Amazon’s AI Escapes Its Hardware Prison

August 4, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 47 Comments

It’s the 21st century, and we’re still a long way from the voice-controlled computers we were all promised in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. The state of voice interaction has improved, though, and Amazon’s release of the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is another sure step towards a future of computers that will pay attention to you. This allows any hardware to become Alexa, your personal voice assistant with the ability to do just about anything you command.

Up to this point, Alexa was locked away inside the Amazon Echo, the ‘smart’ cylinder that sits in your living room and does most of what you tell it to do. Since the Amazon Echo was released, we’ve seen the Echo and the Alexa SDK used for turning lights on and off, controlling a Nest thermostat, and other home automation tasks. It’s not Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Apple’s Siri that is behind all these builds; it’s Amazon’s Alexa that is bringing us into a world where Star Trek’s [Scotty] talking into an old Mac is seen as normal.

Right now, the Getting Started guide for the Alexa Skills Kit is focused more on web services than turning lights on and air conditioning off. Sample code for ASK is provided in JavaScript and Java, although we would expect 3rd party libraries for Python to start popping up any day now. If you want to run ASK on a Raspberry Pi or other small Linux computer, you’ll need a way to do voice capture; the Jasper project is currently the front-runner in this space.

We hope this changes the home automation game in a couple of different ways. First, the ASK processes everything in the cloud so very low power devices are now ready for some seriously cool voice interaction. Second, Amazon’s move to open up what you can do with the software backend means a community developing for the hardware could eventually exert pressure on Amazon to do things like making the system more open and transparent.

Already working on some hacks with the Echo or ASK? Send in a tip to your write-up and tells us about it in the comments below.

‘The Martian’: A Landmark Change In How Sci-Fi Is Written

August 4, 2015 by George Graves 39 Comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock on Mars for the last few hundred “Sols”, you most likely have heard about the book “The Martian” by [Andy Weir]. It’s not often that we here at HAD will give a book recommendation, but there are so many cool little things going on here, that we just had to share it with you fine folks. We’re not going to give anyway any spoilers here. But be warned that the videos at the bottom do, and we would like to encourage the comments to be spoiler-free.

So why did this book catch our attention? Well, first off, it was self-published online, one chapter at a time by a really great writer. And as the people following his work grew, the author started to get more and more feedback about the story and technical details. He would then go back and make revisions to the work based on his audience suggestions/corrections. Does that remind you of something? Maybe a bit like the Open Source movement? Of course writers have worked with their audiences to help maintain continuity from one novel through each of its sequels. But this is fundamentally different, the audience becomes a creative force that can time-travel to rewrite the unfinished story’s… story.

The Second thing that grabbed our attention is that this is a book written by a fellow geek. See, [Andy] is a programmer by trade and in writing this book, rather than just making up dates and flight paths of spaceships, and he actually wrote software to do real orbital mechanics, so that the book is as accurate as possible. If you love reading technical details, while being very entertained by a great story (what Hackaday reader doesn’t?), this is the book for you.

If your hands are too busy with a soldering iron, we can also wholeheartedly suggest the audio book, as the performer does an amazing job. Or if you want, you can just wait until the movie comes out in October. We can’t guarantee Hollywood won’t screw this up, so you’d better hedge and read the book beforehand.

Thar’ be spoilers below. We’re including the movie trailer after the break, as well as a talk [Andy Weir] gave at Google where he shows the software he used while writing the book and several other spoilers and details.

Continue reading “‘The Martian’: A Landmark Change In How Sci-Fi Is Written” →

Cooking With Shop Tools: Most Dangerous Breakfast

August 4, 2015 by James Hobson 10 Comments

In a rather comical video, [Dom] and [Chris] of [ExplosiveDischarge] show us how to make a full English breakfast — without the use of a kitchen.

We’re talking eggs, bacon, ham, hash browns, and baked beans. Without the use of a single cooking element. Some of the methods were expected, like using a clothes iron as a portable grill — which is a great life hack by the way, especially when you’re at a hotel and just happen to have a package of bacon and nowhere to cook it… Or using a blow torch to flame-broil a perfect sausage — with the clever use of a drill-powered rotisserie using a variable power supply to adjust the speed!

