Author: sweethess

when every 17 years, a population of cicadas ranging from Connecticut to the Appalachian highlands of North Carolina emerges to annoy everybody within earshot. The last time east coasters saw this brood was in 1996, making 2013 yet one more year of frustrating insect pests. The only concern is, when will we begin to see this year’s cicada brood?

Radiolab, the remarkable podcast as well as public radio show, has put together an remarkable job that asks listeners to track when the cicadas in their area will emerge. Cicadas generally go into their loud as well as obnoxious adult stage when the ground temperature 8 inches below the surface reaches 64º F. Armed with an Arduino, thermistor, as well as a few wires as well as resistors, any type of Radiolab listener can upload soil temperature data to Radiolab servers where all the data will be correlated with documented cicada sightings.

After complying with the page’s directions for wiring up a lot of LEDs as well as a thermistor to an Arduino, just upload the most well-commented code we’ve ever seen and go outside to take soil temperature measurements. The temperature is displayed in a pseudo-binary style on nine LEDs. To decode the temperature without counting by powers of two, Radiolab has an on the internet decoder that likewise enables you to upload your data as well as location.

If you have a quadcopter as well as are looking for a beer shipment device, HobbyKing is putting on a beerlift competition The rules for the HobbyKing beer lift are quite simple: lift the most beer with a quad/hex/octo copter as well as win a HobbyKing gift card.

There are 3 classes: Unlimited, which means a vehicle of any type of size goes, a 700 class for copters with a motor-to-motor diameter of 700 mm or less, as well as a catastrophe class for the coolest crash.

So far the largest lift is a monsterous 2 meter octocopter by [Muresan Alexandru Camil] capable of lifting just over 47kg. In the 700 class, a bizarre looking 9-rotor copter developed by the Whac-A-Mole flying team was able to lift 28kg.

The catastrophe category, a smaller quad developed by [Gabriel Devault] was barely able to lift four cans of Coors Light water, while the present catastrophe class leader made a few valiant efforts to lift a keg. Protip: if you’re doing a blooper reel, Yakety Sax is definitely the method to go.

[Michael Dornisch] was surprised to discover that the primary processor of the Raspberry Pi reaches about 56 degrees Celsius (about 133 degrees F) while streaming video over the network. He believed it may assist the durability of the gadget if he was able to awesome things off a bit. however why stop with just the processor? He added warm sinks to the SoC, Ethernet/USB chip, as well as voltage regulator.

From his parts bin he grabbed a little warm sink that was most likely utilized on a graphics card. After measuring the three chips with his digital calipers he cut out the footprint he needed, resulting in three smaller warm sinks. We didn’t recognize that thermal compound has sufficient gripping power to hold the sinks in location without any type of mechanical fastener, however obviously it does. [Michael] mentions that it’s possible to utilize other adhesives, like JB Weld. What’s important is that you utilize something (ie: thermal compound or a liquid adhesive) to prevent any type of air space from coming between the chip surface as well as the aluminum.

He determined the result as a 17.3 degree C (31 degree F) decrease in temperature. We looked around as well as it seems there’s no interior temperature sensor on the Broadcom chip so these surface readings will have to suffice. Do you believe this will prolong the life of the board if it is used regularly to play back high high quality video? We already understand that these temperatures are within the specs for the hardware.

[Thanks Simon]

Please join us in welcoming [Sophi Kravitz] to the Hackaday crew. She is coming on board to crank on the 2015 Hackaday Prize. You may keep in mind a publish from a few weeks back when we were in browse of a person with a skill set that might only be referred to as mythical. [Sophi] jumped at the possibility and it is promptly remove that she belongs here.

[Sophi] walks the walk, as well as talks the talk. She’s an EE as well as has dealt with art installations, developed props as well as FX for movies, as well as dealt with tasks that some may think about ‘more serious’ engineering challenges. Her enthusiasm for electronics has led her to evangelize education on the subject by working with trainee programs, as well as she just recently served as a Hacker in home with Sparkfun. Her like of the hardware neighborhood already has her promoting hacking by immersing herself in Hackerspace culture as well as organizing events like the Bring a Hack meetup at maker Faire new York.

