past LaunchPads, this one is designed for easy breadboarding, with all MCU pins broken out to a breadboard compatible header.

Finally, the price is very right. The board will be release at $19.99 USD. This is less than half the price of other ethernet-ready development boards out there. This makes it an attractive solution for hackers who want to put a device on a wired network, or need a gateway between various devices and a network. 

There is something to be said about how easy it is to write Arduino code. For those of who you are big fans of the MSP430 and Texas Instrument’s LaunchPad series, an upcoming release of Energia brings Arduino style coding to the two newest member of the LaunchPad family: the TivaC Connected LaunchPad EK-TM4C1294XL and Wolverine FRAM LaunchPad MSP-EXP430FR5969LP.

“Energia is an open-source electronics prototyping platform … with the goal to bring the Wiring and Arduino framework to the Texas Instruments MSP430 based LaunchPad.” The newest release of Energia is exciting for the sole reason that the new TivaC Connected LaunchPad and Wolverine FRAM LaunchPad are supported. The TivaC Connected LaunchPad is a $20 development board for TI’s low-power ARM processors that has Ethernet connectivity. The MSP430 at the heart of the Wolverine FRAM LaunchPad uses up to 250x less power than flash based MCUs at low speeds in addition to many other cool benefits.

Be sure to keep an eye out for the new version of Energia, it should be arriving sometime next week. Now is a better time than ever to try out the Tiva C or the MSP430 MCUs!

Being able to use one of your old projects to make a new one better can be quite satisfying. [Steve] from Hackshed did just this: he integrated an Arduino based webserver into a new network controllable RGB lamp.

What makes this lamp unique is that the RGB LED bar comes from an old Epson scanner. Recycling leftover parts from old projects or derelict electronics is truly the hacker way. After determining the pinout and correct voltage to run the LEDs at, the fun began. With the LED bar working correctly, the next step was to integrate an Arduino based webserver. Using an SD card to host the website and an Ethernet Arduino shield, the LEDs become network controllable. Without missing a beat, [Steve] integrated a Javascript based color picker that supports multiple web browsers. This allows the interface to look quite professional. Be sure to watch the lamp in action after the break!

The overall result is an amazing color changing lamp that works perfectly. All that is left to do is create a case for it, or integrate it into an existing lamp. This is a great way to use an LED strip that would have otherwise gone to waste. If you can’t find a scanner with a color wand like this one, you can always start with an RGB strip.

[kgsws] is working on a small project that requires some audio and a display of some sort. While this project can be easily completed with a bigish microcontroller or ARM board, he’s taking a much simpler route: the entire project is built around a cheap router module, giving this project amazing expandability for a very meager price.

The router module in question is the HLK-RM04 from Hi-Link, commonly found via the usual Chinese resellers for about $25. On board this module is a UART, Ethernet, and a WiFi adapter along with a few GPIO pins for interfacing with the outside world.

[kgsws] is using the native SPI pins on this module to control the clock and data lines for the tiny LCD, with a GPIO pin toggling the chip select. I2S audio is also implemented, decoded with an 8-bit DAC, the MCP4801.

It’s an extremely inexpensive solution for putting audio and video in a project, and since this board has Ethernet, WiFi, and a few more GPIO pins, it’s can do much more than whatever [kgsws] is planning next.

There is nothing better than a project that you can put on display for all to see. [Tristan's] most recent project, a Decorative LED Matrix Frame, containing 12×10 big square pixels that can display any color, is really cool.

Having been built around a cheap IKEA photo frame this project is very doable, at least for those of you with a 3D printer. The 3D printer is needed to create the pixel grid, which ends up looking very clean in the final frame. From an electronics perspective, the main components are a set of Adafruit Neopixel LED strips, and an Arduino Uno with an Ethernet shield. The main controller even contains a battery backup for the real time clock (RTC) when the frame is unplugged; a nice touch. Given that the frame is connected to the local network, [Tristan] designed the frame to be controlled by a simple HTML5 interface (code available on GitHub). This allows any locally connected device to control the frame.

Be sure to check out the build details, they are very well done. If you are still not convinced how cool this project is, be sure to check out a video of it in action after the break! It makes us wish that you could play Tetris on this frame. Very nice job [Tristan]!

