Build your own USB to Serial dongle

March 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Johan von Konow] found that he was using an FTDI USB-to-Serial chip in a lot of his projects and wanted to have an easy prototyping component on hand to facilitate this. What he came up with is the extremely small USB to serial dongle seen above. The copper fingers are designed to plug into your USB port. And if you’ve got an unused thumb drive (we’ve got a 128mb version that’s been collecting dust for years) it would make a perfect enclosure for the device.

He’s using an FT232BL chip in a LQFP-32 package. That’s got 0.8mm pitch so make sure you’ve got a steady hand, a fine tipped soldering iron, and some solder wick on hand. The 0603 passives might also give you a bit of a run-around during soldering, but all-in-all we think everyone will be able to successfully assemble this with a little bit of practice. The chip is the most expensive component at just under $6. But the good news is that the board is single sided and only needs one jumper wire making for very little drilling and easy home fabrication.

If you’re putting in a parts order, we’d recommend getting doubling the amount of resistors and capacitors. Chances are you’ll drop a few and nary will they be seen again. We also highly recommend looking into [Gerrit’s] surface mount component clamp.

Filed Under: tool hacks Tagged With: , , ,

A capacitive discharge welder/cutter for all your lightweight needs

March 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

microspot-welder

[Radu Motisan] wrote in to share a cool project he has been working on lately, a pulsed microspot welder/cutter.

The device is capable of spot welding thin metals such as foils and battery tabs by sending a pair of high current pulses between the two electrodes whenever [Radu] presses the trigger button. The cutting portion of his device uses the same general mechanism, though it requires a far greater number of pulses to get the work done.

The welding/cutting process is controlled by an ATMega16, which is also tasked with taking input from the user and displaying information on the LCD panel. The microcontroller creates quick (in the ten to several hundred microsecond range) pulses for both welding and cutting, with the latter obviously requiring a long series of pulses.

[Radu] started out using a relatively small capacitor array to power the device, but has recently upgraded to a 1.6 Farad car audio capacitor, which works (and looks) much better than before. His blog seems to update every few days with more pictures and details about his welding station, so be sure to check back often for updates.

Be sure to stick around to see a short video of [Radu] adding metal tabs to batteries and tearing down an aluminum can with his cutter.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Microcontrollers, tool hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Toaster oven reflow soldering roundup

March 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

SMD components have a lot of advantages over the through-hole parts our fathers and grandfathers soldered. Working with these tiny surface mount components requires a larger investment than a soldering iron and a wire-wrap gun, though. Here’s a few reflow ovens that were sent in over the past week or two.

[ramsay] bought a 110 V toaster oven off of eBay. Even though [ramsay] is in England and has 230 V mains, everything in the oven is mechanical and works just fine with a higher voltage. His first test didn’t go quite as planned; the solder paste wasn’t melting at 120° C, so he cranked up the temperature and learned that the FR in FR-4 stands for flame retardant. Never deterred, [ramsay] decided to build a controller so the temperature ramps up and cools off at the right rates for the flux and paste to do their thing.

Solder paste has a temperature profile that requires the board to be kept at a temperature between 150° and 180° C for a minute or so before climbing up to 220° for a second so the solder will melt. [Nicolas] had the interesting idea of putting a USB port in his toaster oven and storing the heating profiles on his desktop. The build uses an MSP430 microcontroller to turn the relays powering heating elements on and off. [Nick] is working on a C# desktop app to monitor and regulate the oven temperature from his computer, so we’re fairly interested in seeing the final results.

Watching the SMD self-alignment videos on YouTube is a lot more fun than messing around with tweezers, stereo microscopes, and extremely fine soldering irons. If you’ve got a better idea for a toaster/reflow oven, send it in on our tip line and we’ll check it out.

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Reverse engineering an oscilloscope circumvents vendor crippleware

March 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

oscope-reverse-engineering

The crew over at the Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge (H.A.C.K.) say they aren’t the most well-funded organization out there, so they were stoked when they found they could afford to bring a slightly used UNI-T UT2025B digital oscilloscope into the shop. As they started to tinker with it, the scope revealed one major shortcoming – screenshots were only accessible via a USB connection to a Windows computer.

Since they didn’t have any Windows boxes in house, [András Veres-Szentkirályi] decided he would try reverse-engineering the protocol so they could get access to this useful feature.

He set up a Windows VM, and using Wireshark on the host Linux box, [András] sniffed the data passing over the scope’s USB interface. He was able to identify what looked like image packets being sent to the VM, which he was able to decode using a small Python script. The resultant images were monochrome and they didn’t look quite right, but it was a start. As he dug further [András] found that he was overlooking some of the color data packed into the images, and after a bit of fiddling he got the sharp, colorful image you see above.

It turns out that while the scope has a monochrome LCD, it sends 16-bit color images over the USB interface – images that the Windows’ client degrades before displaying them on the screen. So in the end, he was not only able to get the scope working on any OS with the ability to run Python, he was able to grab far better images than the manufacturer ever intended – A very nice hack if we do say so.

Be sure to swing by the H.A.C.K. wiki as well as the project’s github repository if you have one of these scopes and are looking to wring some better images out of the hardware.

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SpeechJammer puts an end to annoying speakers

March 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve ever had to deal with people disturbing your peace and quiet by yammering on with their cell phones, you might be interested in the SpeechJammer.

The idea behind the SpeechJammer is fairly simple: It’s very hard to speak if your words are recorded and played back to you a fraction of a second later. This is a real psychological phenomenon known as delayed audio feedback that also has a beneficial effect on stuttering.

According to the researcher’s writeup (PDF warning), the SpeechJammer works by measuring the distance to the ‘target’ with an ultrasonic distance sensor and records the speaker’s voice with a shotgun mic. The recording of the spearker’s voice is delayed for about a fifth of a second and then played on a speaker on the front of the gun.

The researchers tested two conditions: ‘reading news aloud’ and a ”spontaneous monologue.’ Subjects who were reading news aloud had their speech jammed more often than those with the monologue, but the results look fairly promising. There’s only one video of the SpeechJammer in action (available after the break), so we’d like to see a few Hackaday readers build their own ‘shut up gun’ and send in a demo with an annoying talker to validate the results.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: tool hacks, weapons hacks Tagged With: , ,

DyIO is a huge robotics development board

March 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Kevin] wrote in to tell us about the robotics development platform he’s been working on for the last few years. He calls his device the DyIO, and looks like an extremely easy way to get a robot up and running quickly.

Because the DyIO stands for Dynamic Input & Output, [Kevin] thought it was important to put 24 separate IO pins in his build. These pins can serve as 24 digital inputs or outputs, a few analog inputs and PWM outs, or even DC motor controls.

What’s really interesting is the SDK that [Kevin] and his team chose to build. With this SDK, you can program the DyIO in Java or just about any other language you would want. Already, [Kevin] and his team have built a few interesting projects around the DyIO, like a hexapod robot and animatronic pokemon. While we’re sure something awesome beyond imagination is waiting to be built with the DyIO platform, you can check out these already-completed builds after the break.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: robots hacks, tool hacks Tagged With: , , ,
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