Pixel Pump, The Open Source Vacuum Pickup Tool Is Now Shipping

August 1, 2023 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

The Pixel Pump is an open source manual pick & place assist tool by [Robin Reiter], and after a long road to completion, it’s ready to ship. We first saw the Pixel Pump project as an entry to the 2021 Hackaday Prize and liked the clean design and the concept of a completely open architecture for a tool that is so valuable to desktop assembly. It’s not easy getting hardware off the ground, but it’s now over the finish line and nearly everything — from assembly to packaging — has been done in-house.

Pixel Pump with SMD-Magazines, also using foot pedal to control an interactive bill of materials (BoM) plugin.

Because having parts organized and available is every bit as important as the tool itself, a useful-looking companion item for the Pixel Pump is the SMD-Magazine. This is a container for parts that come on SMD tape rolls. These hold components at an optimal angle for use with the pickup tool, and can be fixed together on a rail to create project-specific part groups.

A tool being open source means giving folks a way to modify or add features for better workflows, and an example of this is [Robin]’s suggestion of using a foot pedal for hands-free control of the interactive BoM plugin. With it, one can simply use a foot pedal to step through a highlighted list of every part for a design, an invaluable visual aid when doing hand assembly.

The Pixel Pump looks great, but if you’d prefer to go the DIY route for vacuum pickup tools you would certainly be in good company. We’ve seen economical systems built for under $100, and systems built around leveraging bead-handling tools intended for hobbyists. On the extreme end there’s the minimalist approach of building a tool directly around a small electric vacuum pump.

What Does It Take For A LEGO Car To Roll Downhill Forever?

July 31, 2023 by Donald Papp 11 Comments

Cars (including LEGO ones) will roll downhill. In theory if the hill were a treadmill, the car could roll forever. In practice, there are a lot of things waiting to go wrong to keep this from happening. If you’ve ever wondered what those problems would be and what a solution would look like, [Brick Technology] has a nine-minute video showing the whole journey.

The video showcases an iterative process of testing, surfacing a problem, redesigning to address that problem, and then back to testing. It starts off pretty innocently with increasing wheel friction and adding weight, but we’ll tell you right now it goes in some unexpected directions that show off [Brick Technology]’s skill and confidence when it comes to LEGO assemblies.

You can watch the whole thing unfold in the video, embedded below. It’s fun to see how the different builds perform, and we can’t help but think that the icing on the cake would be LEGO bricks with OLED screens and working instrumentation built into them.

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Splitting 3D Prints Into Parts Can Add Strength

July 28, 2023 by Donald Papp 5 Comments

One of the great things about 3D printers is their ability to make a single part all at once. Separating a part into multiple pieces is usually done to split up objects that are too big to fit on the 3D printer’s print bed. But [Peter] at Markforged (manufacturers of high-end 3D printers) has a video explaining another reason: multi-part prints can benefit from improved strength.

This part can be easily printed as a single piece, but it can be made nearly twice as strong when printed as two, and combined.

The idea is this: filament-based 3D printers generally create parts that are strongest along their X-Y axis (relative to their manufacture) and weakest in the Z direction. [Peter] proposes splitting a part into pieces with this in mind. Not because the part is inconveniently large or has tricky geometry, but so the individual pieces can be printed in orientations that provide the best mechanical strength.

This is demonstrated with the simple part shown here. The usual way to print this part would be flat on a print bed, but by splitting the parts into two and printing each in their optimal orientation, the combined part withstands nearly twice as much force before failing.

[Peter]’s examples use Markforged’s own filaments, but gives advice on more common polymers as well and the same principles apply. This idea is one worth keeping in mind the next time one is seeking to optimize strength. because of how simple it is.

We’ve seen a variety of methods to toughen up or ruggedize prints in the past, but they’re usually more complex (or at least messier.) Examples include embedding braided steel cable, embedding fiberglass mesh, applying electroplating to a printed structure, and plain old embedding some bolts and washers to buffer load-bearing areas.

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GETMusic Uses Machine Learning To Generate Music, Understands Tracks

July 27, 2023 by Donald Papp 10 Comments

Music generation guided by machine learning can make great projects, but there’s not usually much apparent control over the results. The system makes what it makes, and it’s an achievement if the results are not obvious cacophony. But that’s all different with GETMusic which allows for a much more involved approach because it understands and is able to create music by tracks. Among other things, this means one can generate a basic rhythm and melody first, then add additional elements to those existing ones, leaving the previous elements unchanged.

