Coffee roasting is an art or a science, depending on who you talk to. Both camps will however agree that attention to detail is key. Many diehard beanheads, as they’re known, will go so far as to create their own roasting hardware to get the job done just right. [Larry Cotton] is one such builder, who has created an elegant roaster to get his brew just right.

The build is based around a wobble disk design. This consists of a round plate fixed at a 45-degree angle to a rotating shaft. As the shaft spins, the disk gently sweeps and agitates the roast, allowing the batch to heat up evenly without burning the beans. It’s a two-part design, with heat gun parts in the base to generate the hot air for the roasting process. The bean basket sits on top, held in place by magnets that also act as a conduit for the wobble disk motor’s power supply.

It’s a tidy build, which allows for accurate roasting and easy dumping of the beans once finished. We’ve featured [Larry]’s builds before, too. If you’re a serious beanhead yourself with a few hacks up your sleeve, be sure to let us know! Video after the break.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/23/wobble-disk-coffee-roaster-gets-the-beans-just-right/

Somewhere between the onset of annoying hand pain and the feeling of worn-out, mushy switches, [sinbeard]’s keyboard dissatisfaction came to a head. He decided it was time to slip into something bit more ergonomic and settled on building an Iris — a small split keeb with an ortholinear (non-staggered) key arrangement.

The Iris is open source and uses an on-board controller, so you can have the boards fabbed and do a lot of SMD soldering, or get a pair of PCBs with all of that already done. [sinbeard] went the latter route with this build, but there’s still plenty of soldering and assembly to do before it’s time to start clackin’, such as the TRRS jacks, the rotary encoders, and of course, all the switches. It’s a great way for people to get their feet wet when it comes to building keyboards.

Everything went according to plan until it was time to flash the firmware and it didn’t respond. It’s worth noting that both of the Iris PCBs are the same, and both are fully populated. This is both good and bad.

It’s bad you have two on-board microcontrollers and their crystals to worry about instead of one. It’s good because there’s a USB port on both sides so you can plug in whichever side you prefer, and this comes in mighty handy if you have to troubleshoot.

When one side’s underglow lit up but not the other, [sinbeard] busted out the ISP programmer. But in the end, he found the problem — a dent in the crystal — by staring at the board. A cheap replacement part and a little hot air rework action was all it took to get this Iris to bloom.

Want to build a keyboard but need a few more keys? Check out the dactyl and the ErgoDox.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/23/ergo-keyboard-build-issue-becomes-crystal-clear/

We’ve often said that one of the best applications for desktop 3D printing is the production of custom enclosures, but you certainly aren’t limited to an extruded version of the classic Radio Shack project box. As [Marcello Milone] shows with this very clever retro TV enclosure for the Wemos D1 Mini, 3D printing means your imagination is the only limit when it comes to how you want to package up your latest creation.

As nice as the printed parts are, it’s the little details that really sell the look. [Marcello] has bent a piece of copper wire into a circle to make a faux antenna with vintage flair, and while the ESP is connecting to the WiFi network, it even shows an old school TV test pattern on its 1.8″ TFT display.

In the video after the break you can see the device go through its startup routine, and while displaying the Hackaday Wrencher at boot might not be strictly on theme…we’ll allow it.

While you could certainly use this little enclosure for whatever ESP project you had in mind, [Marcello] says he’s building a distributed environmental monitoring network using HTU21D temperature and humidity sensors. It sounds like he’s still working on the software side of things though, so hopefully he posts an update when the functionality is fully realized.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/23/3d-printed-esp8266-tv-is-a-blast-from-the-past/

Neon lights have inspired much prose over the years, with their attractive light output receiving glowing adulation. [Pierre Muth] is a big fan, and decided to spend lockdown creating something suitably pretty for his desk.

The project consists of an 8×48 matrix display constructed out of INS-1 (ИНC-1) tubes. These tiny neon tubes are 6.5 mm in diameter, showing a bright orange dot of light when powered up. Requiring just 100 V and 0.5 mA to light, they’re a touch easier to drive than the famous Nixie.

[Pierre] decided to go all out, wishing to replicate the capabilities of smart LEDs like the WS2812. These contain a microcontroller built in to each LED, so [Pierre] would have to do the same. Each of the 384 neon tubes got its own bespoke PCB, containing a PIC16F15313 microcontroller, step up voltage circuitry, and a 6-pin connector. (Whoah!) When each bulb was soldered to its PCB, they were then plugged into a backplane. An ESP32 was then employed to drive the display as a whole.

Creating a display in this fashion takes a huge amount of work, with most of it being soldering the 384 individual bulb PCBs containing 11 components each. We have a lot of respect for [Pierre]’s work ethic to get this done during lockdown, and the final result is a gloriously retro neon matrix display. We’ve featured other neon matrixes recently, too. Video after the break.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/23/384-neon-bulbs-become-attractive-display/

With a gorgeous view of the Italian seaside, we’re not surprised [Danilo Larizza] had a couple IP cameras set up to pull in real-time views. But using a Raspberry Pi, an environmental sensor, and some software trickery to overlay the current (and naturally, perfect) weather conditions over the images? Now he’s just teasing us.

Whatever his motives are, we have to admit that the end result is very nice. Especially when you find out that there’s no complex hardware or software at work here. An original Raspberry Pi is doing all the heavy lifting by pulling a frame from the external IP camera using ffmpeg, polling the I2C-connected BME280 temperature and humidity sensor with a Python script, and then producing a final snapshot with the environmental data laid over top using ImageMagick.

