[HH] Hardware Hacking

[Tom Metro]

Mark Woodward wrote:
> Hardware hacking? The older guys, like
> myself, who actually own oscilloscopes and soldering irons may be all
> over it. The GenX'ers who grew up after ISA proto cards may not be so
> inclined, but, who knows?

10 years ago after all the hobby magazines dried up, I would have
agreed, but Make Magazine and a small handful of web sites seem to be
thriving on old-school hardware hacking.

Speaking of oscilloscopes, anyone interested in a big 1970's era
Techtronics? It worked the last time I tried using it - probably 10
years ago - but is effectively useless, having the same capability of a
$200 hand-held. I'd hate to trash it, and I'm not sure some collector
would buy it on eBay, but starting to think it is taking up too much
space to hang onto it. (The cart it is on might actually be nicely
repurposed as a welding cart. Maybe I'll stick the scope on a shelf and
do that.)


> Having done embedded work, I'm looking forward to experimenting with
> this thing. The arduino project really shows the power of the open
> source methodology. Embedded systems are typically so arcane and usually
> require a huge learning curve just to get started.

I've been casually keeping an eye on the Arduino.

After doing a bunch of embedded stuff in the late 80's, over the years
I've bought into a few different "quick start" embedded platforms
(Paralax's packaging of the Microchip PIC, and then some AMD
microcontroller, if I remember correctly), but they've largely sat in
the box unused. So I'm reluctantly to but-in to another platform, no
matter how tempting it seems to get it to just play around with it,
unless I have a compelling project lined up.

I do run across the occasional project where a micro would really come
in handy, but then I hit a sort of catch-22 - not having good
familiarity with an embedded platform means I can't knock out a solution
in a few hours (or days). Which means the threshold for compelling is
even higher. Really, building anything from scratch, even if it doesn't
require days of building and software debugging, is hard to justify
these days.


A recent project I considered was a garden light meter. Something I
looked for last year, and didn't find a commercial solution. This year I
found and bought a commercial product:
http://www.amazon.com/Luster-Leaf-1875-Rapitest-Calculator/dp/B002XZLLXU/

with disappointing results. It's fine for their described use case: you
have a spot in your yard where you want to plant something, and you want
a simple guide for what type of plant to select that will do best in
that  light level. Less effective if you are selecting the location for
a vegetable garden and want to compare multiple locations to see which
one has the most hours of full sunlight.

I considered creating a quick hack by joining a solar panel and a hour
meter (as found in heavy machinery). I saw that some (digital) hour
meters had separate battery and control inputs. It would likely still
need a battery and some glue components to match the "full sun" output
voltage from the cell to the control threshold on the hour meter. (Using
a solar panel with 12 V output would make it too expensive. You'd
quickly be over $30 in parts.)

Of course an Arduino with a cadmium cell attach to an A-to-D input, and
some LCD display "shield" would be far more flexible.

 -Tom