Here’s a great example of thinking big while keeping it simple. [Radu Motisan's] putting together a global radiation monitoring network as his entry in The Hackaday Prize.

The simplicity comes in the silver box pictured above. This houses the Geiger tube which measures radiation levels. The box does three things: hangs on a wall somewhere, plugs into Ethernet and power, and reports measurements so that the data can be combined with info from all other functioning units.

After seeing the idea we wanted to know more about [Radu]. His answers to our slate of queries are found below.

Like it often happens, it’s a combination of several hobbies that keeps me in motion. I started with computer science 22 years ago when I was 10, added electronics and chemistry while I was still in my early years, physics and math later in highschool, and then back to computer science for my university studies and later on for my job.

I am a mobile software architect in a private company, it’s the equivalent of a software expert. It’s a title I got to earn after 10 years of experience in my field.

This gets very close to my hobbies, but goes on a slightly different path. I have a passion for knowledge, for life and for the people I care for. If life was not limited I would be fully satisfied. Finding a balance to these, is probably one of my biggest (utopian) dream.

Thanks for getting me back to Earth. Slow computers I had to deal with, buggy mobile phones and all in one technology that annoys me instead of helping me, would surely deserve to be a good target for uber destruction. But I love my equipment and tools and I would never do them harm. I’ve also scrapped many items to get what I needed when components were hard to find, so I’m not sure I could do this.

Mac OS. Because it does a good job while others just try to (and usually fail). I also like small/dedicated RTOS-es that are quick and efficient.

My macbook pro for software and my oscope. Because that’s what I use most and they help me with my tasks more than any other tools. Oh, and I almost forget about my cross screwdriver (it fits the same criteria).

I’m a big fan of microcontrollers, as a software developer I’d say they put the “elegant” attribute to electronics. I’ve used AVRs a lot and I still do.

C because it makes the Earth spin. And all the others, as I had the time to use most of them. I am fond of the saying “the right tool for the right job”. I apply this when deciding what’s the best language and similar things.

1. An exoskeleton for when getting old.
2. Learning biology from the software point of view: the telomeres, cell production codes, DNA damage errors, all in one learning to understand ageing as a software bug (or as a disease that needs a cure).
3. assuming (2) is doable in my lifespan, this last project would probably be taking my wife on a trip to a neighboring galaxy in a few hundred years from now :-)

Computer programming and soldering, but you probably knew I would say that.

I had to think big for a prize of this size, but I also had to keep my sense of reality so the balance was to pick something doable in the given timeframe, as I wanted to present a complete and working solution. Among my ongoing projects, the global radiation network (uRadMonitor) was the best candidate. It’s complex, has scientific and commercial value (so it can be implemented), and brings good to humanity.

I’d love some advise on the hardware production, tips on better design and optimisation, everything that could be put to some practical use for this project. I did make a lot of progress on my own, but some educated tips and know-how are always good to get.

Yes, the exoskeleton idea would be nice to be put to practice, in order to come with a final product what would be reliable and truly helpful to those in need. This would probably be the thing I’d focus on, should I have the time. The power supply is an issue, but for the rest I’d dare to challenge all and fight for a solution. Lots of sensors, pneumatic actuators for all the main muscles and lots of lines of code / clever software, what a spicy and intriguing combination!

I love it all, thanks!

I think I said enough, the beer’s gone and so are the hours. But I’d like to say thanks in the name of the entire community for the THP thing. It’s a great contest, but this is only the label. What’s inside is a great motivation for people all around the world to invest in technology, to dream high and to put their resources into designing some truly amazing things. And this is a gain for the entire humanity. We need more of these things, more support for research, more investments in technology. It’s our best bet for a better tomorrow, and for creating true value. THANK YOU!

[Cnlohr] just published an ingenious but dangerous way to send Ethernet packets using an ATTiny85. The ATtiny directly drives one pair of differential TX wires of a standard Ethernet cable. Doing so will force the TX signal ground to be the same as the ATTiny’s and in some cases may put 48V on your AVR if your cable is plugged into a Power Over Ethernet switch… which may be a problem.

