Day: February 12, 2017

Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff Test Gets Real

February 12, 2017 by 64 Comments

You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you.

Any Sci-Fi fan knows this is a question from the iconic Voight-Kampff test, as made famous by the movie Blade Runner. Humans pass the test. Replicants fail and are “retired”. We may not have replicants just yet, but  [Tom Meehan] is building his own version of the Voight-Kampff machine. He’s entered it in the 2017 Hackaday Sci-Fi Contest.

The machine itself is an odd mix of 70’s and 80’s electronics with older technology. Three mini CRT displays, a sensor arm, and a bellows are some of the machine’s best-known features. [Tom] is starting with the sensor arm, an odd mix of belts and telescoping rods. He’s already got a manually operated prototype built. Add a motor, and one part of the machine is ready for action.

[Tom’s] version of the Voight-Kampff test isn’t going to be a just movie prop. He plans to add a sensor suite which will turn his machine something of a modern polygraph. A Non-contact Temperature sensor will measure blush response. Iris images will be captured by a Raspberry Pi NoIR camera. Pulse oxygen and galvanic skin response will also be captured by a separate hand module. All this data will be processed by a Raspberry Pi computer.

There’s quite a lot of work to be completed. Let’s hope for humanity’s sake that [Tom] gets it done before the contest deadline of March 6.

Cheap LCD TV Gets Cheaper Fix

February 12, 2017 by 34 Comments

Most hacks need some fair bit of skill and knowledge if you want to come out successful at the other end. Others, you just plunge in blindly with a “heck, it’s already broken so I can’t make it any worse” attitude. Throwing caution to the wind, you dive in, rip things up, and see if you can manage to catch the bull by the horns.

[Jim]’s cheap LCD TV, barely a few years old, died. It was purchased from the store whose blue polo-shirted cashiers can drive you nuts with their incessant questions. [Jim] just rolled up his sleeves and rather haphazardly managed to fix his TV while adding an extra feature along the way.

His initial check confirmed that the LCD panel worked. Using a flashlight, he could see that the panel was displaying video which meant it was the backlight that wasn’t working. Opening up the TV, he located the LED driver board whose output turned out to be zero volts. [Jim] happened to have a lot of WS2812B strips lying around, along with their power supplies and RGB color controllers. The obvious solution was to ditch the existing LEDs and power supply and use the WS2812B strips.

Surprisingly, the original backlight consisted of just 21 LEDs arranged in three rows. He ripped those out, put in the WS2812B strips, and taped the jumble of wires out of sight. After putting it back together, [Jim] was happy to see it worked, although the new strips were not as bright as the old ones, causing some uneven light bands. He solved this by adding a few more strips of LEDs. It took him a couple of hours to fix his TV, but by the end of it, he had a TV whose backlight could be adjusted to any color using the external color controllers — although we’re not too sure what good that would be.