Hackaday Podcast 111: 3D Graphics Are Ultrasonic, Lobotomizing Alexa, 3D-Printing Leaky Rockets, And Gaming The Font System

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams curate a week of great hacks. Physical displays created in 3D space are a holy grail, and you can make one with 200 ultrasonic transducers, four FPGAs, and a lot math. Smart speakers have one heck of a microphone array in them, it’s yours for the hacking if you just roll your own firmware. Hobby servos can be awful, but this week we saw they can be made really great by cracking open the DC motor to add a simple DIY position sensor. And lasers are making their way into car headlights; we illuminate the situation in this episode.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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4 thoughts on “Hackaday Podcast 111: 3D Graphics Are Ultrasonic, Lobotomizing Alexa, 3D-Printing Leaky Rockets, And Gaming The Font System

  1. 2 new echo dot 3 50 Euro including post.
    They sell for 25 Euro each 2nd hand on ebay + post on top. Crazy

    How many ADCs and GPIOs and i2C and One-Wire does and echo dot have anyway?

    1. Mike and I talked about this for a while after the show. It looks like the echo reconversion wasn’t playing around with the DSP chip, but just taking its output as given — which makes sense if you’re just interested in the speech recognition.

      Anyone know about hacking the DSP / mic array components?

      Those prices are crazy. But I can do one better! We have one unused in a closet, so it’s free. :) I will have to ask permission to take it apart, though.

    1. Elliot’s a whiz with the audio mastering. We both have good microphones and record with them very close and set so that we don’t top out the levels. Being an open source fanatic, Elliot has scripted a bunch of the mastering to use ffmpeg to set levels between our two tracks, hits up audacity for the actual editing work, then has a post processing script that runs them through ffmpeg again as a compressor.

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