In the video embedded below [cnlhor] explains that the microcontroller is clocked at 20Mhz to bit-bang the Manchester encoded electrical signals. Using a neat trick his home switch will detect his platform as a 10MBit Ethernet switch which can then send hard-coded packets to his computer. As you can guess, each of this packets takes quite a bit of space inside the ATTiny’s flash memory: 2+Kbytes. All of the code used may be downloaded on the creator’s GitHub repository, though he constantly warned us that it shouldn’t be used for real life applications.

Edit: One of our readers also let us know of a similar awesome project called the IgorPlug-UDP. Make sure to check it out!

More and more clubs are going digital. When you go out to hear a band, they’re plugging into an ADC (analog-to-digital converter) box on stage, and the digitized audio data is transmitted to the mixing console over Ethernet. This saves the venue having to run many audio cables over long distances, but it’s a lot harder to hack on. So [Michael] trained popular network analysis tools on his ProCo Momentum gear to see just what the data looks like.

[Michael]’s writeup of the process is a little sparse, but he name-drops all the components you’d need to get the job done. First, he simply looks at the raw data using Wireshark. Once he figured out how the eight channels were split up, he used the command-line version (tshark) and a standard Unix command-line tool (cut) to pull the data apart. Now he’s got a text representation for eight channels of audio data.

Using xxd to convert the data from text to binary, he then played it using sox to see what it sounded like. No dice, yet. After a bit more trial and error, he realized that the data was unsigned, big-endian integers.  He tried again, and everything sounded good. Success!

While this is not a complete reverse-engineering tutorial like this one, we think that it hits the high points: using a bunch of the right tools and some good hunches to figure out an obscure protocol.

The TP-Link TL-WR703n is the WRT54G for the modern era – extremely hackable, cheap, and available just about everywhere. Loaded up with OpenWRT, it’s capable of bridging networks: turning Ethernet into WiFi and vice versa. This requires reconfiguring the router, and after doing this enough times, [Martin] was looking for a better solution. The SOC inside the WR703n has two exposed GPIO pins, allowing [Martin] to choose between WiFi access point or client and between bridged or NAT/DHCP.

According to the OpenWRT wiki, there are a few GPIOs available, and after connecting these pins to a DIP switch, [Martin] could access these switches through the firmware. The hard part of this build is building the script to change the settings when the system boots. This script looks at the state of the GPIOs and changes the WiFi into client or access point mode and tries not to muck about with the DHCP somewhere off in the cloud. Yes, we just used cloud in its proper context.

The only other hardware to complete this build was a simple USB to serial converter that should be shoved into the corner of everyone’s workbench. Not bad for an extremely minimal soldering and configuration required for a something that’s extremely useful.

[johannes] wrote in to tell us about his latest project, a home automation setup he named Botman. While he calls it a home automation system, controlling lights and home appliances (which it does wirelessly on 433MHz) is just a small part of its functionality. The front panel of Botman includes a servo which points to laser-etched icons of the current weather. It also has a display which shows indoor and outdoor weather conditions along with the status of public transportation around [johannes]’s house.

Botman is built around an Arduino with an Ethernet shield. The Arduino has very little memory, so [johannes] used the Google Apps engine as a buffer between his Arduino and the JSON APIs of his data sources. This significantly reduces the amount of data the Arduino has to keep in memory and parse.

[johannes] also wrote an Android app that communicates with Botman. The app has buttons for controlling lights in his house and duplicates all the information shown on the front panel. [johannes] also built some logging features into Botman. The temperature readings and other information are uploaded from the Arduino to a Google Docs spreadsheet where he can view and graph them from anywhere. Check out the video after the break to see Botman in action.

Flip-dot displays are grand, especially this one which boasts 74,088 pixels! I once heard the hardware compared to e-ink. That’s actually a pretty good description since both use a pixel that is white on one side and black on the other, depend on a coil to change state, and only use electricity when flipping those bits.

What’s remarkable about this is the size of the installation. It occupied a huge curving wall on the ooVoo booth at 2015 CES. We wanted to hear more about the hardware so we reached out to them they didn’t disappoint. The ooVoo crew made time for a conference call which included [Pat Murray] who coordinated the build effort. That’s right, they built this thing — we had assumed it was a rental. [Matt Farrell] recounts that during conception, the team had asked themselves how an HD video chat for mobile company can show off display technology when juxtaposed with cutting edge 4k and 8k displays? We think the flip-dot was a perfect tack — I know I spent more time looking at this than at televisions.

