about six months ago, Texas Instruments released a simple, cheap, single-chip WiFi module. At $10 a piece in quantities of 1000, the CC3000 is a much much better solution to the issue of an ‘Internet of Things’ than a $50 Arduino Ethernet modules, or even the $30 electric Imp. All indications, particularly the regular out of stock condition for the dev board on TI’s web site, show the CC3000 will be a prominent chip, however up until now we haven’t seen a CC3000 library for the Arduino or other microcontrollers.

[Chris] just resolved that issue for us with a CC3000 WiFi library for the Arduino. He ported TI’s MSP430 CC3000 library to the Arduino, enabling even the bare-bones Arduino Uno to link to a WiFi network with just a handful of parts. The code itself takes about 12k of Flash as well as 350 bytes of RAM, providing anyone utilizing the CC3000 sufficient space left over to do some truly fascinating stuff. There’s even a slimmed down library that utilizes somewhere between 2k as well as 6k of Flash, making an ATtiny-powered web server a reality.

There are a few caveats in utilizing the CC3000 with an Arduino; it’s a 3.3 Volt part, so you’ll requirement a level shifter or some resistors. Also, the chip draws about 250 mA when it’s being used, so you’ll requirement a beefy battery if you want your job to last an entire day of use.

Now that the library is out of the way, be on the lookout for a CC3000 breakout board. Here’s one, however expect some more on the market soon.

who doesn’t like a great surplus store? [Tyler Bletsch] just completed up this awesome clock hack by re-purposing a scrapped medical circuit board.

Ax-Man Surplus in Minneapolis has all kinds of goodies as well as it’s been around a long time (here’s a hack from the ’90s that source from the store). one day while digging with their inventory, [Tyler] discovered a lot of scrap circuit boards with 7-segment displays. At $2 a pop, he made a decision to danger it to tinker with.

He swiftly identified the primary chip on the board to be a typical LED motorist (MAX7221) as well as began reverse engineering the board by tracing the circuit. He really has a dazzling guide on his web site about how to make circuit tracing method easier. From there it was just a matter of loading a MAX7221 library onto a ATtiny44, adding a 16MHz crystal, as well as considering that there’s an additional 2 digits offered on the display… a temperature sensor too!

It’s a excellent little hack, as well as as it turned out, there wasn’t anything wrong with the boards, except for a minor typo in the company’s name. Hooray for reusing scrapped parts!

[ch00f] managed to capture some holiday spirit this year by translating all of A Christmas Carol to scrolling text. Dickens’s work has long since entered public domain, which led [ch00f] to wire up a GeekCatch programmable display from Amazon. It has a low refresh rate, which means videos look a bit goofy, but it’s perfectly acceptable for text. [ch00f] ditched the remote control and instead used the display’s serial connection to program in the novella. Unfortunately, he could not find any documentation for the serial protocol, but he was able to reverse engineer it with some freeware applications found online.

It takes over six hours for the sign to spit out the entirety of A Christmas Carol, which easily surpassed the display’s limited text buffer. [ch00f] instead had to send text to the display one paragraph at a time via a custom Python script. This solution takes advantage of the sign’s fixed-width font to estimate the time it takes for each character to scroll by, then right away feeds the sign a new line.

Check out the blog post for a quick teardown of the display itself and for a detailed description of the protocol in case you decide to use this display for a project. Stick around for a video below!

The range of this job is practically as jaw-dropping as the expense of the parts. [LeoneLabs] phone calls the job PixelBrite. It’s a highly-polished modular RGB LED panel system, as well as he’s not keeping it a secret. We believe it’s sensible to phone call the develop documentation mammoth. If you’re a fan of fast-motion assembly videos he’s got you covered there as well.

It’s fascinating to compare this develop to a few of the Daft Punk tables from years back. It shows exactly how economies of scale in the pastime electronics market have assisted new as well as economical products to emerge. For instance, this providing is a 10×10 grid which is outside of the typical 8 pixel broad positioning dictated by 8-bit microcontrollers. The reason for the modification is that this doesn’t utilize a matrix developed with point-to-point soldering. It utilizes a string of RGB pixels (WS2801).

The enclosure is likewise a thing of beauty. The dividers that comprise each cell are laser cut foam board. This makes the joints extremely tight to avoid light from leaking into the next cell. The housing is acrylic held in location by an aluminum rail system. requirement much more than one panel? No problem, a single connector chains one panel to the next. however we did mentioned the expense of materials. Unassembled you can expect to decrease over five hundred bones for the enjoyment of seeing this thing blink.

tired of flashing your embedded project over and over just to modify a few values? So was [Karl], so he composed a text editor that runs on his ARM dev board.

Having trouble wrapping your mind around the need for this kind of thing? He’s actually playing around with eLua, the embedded version of the Lua programming language. In this case the program data are being kept on an SD card. but still, moving that back and forth between computer and embedded project gets old quickly. So he invested the time to write a rudimentary text editor that he interfaces through this terminal window. above you can see the help screen which sets out all of the applications features. right now it sounds like the only gotcha for this is the amount of RAM it needs to run. As it stands, the editor will now work an mbed board, but it works just fine on an STM Discovery.

Resin-based SLA 3D printers are seen a lot more as well as a lot more nowadays however stay fairly uncommon. This Low Cost, open Source, LCD based SLA 3D Printer design by [Dylan Reynolds] is a idea that aims to make diy SLA 3D printing a lot more accessible. The concept is to utilize hardware as well as producing techniques that are a lot more easily offered to hobbyists to produce a dependable as well as consistent diy platform.

[Dylan]’s goal isn’t truly to contend with any type of of the hobbyist or prosumer choices on the market; it’s a lot more a test bed for himself as well as others, to show that a affordable style that takes full advantage of contemporary hardware like the Raspberry Pi can be made. The result would be a hackable platform to let people a lot more quickly develop, experiment, or just tamper with whatever part or parts they wish.

The HackadayPrize2017 is Sponsored by: