2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: Simple Window Closer Relies On Gravity

March 13, 2024 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

While most pet owners are happy to help out their furry friends, everyone has a limit. For [Gauthier], getting up to open or close the window every three minutes so their cat can go out on the balcony was a bridge too far, so they decided to take a crack at automating the window. The end result not only does the job, it’s extremely low-tech and pretty much invisible except when in use.

Of course, [Gauthier] didn’t arrive at this solution immediately. Their first thoughts went to RFID or perhaps a pressure sensor to detect the cats, coupled with something motorized to open and shut the window, like a belt or maybe a linear actuator. But ultimately, the system has to be robust, so that’s when [Gauthier] got the idea to employ gravity by using pulleys and weights.

Due to the configuration of the space and the shape of the window, [Gauthier] was able to to hide cable pretty well — you can’t really see anything when the window is closed. Be sure to check it out in action after the break. Continue reading “2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: Simple Window Closer Relies On Gravity” →

A dress is shown in three shapes: the original, a slightly-heated A-line version, and a close-fitting body con version.

4D Knit Dress Skirts Waste

March 13, 2024 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

Regular 2D sewing of anything is inherently wasteful. You can align the pattern pieces however you want, but there’s going to be wasted everything — thread, fabric, and interfacing — whether you get it right the first time or not. Never mind the fact that people tend to create a muslin (prototype) first using inexpensive fabric (like muslin) for the purposes of getting the fit right.

A few examples of the lines than can be created.

The MIT Self-Assembly Lab x Ministry of Supply have come up with a 4D garment construction technique that minimizes waste while being pretty darn cool at the same time. They’ve created a knit dress that combines several techniques and tools, including heat-activated yarns, computerized knitting, and 6-axis robotic activation. The result is a dress that can be permanently molded to fit the body however and wherever you want, using a heat gun mounted on a 6-axis robotic arm.

As far as we can tell, a finished dress does not come off of the machine in the short demo video after the break. It looks like it still has to be sewn together, which creates some potential for waste, but absolutely nothing like conventional methods.

This is probably the coolest dress we’ve seen since the one covered in LCD panels.

Continue reading “4D Knit Dress Skirts Waste” →

A Kyria split keyboard and wrist rests on a stand made of LEGO.

LEGO Keyboard Stand Fits Just Right

March 12, 2024 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

Split keyboards are great for many reasons, but mostly because you can place the halves as far apart as you want and really give your arms and shoulders the room they need. [Jason Cox] hit the nail on the head, though: add in a couple of palm rests, and you now have four things that will potentially shift and drift out of place on your desk or keyboard tray. It was such a problem that [Jason] hardly ever used his Kyria. That is, until he built a stand out of LEGO to hold everything.

[Jason] was using a pair of Manfrotto pocket tripods to tent the keyboard, and those held their position surprisingly well, even though he tweaked them here and there over time. Ultimately, [Jason] knew he wanted the answer to be something customizable. And what’s more customizable than LEGO?

About $60 worth of new white bricks and plates later, [Jason] got to work, spending an evening building the thing. He ended up using a few bricks to hold the keyboard in place on the plate, and it worked perfectly.

Of course, he didn’t get the whole contraption exactly how he wanted it the first time, but tweaking builds is half the fun, right? After a while, [Jason] figured out he could rebuild the part that connects the two keyboard halves to go around a plastic piece at the back of the keyboard tray, which holds the whole thing in place. The end result? Wonderful. The Kyria stays in place, and now [Jason] is using it way more than before.

You know LEGO is versatile, but did you know you can use it to build a hydroelectric dam?

Via reddit

LED Choker Is A Diamond In The Junk Pile

March 12, 2024 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Isn’t it great when you find a use for something that didn’t work out for the project it was supposed to? That’s the story behind the LED strips in this lovely blinkenlights choker by [Ted].

The choker itself is a 15 mm wide leather strap with holes punched in it. According to [Ted], the hole punching sounds like the absolute worst and hardest part to do, because the spacing of the holes must be greater than that of the LEDs to account for flex in the strap. [Ted] tested several distances and found that there is little margin for error.

