It has come to my attention that the biggest risk at a keyboard meetup is having your keyboard stolen. For this I propose a precaution that can be taken to protect your board.
The case and the ground pin in a mini / micro USB connector are not always shorted together. In cases where they are an open circuit until you connect them,a custom device can be made.
You create a cable where it uses the ground pin and the plug casing as a switch. When it is plugged into a keyboard, it will close the circuit. When I bugged the circuit will then open. You can use the circuit opening event to trigger a loud audible alarm, along with anything else like flashing lights or whatever you want.
This way you could make it a requirement to speak to an event staff or enter a pin to remove your keyboard.
Therefore only the owner of the board is able to disconnect it without drawing everyone’s attention to the act.
As an added bonus you can feed in +5v on the appropriate pin to power the board for lights and sounds and whatnot.
This same method can likely be adapted to different connector types providing the ground pin is not already connected to the connector casing.
And with some trickery that requirement can probably be worked around.
I might make a prototype soon when I get a mini USB connector.
Yesterday I decided to visit the Robots and Dinisaurs hackerspace in Meadowbank after work.
I had been meaning to go there for quite some time, and finally got around to going!
I got on the train to Epping from Central and not too long later I was at Meadowbank station.
Across the road from the station, around the back of the shops, it was easy to find.
Knocking on the door a man named James was there to greet us, he let us in, we took a quick glance around, and I knew I was happy to be there!
There is heaps of amazing resources available, machinery, tools, parts, everything a young hacker could need!
James showed us some things he had been working on including a laser cut geared arduino powered compass !
It looks pretty damn cool! Haha
Here is some photos of the space:
Ok fine, some photos of the machines I was keen to learn how to use!
The black laser cutter was the objective today, James showed me how to work the CAD software, how to work with objects, to set the machine up and mark its origin, how to properly attach the material to the work area using magnets, adjust settings, all the things!
He used some scrap wood out of the scrap bin to laser cut and engrave a few die that he had prior designed through (Inkscape?)
They’re pretty cute, and it was amazing how fast the machine works, especially when I was used to the slow speed of 3D printers!
On the topic of 3D printers, the space has a bunch of them, from commercial types, to homemade, to an egg boy that can draw designs on eggs or other round objects!
I decided I wanted to try making a keyboard on the laser machine. I picked out a piece of wood from the new materials section, because I wanted a nice thin piece some MX switches could clip into, and I loaded up some DXF files onto a USB of a design I liked.
Importing the files into the cutter software was super easy, and within seconds we had realigned the material and had the box for the plate free from obstruction and held down steady!
I hit go and the machine jumped to life !
I took two revisions, the first one had 4 mounting holes, which would be fine for a metal plate, but the wood is too soft and weak for that.
In the second revision, Mark and James added in a bunch more holes for mounting points !
Much sturdier!
The second one also has a 3mm white acrylic base as that was in the off cuts bin for free.
The machine is pretty damn good at getting the detail, and for the most part switches fit in pretty well!
While I was doing all this, Mark and James were working on making a completely DIY DC Motor!
They were following a guide and using some enamelled copper wire, paper clips, a hard disk magnet and a block of foam!
It was pretty cool watching them spend hours on it and get really excited when it finally worked!
I went on a mission today to get my HF antenna working with my Uncle’s help!
We started out testing a ‘mini g5vr junior’ off ebay, it was about $50, and… not great.
Its only about 15m at its widest (both elements!)
We couldn’t even get it to tune on any band.
So back to the drawing board, or more the cutting board, we butchered the mini antenna and used its copper wire to repair the G5RV I already had!
With the two elements from the mini one soldered on, I was still about 40cm short of the correct length, so I cut 45cm of solid core ethernet, stripped the ends and twisted them together, and then soldered that in the mix!
with the two elements the correct lengths (or close enough)
we popped down the road to the park and strung the antenna between two trees about 50m apart from each other, using some rope to reach the trees.
The antenna was only 2-3 meters off the ground, so not ideal, but it was great hearing voices coming through the radio again!
It tunes on some bands, but not others.
I think im done messing around, and ill just buy a new G5RV and not let my parents near it (theyre the reason the one I have now is broken, they didnt even keep the half they snapped off :((((( so much copper just thrown away…)
The park is a good candidate, seems low noise there (compared to elsewhere, I still miss my perk in the mountains though!)
There is two trees with nice high branches I am eyeing off, about 10-15 meters off the ground, and ~70m apart.
If I can string it up between there, and set up camp in the middle of the two, with a little picnic table and some food, I think I could have a fun few hours!
Here is some pictures of the final setup, and a youtube video showing some sweet morse and voice coming through
Over the weekend I picked up some fiber gear from the lab, took it home and decided to replace the links between rooms with it!
I brought home my trusty old Lindy switch I got years ago from ByteFoundry, some multimode OM3 cable with LC connectors, and I already had some 850nm optical transceivers at home in my tool box.
I replaced the run of copper from the core in the living room to the Lindy switch in my bedroom, it’s just sitting there for now, I’ll grab a Lack when I’m near Ikea next and mount it to that.
This solves my problem of having to do my wired network projects in the living room ! I finally have spare ports in my bedroom haha
The core switch in the living room has 3 spare SFP ports?, which leaves room for a second link to my room that I could trunk if I setup a NAS in there, and a link to my flatmates room, still leaving a spare port for a link to the veranda or garage if I setup a rack there.
There’s little benefit to this as the links are still 1gbps but the fiber has a smaller profile physically to the copper so it pleases me.
Plus it’s nice to play with fiber!
I’ll get some of that Velcro people use over cables to replace the duct tape as that’s already peeling 🙁
Here’s some photos of how it is:
I should get around to setting up a Spillpass hotspot already!
It sure as heck isn’t a 32u4 but it is rather interesting !
It looks like it’s an esp8266 module in the form factor of an arduino pro micro, I’m a bit put off by the $20~ price tag but it would be interesting to see if they have routed the pins to the corresponding ones as for the pro micro.
Then you could use it as a drop in replacement without even having to change the code, except you would suddenly have the option to add wifi to your project!
IoT is definitely getting much easier these days to implement than when this blog first started! Hahaha
No more fumbling around with an Arduino Uno with Ethernet and then little dodgy radios talking to other Unos with the same radio…..
So my Neutrino works, pretty well. but not perfectly.
Theres some funny things with the shift keys not working if I press shift + w, it will release shift, but if i press w + shift it works fine?