Join us after the break for the skinny on how it was built, including pictures of the back side of the installation and video clips that you have to hear to believe.

Shockingly Short Development Time

Get this, conception to finished construction for the wall was just under two months. The first pitch for funding happened the last week of October and the rig was finished about a week before Christmas.

In the video below you can just make out the panels which make up the display. Each of them hosts a 28 by 14 grid of flip-dots. The panels are arranged in 21 columns of 9. This provides a black and white display resolution of 588×126. Cognitively, that’s horrible resolution. But the sheer size and novelty of the technology makes the 74,088 mechanical pixels look and sound stunning as they click their way from one state to the next.

Each module has a built-in controller which are commanded via serial. To gang 189 of them into a single display, [Pat] sourced some serial to Ethernet hardware from Grid Connect. These adapters report back to a single computer via 64 Ethernet cables. That box plays back a video file, adapting it on the fly using Adobe Air to send packets to the IP addresses of the Ethernet controllers.

All of this is supplied by a trio of 56A, 24V power supplies. At a refresh rate of 30fps, when flipping all the dots at once this is a max current draw of 189 panels * 0.680 Amps = 128.52A @ 24VDC (Same power as 28 Amps @ 110VAC = 3085W).

Making it Interactive

The display wasn’t just rolling video. Interspersed with ooVoo’s advertising these cartoon faces would emerge. Space evenly along the length of the display are PrimeSense depth cameras. [Pat] told us that these were chosen over the Kinect sensors because they are more suited for up-close facial recognition. In conjunction with Affectiva and Faceshift, your facial disposition is measured and translated to the cartoon character. Each sensor has its own Mac mini which parses the data and sends commands over the network to the box controlling the display.

Our European readers may get a chance to see this one in person. ooVoo will be taking the display to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, March second through the fifth.

[Hunter] wanted to do something a bit more interesting for his holiday lights display last year. Rather than just animated lights, he wanted something that was driven by data. In this case, his display was based on the mood of people in his city. We’ve seen a very similar project in the past, but this one has a few notable differences.

The display runs off of an Arduino. [Hunter] is using an Ethernet shield to connect the Arduino to the Internet. It then monitors all of the latest tweets from users within a 15 mile radius of his area. The tweets are then forwarded to the Alchemy Sentiment API for analysis. The API uses various algorithms and detection methods to identify the overall sentiment within a body of text. [Hunter] is using it to determine the general mood indicated by the text of a given tweet.

Next [Hunter] needed a way to somehow display this information. He opted to use an LED strip. Since the range of sentiments is rather small, [Hunter] didn’t want to display the overall average sentiment. This value doesn’t change much over short periods of time, so it’s not very interesting to see. Instead, he plots the change made since the last sample. This results in a more obvious change to the LED display.

Another interesting thing to note about this project is that [Hunter] is using the snow in his yard to diffuse the light from the LEDs. He’s actually buried the strip under a layer of snow. This has the result of hiding the electronics, but blurring the light enough so you can’t see the individual LEDs. The effect is rather nice, and it’s something different to add to your holiday lights display. Be sure to check out the video below for a demonstration.

[Bayres’] dad setup a webcam as a surveillance camera for a remote property. The only problem was that the only stable Internet connection they could get at this property was DSL. This meant that the external IP address of the webcam would change somewhat often; the needed a way to keep track of the external IP address whenever it changed. That’s when [Bayres] built a solution using Arduino and an Ethernet shield.

The main function of this device is to monitor the public IP address and report any changes. This is accomplished by first making a request to checkip.dyndns.org. This website simply reports your current public IP address. [Bayres] uses an Arduino library called Textfinder in order to search through the returned string and identify the IP address.

From there, the program compares this current value to the previous one. If there is any change, the program uses the Sendmail() function to reach out to an SMTP server and send an e-mail alert to [Beyres’] dad. The system also includes a small LCD. The Arduino outputs the current IP address to this display, making it easy to check up on the connection. The LCD is driven by 74HC595 shift register in order to conserve pins on the Arduino.