Controlling those blinkenlights is a Seeed Xiao S3, which fits nicely behind the neck in what looks like a heat shrink tube cocoon. [Ted] chose this because there was one lying around, and it happens to be a good fit with its LiPo charge controller.

The choker runs on four 300 mAh LiPo batteries, which makes for more bulk than [Ted] would like, but again, sometimes it’s about what you have lying around. Even so, the batteries last around two hours.

Sometimes it’s about more than just blinkenlights. Here’s an LED necklace that reports on local air quality.

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Pocket Cyberdeck

March 12, 2024 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

When you find something you love doing, you want to do it everywhere, all the time. Such is the case with [jefmer] and programming. The trouble is, there is not a single laptop or tablet out there that really deals well with direct sunlight. So, what’s a hacker to do during the day? Stay indoors and suffer?

The answer is a project like Pocket Pad. This purpose-built PDA uses a Nice! Nano and a pair of two very low-power ST7302-driven monochrome displays. They have no backlight, but they update much faster than e-paper displays. According to [jefmer], the brighter the ambient light, the more readable the displays become. What more could you want? (Besides a backlight?)

The miniature PocketType 40% is a little small for touch typing, but facilitates thumbs well. [jefmer] added those nice vinyl transfer legends and sealed them with clear nail polish.

All of the software including the keyboard scanner is written in Espruino, which is an implementation of JavaScript that targets embedded devices. Since it’s an interpreted language, [jefmer] can both write and execute programs directly on the Pocket Pad, using the bottom screen for the REPL. I’d sure like to have one of these in my pocket!
Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Pocket Cyberdeck” →

Custom Mouse-Making: Clay Is The Way

March 10, 2024 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

For something that many of us handle all day long, it sure would be nice if mice came in more sizes and shapes, wouldn’t it? Until that day, we’ll just have to find something passable or else design and build a custom-shaped mouse from scratch like [Ben Makes Everything] did.

First, [Ben] played around with some modelling clay until he had a shape he was happy with, then took a bunch of pictures of it mounted on a piece of wood for easy manipulation and used photogrammetry to scan it in for printing after cleaning it up in Blender. About six versions later, he had the final one and was ready to move on to electronics.

That’s right, this isn’t just mouse guts in an ergonomic package. Inside is Arduino Pro Micro and a PMW 3389 optical sensor on a breakout board. [Ben] was going to use flexible 3D printed panels as mouse buttons, but then had an epiphany — why not use keyboard switches and keycaps instead? He also figured he could have two buttons per finger if he wanted, so he went with Kailh reds for the fingers and and whites in the thumb.

Speaking of the thumb, there was no room for a mouse wheel in between those comparatively huge switches, so he moved it to the the side to be thumb-operated. [Ben] got everything working, and after all this, decided to make it wireless. So he switched to an Adafruit Feather S3 and designed his first PCB for both versions. Ultimately, he found that the wireless version is kind of unreliable, so he is sticking with the wired one for now.

Continue reading “Custom Mouse-Making: Clay Is The Way” →

Your Cat Needs Its Own TV

March 10, 2024 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

Cats are wonderful creatures to have around, and they provide us with hours of entertainment. So why not do a little something to entertain them in return? That’s exactly what [Becky Stern] did by making a cat TV that shows YouTube videos of birds and other cat-approved content. Not all cats seem to care about TV, but [Becky]’s cat Benchley really gets into it.

As you may have guessed, this is a fairly simple build, consisting largely of a Raspberry Pi, a speaker, and a screen — a 5″ HDMI LCD display to be exact. Seems like a nice size for cats. After getting the cat-puter up and running, [Becky] set about designing a 3D-printed enclosure to turn it into a TV. The first draft looked great in marble-effect filament, but lacked breathing holes for the Pi, so the final version has a nice honeycomb pattern that is too small for curious cat paws to fit through.

What their paws can do is accidentally pause the video via the touch screen, so [Becky] swapped the USB cable for a charge-only to prevent this. Be sure to check out the build video after the break, because there is plenty of cat cuteness to be had. [Benchley] was so into it that he went looking around back for cats and squirrels inside the box.

Would you rather not encourage your cats to lie about the house watching TV all day? Make them play piano for their dinner.

Continue reading “Your Cat Needs Its Own TV” →