Adventures Of ArduinoMan – The Rudis

Rudis – A small wooden sword given to a Gladiator as proof of his achieved freedom. It signifies his ascent from being a slave to becoming a free man.

One thing is certain – anything that runs on electricity can be connected to the internet. The only obstacle is cost. And as costs come down, the reality of The Internet of Things will be upon us. Everything from cars to curling irons will be connected to the Internet. With this newly connected world will come a new breed of hacker. The Black Hats will move out from behind their keyboards and spill into the streets, only to be met by the White Hats as they battle for control over our endlessly connected world.

And such was the case on the morning of October 16, 2029. The air was cool and breezy when Randall C. Tubbs, a senior police officer at the Bronx 49th precinct, received a call over his radio to check out a tripped alarm at a nearby cell tower. Barely a minute had passed by when he pulled in to the Tower Road cul-de-sac on the day our story begins. The cell tower dominated the horizon, and was silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky. The trees of the forest surrounding the area were just starting to show their colors, with the yellow oak leaves being most vibrant. A narrow gravel driveway led to a small, brown, nondescript building at the base of the tower. At first glance, Officer Tubbs could see no sign of anything unusual. There was no service truck in sight, and the gate to the ten-foot-tall chain link fence surrounding the tower was latched shut and securely locked.

It wasn’t until he unlocked the gate that he first noticed something odd. A security camera on the right corner of the building was pointing toward the forest. He glanced around and quickly spotted two other cameras, each of them pointing away from the tower building. Clearly, they should have been pointing toward the tower and the door to the building… a door that Officer Tubbs now realized was slightly open. He could barely make out shadows moving around from the small sliver of light that was peeking ominously through the opening, suggesting someone was inside. Suddenly, the sound of his footsteps on the gravel seemed to become amplified, and his breathing so loud that for a split second he held his breath. He reached down and turned the volume of his radio to silent, and slowly began making his way to the open door.

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DTMF Robot Makes Rube Goldberg Proud

Sometimes you start building, and the project evolves. Layers upon layers of functionality accrue, accrete, and otherwise just pile up. Or at least we’re guessing that’s what happened with [Varun Kumar]’s sweet “Surveillance Car Controlled by DTMF“.

In case you haven’t ever dug into not-so-ancient telephony, Dual-tone, multi-frequency signalling is what made old touch-tone phones work. DTMF, as you’d guess, encodes data in audio by playing two pitches at once. Eight tones are mapped to sixteen numbers by using a matrix that looks not coincidentally like the old phone keypad (but with an extra column). One pitch corresponds to a column, and one to a row. Figure out which tones are playing, and you’ve decoded the signal.

Anyway, you can get DTMF decoder chips for pennies on eBay, and they make a great remote-control interface for a simple robot, which is presumably how [Varun] got started. And then he decided that he needed a cell phone on the robot to send back video over WiFi, and realized that he could also use the phone as a remote controller. So he downloaded a DTMF-tone-generator app to the phone, which he then controls over VNC. Details on GitHub.

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Retrotechtacular: Examining Music In 1950’s Russia

If you had told 12-year-old me that one day I would be able to listen to pretty much any song I wanted to on demand and also pull up the lyrics as fast as I could type the artist’s name and part of the title into a text box, I would have a) really hoped you weren’t kidding and b) would have wanted to grow up even faster than I already did.

The availability of music today, especially in any place with first world Internet access is really kind of astounding. While the technology to make this possible has come about only recently, the freedom of music listening has been fairly wide open in the US. The closest we’ve come to governmental censorship is the parental advisory sticker, and those are just warnings. The only thing that really stands between kids’ ears and the music they want to listen to is parental awareness and/or consent.

However, the landscape of musical freedom and discovery has been quite different in other corners of the world, especially during the early years of rock ‘n roll. While American teens roller skated and sock-hopped to the new and feverish sounds of Little Richard and Elvis Presley, the kids in Soviet Russia were stuck in a kind of sonic isolation. Stalin’s government had a choke hold on the influx of culture and greatly restricted the music that went out over the airwaves. They viewed Western and other music as a threat, and considered the musicians to be enemies of the USSR.

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