GETMusic can make music from scratch, or guided from examples, and under the hood uses a diffusion-based approach similar to the method behind AI image generators like Stable Diffusion. We’ve previously covered how Stable Diffusion works, but instead of images the same basic principles are used to guide the model from random noise to useful tracks of music.

Just a few years ago we saw a neural network trained to generate Bach, and while it was capable of moments of brilliance, it didn’t produce uniformly-listenable output. GETMusic is on an entirely different level. The model and code are available online and there is a research paper to accompany it.

You can watch a video putting it through its paces just below the page break, and there are more videos on the project summary page.

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Beautifully Rebuilding A VR Headset To Add AR Features

July 25, 2023 by Donald Papp 12 Comments

[PyottDesign] recently wrapped up a personal project to create himself a custom AR/VR headset that could function as an AR (augmented reality) platform, and make it easier to develop new applications in a headset that could do everything he needed. He succeeded wonderfully, and published a video showcase of the finished project.

Getting a headset with the features he wanted wasn’t possible by buying off the shelf, so he accomplished his goals with a skillful custom repackaging of a Quest 2 VR headset, integrating a Stereolabs Zed Mini stereo camera (aimed at mixed reality applications) and an Ultraleap IR 170 hand tracking module. These hardware modules have tons of software support and are not very big, but when sticking something onto a human face, every millimeter and gram counts.

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Text-to-Speech Model Can Do Music, Background Noises, And Sound Effects

July 24, 2023 by Donald Papp 8 Comments

Bark is a universal text-to-audio model that can not only create realistic speech, it can incorporate music, background noises, and sound effects. It can even include non-speech sounds like laughter, sighs, throat clearings, and similar elements. But despite the fact that it can deliver such complex results, it’s important to understand some of the peculiarities.

The model takes a prompt and generates the resulting sound from scratch. Results might sometimes be unexpected.

Bark is not a conventional text-to-speech program, and how it works has a lot more in common with large language model AI chatbots. This means that results can deviate from expectations, and outputs aren’t necessarily going to be studio-quality speech. As the project’s README points out, “(generated outputs can) be anything from perfect speech to multiple people arguing at a baseball game recorded with bad microphones.” That being said, there is some support for voice presets as a way to help guide the model with some consistency.

Bark was designed by a company called Suno for research purposes and is available under the MIT License. It can be installed and run locally, and has some demos available as well as an online implementation.

The ability to install and run Bark locally is promising territory for incorporating it into projects. And should you be more interested in speech-to-text instead, don’t forget about this plain C/C++ implementaion of AI-powered speech recognition.

Weather In Wartime: The Importance Of British Meteorology In WWII

July 24, 2023 by Donald Papp 10 Comments

Weather can have a significant impact on transport and operations of all kinds, especially those at sea or in the air. This makes it a deeply important field of study, particularly in wartime. If you’re at all curious about how this kind of information was gathered and handled in the days before satellites and computer models, this write-up on WWII meteorology is sure to pique your interest.

Weather conditions were valuable data, and weather *forecasts* even more so. Both required data, which relied on human operators for instruments to be read and their readings transmitted.

The main method of learning weather conditions over the oceans is to persuade merchant ships to report their observations regularly. This is true even today, but these days we also have the benefit of things like satellite technology. Back in the mid-1900s there was no such thing, and the outbreak of WWII (including the classification of weather data as secret information due to its value) meant that new solutions were needed.

The aircraft of the Royal Air Force (RAF) were particularly in need of accurate data, and there was little to no understanding of the upper atmosphere at the time. Eventually, aircraft flew regular 10-hour sorties, logging detailed readings that served to provide data about weather conditions across the Atlantic. Readings were logged, encoded with one-time pad (OTP) encryption, then radioed back to base where charts would be created and updated every few hours.

The value of accurate data and precise understanding of conditions and how they could change was grimly illustrated in a disaster called the Night of the Big Wind (March 24-25, 1944). Forecasts predicted winds no stronger than 45 mph, but Allied bombers sent to Berlin were torn apart when they encountered winds in excess of 120 mph, leading to the loss of 72 aircraft.

The types of data recorded to monitor and model weather are nearly identical to those in modern weather stations. The main difference is that instruments used to be read and monitored by human beings, whereas today we can rely more on electronic readings and transmission that need no human intervention.