Author: Lewin Day

3351 Articles

British Hospital Blasts Through Waiting Lists By Slashing Surgeon Downtime

January 4, 2024 by 66 Comments

It feels like it doesn’t matter where you go, health systems are struggling. In the US, just about any procedure is super expensive. In the UK and Australia, waiting lists extend far into the future and patients are left sitting in ambulances as hospitals lack capacity. In France, staff shortages rage furiously, frustrating operations.

It might seem like hope is fruitless and there is little that can be done. But amidst this horrid backdrop, one London hospital is finding some serious gains with some neat optimizations to the way it handles surgery, as The Times reports.

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Impressively Responsive Air Drums Built Using The Raspberry Pi Pico

January 2, 2024 by 6 Comments

Drum kits are excellent fun and a terrific way to learn a sense of rhythm. They’re also huge and unwieldy. In contrast, air drums can be altogether more compact, if lacking the same impact as the real thing. In any case, students [Ang], [Devin] and [Kaiyuan] decided to build a set of air drums themselves for their ECE 4760 microcontroller class at Cornell.

As per the current crop of ECE4760 projects, the build relies on the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller as the brains of the operation. The Pico is charged with reading the output of MPU6050 inertial measurement units mounted to a pair of drum sticks. The kick pedal itself simply uses a button instead.

Where the project gets really interesting, though, is in the sound synthesis. The build doesn’t simply play different pre-recorded samples for different drums. Instead, it uses the Karplus-Strong Drum Synthesis function combined with a wavetable to generate different sounds.

In the demo video, we get to hear the air drums in action, complete with a Stylophone playing melody. Unlike some toy versions that trigger seemingly at random with no rhythm, these air drums are remarkably responsive and sound great. They could be a great performance instrument if designed for the purpose.

We’ve seen similar builds before, too.

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Electroluminescent Surfboard Looks Sharp For Night Surfing

January 1, 2024 by 5 Comments

If you’ve watched Point Break lately, you probably considered the thrill and elation involved in night surfing. If you’ve hung out with a lifeguard, though, you might instead have fretted over the dangers. In any case, it remains a popular pastime, and it’s all the more fun with a light-up surfboard like this one from [Moritz Sivers].

This project came about due to a local tradition for [Moritz], where people often surf at night to avoid the crowded breaks during the day. The build started from scratch, with a foam blank shaped into a compact  design optimized for riversurfing, with three fins set up in a thruster configuration. The back side of the board was given a coat of resin impregnated with glow-in-the-dark pigment such that the entire thing would emit an nice green glow, making it more visible at night. On the top surface, a pocket was cut in the board to host electronics for running an electroluminescent panel, complete with artwork inspired by 2001 – A Space Odyssey. The board was also outlined with EL wire to further improve the look.

[Moritz] has experimented with some neat LED surfboard designs before, too. Video after the break.

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Building A Simple Compressed Air Cannon Is Easy

January 1, 2024 by 33 Comments

The world of warfare was revolutionized by the development of black powder, fireworks, cannons, and the like. You don’t need any of that chemical nonsense to just have fun, though, as this compressed air cannon from [OtisLiu153] demonstrates.

The build uses PVC pipes for both the barrel and the air tank. In the case of the latter, avoiding over-pressurization is key to avoiding injury, though some will say you should simply never build a PVC pipe pressure vessel at all. In this case, [OtisLiu153] strictly recommends 150 psi as a limit, which is nicely within the 280 PSI rating of the 2″ Schedule 40 PVC being used. Though, as they note, the connections in the design aren’t necessarily up to the same rating.

Off-the-shelf couplings are used to piece everything together, with the twin-reservoir design also acting as a useful shoulder mount. Charging the cannon is done via a Schrader valve, as you might find on a bike’s inner tube, and firing is achieved via a ball valve.

Of course, if you build such an air cannon yourself, just be careful with your aim. Video after the break.

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Wii-Inspired Controller Built Using Raspberry Pi Pico

January 1, 2024 by 2 Comments

We all thought Nintendo was going to change the world of gaming when it released the Wii all those years ago. In the end, it was interesting but not really fundamentally life-changing for most of us. In any case, [Sebastian] and [Gabriel] decided to build a Wii-like controller for their microcontroller class at Cornell.

The build uses a pair of Raspberry Pi Pico microcontrollers, communicating over HC-05 Bluetooth modules. One Pico acts as a controller akin to a Wiimote, while the other runs a basic game and displays it on a screen via VGA output. The controller senses motion thanks to a MPU6050 inertial measurement unit, combining both gyros and accelerometers in all three axes.

The duo demonstrate the hardware by using it as a pointer to play a simple Tic-Tac-Toe game. It’s in no way going to light up the Steam charts, but the project page does go into plenty of useful detail on how everything was implemented. If you want to create your own motion gaming controller, you could do worse than reading up on their work.

We’ve seen some other great examples of motion controls put to good use, like this VR bowling game. Video after the break.

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Frog Boy Color Reimagines The Game Boy Color Hardware From The Ground Up

December 31, 2023 by 13 Comments

Sales figures suggest Nintendo did pretty well with the Game Boy Color during its original run, even if the hardware and visuals feel a tad archaic and limited today. [Chris Hackmann] has taken the Game Boy Color design and reworked it from the ground up as the Frog Boy Color, kitting it out with modern upgrades in a GBA-like form factor while retaining the original hardware underneath.

[Chris] went to the wide-style GBA layout for comfort, which he considers superior to the original rectangular Game Boy format. He iterated through over 50 3D-printed enclosure designs to get the design to work, ensuring that the final housing could be CNC machined. He then set out to trim down the original Game Boy Color circuit layout to cut out hardware he considered unnecessary. The original LCD driver could go, since the Q5 replacement LCD he intended to use didn’t need it, and he also considered the IR port to be surplus to requirements. He also set out to replace the original audio amp with his own stereo design.

The result is a wide-format Game Boy Color with a gorgeous modern LCD, USB-C charging, and excellent compatibility with original games and accessories. Files are on Github if you want to build one yourself. Of course, he’s not the only person working on building the best Game Boy ever, but we always love seeing new work in this space. Video after the break.

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Raspberry Pi Pico Becomes Emotionally-Aware Music Visualizer

December 31, 2023 by No comments

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the nascent world of digital music was incredibly exciting. We all cultivated huge MP3 collections and spent hours staring at the best visualizers Winamp and Windows Media Player had to offer. [Rafael] and [Eric] decided to bring back those glory days with their music visualizer that runs on the Raspberry Pi Pico.

The design is quite interesting, going beyond the usual simplistic display of waveforms and spectrograms. Instead, the Pi Pico uses a Fast Fourier Transform analysis to determine the frequencies of the music, ideally then to determine the key, and thus the mood, of the tune.  Then, the visualizer uses different colors to represent those moods, such as green for happy music in a major key, or deeper blues for a sad piece in a minor key. The output of the visualizer is via Bruce Land’s 8-bit color VGA library, which allows the Pi Pico to drive a monitor directly.

Whether the visualizer really gets the music is up for debate.  The visuals simply don’t look sad and depressing enough when listening to Hallelujah, but maybe that’s just the lack of Jeff Buckley’s vocals in the instrumental. Furthermore, getting an FFT analysis to pull out reliable musical information from an audio recording is finicky to say the least. In any case, the blocky and colorful animations are nice to watch nonetheless. They’d make an excellent basis for visuals at your next underground chiptune show, that much is for certain. Video after the break.

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