Author Archives: R-B

SatNOGS is the 2014 Hackaday Prize winner

Hackaday has announced the grand prize winner of the 2014 Hackaday Prize today. The winner is SatNOGs, a complete platform of an open-source satellite ground station built from readily available and affordable tools and resources.

Hackaday writes,

It opens up the use of satellite data to a much wider range of humanity by providing plans to build satellite tracking stations, and a protocol and framework to share the satellite data with those that cannot afford, or lack the skills to build their own tracking station. The hardware itself is based on readily available materials, commodity electronics, and just a bit of 3D printing.

SatNOGS provides the basis for:

  • Bulk manufacturing and deployment of affordable Satellite Ground Stations
  • Modular design for integration with existing and future technologies
  • A platform for a variety of instrumentation around Satellite Ground Station operations
  • A firm platform for a Ground Station collaborative network (one to one, one to many, many to many)
  • A community based approach on Ground Station development
  • A solution for massive automation of operator-less Ground Stations based on open standards
SatNOGS: An open-source networked ground station

SatNOGS: An open-source networked ground station

SA

SatNOGS is built using readily available and affordable tools and resources 

Microchip announces new 16-bit A/D converters with 200Msps sampling rate

Microchip Technology Inc. has announced two families of new high-speed A/D converters in the MCP37DX1-200 and MCP372X1-200 families. These families feature 12-, 14- and 16-bit pipelined A/D converters with a maximum sampling rate of 200 Mega samples per second (Msps). The 14- and 16-bit devices feature high accuracy of over 74 dB Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and over 90 dB Spurious Free Dynamic Range (SFDR), while the 12-bit devices have 71.3 dB SNR and 90 dB SFDR. This enables high-precision measurements of fast input signals. These families operate at very low-power consumption of 490 mW at 200 Msps including LVDS digital I/O. Lower power-saving modes are available at 80 mW for standby and 33 mW for shutdown.

The MCP37DX1-200 and MCP372X1-200 include various digital processing features that simplify system design, cost and power usage for designers. These families also include decimation filters for improved SNR, individual phase, offset and gain adjustment and a fractional delay recovery for time-delay corrections in multi-channel modes. Data is available through the serial DDR LVDS or parallel CMOS interface and configured via SPI. An integrated digital down-converter is included in the MCP37DX1-200 family making it ideal for communications applications. The 12-bit families include an integrated noise-shaping requantizer, which enables users to lower the noise within a given band of interest for improved accuracy and performance. These families are targeted for applications in the communications markets such as base stations, test equipment, and IF receivers, among others.

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Mooltipass: An offline password keeper

In today’s digital world, password management has become an indispensable and challenging part of our lives. No matter is it our online banking, social media, email, restaurant, utilities, or remote server account, every web-interaction these days requires you to create a strong, non-repetitive, and frequently-changed  password to login to the system. With growing number of online accounts and their strong password policies, keeping track of the passwords is getting annoying and harder. Choosing the same password for multiple accounts puts your entire online identity at risk if that password is compromised. To address this password problem, Hackaday introduces a new piece of open-source hardware, called Mooltipass, which is a secure offline password keeper.

Mooltipass can generate and safely store strong and unique passwords for each website you use. It is a standalone USB device compatible with PCs, MACs, and smartphones, and emulates a standard USB keyboard when connected. When you visit a website and login is required, it enters your credentials with your confirmation. A personal PIN-locked smartcard is used to store the encryption key for your credentials, thus making sure that only you can get access to them. Last but not least, the Mooltipass offline password keeper also contains plugin headers to incorporate standard Arduino shields to further expand its capabilities.

To get Mooltipass into mass production, Hackaday is currently running a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo with half of the target ($109,112) being already made in a week. Good luck to the Mooltipass team for the success of their campaign.

Mooltipass, an offline password keeper

Mooltipass, an offline password keeper

Motion Sensing Pumpkin Vibrobot

Mechanical Engineer and K-12 STEM educator, Ben Finio, has designed this kid-friendly motion sensing pumpkin Bot, which could be a fun project to make for the next Halloween. The thing I liked the most about this PumpkinBot is its simplicity and microcontroller-free design. His motion-sensing bot uses a passive infrared (PIR) sensor attached in front of the pumpkin to detect motion. Three toothbrush heads are glued underneath the PumpkinBot to give it a stable tripod. When a motion is sensed, it triggers the robot’s LED eyes and a DC motor attached on its back. A wine cork fixed to the motor shaft create vibrations that are strong enough to move the robot around. It works best on a flat and smooth surface. You can leave it on your porch and watch enjoying the PumpkinBot scaring trick-or-treaters as they approach to your door.

Motion sensing pumpkin robot

Motion sensing pumpkin robot

Order your favorite pizza with just the push of a button

Hungry pizza-lover yet excessively lethargic to pick up the phone or use an app to order online? Don’t worry, this Emergency Pizza button will let you instantly order a pizza full of your favorite toppings with the simple push of the button. The Pizza Button uses the BeagleBone Black microcontroller board which does all of web scrapping for you behind the screen. When the button is pressed, the web scraper can log into your Grub Hub account and order a pizza from your favorite online store (the author has programmed it for making online order from San Francisco North Beach Pizza).

The Python application for Pizza Button interacts with webpages through Selenium, which is a software tool for automating web browsing. To further enhance the browsing experience, the application incorporates the PhantomJS headless browser. A headless browser is a GUI-less web browser, not meant for displaying content to users, that accesses web pages and provides their contents to other programs. The combination of all these tools together facilitates the Pizza Button to login to your personal GrubHub account, browse through the menu of your favorite online pizza store, and orders a pizza of your choice. It all happens with just the push of the button.

Emergency pizza button

Emergency pizza button

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