We have huge plans for the 2015 Hackaday prize which will be revealed soon. In the meantime, anyone going to the worldwide consumer electronics show (CES) next week can satisfy up with [Sophi] as well as discover out about the plans we’ve made so far. She will be at CES to represent Hackaday together with [Mike Szczys] as well as [Sarah Petkus]. We’re planning an unscripted meetup for anyone interested. Reply to this Tweet to tell us you’ll be there as well as we’ll make sure to get you the details when we have them. as well as of course, if you want to get your hands on some Hackaday stickers track us down during the conference. inspect out our CES Twitter listing to make a lot more connections.

There’s a building downtown built about ten years ago that has tablet-sized LCD screens next to the entrance of each large meeting room. They’re never on and we always wonder why they didn’t just use one of those things that holds a sheet of printer paper to label what’s happening in the meeting space? now this is a similar idea but with much better execution. instead of just displaying data the in-wall tablet mount makes your room interactive.

[Tim’s] been working on it for a couple of years. He started out trying to house an iPod Touch behind a junction box cover plate. There are some pictures of that at the top of his build album. That didn’t quite take so keep scrolling to see the path to the finished product shown above. He cut a hole in the drywall and figured out how to mount a tablet dock that includes inductive charging. It holds the tablet in place with the small ledge and a few magnets, keeping its battery charged without a need for wires. once tested he mudded, sanded, textured, and painted for a perfect finished product.

There are essentially two methods to compute data. The very first is with a DSP, a chip that performs extremely specialized functions on a restricted set of data. These are extremely cheap, have remarkable performance per watt, however can’t do general computation at all. If you’d like to develop a general-purpose computer, you’ll have to choose a superscalar processor – an x86, PowerPC, or any type of one of the other truly beefy CPU architectures out there. Superscalars are great for general function computing, however their performance per watt dollar is abysmal in comparison to a DSP.

A great deal of people have looked into this issue as well as have come up with nothing. This may change, though, if [Ivan Godard] of Out-of-the-Box computing is able to create The Mill – a ground-up rethink of present CPU architectures.

Unlike DSPs, superscalar processors you’d discover in your desktop have an huge amount of registers, as well as many of these are rename registers, or locations where the CPU stores a value temporarily. integrate this with the truth that linking numerous these short-term registers to locations where they’ll ultimately be utilized eats up about half the power budget plan in a CPU, as well as you’ll see why DSPs are so much much more effective than the x86 sitting in your laptop.

[Ivan]’s service to this issue is replacing the registers in a CPU with something called a ‘belt’ – essentially a strange combination of a stack as well as a shift register. The CPU can take data from any type of setting on the belt, carry out an operation, as well as locations the result at the front of the belt. any type of data that isn’t utilized just falls off the belt; this isn’t a problem, as many data utilized in a CPU is utilized only once.

On paper, it’s a vastly much more effective implies of general function computation. Unfortunately, [Ivan] doesn’t rather have all the patents in for The Mill, so his talks (two offered below) are a bit compartmentalized. Still, it’s one of the coolest advances in computer design in recent memory as well as something we’d like to see ended up being a genuine product.

meet [Ray Gascoigne]. He’s a ship builder. Well, he builds ships in bottles. He’s been doing it for years and years and years and you can see it in his hands. The details are wonderful on the ships, but I really love hearing about the tools. He talks about how much things have changed over the years from having to build your own specialized tiny drill bits from broken needles to being able to just walk best down to the store and purchase some.

The part that I found many interesting is this video, as amazingly stunning as it is, never shows the insertion and erection of a full ship.

What do you do if you’ve got a fully equipped machine shop and you’re tired of taking old beer cans to the recycler? If you’re like [Brock], you’ll probably end up melting those cans down to build an engine.

After gathering 50 pounds of beer cans and melting them down into ingots of various sizes, [Brock] and company had a lot of aluminum and nothing to build. Eventually, someone got the idea to build an internal combustion engine out of these beer can ingots.

So far, the beer can engine crew has built two engines from these beer can ingots. The four-stroke engine started off as a 5-inch aluminum cube, bored and milled into something resembling an engine block. When [Brock] and the beer can engine team completed their four-stroke masterpiece, they had a water-cooled engine displacing 150cc with a single 2″ bore piston. The two-stroke engine is a much simpler affair with a 1 inch bore displacing 19cc.

Even though there’s no information at all covering the pottery kiln foundry used to melt the beer cans into ingots, it’s an remarkable piece of work building and engine from the ground up.

You can check out a few videos of both engines after the break.