Day: February 14, 2021

Machine Learning Helps You Track Your Internet Misery Index

February 14, 2021 by 8 Comments

We all seem to intuitively know that a lot of what we do online is not great for our mental health. Hang out on enough social media platforms and you can practically feel the changes your mind inflicts on your body as a result of what you see — the racing heart, the tight facial expression, the clenched fists raised in seething rage. Not on Hackaday, of course — nothing but sweetness and light here.

That’s all highly subjective, of course. If you’d like to quantify your online misery more objectively, take a look at the aptly named BrowZen, a machine learning application by [Nick Bild]. Built around an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX and a web camera, BrowZen captures images of the user’s face periodically. The expression on the user’s face is classified using a facial recognition model that has been trained to recognize facial postures related to emotions like anger, surprise, fear, and happiness. The app captures your mood and which website you’re currently looking at and stores the results in a database. Handy charts let you know which sites are best for your state of mind; it’s not much of a surprise that Twitter induces rage while Hackaday pushes [Nick]’s happiness button. See? Sweetness and light.

Seriously, we could see something like this being very useful for psychological testing, marketing research, or even medical assessments. This adds to [Nick]’s array of AI apps, which range from tracking which surfaces you touch in a room to preventing you from committing a fireable offense on a video conference.

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The First Hacker Camp To Show Up On Google Maps

February 14, 2021 by 23 Comments

Our summer gatherings at hacker camps are fleeting and ephemeral, anticipated for months but over far too quickly. Afterwards we have only our memories, and perhaps the occasional Hackaday write-up. We think BornHack 2020 in Denmark was the only hacker camp that wasn’t forced to go online-only by the pandemic last year, and now as far as we know it has also become the only one ever that has left its mark for the wider world by being captured for posterity by Google Earth.

Visible in the forest is the sparsely populated and socially distanced main field of what was a considerably smaller camp than normal, as well as in separate clearings the speakers tent and the loud field. Perhaps it doesn’t help as much in explaining to outsiders what a hacker camp is as might a picture of one of the larger ones, but it does at least serve as a visible reminder that we weren’t quite snuffed out last year.

It’s a moment of nostalgia to see BornHack 2020 on Google Maps for those of us who were there, but perhaps the point of all this is to take a moment to consider the likely prospects for similar events in 2021 given the pandemic. Both the British EMF Camp and American Toorcamp had to cancel their events last year and should return in 2022, there’s no word as yet about 2021 from the Serbian BalCCon or the Italian IHC,  our latest update on Luxembourg’s HaxoGreen is that it’s still slated to go ahead with its move to 2021, and currently both BornHack and the Dutch MCH are expecting to run as normal this summer.

In the grip of a savage third wave of the pandemic where this is being written, it’s by no means a foregone conclusion that 2020’s cancellations may not repeat themselves. International borders remain difficult to cross without exacting quarantine requirements. If you make it to a camp this year you may be one of the lucky few, and in the increasingly likely event that we don’t, we’ll be suitably envious. Don’t loose hope, we shall all meet again… eventually.

If you fancy a closer look at BornHack 2020, have a read of our write-up.

FreeTouchDeck Upgrades Its Hardware And Its Name: ESP32 Touchdown

February 14, 2021 by 23 Comments

With many folks continuing to work from home for far longer than they ever thought, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing the rise of small DIY devices to make that video call or virtual presentation a little easier. [Dustin Watts] was interested in the functionality of the Elgato Stream Deck — a macro keyboard where each key is its own screen. But that kind of fancy hardware comes with a formidable price tag. So he built his own, and made it open source!

His first iteration — FreeTouchDeck — was built using commonly available modules but has since evolved into the ESP32 Touchdown which does it all with a single PCB. It’s a highly-customizable touchscreen macro keyboard which provide easy access shortcuts and macros for quick actions. Need a quick mute button, want to switch camera views on OBS, or maybe you want smarter shortcut keys for your CAD of choice. This will can get you there.

There a few key differences from the first version (FreeTouchDeck). The ESP32 dev board was ditched for a tidy PCB the directly integrates the module. This one has a capacitive touch controller (FT6236) rather than a resistive one as the capacitive screens deliver a far nicer user experience. A built-in battery and charger circuit (which the FreeTouchDesk didn’t have) allows for the extra bit of flexibility to stream from anywhere (within wireless range of course). Multiple case designs are available in STL form that allows it to be placed on a wall or desk with ease.

Datasheets, gerbers, kicad files, BOMs, and example firmware is provided on GitHub. The software is easily configurable so it can be set up to do any sort of macro, key combination, or action. This isn’t just limited to emulating a Bluetooth keyboard as there are examples showing how to connect to Home Assistant. All in all, this is a wonderful example of continued iteration on a project.

Thanks [Timothy Gregory] for sending this one in!

How To Bake Brownies With A Perfect Glossy Skin

February 14, 2021 by 35 Comments

If you’re anything at all like this writer, you don’t spend a lot of time inspecting brownies past the initial object identification phase, preferring to insert them directly into the mouth post-haste. But those with more of an aesthetic focus take great care to produce brownies with a glossy, attractive skin. [Adam Ragusea] decided to find out what it takes to get a perfect brownie skin, time after time.

