We love squeezing every last bit of silicon goodness out of a tiny chip, or at least we delight in seeing it done. Today’s analog/digital hack is one of the sweetest we’ve seen in a while. And it’s also a little bit of a puzzle, so don’t scroll down to the answer until you’ve given the schematic a good think-over.
First there was [Geohot]’s lofty goal to build a hacker’s version of the self-driving car. Then came comma.ai and a whole bunch of venture capital. After that, a letter from the Feds and a hasty retreat from the business end of things. The latest development? comma.ai’s openpilot project shows up on GitHub!
If you’ve got either an Acura ILX or Honda Civic 2016 Touring addition, you can start to play around with this technology on your own. Is this a good idea? Are you willing to buy some time on a closed track?
A quick browse through the code gives some clues as to what’s going on here. The board files show just how easy it is to interface with these cars’ driving controls: there’s a bunch of CAN commands and that’s it. There’s some unintentional black comedy, like a (software) crash-handler routine named crash.py.
What’s shocking is that there’s nothing shocking going on. It’s all pretty much straightforward Python with sprinklings of C. Honestly, it looks like something you could get into and start hacking away at pretty quickly. Anyone want to send us an Acura ILX for testing purposes? No promises you’ll get it back in one piece.
If you missed it, read up on our coverage of the rapid rise and faster retreat of comma.ai. But we don’t think the game is over yet: comma.ai is still hiring. Are open source self-driving cars in our future? That would be fantastic!
Via Endagadget. Thanks for the tip, [FaultyWarrior]!
The HTC Vive’s Lighthouse localization system is one of the cleverest things we’ve seen in a while. It uses a synchronization flash followed by a swept beam to tell any device that can see the lights exactly where it is in space. Of course, the device has to understand the signals to figure it out.
[Alex Shtuchkin] built a very well documented device that can use these signals to localize itself in your room. For now, the Lighthouse stations are still fairly expensive, but the per-device hardware requirements are quite reasonable. [Alex] has the costs down around ten dollars plus the cost of a microcontroller if your project doesn’t already include one. Indeed, his proof-of-concept is basically a breadboard, three photodiodes, op-amps, and some code.
His demo is awesome! Check it out in the video below. He uses it to teach a quadcopter to land itself back on a charging platform, and it’s able to get there with what looks like a few centimeters of play in any direction — more than good enough to land in the 3D-printed plastic landing thingy. That fixture has a rotating drum that swaps out the battery automatically, readying the drone for another flight.
If this is just the tip of the iceberg of upcoming Lighthouse hacks, we can’t wait!
Continue reading “Lighthouse Locates Drone; Achieves Autonomous Battery Swap”
If you aren’t already living on the spacecraft Discovery One, you may not have HAL listening to your every voice command. If that’s the case for you, as it is for us, you may have to resort to mashing buttons on little black monoliths like a primitive monkey. [Barnr]’s universal remote project, and some black PLA filament, will get you there in no time.
The remote is based on a nRF24 radios with a PIC to read the button presses. A Raspberry Pi and another nRF24 are listening on the other end. The code that runs either side of the connection is so minimal that both sides fit in the project description. It gets the job done, and it’s easily hackable. And with that, [barnr] can control anything that he can connect up to the Pi without getting up from his campfire.
While [barnr] is shy about his 3D design skills, we think that the box is fantastic. It’s got 3D-printed keycaps for the tactile switches that sit inside, and it’s an easily printed case. Maybe it’s a little blocky and, frankly monolithic, but it gets the job done. Aesthetics are for version 2.0.
When you build something yourself, and it’s not a HAL 9000, you pretty much need a way to control it. It’s no wonder we’ve seen so many projects on Hackaday. If your 2.4 GHz spectrum is too crowded to run a nRF24 remote, you might consider infrared: tiny, tiny, infrared. Or if you want to see the craziest remote that we’ve ever seen, check out this DTMF-over-cellphone build. But if you just want something sweet and minimal that gets the job done, [barnr]’s build is for you.
Thanks [Mikejand] for the tip!
[Ivan Franco] sent us this great synthesizer project that he’s working on. Or maybe it’s more like a synthesizer meta-project: a synthesizer construction set. You see, what Pryth has is a Raspberry Pi inside that’s running a custom distribution that includes SuperCollider to generate the sound, OSC for the communication layer, and a Teensy with up to 80 (!) multiplexed analog inputs that you’ll connect up to whatever hardware you desire.
Continue reading “The Most Flexible Synthesizer Is DIY, Raspberry Pi”
How do you get teenagers interested in science, technology, and engineering? [Erich]’s team at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences makes them operate three robots to get a gumball. The entire demonstration was whipped together in a few days, and has been field-repaired at least once; a green-wire fix was a little heavy on the solder and would short out to a neighboring trace when mechanical force was applied.
Continue reading “Mintomat: An Overcomplicated Gumball Machine”
It’s no secret that we love bizarre robot locomotion, so we are naturally suckers for BALLU (YouTube link, also embedded below) the Bouyancy-Assisted Lightweight Legged Unit. The project started with a simple observation — walking robots are constrained by having to hold themselves up — and removing that constraint make success much easier. Instead of walking, BALLU almost floats and uses what little net weight it does have to push against the ground.