The system is also designed with a pretty slick setup interface. When it is booted, the user can enter a configuration menu via a Serial terminal. This setup menu allows the user to configure options such as SMTP server, email address, etc. These variables are then edited and can be committed to EEPROM as a more permanent storage solution. Whenever the system is booted, these values are read back out of the EEPROM and returned to their appropriate variables. This means you can reconfigure the device on the fly without having to edit the source code and re-upload.

I’ve said over and over again that Apple’s MagSafe port is the greatest advancement in laptop tech in the last 15 years. Those charger connectors break, though, so how do you fix it? With Lego, of course (Google translatrix). Use a light-colored 1×4 brick so the LED will shine through.

Want to learn Git commands? Here’s a great game that does just that. It’s a really well-designed game/tutorial that walks you through basic Git commands.

Lets say you’re just slightly paranoid about the Bad Guys™ getting into your computer with 0-days and roller blades. You’d like to connect this computer to the Internet, but you don’t want to leave it connected all the time. The solution? A timer for an Ethernet switch. It’s actually a better solution than doing the same thing with scripts: there’s a real, physical interface, and if the Bad Guys™ get in when you are connected, they could just enable the network adapter anyway. An extremely niche use case, but that’s 99% of the security hacks we see.

The DaVinci 3D printer is an okay printer if you’re cool with the Gilette model. The filament cartridges are chipped, and the software is proprietary. These problems have been solved, and now you can use a standard RepRap heated bed and glass with the DaVinci. At this point, people are buying the DaVinci just to tear it apart.

Ethernet has been around since the mid-70s, but if you think it was always Cat5 and 10BaseT, you’d be sorely mistaken. The first ethernet was built with coaxial cable, vampire taps, AUI adapters, and a whole bunch of other network hardware that will make wizened networking veterans cringe. [Matt] had heard about these weird physical layers back when he started building networks in 1997, but he had never seen one. Now it’s an ancient and forgotten footnote in the history of computer networking. Is it possible to build a Thicknet in this modern era? It turns out, yes, it’s possible. It’s not easy, though.

The network [Matt] is building is a true 10Base5, or Thicknet, network. The backbone of this network is a coaxial cable 9.5mm in diameter. [Matt] discovered that while the common belief that Thicknet used RG-8/U cable. This appears to be incorrect, as the connectors for this cable – vampire taps that pierced the insulation and shield of the cable – are designed for cable manufactured by Belden, part number 9880.

[Matt] assembled the cable, vampire taps, AUI cables, and even found a few ISA NICs that would still work with a reasonably modern computer. He even went so far as to build a USB Ethernet adapter with an AUI interface. This impossibly retro device uses a standard USB to 10BaseT Ethernet adapter, with a chip designed to convert 10BaseT to AUI hacked onto a circuit board. That in itself is an incredible piece of engineering, with a handful of power supplies to get the correct 2.5, 3.3, 5, and 12 Volts to the right places.

As far as exercises in computing history go, [Matt] is at the top of his game. In the process of building it, he also figured out why no one uses Thicknet anymore; once it’s in place, you can’t change it, the cable is big, bulky, and the connectors are terrible. Still, it’s an amazing example of how far we’ve come.

An engineering student at the University of Western Macedonia has just added another appliance to the ever-growing list of Internet enabled things. [Panagiotis] decided to modify an off-the-shelf bread maker to enable remote control via the Internet.

[Panagiotis] had to remove pretty much all of the original control circuitry for this device. The original controller was replaced with an Arduino Uno R3 and an Ethernet shield. The temperature sensor also needed to be replaced, since [Panagiotis] could not find any official documentation describing the specifications of the original. Luckily, the heating element and mixer motor were able to be re-used.

A few holes were drilled into the case to make room for the Ethernet connector as well as a USB connector. Two relays were used to allow the Arduino to switch the heating element and mixer motor on and off. The front panel of the bread maker came with a simple LCD screen and a few control buttons. Rather than let those go to waste, they were also wired into the Arduino.

The Arduino bread maker can be controlled via a web site that runs on a separate server. The website is coded with PHP and runs on Apache. It has a simple interface that allows the user to specify several settings including how much bread is being cooked as well as the desired darkness of the bread. The user can then schedule the bread maker to start. Bread Online also comes with an “offline” mode so that it can be used locally without the need for a computer or web browser. Be sure to check out the video demonstration below.

[Thanks Minas]