Turning Anyone Into A Casuality

August 16, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

Triage

EMTs and other first responders don’t just sit around waiting for a disaster to happen. If they need to train for a disaster – environmental, terrorist, or otherwise – they put together a mass injury simulation, or their version of a war game. As you can imagine, coordinating one of these simulations is a nightmare, but [David] came up with a way to simulate a casualty with a few XBees, a Parallax Propeller, and a few RFID cards.

This triage training simulator consists of an ‘acting coach’ on each simulated victim that includes a speech-to-text module that speaks instructions into the actors ear, a pulse simulator and a readout for vital signs that correspond to twelve major injuries. When an EMT triages a victim, they swipe an RFID card for each medical procedure they perform – intubating is one card, while a bandage is another – and all this is sent back to the coordinator’s tablet.

The coordinator has direct control over each of the actors through a two-way radio link, and can initiate changes in each victim, monitor a paramedic’s responses, and “escalate” the situation by setting off another simulated bomb.

All this is created with off-the-shelf hardware, vastly reducing the cost of this type of training device. An amazing application of what we usually consider to be just robot parts, and we’re happy for [David] to share it with us.

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Change The TV Channel Over IP

August 16, 2013 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

tv-channel-change-over-ip

[Mustafa Dur] wrote in to tell us about his hack to control the television with a smartphone. Now the one-IR-remote-to-rule-them hacks have been gaining popularity lately so we assumed that’s how he was doing it. We were wrong. He’s using his satellite receiver to provide the Internet connection. It pushes commands to his LG 47LH50 TV which has an RS-232 port.

The image above is the back of another LG television (it came from a forum post about controlling the TV with a PC). [Mustafa] is using a Dreambox DM800 satellite receiver which also has a serial port an he can telnet into it. He searched around the Internet and discovered that it should be possible to connect the two using a null modem cable. His initial tests resulted in no response, but a tweak to the com port settings of the box got his first command to shut off the television. After a bit of tweaking he was able to lock in reliable communications which he made persistent by writing his own startup script. From there he got to work on a Python script which works as the backend for a web-based control interface.

If you want to find out what else you can do with this type of serial connection read about this hack which used a script to try every possible command combination.

Turning A Tiny Linux Box Into A Synthesizer

August 16, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

waveforms

For all the cool things the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, and other low-power Linux boards can do, there’s one thing we haven’t seen much of: creating music with software synthesizers. Yes, soft synths have been around for ages now, but compiling them for these ARM boards is something we haven’t seen much of (to say nothing of the Linux audio system). Luckily, [Paul] and [Trev] have put together a tutorial for making synthesizers on these small Linux boards using Csound, the premier audio programming language for Linux.

[Paul] and [Trev] have already put together a few Csound instruments that include a Vangelis-inspired synth, a Lorenz Strange Attractor FM synth, a drum machine, and a classic monophonic style synth. All these instruments are ready to play on a Raspi or BeagleBone and we’re sure we’ll see a few more applications of this great tool for creating musical instruments as more musicians are turned onto these small Linux boards.

Rock Solid PCB Mill Built At Home

August 16, 2013 by Mike Szczys 41 Comments

Let’s all slow clap for [Daniel Taylor] who, after a long journey, got his home built PCB mill up and running with remarkable precision. That’s 10 mil traces with 0.5mm pitch pads. We’re impressed! The board will be used for breaking out the connections of an LCD screen he has on hand.

After seeing a CNC project as yesterday’s Fail of the Week it’s nice to look in on one like this that does some amazing stuff. In fact, [Daniel’s] creation has been working for months already. The link above is the project log he kept while hacking, tweaking, and retrofitting his rig to get the level of precision he was after.

Improvements include swapping out drawer slides for proper linear bearings and completely reworking the Z-axis along with a motor upgrade. For those that aren’t fans of the reading (how did you make it this far into this feature?) you can take a quick look at his image gallery which includes captions.

Microcontrollers And Node.js, Naturally

August 16, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

We see a surprising amount of projects using Node.js, but despite this we haven’t seen much JavaScript running microcontrollers, even the ARM powered Raspi or BeagleBone. The folks at Technical Machine want to change that with a very cool dev board designed to be an Internet-connected JavaScript running prototyping device from the very beginning. It’s called Tessel, and brings some very cool tools to any maker’s workbench.

On board this little… board is an ARM Cortex-M3 running at 180 MHz, 32 Megs of Flash, 32 Megs of SDRAM, and a TI CC3000 WiFi module that we’ve heard so much about. The 16-pin GPIO can connect to other Tessel modules that allow for servos, accelerometers, micro SD cards, and a whole bunch of other sensors for just about any project imaginable.

Aside from having WiFi built in from the get-go, Tessel also has some Arduino compatibility, allowing it to work with existing shields and code. It seems pretty cool, and we can’t wait to get our hands on one when it launches in September.

IMU Boards As Next-gen Motion Capture Suit?

August 15, 2013 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

This guy takes a drink and so does the virtual wooden mannequin. Well, its arm takes a drink because that’s all the researchers implemented during this summer project. But the demo really makes us think that suits full of IMU boards are the next generation of motion capture. Not because this is the first time we’ve seen it (the idea has been floating around for a couple of years) but because the sensor chips have gained incredible precision while dropping to bargain basement prices. We can pretty much thank the smartphone industry for that, right?

Check out the test subject’s wrist. That’s an elastic bandage which holds the board in place. There’s another one on this upper arm that is obscured by his shirt sleeve. The two of these are enough to provide accurate position feedback in order to make the virtual model move. In this case the sensor data is streamed to a computer over Bluetooth where a Processing script maps it to the virtual model. But we’ve seen similar 9-axis sensors in projects like this BeagleBone sensor cape. It makes us think it would be easy to have an embedded system like that on the back of a suit which collects data from sensor boards all over the test subject’s body.

Oh who are we kidding? [James Cameron’s] probably already been using this for years.

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Fail Of The Week: The Follies Of A Bootstrapped CNC Mill

August 15, 2013 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

fotw-bootstrap-cnc-mill

Anyone who’s built their own CNC machine from scratch will tell you that it’s no walk in the park. Heck, even commercially available (but hobby priced) 3D printers are no picnic to get running reliably. This offering is the tale of how [Brian Amos] failed at building a CNC mill over and over again. But hey, that ‘over and over again’ part is what makes great hackers. He not only documented what didn’t work, but shows the hacks that he tried using to work through each scrape.

We think the most interesting bits are in his second post, but start with the first one (it’s a quick read) to get the background on the project. The real issues start with a common one: a bed that is severely unlevel compared to the cutting head’s axes. The solution is to use a sacrificial bed, milling it out to match the surface to the tool. This exposed the next issue which is a misaligned Z axis. Some give in the entire support structure means problems with slop and backlash. And there’s even a very creative spiral-cut coupler to help account for alignment issues between the lead screws and motors.

The nice thing about building a mill is that you can turn around a use it to mill more accurate replacement parts. Just keep telling yourself that as you toil away at a project that just won’t seem to work!

We’re already looking for next week’s fail post topic. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and sending us a link to the story.