Day: October 8, 2017

Global Thermonuclear War: Tweeted

October 8, 2017 by 22 Comments

[Andreas Spiess] did a video earlier this year about fallout shelters. So it makes sense now he’s interested in having a Geiger counter connected to the network. He married a prefabricated counter with an ESP32. If it were just that simple, it wouldn’t be very remarkable, but [Andreas] also reverse-engineered the schematic for the counter and discusses the theory of operation, too. You can see the full video, below.

We often think we don’t need a network-connected soldering iron or toaster. However, if you have a radiological event, getting a cell phone alert might actually be useful. Of course, if that event was the start of World War III, you probably aren’t going to get the warning, but a reactor gas release or something similar would probably make this worth the $50.

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Casa Jasmina Two Years On

October 8, 2017 by 3 Comments

[Bruce Sterling], author of fiction and nonfiction tomes aplenty, wrote up one of his projects for Makezine: Casa Jasmina, an IoT “house of the future”. Located in Torino, Italy, it was built upstairs from the Torino Fab Lab as a collaboration between [Bruce], his wife [Jasmina Tesanovic], and a number of other contributors. The original vision was for Casa Jasmina to be jam packed with cool laser-cut furniture, glowing LED projects, and other Maker Faire goodies.

In his piece, however, [Bruce] dials back Casa Jasmina’s technology focus. At a time when people add dodgy WiFi-capable devices to their house willy-nilly, he made it clear that it’s not just a huge assembly of projects no one fully understands. The concept of “making”, [Bruce] writes in his piece, involves algorithms and circuit boards and computer-controlled fabrication machines, and marginalizes those who don’t understand or find fascinating technological innovations. To those who love fabrication, for instance, there is a giddiness involved in creating one’s own chair out of plywood — but end users mostly just care that the creation works like a chair. The place is an AirBNB which makes it a great testbed for providing only what is needed, trusted, and stable.

For  more futuristic houses, check out our coverage of 3D-printed concrete houses and this Pi-controlled automated green house.

 

 

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Hackaday Links: October 8, 2017

October 8, 2017 by 40 Comments

On the top of the popcorn pile for this weekend is an ambiguous tweet from Adafruit that was offered without comment or commentary. [Lady Ada] is holding some sort of fancy incorporation papers for Radio Shack. The smart money is that Adafruit just bought these at the Radio Shack auction a month or so ago. The speculation is that Adafruit just bought Radio Shack, or at least the trademarks and other legal ephemera. Either one is cool, but holy crap please bring back the retro 80s branding.

A Rubik’s Cube is a fantastic mechanical puzzle, and if you’ve never taken one apart, oh boy are you in for a treat. Here’s an RGB LED Rubick’s Cube with not enough detail as to how each square is getting powered. Here’s an open challenge for anyone: build an RGB LED Rubick’s Cube, and Open Source the design.

Last weekend, the front fell off the engine of an Air France A380 flying over Greenland. As with all aircraft incidents, someone has to find the missing bits. It only took a week to find a mangled cowling on an ice sheet. This is incredibly impressive; if you want a comparison to another accident, it took three months to find the fan disk for UA 232 in an Iowa cornfield.

Poorly thought out Kickstarters don’t grab our attention like they used to, but this is an exception. The Aire is a mashup of one of those voice-activated home assistants (Alexa, whatever the Google one is named…) and a drone. The drone half of the build is marginally interesting as a ducted fan coaxial thingy, and building your own home assistant isn’t that hard with the right mics and a Raspberry Pi. The idea is actually solid — manufacturing is another story, though. It appears no one thought about how annoying it would be to have a helicopter following them around their house, or if the mics would actually be able to hear anyone over beating props. Here’s the kicker: this project was successfully funded. People want to buy this. A fool and his or her money…

Processing is cool, although we’re old skool and still reppin’ Max/MSP. It looks like the first annual Processing Community Day is coming up soon. The Processing Community Day will be at the MIT Media Lab on October 21st, with talks from the headliners of the Processing community.

Maker Faire NYC was two weekends ago, the TCT show in Birmingham was last week, and Open Hardware Summit was in Denver this weekend. Poor [Prusa] was at all of them, racking up the miles. He did, however, get to ride [James from XRobots.co.uk]’s electric longboard. There’s some great videos from [James] right here and here.

