Day: November 20, 2023

2023 Halloween Hackfest: This Year’s Spooky Winners

November 20, 2023 by 1 Comment

With the zombies, ghouls, and ghosts now safely returned to their crypts until next October, it’s time to unveil this year’s winners for the 2023 Halloween Hackfest.

For this contest, sponsors DigiKey and Arduino challenged the community to come up with their best creations for what’s arguably the most hacker-friendly of holidays. Pretty much everything was fair game, from costumes to decorations. The top three winners will get $150 credit from DigiKey and some treats from Arduino — just don’t try to eat them.

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What Can You Do With Thousands Of Vintage Telephones?

November 20, 2023 by 56 Comments

Telephones. We’ve got a few around the place, and some may remember all the weird and wonderful varieties produced over the years. But, vintage phone dealers [Ron and Mary Knappen] may have a few too many. With a large 41,000 sqft property, at least three farm buildings, and no fewer than 33 semi-trailers loaded to busting with racks of phones, the retiring couple have a job sorting it all out and finding someone passionate enough to take over this once-strong business.

Technology has moved on somewhat since 1971 when they got into the retro business, and there are only so many period dramas being produced that could make a dent in a collection of a thousand steel desk phones. Nobody seems interested in taking on their business, so they are concentrating on emptying that large property in order to sell it, but the fate of the crazy number of other storage locations seems uncertain. Perhaps, other than a few museums around the world purchasing a few, this collection really is likely heading to the recyclers.

So what can we do with a vintage phone in this modern era? Here’s a primer to get you started. How about going cellular? Or maybe just add them to your existing designer collection?

Thanks to [Jeremy] and Adafruit for the tip!

3D Human Models From A Single Image

November 20, 2023 by 12 Comments

You’ve seen it in movies and shows — the hero takes a blurry still picture, and with a few keystrokes, generates a view from a different angle or sometimes even a full 3D model. Turns out, thanks to machine learning and work by several researchers, this might be possible. As you can see in the video below, using “shape-guided diffusion,” the researchers were able to take a single image of a person and recreate a plausible 3D model.

Of course, the work relies on machine learning. As you’ll see in the video, this isn’t a new idea, but previous attempts have been less than stellar. This new method uses shape prediction first, followed by an estimate of the back view appearance. The algorithm then guesses what images go between the initial photograph and the back view. However, it uses the 3D shape estimate as a guideline. Even then,  there is some post-processing to join the intermediate images together into a model.

The result looks good, although the video does point out some areas where they still fall short. For example, unusual lighting can affect the results.

This beats spinning around a person or a camera to get many images. Scanning people in 3D is a much older dream than you might expect.

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