“Bricking” Microcontrollers In LEGO Motivates Young Programmers

May 19, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

Back when he was about seven years old, [Ytai] learned to program on an Atari 800XL. Now he has a seven-year-old of his own and wants to spark his interest in programming, so he created these programmable LEGO bricks with tiny embedded microcontrollers. This is probably one of the few times that “bricking” a microcontroller is a good thing!

The core of the project is the Espruino Pico microcontroller which has the interesting feature of running a Java stack in a very tiny package. The Blocky IDE is very simple as well, and doesn’t bog users down in syntax (which can be discouraging to new programmers, especially when they’re not even a decade old). The bricks that [Ytai] made include a servo motor with bricks on the body and the arm, some LEDs integrated into Technic bricks, and a few pushbutton bricks.

We always like seeing projects that are geared at getting kids interested in creating, programming, and hacking, and this certainly does that! [Ytai] has plans for a few more LEGO-based projects to help keep his kid interested in programming as well, and we look forward to seeing those! If you’re looking for other ways to spark the curiosity of the youths, be sure to check out the Microbot, or if you know some teens that need some direction, perhaps these battlebots are more your style.

[Sophi Kravitz] On Ask An Engineer Tonight

May 19, 2015 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Whew, your Wednesday night entertainment is all sorted out. Mark it in your calendar, [Sophi Kravitz] will be appearing on Adafruit’s Ask an Engineer at 8pm EDT (UTC -4).

Of course she’ll be talking about The Hackaday Prize with all of the incredible entries so far and the amazing opportunities waiting for you as THP continues through the summer. But [Sophi’s] life experience runs far-and-deep and so will the conversation. She is an Electronics Engineer, an Artist, and a huge part of the Hackaday crew. This year she landed a grant to bring one of her projects to life for Burning Man (and to document the process which we’re really excited about). She’s brewing up a new project involving Quadcopters and the technology [Alan Yates] has been working on for Valve. And [Sophi] frequently works on projects like Breathe that delight us with her creativity.

But hey, we better leave some of it for the show. The live link is above, here’s the Adafruit page as well.

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Raspberry Pis And A Video Triptych

May 19, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

A filmmaker friend of [Thomas] mentioned that she would like to display a triptych at the 2015 Venice Art Walk. This is no ordinary triptych with a frame for three pictures – this is a video triptych, with three displays each showing a different video, and everything running in sync. Sounds like a cool engineering challenge, huh?

The electronics used in the build were three Raspberry Pi 2s and a trio of HDMI displays. Power is provided by a 12V, 10A switching supply with 5V stepdown converters for the Pis. The chassis is a bunch of aluminum bars and U channel encased in an extremely well made arts and crafts style frame. So far, nothing out of the ordinary.

Putting three monitors and three Pis in a frame isn’t the hard part of this build; getting three different displays all showing different videos is. For this, [Thomas] networked the Pis through an Ethernet hub, got the videos to play independently on a RAM disk with omxplayer. One of the Raspberry Pis serves as the master, commanding the slaves to start, stop, and rewind the video on cue. According to [Thomas], it’s a somewhat hacky solution with a bunch of sleep statements at the beginning of the script to allow the boot processes to finish. It’s a beautiful build, though, and if you ever need to command multiple monitors to display the same thing, this is how you do it.

Interview With The Creators Of CHIP, A $9 Single-Board Computer

May 19, 2015 by Mike Szczys 125 Comments

Single-board computing is hot on the DIY scene right now and riding that knife edge is C.H.I.P., a project currently in crowd-funding which prices the base unit at just $9. I was happy to run into the crew from Next/Thing Company who developed C.H.I.P. They were happy because, well, the project’s reception has been like a supernova. Right now they’re at about $1.5M of their original $50k goal. We spoke about running Linux on the board, what connectors and pinout headers are available, as well as the various peripheral hardware they have ready for the board.

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Retrotechtacular: Firepower For Freedom

May 19, 2015 by Kristina Panos 61 Comments

As the United States were settled, its leaders found that they needed firepower to preserve freedom. This became especially apparent during the military engagements of the era, so a number of specialized facilities were founded to manage the research, development, manufacture, and dissemination of different types of munitions.

Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey was the place for both nuclear and conventional weapon development. The men and women working in this facility created anti-personnel devices, including a flexible, adhesive charge called Flex-X that could be affixed to almost anything. This demolition charge could be layered for increased power, and could even detonate underwater. Picatinny also developed new rocket engines, propellants, and liquid propulsion for projectiles.

In Pennsylvania, a small-arms ammunition plant called Frankford Arsenal developed a duplex rifle cartridge. That is, a lead projectile fires on target, and a second one sitting behind it in the cartridge shoots at an angle, landing an inch or so near the lead bullet. Frankford workers also ground precision optics for target sighting and centering, and developed a case-less cartridge. Propellants geared for a wide variety of uses also came out of Frankford. These propellants were employed to deliver nerve agent antidotes, inflate life rafts quickly, and eject pilots from sketchy situations.

The Edgewood Arsenal in Baltimore specializes in the research and development, manufacture, and supply of chemical weapons. They are particularly adept at fire suppression. Edgewood research has provided civilian benefits as well, such as an anthrax vaccine. In addition, Fort Detrick, Maryland contains a biological R&D wing where vital antidotes and vaccines are developed.

All of this R&D and manufacture was orchestrated by the Ammunition Procurement and Supply Agency (APSA) located near Joliet, IL. In addition to reviewing all contractor bids with equal consideration, APSA controlled distribution, maintaining inventory on large computers that could crunch numbers like nobody’s business.

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Turning A Page With Your Voice

May 19, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

[Justin]’s friend [Steve] injured his spine a while ago, and after asking what would make [Steve]’s life simpler, the answer was easy. [Steve] missed reading books. Sure, e-readers exist, but you still need to turn the page. Now [Steve] can do that with his voice thanks to some microcontrollers, Bluetooth modules, and a voice recognition module.

A voice-activated page turner wasn’t the first attempt at giving [Steve] the ability to turn a page on a Kindle. The first prototype was a big blue button that sent a keyboard code for ‘right arrow’ over Bluetooth, turning a book one page at a time. This worked well until multiple pages turned, and with no back button it was a major nuisance.

After playing with the voice recognition in an Amazon Echo, [Steve] and [Justin] wondered if the same voice recognition technology could be applied to page turns on a Kindle. With a voice recognition Arduino shield from SparkFun it was easy to detect a ‘page down’ command. A Bluetooth module sends HID commands to a Kindle, allowing [Steve] to read a book with only his voice.

[Justin] put all the design files for this build up on Github.

Real Time Video Anonymizer

May 19, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

If you’re wondering, Cornell is just like every other university in one respect: the grad students are starving, and wherever there is free food, students circle like vultures. The engineering and CS departments have a mailing list alerting people to free food, but a more automated solution was desired. The first web cam ever was used to notify grad students if a coffee pot was full, but Cornell shot down this idea on the basis of privacy concerns.

It’s final project time for [Bruce Land]’s courses, and a project by [Ferian Chen] and [Sean Ogden] solved the privacy concerns of a webcam in a kitchen. It’s a real-time video anonymizer, that can also be used to livestream ransom demands if you’re so inclined.

There are actually two parts to this project. The first part pixellates faces and any other skin tone, just like you’d see on a true crime TV show. This part of the project was based on an FPGA-based face detection project. ‘Skin’ pixels are defined as having a difference between the red and green channels within a certain range. With the right lighting, it works very well.

You can identify someone with their voice, too, so [Ferian] and [Sean] also made efforts to disguise hungry student’s voices as well. This was done with a phase vocoder that changes the pitch of someone’s voice, but not the spectral characteristics. The result should have been an audio channel that can’t be pinned down to one person, but is still recognizable as speech. The audio processing didn’t work as intended, with noticeable artifacts in the output. There’s still some work to be done, and now that [Ferian] and [Sean] aren’t checking the kitchen every ten minutes, the might have the time to do it.