Controlling Music With The Wave Of A Hand

August 6, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 14 Comments

[Thomas] created a magical music player that gives the listener the ability to change songs and alter the volume levels without having to touch anything but air. Called the LighTouch, this device puts the control in the hands of the user by interpreting input from an ultrasonic sensor and plays back tracks based on waving gestures.

It is the 2nd iteration of a prototype that he completed about a year ago and functions as a streaming radio/alarm clock. The sensor is hooked up to a Raspberry Pi with a fading LED. Everything is highly customizable including the distances used for playback features. The criteria [Thomas] put in place has the pause method trigger when an object is detected between 0-10cm from the sensor. The volume control on the next level up brightens and dims the LED light just for some added flair.

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Pole Climbing Device Runs Up Flags And Undies

August 6, 2014 by Rich Bremer 20 Comments

Tubular Drive travels up and down poles

Driving a carriage up and down a cylindrical object isn’t the most popular activity but that is certainly no reason not to build such a device. Check out [Ryan’s] creation that does just that, he calls it a Tubular Drive.

There isn’t much going on here, basically there are 4 wheels that grip a pipe. Two of those wheels have integrated gears and are driven by a DC motor. The remaining two wheels are idlers. When power is applied to the motor, two of the wheels spin, which then moves the entire assembly down the pole. A quick reversal in polarity brings the unit back the other way.

With those 3D printed plastic wheels you may think that traction would be an issue but [Ryan] insists that it is not a problem. The ABS wheels were treated with an acetone bath to smooth out the print layers and the distance between the wheels can be adjusted using a couple of bolts. Together that allows enough surface contact and pressure to ensure slip-free traveling.

Although the wheels were made to grip 1/2″ electrical conduit, it would be very easy to adapt this design to fit around and climb up all sorts of cylindrical objects, maybe even rope! Perhaps v-wheels with a spring tensioner system would allow for traveling on different size tubes while also adjusting for any variation in the diameter of a single tube.

[Ryan] says version two will have a linear encoder and be driven by a stepper motor. Check out the video after the break…

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San Francisco Event: Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic

August 6, 2014 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

It’s a mouthful to say, but an evening-ful of fun. San Franciscans who like to talk about all things hardware need to block this one out on their calendars:

Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic
Thursday, August 14th 2014 starting 6pm-9:30pm
500 3rd St., Suite 230 in San Francisco

The night will include a few talks on hardware; So far we know [Matt Berggren] is doing FPGA stuff, [Chris Gammell] will talk about KiCAD, and I’m going to talk about the community adventure that is Mooltipass. We’re also looking for others to make presentations so step up and share your hardware passion!

In addition to the formal talks there’ll be plenty of time for chewing the fat with all the other hardware-awesomes that will be there. See you a week from tomorrow, and don’t be shy about bringing your own hardware to show off!

Building A Home Made IPhone

August 6, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

iThing A few years ago, [Michele] built a mobile device with a touch screen, a relatively powerful processor, and a whole bunch of sensors. To be honest, the question of why he built this was never asked because it’s an impressive display of electronic design and fabrication. [Michele] calles it the iGruppio. Although it’s not a feature-packed cell phone, it’s still an impressive project that stands on its own merits.

Inside the iGruppio is a Pic32mx microcontroller, a 240×320 TFT touchscreen, and enough sensors to implement a 10 DOF IMU. The software written for the iGruppio is heavily inspired by the iPhone and a completely homebrew project – all the software was written by [Michele] himself. While the first version of the iGruppio was a little clunky, the second revision (seen in the pic above) uses an old iPhone case to turn a bunch of boards and plugs into a surprisingly compact device.

No, there’s no cellular modem inside the latest version, but [Michele] has put all the sources up on Github, and anyone wanting to build a homebrew cell phone could do worse than to take a look at his work. Video demo below.

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Focus Your Ears With The Visual Microphone

August 6, 2014 by Adam Fabio 53 Comments

VideoMicrophone

A Group of MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe researchers have managed to reproduce sound using video alone. The sounds we make bounce off every object in the room, causing microscopic vibrations. The Visual Microphone utilizes a high-speed video camera and some clever signal processing to extract an audio signal from these vibrations. Using video of everyday objects such as snack bags, plants, Styrofoam cups, and water, the team was able to reproduce tones, music and speech. Capturing audio from light isn’t exactly new. Laser microphones have been around for years. The difference here is the fact that the visual microphone is a completely passive device. No laser or special illumination is required.

The secret is in the signal processing, which the team explains in their SIGGRAPH paper (pdf link). They used a complex steerable pyramid along with wavelet filters to obtain local pixel motion values. These local values are averaged into a global motion value. From this global motion value the team is able to measure movement down to 1/1000 of a pixel. Plenty of resolution to decode audio data.

Most of the research is performed with high-speed video cameras, which are well outside the budget of the average hacker. Don’t despair though, the team did prove out that the same magic can be performed with consumer cameras, albeit with lower quality results. The team took advantage of the rolling shutter found in most of today’s CMOS imager based consumer cameras. Rolling shutter CMOS sensors capture images one row at a time. Each row can be processed in a similar fashion to the frames of the high-speed camera. There are some inter-frame gaps when the camera isn’t recording anything though. Even with the reduced resolution, it’s easy to pick out “Mary had a little lamb” in the video below.

We’re blown away by this research, and we’re sure certain organizations will be looking into it for their own use. Don’t pull out your tin foil hats yet though. Foil containers proved to be one of the best sound reflectors.

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THP Entry: A CPLD Video Card With VGA And NTSC

August 6, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

NTSC

[PK] is working on a very simple video card, meant to output 640×480 VGA with a cheap CPLD. The interface will be 5 Volt SPI, meaning there’s a ton of potential here for anyone wanting put a reasonable (and cheap) display in a microcontroller project. The project has come a long way, and his latest update showcases something that has only been done once before: color NTSC with programmable logic

The brains of the outfit is a $5, 100-pin CPLD from Xilinx. Apart from that, the rest of the components are a crystal, PLL, and an almost hilarious number of resistors for the R2R ladder. The one especially unique component is the 25.056815 MHz crystal – multiply by that by two, and it’s fast enough to drive a VGA monitor. Divide the crystal by seven, it’s the 3.579545 MHz you need for an NTSC colorburst frequency. That’s VGA and NTSC in a single programmable logic project, something the one FPGA project we could find that did color NTSC couldn’t manage.

The next step in the project is designing a PCB and figuring out the code for the framebuffer. [PK] put up a demo showing off both VGA and NTSC; you can check that out below.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

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Hit The Polls Before Friday

August 6, 2014 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

astronot Don’t forget to vote in the newest round of Astronaut or Not. In addition to deciding which projects should be recognized as “Too Cool for Kickstarter”, you will be eligible for the voter lottery.

What is this voter lottery we speak of? On Friday we’ll draw a random number and see if that hacker profile on Hackaday.io has voted at least once in this round, which started on Monday.

If they voted they’ll received a prize package packed with all kinds of prototyping hardware. This cycle offers several breakout boards, a bunch of programmers and debuggers, as well as a digital multimeter and a bench power supply (full list here). For the hackers who haven’t registered a vote? Nothing!

We’ll be drawing the number from a hotel room in Vegas since we’ll be there for DEFCON. If you’re also attending the conference track us down to show off your own hardware or just to grab some stickers.