Speaking of Open Hardware Summit, there was a field trip to Sparkfun and Lulzbot this Friday. The highlight? The biggest botfarm in the states, and probably the second largest in the world. That’s 155 printers, all in their own enclosures, in a room that’s kept at 80° F. They’re printing ABS. Control of the printers is through a BeagleBone running Octoprint. These ‘Bones and Octoprint only control one printer each, and there is no software layer ‘above’ the Octoprint instances for managing multiple printers simultaneously. That probably means the software to manage a botfarm doesn’t exist. There have been attempts, though, but nothing in production. A glove thrown down?

Hackaday Prize Entry: Personal Guardian Keeps An Eye Out

October 8, 2017 by 14 Comments

The Personal Guardian is a wearable tracking and monitoring device intended to help vulnerable people. The project goal is to allow these patients as much independence and activity as possible without a caregiver needing to be present. Wearing a sensor package might allow a memory care patient (for instance) greater freedom to wander.

The device consists of an Arduino 101 development board with a GSM shield that it uses to send SMS messages to the caregiver — for instance, if the accelerometer shows the patient fell over, or moved beyond certain GPS coordinates. Furthermore, the care-giver can monitor the device to determine the device’s status, and sees the patient’s heart rate thanks to a BLE sensor strap.

The patient can also press a panic button or toggle through a series pre-set SMS messages. In terms of complexity, the project’s creator [Ray Lynch] intended the interface to be simpler than a smart phone.

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MIDISWAY Promises To Step Up Your Live Show

October 8, 2017 by 13 Comments

If you like to read with gentle music playing, do yourself a favor and start the video while you’re reading about [Hugo Swift]’s MIDISWAY. The song is Promises, also by [SWIFT], which has piano phrases modulated during the actual playing, not in post-production.

The MIDISWAY is a stage-worthy looking box to sit atop your keys and pulse a happy little LED. The pulsing corresponds to the amount of pitch bending being sent to your instrument over a MIDI DIN connector. This modulation is generated by an Arduino and meant to recreate the effect of analog recording devices like an off-center vinyl or a tape that wasn’t tracking perfectly.

While recording fidelity keeps inching closer to perfect recreation, it takes an engineer like [Hugo Swift] to decide that a step backward is worth a few days of hacking. Now that you know what the MIDISWAY is supposed to do, listen closely at 2:24 in the video when the piano starts. The effect is subtle but hard to miss when you know what to listen for.

MIDI projects abound at Hackaday like this MIDI → USB converter for getting MIDI out of your keyboard once you’ve modulated it with a MIDISWAY. Maybe you are more interested in a MIDI fighter for controlling your DAW. MIDI is a robust and time-tested protocol which started in the early 1980s and will be around for many more years.

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Low-Tech Chair Enters The Matrix

October 8, 2017 by 37 Comments

This video demonstrates a really interesting experiment: sticking a Vive Tracker onto an ordinary chair in order to sync it up perfectly with its VR counterpart. The result? A chair that is visible in VR as a virtual object, but has a 1:1 physical world version occupying the same space. This means that unlike any other virtual object, this chair can be seen, touched, felt, moved, and actually sat in while the user is immersed in VR.

The purpose of this experiment seems to have been to virtually explore seating arrangements for real-world environments, and spawned a theatre planning tool by design studio [Agile Lens]. But we wonder if there’s unrealized potential in the idea of connecting physical objects that can be touched and held (or sat on) with their VR counterparts. Video demos of the chair test are embedded below.

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Hovering Questions About Magnetic Levitation

October 8, 2017 by 29 Comments

Who doesn’t love magnets? They’re functional, mysterious, and at the heart of nearly every electric motor. They can make objects appear to defy gravity or move on their own. If you’re like us, when you first started grappling with the refrigerator magnets, you tried to make one hover motionlessly over another. We tried to position one magnet over another by pitting their repellent forces against each other but [K&J Magnetics] explains why this will never work and how levitation can be done with electromagnets. (YouTube, embedded below.)

In the video, there is a quick demonstration of their levitation rig and a brief explanation with some handy oscilloscope readings to show what’s happening on the control side. The most valuable part, is the explanation in the article where it walks us through the process, starting with the reason permanent magnets can’t be used which leads into why electromagnets can be successful.

[K&J Magnetics]’s posts about magnets are informative and well-written. They have a rich mix of high-level subjects without diluting them by glossing over the important parts. Of course, as a retailer, they want to sell their magnets but the knowledge they share can be used anywhere, possibly even the magnets you have in your home.

Simpler levitators can be built with a single electromagnet to get you on the fast-track to building your own levitation rig. Remember in the first paragraph when we said ‘nearly’ every electric motor used magnets, piezoelectric motors spin without magnets.

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