After many, many trays of brownies, [Adam], with the assistance of [Dr. Pia Sörensen], determined that the key seems to be making a brownie mixture with very finely dissolved sugar, in sucrose form, with a carefully controlled amount of water in the mixture. This produces a thick mixture which can hold together against the gases bubbling out during the cooking process, and produces a nice glossy skin. Too much water, and the mixture isn’t viscous enough to hold up, leading to brownies full of pock marks, while alternative sugars like fructose and glucose likely disrupt the ordered structure of sucrose molecules necessary for a shiny surface.

Together, [Adam] and [Pia] do a great job of exploring the molecular chemistry behind the process, as well as ruling out several myths that have been perpetuated in the viciously insular brownie subculture. All they’re missing is a set of standardised reflectivity tests executed with an Arduino and some photodiodes, but we’ll assume that was just cut for time. We’ve seen other hacks in the realm of molecular gastronomy before, like this homebrew kitchen centrifuge. Video after the break.

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Stray Cat Shelter Is Nicer Than Our First Apartment

February 14, 2021 by 59 Comments

There are a lot of stray cats roaming around [Red Tie Projects’] neighborhood, and no one seems to care much about what happens to them. Fortunately for the cats, [Red Tie Projects] cares quite a lot, as evidenced by this colossal cat condo they built. The cats retain their freedom, but get food and a warm, sheltered bed whenever they decide to grace [Red Tie Projects] with their presence.

[Red Tie Projects] built this sturdy shelter from pallet wood and did a fine job of it, sealing all the seams and screws up with wood putty and waterproofing it with silicone. Inside there’s a heated pillow, a light, and a remote-controlled camera so RTP] can pan around and keep an eye on the cats. All the wires run out through a weatherproof junction box attached to the side and over to a control box made from an ATX power supply.

Most of the build is made from scrap, including the best part — an Arduino-driven motorized zip line for delivering food from the balcony to the cat porch. Details on the control box and the food delivery system are coming soon, as [Red Tie Projects] teases in the video after the break. We’re looking forward to seeing those. Oh, and don’t worry — there’s more than enough footage to cover the cat tax.

If [Red Tie Projects] ever takes any of those cats in, their demands will only increase. Maybe they can handle the sound of a motorized chair that follows the sun, since they’re tough street cats and all.

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Truck Bed Liners Improve 3D Prints

February 14, 2021 by 27 Comments

There are at least two kinds of 3D printer operators: those who work hard to make their prints look better after they come off the bed and those who settle for whatever comes off the printer. If you are in the latter camp, you probably envy people who have smooth prints with no visible layer lines. But the sanding and priming and multiple coats of paint can put you off.

[Teaching Tech] has a few tricks that might change your mind. He shares his technique for using different coatings for 3D prints that provide good quality with a lot less effort. The coatings in question are polyurethane used for coating pickup truck beds and bitumen rubber used for waterproofing. In the United States, bitumen is known as asphalt, and both materials are relatively cheap, available, and safe to use.

According to the video you can see below, there’s no need to sand or prime the print. In addition to covering imperfections and sealing gaps, it produces watertight prints that have UV resistance and some measure of protection against heating.

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Legacy Digital Photos, With A Side Of Murphy’s Law

February 14, 2021 by 26 Comments

[Dave Madison] came across some old digital photos, and in his quest to access them, he ran into quite a few challenges. The saga brings to mind both Murphy’s Law, and while [Dave] prevailed in the end, it required quite a few more steps than one might expect.

The one smooth part of the process was that Konica’s proprietary software had a handy JPEG export feature.

Here’s the scene: in the late 90s, Konica partnered with photo shops to provide a photo scanning service, delivering digital scans of film photos on 3.5″ floppy disks, and that’s exactly what [Dave] had to work with. The disks were in good condition, and since modern desktop computers still support floppy drives and the FAT filesystem, in theory all one needs to do is stick disks into the reader one at a time in order to access the photos.

Sadly, problems started early. A floppy drive is revoltingly slow compared to any modern storage device, so [Dave]’s first step was to copy all of the files to his machine’s local storage before working on them. This took a bit of wrangling to deal with 8.3 format file names and avoid naming collisions across disks while still preserving some metadata such as original creation date. It was nothing a quick python script couldn’t handle, but that soon led to the next hurdle.

The photos in question were in an obsolete and proprietary Konica .KQP format. [Dave] went through a number of photo viewing programs that claimed to support .KQP, but none of them actually recognized the images.

Fortunately, each disk contained a copy of Konica’s proprietary “PC PictureShow” viewer, but despite having a variety of versions dated between 1997 and 2001 (making them from the Windows 98 and Windows ME eras) [Dave] could not get any version of the program to run in Windows 10, even with compatibility mode for legacy programs enabled. The solution was to set up a Windows XP virtual machine using Oracle’s Virtualbox, and use that to ultimately run PC PictureShow and finally access the photos. After all that work, [Dave] finally had a stroke of luck: Konica’s software had a handy feature to export images in JPEG format, and it worked like a charm.

In the end, [Dave] was able to save 479 out of the 483 images on the old floppy disks, with a reminder that proprietary formats are a pain. The disks and images may have been over twenty years old, but the roots of digital imaging go considerably further back than that. Take a few minutes out your day to read a bit about Russell Kirsch and the first digitized image, that of his three-month old son in 1957.