Sara Adkins Is Jamming Out With Machines

December 4, 2019 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

Asking machines to make music by themselves is kind of a strange notion. They’re machines, after all. They don’t feel happy or hurt, and as far as we know, they don’t long for the affections of other machines. Humans like to think of music as being a strictly human thing, a passionate undertaking so nuanced and emotion-based that a machine could never begin to understand the feeling that goes into the process of making music, or even the simple enjoyment of it.

The idea of humans and machines having a jam session together is even stranger. But oddly enough, the principles of the jam session may be exactly what machines need to begin to understand musical expression. As Sara Adkins explains in her enlightening 2019 Hackaday Superconference talk, Creating with the Machine, humans and machines have a lot to learn from each other.

To a human musician, a machine’s speed and accuracy are enviable. So is its ability to make instant transitions between notes and chords. Humans are slow to learn these transitions and have to practice going back and forth repeatedly to build muscle memory. If the machine were capable, it would likely envy the human in terms of passionate performance and musical expression.

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Jonas Salk, Virologist And Vaccination Vanguard

December 3, 2019 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

In the early 1950s, the only thing scarier than the threat of nuclear war was the annual return of polio — an easily-spread, incurable disease that causes nerve damage, paralysis, and sometimes death. At the first sign of an outbreak, public hot spots like theaters and swimming pools would close up immediately.

One of the worst polio epidemics in the United States struck in 1952, a few years into the postwar baby boom. Polio is more likely to infect children than adults, so the race to create a vaccine reached a fever pitch.

Most researchers were looking into live-virus vaccines, which had worked nicely for smallpox and rabies and become the standard approach. But Jonas Salk, a medical researcher and budding virologist, was keen on the idea of safer, killed-virus vaccines. He believed the same principle would work for polio, and he was right. Within a few years of developing his vaccine, the number of polio cases in the United States dropped from ~29,000 in 1955 to less than 6,000 in 1957. By 1979, polio had been eradicated in the US.

Jonas Salk is one of science’s folk heroes. The polio vaccine was actually his sophomore effort — he and Thomas Francis developed the first influenza vaccine in the 1940s. And he didn’t stop with polio, either. Toward the end of his life, Salk was working on an AIDS vaccine.

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Supercon: The Things You Brought, And A Few You Forgot

December 2, 2019 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

Part of the fun of Supercon is that there is so much available in one place. For the price of admission, you’re surrounded by expertise, power, and soldering irons. Digi-Key brought several large parts bins stuffed full of everything from passives to LEDs to chips for people use in hacking away on their badges. But one thing that makes the whole experience really special is the stuff people bring. We don’t just mean the projects you brought to show off, we mean the stuff you bring to enhance your Supercon experience, whether it be tools, bits and bobs, or other fun stuff to play with.

This year was my first Supercon, and you never forget your first. I had a great time, and was overwhelmed by how much awesomeness was going on in one place. I wish Supercon was a simulation I could run again and again so I could listen to every talk, attend every workshop, and spend time talking to everyone about the things they brought and the cool things they’re doing with their time and badges.

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Progressive Or Thrash? How Metal Detectors Discriminate

November 26, 2019 by Kristina Panos 37 Comments

Metal detecting is a fun pastime, even when all you can find is a little bit of peace and a whole lot of pop tabs. [Huygens Optics] has a VLF-based metal detector that offers much more feedback than just a beep or no beep. This thing is fancy enough to discriminate between types of metal and report back a numerical ID value from a corresponding range of conductivity.

Most pop tabs rated an ID of 76 or 77, so [Huygens Optics] started ignoring these until the day he found a platinum wedding band without looking at the ID readout. Turns out, the ring registered in the throwaway range. Now thoroughly intrigued by the detector’s ID system, [Huygens Optics] set up a test rig with an oscilloscope to see for himself how the thing was telling different metals apart. His valuable and sweeping video walk-through is hiding after the break.