[Danilo] gives the exact commands he’s using for each step of the process, making it easy to follow along and see how everything comes together in the end. That also makes it much easier to adapt for your own purposes should you feel so inclined. Once you see how all the pieces fit together, where the data and images come from is up to you.

We’ve previously shown how some simple Python code can be used to turn your raw data into attractive images, and combining that with real-world photographs is an excellent way of turning a text file full of values into a display worth showing off.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/23/custom-weather-camera-feed-with-software-tricks/

Once upon a time, computers were very expensive and you were lucky to have shared access to one computer. While that might seem to be a problem, it did have one big advantage: all of your files were on that computer.

Today, we all probably have at least a desktop and one laptop. Your phone is probably a pretty good computer by most standards. You might have multiple computers and a smattering of tablets. So what do you do to keep your files accessible everywhere? Why not run your own peer-to-peer synchronization service? Your files are always under your control and encrypted in motion. There’s no central point of failure. You can do it with one very slick piece of Open Source software called synching. It runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD, and Solaris. There are also Android clients. We haven’t tested it, but one caveat is that the unofficial iOS support sounds a little spotty.

The joke about the cloud — that it’s just other people’s servers — is on point here. Some people don’t like their files sitting on a third-party server. Even if your files are encrypted or you don’t care, you still have the problem of what happens if you can’t reach the server — may be on an airplane with no WiFi — or the server goes down. Sure, Google and Microsoft don’t go dark very often, but they can and do. Even if you build your own cloud, it runs on your servers. Syncthing is serverless: it simply makes sure that all files are up-to-date on all your end devices.

Enter Syncthing

Syncthing is written in Go — not that you care — and efficiently syncs directories across many devices with a number of options. The simplest setup syncs all files in a folder, on all machines, with no versioning. But there are several flavors of version control to select and you can also make folders that only publish changes or where changes will not propagate to other devices. By default data is encrypted, and optionally compressed, when synchronizing. What’s more, the block exchange protocol gains efficiency as you add devices — think of it as a private BitTorrent between your devices.

Setup

Setting up Syncthing is easy. For Debian-type Linux you can follow their instructions to add a repository and install it using apt. There are other options for other operating systems. The only negative to the install is that it doesn’t set up Syncthing as a service, which is probably something you want.

They do provide examples of how to do this on GitHub. In my case, I had to use the linux-systemd files and put them in my /etc/system.d/system directory. The file syncthing@.service indicates that the service will run on behalf of a user. You can enable the service like this:

systemctl --user enable syncthing.service

The program does a good job of traversing NAT and firewalls, so I didn’t have to set any of that up. Speaking of setup, the default method of running setup is to open a web browser on the localhost. By default, you must be on the local machine to access the web page, but you can change that if you want to remotely configure the system. You can also use an ssh tunnel to pop out on the local machine. There are some third-party GUIs and programs that can control syncthing through its API.

Coupling Devices

Devices have to know about one another. The program generates a long ID or a QR code you can use to set up one machine on the other. You really need to do this on both sides — that is, you have to give computer A the code for computer B and give computer A’s code to computer B. When you accept another computer into your device list, you can mark it as an “introducer”. This will add all the computers they know and trust to your list as well.

This scheme means you need some sort of access to both computers, which is a good thing for security. If you are setting up on a headless server, though, you might need to use an ssh tunnel. I did this:

ssh -L 9876:localhost:8384 my-remote-host

Now a browser pointing to my localhost on port 9876 will appear on the syncthing administration port (8384) on the remote server. I didn’t use 8384 on the local side because, of course, I was running syncthing there already.

Sharing Folders

When you create a folder you can give it a display name and a location. Those can be different on every machine or they could be the same. What ties them together is the folder ID. Any folder with the same ID that is shared between two machines will synchronize. So, for example, you could have your local ~/Documents directory sync with a server directory called Desktop-Backups.

When you set up a folder you can turn on versioning. This keeps versions of files when a remote computer makes changes to it. It does not make versions for local changes. There are several options for versioning. The trashcan model just keeps a single copy of the old file. Simple versioning keeps a configurable number of old copies with a time stamp. There are several other choices, but those are the easiest ones.

Another feature allows you to set up folders that only send changes to remote computers or only receive them. Of course, the default is that folders both send and receive changes. You might, for example, have a master set of configuration files that you only want to change locally, but you want other computers to incorporate those changes: set the folder to only send. You’ll notice the folder icons change based on your selections to include an arrow that points up or down depending on your choice.

What to Sync

Once you have things set up, it is pretty addictive to start syncing directories. Sure, pictures and other documents are a no brainer. But what about 3D printer configurations? Or even your system startup scripts. It is true that the system isn’t necessarily the best solution for backups, but you can use it that way, too.

When we’ve mentioned Syncthing to people, they often reply they would use OwnCloud or NextCloud. Each has its advantages, of course. While setting up your private cloud gives you the ability to install applications, you now have a dependency on a central server, even if it is your own.

Speaking of startup scripts, I wrote something to do that and it used Git to synchronize and version control your bash startup. That system would work well with syncthing instead of Git. If you are interested in such things, you might also want to check out chezmoi.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/23/linux-fu-keep-in-sync/