Author: Richard Baguley

244 Articles

Robotic Open Source Puppy Needs A Home

May 12, 2020 by 20 Comments

Personally, I am a fan of the real thing, but dogs aren’t an option for all. Plus, robotic dogs are easier to train and don’t pee on your couch. If you are looking to adopt a robotic companion, Stanford Pupper might be a good place to start. It’s a new open source project from the Stanford Robotics Student group,  a group of robotic hackers from Stanford University. This simple robotic quadruped looks pretty simple to build, but also looks like a great into to four-legged robots.

This is the first version of the design, but it looks pretty complete, built around a carbon fiber and 3D printed frame. The carbon fiber parts have to be cut out on a router, but you can order them pre-cut here, and you might be able to adapt it to easier materials. The Pupper is driven by twelve servos powered from a 5200 mAh 2S LiPo battery and a custom PCB that distributes the power. That means it could run autonomously.

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Neat Open Source Pinhole Camera Design Can Be (Mostly) 3D Printed

May 6, 2020 by 21 Comments

We’ve seen pinhole camera builds before, but this new one looks interesting. The Scura is a new open-source design for a pinhole camera that shoots on analog 35 mm film. It is all 3D printable except for a handful of screws, magnets, and the pinhole itself, which is laser cut. The cool and unusual part of the design, though, is the curved film holder, which produces 60 mm by 25 mm (2.3 in by 0.98 in) panoramic images that are sharp to the edges.

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Dropping A Glider From 18,000 Feet

April 17, 2020 by 37 Comments

[Tarik and Kemal] have an objective in mind: to drop a home-made autonomous glider from a high-altitude balloon and safely return it to home. To motivate them, [Tarik] has decided not to cut his hair until they reach 18,000 feet. Given the ambition of their project, it isn’t surprising that his hair is getting rather long now.

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Harry Potter Wand Hack Makes Magic Real

April 5, 2020 by 8 Comments

Any sufficiently advanced hack is indistinguishable from magic, a wise man once observed. That’s true with this cool build from [Jasmeet Singh] that magically opens a box when you wave a Harry Potter magic wand in the right way. Is it magic? No, it’s a neat hack that uses computer vision to track the wand and recognize when you make the magic gesture.

The trick is based on the same technique that Universal Studios use in their Harry Potter theme park, as detailed in a patent with the snappy title of “System and method for tracking a passive wand and actuating an effect based on a detected wand path“. The basic idea is that a retroreflective dot on the end of the wand reflects light from a set of infra-red LEDs around the camera. An infra-red sensitive camera detects this reflected light as a bright dot. This camera is tied into a computer vision system that tracks the path of the dot, then triggers the action if it follows a certain pattern.

The version that [Jasmeet] built uses a Raspberry Pi NoIR camera, and a Raspberry Pi 3 running OpenCV. This feeds into a machine learning graph that detects the letters of the alphabet. If the detected letter is an A (for Alomahora, the Harry Potter open spell), then the box opens. If it is a C, the box closes. This is all tied together using Python.

It’s a neat build that ties together a number of interesting techniques, and which could keep the kids amused for a while. You could also expand it further, such as adding a death ray that triggers if you trace an S for Sectumsempra. That’ll teach them not to mess with the dark arts.

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Open Source Telescope Controller Puts Smart Features In Old Telescopes

April 4, 2020 by 10 Comments

In times like these, we all need to look beyond ourselves. This project might help: OnStep is an open-source telescope controller, a device that controls a telescope to point at something interesting in the sky. Want to take a look at M31? Use an app on a PC or smartphone, select the object and the OnStep will pan and tilt your telescope until the Andromeda Galaxy pops into view.

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Making PCBs With A Vinyl Cutter

April 1, 2020 by 26 Comments

You might assume that you need a lot of expensive stuff to make your own PCBs, but that isn’t the case: you can do it with a vinyl cutter and a few common chemicals and tools. [Emiliano Valencia] has laid out the entire process. While we’ve seen plenty of make your own PCB guides before, this one goes a bit further as it covers using the vinyl cutter to make solder masks, so you can use it for surface mount designs.

The end result of the process that [Emilano] lays out is the tinyDice, a cute little electronic die that can fit on a keyring. The whole process is very well written up, and even experienced PCB makers will probably find a few useful tricks here.

The really interesting part for us was using the vinyl cutter to make three parts of the process: the etching mask, the solder mask that protects the traces and the solder stencil that applies the solder to the pads for surface mounting. Continue reading “Making PCBs With A Vinyl Cutter” →

Measuring UV-C For About $5

March 27, 2020 by 90 Comments

Looking to sterilize something? Give it a good blast of the old UV-C. Ultraviolet radiation in the shortest wavelength band breaks down DNA and RNA, so it’s a great way to kill off any nasties that are lurking. But how much UV-C are you using? [Akiba] at Hackerfarm has come up with the NukeMeter, a meter that measures the output of their UV-C sterilizer the NukeBox. It is built around a $2.50 sensor and a $3 Arduino.

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