Science Projects

Chris Anderson – From a Writer to CEO of 3DRobotics – Hack Things – We help software people make hardware. You might recognize Chris Anderson as a world renowned journalist. Former editor-in-chief atWired, author of The Long Tail, and recent author of Makers, he has traded in his pen to become CEO of 3D Robotics, a manufacturer of unnmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). So when I saw he was speaking at the annual Hardware Innovation Workshop, I was intrigued. Just how does someone go from being an editor to CEO of a robotics company? I knew he was an awesome writer, but seriously, a CEO? Chris’s story starts five years before he quit his job at Wired. Passionate about hardware, Chris was spending his weekends building products with his kids, hoping they would gain his same affinity for science and technology. Like any Dad he wanted to impress his kids, but unfortunately most of his projects ended with them saying, “Is that all it can do?” Wanting to step up his game, Chris decided it was time to build a robot that could fly!

NEW PRODUCT – S-Video Cable – 9 feet. This basic cable comes with two S-Video MiniDIN-4 connectors. It’s fairly straight forward, you’ll commonly need these to connect two S-Video devices together. Works great with the Uzebox kit when you want better quality than Composite. Cable is 9 ft long. In stock and shipping now.

NEW PRODUCT – WS2812 5050 RGB LED with Integrated Driver Chip – 10 Pack. Make your own smart LED arrangement with the same integrated LED that is used in our NeoPixel strip and pixels. This tiny 5050 (5mm x 5mm) RGB LED is fairly easy to solder and is the most compact way possible to integrate multiple bright LEDs to a design. The driver chip is inside the LED and has ~18mA constant current drve so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and no external choke resistors are required making your design minimal. Power the whole thing with 5VDC and you’re ready to rock. The LEDs are ‘chainable’ by connecting the output of one chip into the input of another – see the datasheet for diagrams and pinouts. To allow the entire chip to be integrated into a 6-pin package, there is a single data line with a very timing-specific protocol. Since the protocol is very sensitive to timing, it requires a real-time microconroller such as an AVR, Arduino, PIC, mbed, etc. It cannot be used with a Linux-based microcomputer or interpreted microcontroller such as the netduino or Basic Stamp. The LEDs basically have a WS2811 inside, but fixed at the 800KHz ‘high speed’ setting. Our wonderfully-written Neopixel library for Arduino supports these pixels! As it requires hand-tuned assembly it is only for AVR cores but others may have ported this chip driver code so please google around. An 8MHz or faster processor is required. Comes in a package with 10 individual LEDs. We have a ready-to-go component for this in the Adafruit EAGLE library In stock and shipping now!

NEW PRODUCT – WS2811 LED Driver Chip – 10 Pack. Make your own smart LEDs with the same chip that is used in our NeoPixel strip and pixels. This tiny SOIC-8 is fairly easy to solder and can drive a single common-anode RGB LED or three single-color LEDs of your choice. (The outputs are NPN transistors so they won’t work with common-cathode!) The outputs are each ~18mA constant current so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and no choke resistors are required making your design minimal. The pixels are ‘chainable’ by connecting the output of one chip into the input of another – see the datasheet for diagrams and pinouts. To keep the chip small, there is a single data line with a very timing-specific protocol. Since the protocol is very sensitive to timing, it requires a real-time microconroller such as an AVR, Arduino, PIC, mbed, etc. It cannot be used with a Linux-based microcomputer or interpreted microcontroller such as the netduino or Basic Stamp. There are two speeds supported by the chip, one 400KHz and one 800KHz. Our wonderfully-written Neopixel library for Arduino supports both! As it requires hand-tuned assembly it is only for AVR cores but others may have ported this chip driver code so please google around. Using the slow timing rate, 4MHz or faster processor is required. Comes in a package with 10 individual chips. We have a ready-to-go component for this in the Adafruit EAGLE library In stock and shipping now!

Often the true key to success is persistence and that holds true for this project which dumped the ROM from the current generation of Tamagotchi toys. If you’re a fan of learning the secrets built into consumer electronics — and you know we are — you’ll want to go back and watch the 24-minute lecture on Tamagotchi hacking which [Natalie Silvanovich] gave a 29C3 last year. She had made quite a bit of headway hacking the playable pods, but wasn’t able to get her hands on a full ROM dump from the General Plus chip on board processor. This update heralds her success and shares the details of how it was done. As we learned form the video lecture it was a huge chore just to figure out what processor this uses. It turned out to be a 6502 core with a few other things built in. After prowling the manufacturer’s website she found example code for writing to Port A. She was then able to execute her own code which was designed to dump one byte of ROM at a time using the SPI protocol. [Natalie] posted her code dump if you’re interested in digging through it. But as usual we think the journey is the most interesting part. [Thanks Itay] Filed under: classic hacks, Microcontrollers, toy hacks

I don’t know if very tiny tools like programmer adapters are very handy to use, but it is always fun to watch how tiny they can get. Philip took a vusbtiny programmer and squeeze it in to smallest PCB he could make. So, he made USB connector directly on PCB by tracing pads on it. But to be sure, on other side he made footprint for Mini USB socket. If one fails there is a way out. Of course all parts are SMD except the 6-pin ISP connector. The board size come to be 12mm x 28mm and I think, there still is a space to squeeze a bit by making ISP header smaller (use 1mm instead of 2.54mm) or choosing smaller passives instead of 0805. But would such tool be normally useable?

The fly-by, Wi-Fi hacking machine. There’s something unusual about the motorcycle Denis Andzakovic likes to ride… Kitted out with a miniature Raspberry Pi computer for a heads-up display (HUD) integrated in an external helmet, two Mikrotik routers, wireless sniffing and attack tools, GPS and a netbook, the motorcycle is able to detect wireless access points and plot them on Google Maps.

Really cool Raspberry Pi project from Paul Herron: Heng Long Tiger tank with a Raspberry Pi installed. I followed Ian Renton’s build. Original image source here! Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro”? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi. We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

After that, though, it looks just like I'm cheating, doesn't it?

Pierre Villeneuve shares a great Raspberry Pi powered Lego project: I have always wanted to control something interesting involving little servo motors. That’s somewhat of an ill-defined dream, isn’t it? But it has all been made possible by using my handy dandy Raspberry Pi computer. I spent quite a bit of time this past year on another project that involved reading signals from almost a dozen temperature-humidity sensors and reporting status details to a remote web server. That project is now unfortunately stuck on the backburner, but at least it got me started doing interesting things with my Raspberry Pi. In this post I report on my current side project, which involves my Raspberry Pi, five servos, my son’s Lego blocks, and synchronized groovy music. Let’s get right to it: the final result is a video hosted on my YouTube channel. I recommend watching it full screen on a device with decent speakers. Enjoy! Check out the full blog post here! Featured Adafruit Products Adafruit 16-Channel 12-bit PWM/Servo Driver – I2C interface – PCA9685 – You want to make a cool robot, maybe a hexapod walker, or maybe just a piece of art with a lot of moving parts. Or maybe you want to drive a lot of LEDs with precise PWM output. Then you realize that your microcontroller has a limited number of PWM outputs! What now? You could give up OR you could just get this handy PWM and Servo driver breakout. (read more)