Continue reading “Cooking With Shop Tools: Most Dangerous Breakfast” →

Embed With Elliot: The Static Keyword You Don’t Fully Understand

August 4, 2015 by Elliot Williams 70 Comments

One of our favorite nuances of the C programming language (and its descendants) is the static keyword. It’s a little bit tricky to get your head around at first, because it can have two (or three) subtly different applications in different situations, but it’s so useful that it’s worth taking the time to get to know.

And before you Arduino users out there click away, static variables solve a couple of common problems that occur in Arduino programming. Take this test to see if it matters to you: will the following Arduino snippet ever print out “Hello World”?

void loop()
{
	int count=0;
	count = count + 1;
	if (count > 10) {
		Serial.println("Hello World");
	}
}

Continue reading “Embed With Elliot: The Static Keyword You Don’t Fully Understand” →

Engineers Create Super-Hard Whack-a-Mole

August 4, 2015 by Richard Baguley 6 Comments

Is your latest project driving you mad? Are you subject to occasional fits of rage? This project might help: for a class called elecanisms at Olin College, [Forrest] and a team of three other students made a whack-a-mole arcade game that lets you vent your rage on a helpless furry animal by whacking it with a large hammer. He built most of it from scratch, creating his own solenoid driver and LED sensor board. However, there is a twist in here that gives the moles a fighting chance: there is an accelerometer built into the hammer that lets them know that your heavy hammer of doom is approaching.

Will they escape before your righteous wrath descends upon them? That depends on how you decide to set it up, and how merciful you want to be. The build even includes a coin-operated pay-to-play slot. They kept the cost low at a penny, but this is just begging to be installed at the local pub to rake in those quarters.

This course has been the source of a few projects that we have featured before on Hackaday, including the Confectionary Canon, which tracks your face and fires marshmallows right into your gaping maw.

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Clocking (or Overclocking) An AVR

August 4, 2015 by Al Williams 26 Comments

Some guys build hot rods in their garage. Some guys overclock their PCs to ridiculously high clock frequencies (ahem… we might occasionally be guilty of this). [Nerd Ralph] decided to push an ATTiny13a to over twice its rated frequency.

It didn’t seem very difficult. [Ralph] used a 44.2 MHz can oscillator and set the device to use an external clock. He tested with a bit-banged UART and it worked as long as he kept the supply voltage at 5V. He also talks about some other ways to hack out an external oscillator to get higher than stock frequencies.

We wouldn’t suggest depending on an overclock on an important or commercial project. There could be long term effects or subtle issues. Naturally, you can’t depend on every part working the same at an untested frequency, either. But we’d be really interested in hear how you would test this overclocked chip for adverse effects.

Now, if you are just doing this for sport, a little liquid nitrogen will push your Arduino to 65 MHz (see the video after the break). We’ve covered pushing a 20MHz AVR to 30MHz before, but that’s a little less ratio than [Ralph] achieved.

Continue reading “Clocking (or Overclocking) An AVR” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Wearable Electrodermal Activity Monitor

August 3, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

Electrodermal activity, or galvanic skin response has a lot of practical applications. Everything from research into emotional states to significantly more off-the-wall applications like the E-meter use electrodermal activity. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [qquuiinn] is building a wearable biofeedback wristband that measures galvanic skin response that is perfect for treating anxiety or stress disorders by serving as a simple and convenient wearable device.

Detecting electrodermal activity has been within the capability of anyone with an ohmmeter for over a hundred years. [quin²] is doing something a little more complex than the most primitive modern means of measuring galvanic skin response and using a dual op-amp to sense the tiny changes in skin resistance. This data is fed into an ATMega328 which sends it out to a tiny LED display in the shape of an ‘x’.

Reading electrodermal activity is easy, but doing it reliably in a wearable device is not. There are issues with the skin contacts to work though, issues with the amplifier, and putting the whole thing in a convenient package. [qquuiinn] asked the community about these problems in group discussion on the hacker channel and got a lot of really good advice. That’s a great example of what a project on hackaday.io can do, and a great project for the Hackaday Prize.