A Very Low-Frequency (VLF) detector uses two coils, one to emit and one to receive. They are overlapped just enough so that the reception coil can’t see the emission coil’s magnetic field. This frees up the reception coil’s magnetic field to be interrupted only by third-party metal, i.e. hidden treasures in the ground.

Once [Huygens Optics] determined which coil was which, he started passing metal objects near the reception coil to see what happened on the ‘scope. Depending on the material type and the size and shape of the object, the waveform it produced showed a shift in phase from the emission coil’s waveform. This is pretty much directly translated to the ID readout — the higher the phase shift value, the higher the ID value.

We’ve picked up DIY metal detectors of all sizes over the years, but this one is the ATtiny-ist.

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The Strain Of Flu Shot Logistics

November 26, 2019 by Kristina Panos 43 Comments

Did you get a flu shot this year? How about last year? In a world of next-day delivery and instant downloads, making the yearly pilgrimage to the doctor or the minute clinic feels like an outdated concept. Even if you get your shots free at the office, it’s still a pain to have to get vaccinated every year.

Unfortunately, there’s really no other way to deal with the annual threat of influenza. There’s no single vaccine for the flu because there are multiple strains that are always mutating. Unlike other viruses with one-and-done vaccinations, influenza is a moving target. Developing, producing, and distributing millions of vaccines every year is a massive operation that never stops, or even slows down a little bit. It’s basically Santa Claus territory — if Santa Claus delivered us all from mass epidemics.

The numbers are staggering. For the 2018-19 season, as in last year, there were 169.1 million doses distributed in the United States, up from 155.3 million doses the year before. How do they do it? We’re gonna roll up our sleeves and take a stab at it.

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CircuitPython Sculpture Clock Adds Character To Any Desk

November 21, 2019 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

We can probably all relate to the origin story of this one. [Alex] was working on a bigger, more involved clock project when this cute little desk clock idea caught his mind’s eye. Who wouldn’t want a clock with character and a little bit of an attitude?

This little guy’s brain is an ItsyBitsy M0 Express, and he gets his time data from an Adalogger FeatherWing RTC. Those antennae aren’t just for looks – [Alex] chose the ItsyBitsy because it can easily do capacitive touch out of the box without extra components. In the brief demo after the break, [Alex] shows how touching them triggers either an animated face or a still face before switching to the clock face.

We love functional circuit sculptures, especially ones with this much character. [Alex] was inspired by [Mohit Bhoite]’s breathtaking circuit sculptures and seems to follow his great example of laying it all out on paper first. Incidentally, our last HackChat before Supercon starred [Mohit] and his circuit sculptures. Missed it? Read the transcript here.

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Music Box Paper-Punching Machine Settles The Score

November 15, 2019 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

As soon as [pashiran] laid eyes on his first hand-cranked music box, he knew he was in love. Then, he started punching the holes for his first ditty. As the repetitive stress of punching heated up his arm, his love cooled a bit. Annealed by the ups and downs of this experience, he decided to design a machine that can punch the holes automatically.

Soon, [pashiran] found his people — a community of music boxers that transform MIDI files to DXF format, which creates coordinates for CAD software. In [pashiran]’s music puncher, an Arduino MEGA takes a DXF file and bubble-sorts the jumble of x-coordinates. The MEGA conducts a trio of two stepper motors and DC motor. One stepper pushes the paper through on the x-axis, and the other moves the puncher head back and forth across the paper scroll as the y-axis. The DC motor moves the punch up and down.

Now, paired with [Martin] of [Wintergatan]’s method for chaining music box paper together, [pashiran] can write a prog-rock-length opus without fear of repetitive stress injury. And since he’s published the STL and INO files, now you can, too. Watch it punch and play 250 notes worth of “~~See My Vest”~~ “Be Our Guest” after the break.

There’s more than one way to avoid manually punching all those holes. When [Wintergatan] was wrestling this problem, he inspired the hacker community to create a MIDI-to-laser-cut-stencil solution.

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