Day: August 23, 2021

Wooden Monowheel Build Is Simplicity Itself

August 23, 2021 by 9 Comments

Monowheels are nothing new, first being patented in the middle of the 19th century, but never really went mainstream due to, well, quite a lot of obvious issues. We’ve got problems with forward visibility, stability, steering, especially at speed, and the hilariously-named ‘gerbiling’ where the rider can spin around inside the wheel akin to a gerbil in a wheel. Fun times! But obviously that didn’t stop [The Q] from adding to the monowheel corpus by building one out of wood.

Sometimes people take on these projects simply for a laugh, like this bright orange one we covered a while back. Sometimes they’re powered by a motor, be it electric or internal combustion. Some are hand-cranked, some are pedal-powered, its all been tried.

[The Q] is no stranger to interesting wooden builds, and this video from a year ago shows him building a very simple direct-pedal-drive monowheel. The vast majority of the structure is wood, glued and screwed the old-fashioned way, with a bit of metalwork where necessary. We particularly like the simple counterweight solution which doubles up as a parking brake. It may look a little ungainly, but we can’t think of a simpler solution that would make much sense.

The build video after the break is six and half minutes of well executed videography for your viewing pleasure.

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ESP8266 weather widget with touchscreen display

Nothing Should Cloud The Build Of This Wieldy Weather Widget

August 23, 2021 by 9 Comments

Weather is one of those things that seems to be endlessly interesting to hackers. We may decry the notion that weather can be accurately predicted two days out, much less seven, but if there’s an extended forecast available, by gosh we’re gonna take a gander at it.

So why pick up your phone or open a browser tab every time you want to check the temperature? If you’re so into it, you should build a desktop weather widget. [opengreenenergy] has written a great guide to a tidy build of this classic and oh-so-useful project that covers everything from the soldering to obtaining an API key. Inside is an ESP8266 and a 2.8″ touch screen display that shows localized conditions via Open Weather Map. The main screen shows the time, date, current weather, 7-day forecast, and the moon phase for each day, and subsequent screens go into further detail. It’s informative without being busy.

We love the streamlined look of the snap-fit enclosure. This may be a fairly simple project, but the build as designed is challenging due to the space constraints inside. Check out the video after the break, which features the venerable Stickvise.

What? You’ve never heard of the Stickvise? You must be new around here. Allow me to introduce you two.

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Automatic Nut Sorter For A Tidy Workspace

August 23, 2021 by 28 Comments

We all have that one drawer or box full of random hardware. You don’t want to get rid of anything because as soon as you do, that’s the one thing you’ll need. But, honestly, you’ll be lucky to find what you need in there, anyway. Enter  [Mr. Innovative’s] nut sorting machine. As you can see in the video below, it will make order out of the chaos, at least for nuts.

You might think the device would need optical recognition software or some other high-tech mechanism. But, in fact, it is nothing more than a motor with a speed controller. The sorting is done by a plastic piece built like stairs. When a nut is too tall to fit under the next step, it slides out into the output hopper. You could probably turn the whole thing with a crank and no electricity at all if you wanted to.

Drilling out the shaft required a bit of machine tool usage, so this might not be a great weekend project without a lathe. Like many of the commenters on the video mentioned, we probably wouldn’t have used a rod holder as a rotating bearing, either, but for as little as something like this would probably operate, it is likely to last a fair amount of time. It would be easy to replace it or even affix a shaft to the motor with a coupler, sidestepping several issues.

Apparently, the device isn’t perfect. You do get some missorts. We imagine that’s from a larger nut pushing a smaller nut on the way to the hopper. The Thingiverse files seem to be missing, but this is something you’d probably adapt to your own design, anyway.

It isn’t as automated, but we’ve seen a gadget that can help sort drill bits, too. Sometimes you want to sort little parts by color, too.

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School Surplus Laptop BIOS Hacked To Remove Hardware Restrictions

August 23, 2021 by 50 Comments

Why did [Hales] end up hacking the BIOS on a 10 year old laptop left over from an Australian education program? When your BIOS starts telling you you’re not allowed to use a particular type of hardware, you don’t have much of a choice.

Originally [Hales] planned on purchasing a used Lenovo X260 to replace his dying laptop, but his plans were wrecked. A pandemic-induced surge in demand that even the used laptop market caused prices to bloat. The need for a small and affordable laptop with a built in Ethernet port led to the purchase of a Lenovo Thinkpad x131e. Although the laptop was older than he liked, [Hales] was determined to make it work. Little did he know the right-to-repair journey he was about to embark on.

Problems first arose when the Broadcom WiFi adapter stopped working reliably. He replaced it, but the coaxial antenna cable was found to be damaged. Even after replacing the damaged cabling, the WiFi adapter was still operating very poorly. Recalling past problems with fickle Broadcom WiFi adapters, it was decided that an Intel mPCIe WiFi adapter would take its place. When power was re-applied, [Hales] was shocked to find the following message:

Unauthorized network card is plugged in – Power off and remove the miniPCI network card

And this is where things got interesting. With off the shelf SOIC8 clips and a CH340 programmer, [Hales] dumped the BIOS from the laptop’s flash chip to another computer and started hacking away. After countless hours of researching, prodding, hacking, and reverse engineering, the laptop was useful once again with the new Intel WiFi adapter. His site documents in great detail how he was able to reverse engineer the BIOS over the course of several days.

But that’s not all! [Hales] was also able to modify the hardware so that his slightly more modern mPCIe WiFi adapter would come back on after the computer had been put in Hibernation. It’s an elegant hack, and be sure to check [Hales’] site to get the full details. And at the end, there’s a nice Easter egg for anybody who’s ever wanted to make their laptop boot up with their own logo.

We applaud [Hales] for his fine efforts to keep working equipment out of the landfill. We’ve covered many hacks that had similar goals in the past. Do you have a hack you’d like to share? Submit it via the Tips Line.

Redefine Robots Is The Newest Hackaday Prize Challenge

August 23, 2021 by 5 Comments

Roboticists and automation enthusiasts, start your engines. This 2021 Hackaday Prize challenge is made just for you! It’s the Redefine Robots challenge and it calls for a softer, more utopian side of what tomorrow’s automated future can be.

The promise of robots has always been one of making our lives better. But so far we still don’t have a robot assistant sitting next to us ready to lend a hand. That’s where you come in! Whether it’s a physical, nuts-and-bots robot or a 1’s and 0’s software bot, create something that people can see and interact with in their day-to-day lives in ways that make sense and make us feel good about where technology is going.