Posts

Featured Post

Building a Self-Playing Chess Board Robot

-
Image
As popular as the game of chess is, it has one massive flaw. This being that it requires two participants, which can be a challenge. Although playing chess on a computer against an AI has been a thing for many decades, it’s hard to beat physical chess boards that give you all the tactile pleasure of handling and moving pieces, yet merging the two is tricky. You can either tell the player to also move the opponent’s pieces, or use a mechanism to do so yourself, which [Joshua Stanley] recently demonstrated in a video . There are a few ways that you can go about having the computer move and detect the pieces. Here [Joshua] chose to use Hall magnetic sensors to detect the magnets that are embedded in the 3D printed chess pieces as well as their absence. These sensors are mounted to the back side of a PCB which is also the playing field, thus using the silkscreen for the board markings. For the electromagnet that moves the chess pieces core x/y kinematics were used to move it underneath ...
Post a Comment
Get this one»

A Working Intercom From Antique Telephones

-
Image
Although it can be hard to imagine in today’s semiconductor-powered, digital world, there was electrical technology around before the widespread adoption of the transistor in the latter half of the 1900s that could do more than provide lighting. People figured out clever ways to send information around analog systems, whether that was a telegraph or a telephone. These systems are almost completely obsolete these days thanks to digital technology, leaving a large number of rotary phones and other communications systems relegated to the dustbin of history. [Attoparsec] brought a few of these old machines back to life anyway, setting up a local intercom system with technology faithful to this pre-digital era . These phones date well before the rotary phone that some of us may be familiar with, to a time where landline phones had batteries installed in them to provide current to the analog voice circuit. A transformer isolated the DC out of the line and amplified the voice signal. A gene...
Post a Comment
Get this one»

Upcycling an iPad into a Touchscreen Display for your PC

-
Image
Installing an RPi Pico board like it’s a modchip. (Credit: Tucker Osman, YouTube) Although generally iPads tend to keep their resale value, there are a few exceptions, such as when you find yourself burdened with iCloud-locked devices. Instead of tossing these out as e-waste, you can still give them a new, arguably better purpose in life: an external display, with touchscreen functionality if you’re persistent enough. Basically someone like [Tucker Osman], who spent the past months on making the touchscreen functionality play nice in Windows and Linux. While newer iPads are easy enough to upcycle as an external display as they use eDP (embedded Display Port), the touch controller relies on a number of chips that normally are initialized and controlled by the CPU. Most of the time was thus spent on reverse-engineering this whole process, though rather than a full-depth reverse-engineering, instead the initialization data stream was recorded and played back. This thus requires tha...
Post a Comment
Get this one»

Converting AC Irrigation Valves To DC Operation

-
Image
Due to historical engineering decisions made many decades ago, a great many irrigation systems rely on solenoid valves that operate on 24 volts AC. This can be inconvenient if you’re trying to integrate those valves with a modern smart home control system. [Johan] had read that there were ways to convert these valves to more convenient DC operation , and dived into the task himself. As [Johan] found, simply wiring these valves up to DC voltage doesn’t go well. You tend to have to lower the voltage to avoid overheating, since the inductance effect used to limit the AC current doesn’t work at DC. However, even at as low as 12 volts, you might still overheat the solenoids, or you might not have enough current to activate the solenoid properly. The workaround involves wiring up a current limiting resistor with a large capacitor in parallel. When firing 12 volts down the line to a solenoid valve, the resistor acts as a current limiter, while the parallel cap is initially a short circuit....
Post a Comment
Get this one»

Keebin’ with Kristina: the One with the Height-Adjustable Key Caps

-
Image
Now, we can’t call these LEGO key caps for obvious reasons , but also because they don’t actually work with standard LEGO. But that’s just fine and dandy, because they’re height-adjustable key caps that use the building block principle. Image by [paper5963] via reddit Now you could just as easily build wells as the dome shape pictured here, and I’d really like to see that one of these days. In the caption of the gallery, [paper5963] mentions foam. As far as I’ve studied the pictures, it seems to be all 3D-printed material. If they were foam, they would likely be porous and would attract and hold all kinds of nastiness. Right? [paper5963] says that there are various parts that add on to these, not just flat tops. There are slopes and curves, too. They are also designing these for narrow pitch, and say they are planning to release the files. Exciting! Fold-able Keyboard Goes Anywhere [pinya] says this is a remake of their Crabapplepad V2 into something that folds. They take it ...
Post a Comment
Get this one»

Kodak MC3: Everything But a Phone In 2001

-
Image
One of the constants in consumer electronics is that designers will try to put as many features into a single device as possible, whether it’s a Walkman with a radio tuner or a new class of devices that crams a photo and video camera in the same enclosure as a music player. At the time that the Kodak MC3 was released this made it a rather unique device, with it in hindsight being basically a smartphone without the phone, as [Tech Tangents] aptly notes in his recent video on the device . Six years before Apple’s iPhone would be announced, and eight years before the first iPod with a video camera, the Kodak MC3 was in many respects bleeding edge technology targeted straight at tech enthusiasts. For less than $300 you got VGA-quality images, CompactFlash storage, and MP3 playback capability. The videos it produced were 320×240 resolution, h.263 encoded MOVs with a maximum length of 4 seconds at 20 FPS, or 4 minutes with a 64 MB CF card. The unit that [Tech Tangents] got used came with...
Post a Comment
Get this one»

Hackaday Links: February 8, 2026

-
Image
We start this week with a bit of a good news/bad news situation. On February 6th, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was shut down  after 25 years of operation . Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the RHIC was the only operating particle collider in the United States, and along with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was one of only two heavy-ion colliders in existence. So that’s the bad news. The good news is that the RHIC is going dark so that the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) can take its place. Planned for activation in the mid-2030s, the EIC will occupy the same tunnel as the RHIC and reuse much of the same hardware. As the name implies, it will be used to collide electrons. Switching gears (no pun intended) to the world of self-driving cars, Waymo’s chief safety officer, Dr. Mauricio PeƱa, made a surprising admission this week during a U.S. Senate hearing . When asked what his company’s vehicles do when they are presented with a situation t...
Post a Comment
Get this one»