A Lightweight Balloon Tracker For High Altitude Missions

October 3, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 47 Comments

It’s pretty easy to take a balloon, fill it up with helium, and send it up in to the upper atmosphere. It’s much harder to keep track of it and recover it when it falls back to Earth. If you’re trying to do that, you might find some value in the Tiny4FSK project from the New England Weather Balloon Society.

Tiny4FSK is intended to be a very small solution for high-altitude tracking. As you might have guessed from the name, it communicates via 4FSK—four frequency shift keying. Basically, it communicates data via four separate tones. Based around the SAMD21G18A microcontroller, it’s designed to run on a single AA battery, which should last for anywhere from 10-17 hours. It communicates via a Si4063 transmitter set up to communicate on 433.2 MHz, using the Horus Binary v2 system. As for data, it’s hooked up with a GPS module and a BME280 environmental sensor for location. The balloon can figure out where it is, and tell you the temperature, pressure, and humidity up there, too.

If you’re looking for a lightweight balloon tracker, this one might be very much up your alley. We’ve featured other projects in this vein, too. Meanwhile, if you’re developing something new in the high-altitude ballooning space, you could keep it to yourself. Or, alternatively, you could tell us via the tipsline and we’ll tell everybody else. Your call!

Pulley System Makes Headphone Cables More Managable

October 3, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 12 Comments

It’s 2024. You’ve probably got one or more pairs of wireless headphones around the house. [Barnso] prefers wired headphones with a long cable, but he also decries the fact that it often gets tangled in his chair. The solution? A pulley system to make everything easier.

The concept is simple. [Barnso]’s system uses three pulleys. The headphone cable goes to the PC, and then runs over the first pulley. It then runs under a second pulley which is free to move, but weighted so that it naturally wants to fall down under gravity. The cable then comes back up over a third pulley, and then runs to the headphones on [Barnso]’s head. Basically, it’s a super simple cable retraction mechanism that keeps the long headphone cable organized and in one place.

It’s nice to see a simple mechanism that makes life easier, particularly one that solves a problem so many of us have faced in real life. The construction shown in the video is almost (intentionally?) maddeningly hacky but it does the job. If you prefer to go wireless, though, we can show you how to do that too.

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Witch’s Staff Build Is A Rad Glowing Costume Prop

October 2, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 9 Comments

Let’s say you’re going to a music festival. You could just take water, sunscreen, and a hat. Or, you could take a rad glowing witch’s staff to really draw some eyes and have some fun. [MZandtheRaspberryPi] recently undertook just such a build for a friend and we love how it turned out.

The concept was to build a staff or cane with a big glowing orb on top. The aim was to 3D print the top as a very thin part so that LEDs inside could glow through it. Eventually, after much trial and error, the right combination of design and printer settings made this idea work. A Pi Pico W was then employed as the brains of the operation, driving a number of through-hole Neopixel LEDs sourced from Adafruit.

Power was courtesy of a long cable running out of the cane and to a USB power bank in the wielder’s pocket. Eventually, it was revealed this wasn’t ideal for dancing with the staff. Thus, an upgrade came in the form of an Adafruit Feather microcontroller and a 2,000 mAh lithium-polymer battery tucked inside the orb. The Feather’s onboard hardware made managing the lithium cell a cinch, and there were no more long cables to worry about.

The result? A neat costume prop that looks fantastic. A bit of 3D printing and basic electronics is all you need these days to build fun glowing projects, and we always love to see them. Halloween is right around the corner — if you’re building something awesome for your costume, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Creating Video Games With AI: A Mario Example

October 2, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 22 Comments

Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be doing everything these days. Making images, making videos, and replacing most of us real human writers if you believe the hype. Maybe it’s all over! And yet, we persist, to write about yet another job taken over by AI: creating video games.

The research paper is entitled “Video Game Generation: A Practical Study using Mario.” The basic idea is whether a generative AI model can create an interactive video game by first training it on an existing game.

MarioVGG, as it is called, is a “text-to-video model.” It hasn’t built the Mario game that you’re familiar with, though. It takes player commands as text inputs—such as “run, or “jump”—and then outputs video frames showing the result in the ‘game.’ The model was trained on a dataset of frame-by-frame Super Mario Brothers game play, combined with data on user inputs at the time. The model shows an ability to generate believable video output for given player inputs, including basic game physics, item interactions, and collisions. It’s able to do this in a chained way, so that it can reasonably simulate a player making multiple actions and moving through a level of the game.

It’s not like playing a real Mario game yet, by any means. Regardless, the AI model has shown an ability to replicate the world of the game in a way that behaves relatively consistently with its established rules. If you’re in the field of video game development, though, you probably don’t have a lot to worry about just yet—you probably moved past making basic Mario clones years ago, so you’ve got quite an edge for now!

Print Yourself Penrose Wave Tiles As An Excellent Conversation Starter

October 1, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 16 Comments

Ah, tiles. You can get square ones, and do a grid, or you can get fancier shapes and do something altogether more complex. By and large though, whatever pattern you choose, it will normally end up repeating on some scale or other. That is, unless you go with something like a Penrose Wave Tile. Discovered by mathematician Roger Penrose, they never exactly repeat, no matter how you lay them out.

[carterhoefling14] decided to try and create Penrose tiles at home—with a 3D printer being the perfect route to do it. Creating the tiles was simple—the first step was to find a Penrose pattern image online, which could then be used as the basis to design the 3D part in Fusion 360. From there, the parts were also given an inner wave structure to add further visual interest. The tiles were then printed to create a real-world Penrose tile form.

You could certainly use these Penrose tiles as decor, though we’d make some recommendations if you’re going that path. For one, you’ll want to print them in a way that optimizes for surface quality, as post-processing is time consuming and laborious. If you’re printing in plastic, probably don’t bother using these as floor tiles, as they won’t hold up. Wall tiles, though? Go nuts, just not as a splashback or anything. Keep it decorative only.

You can learn plenty more about Penrose tiling if you please. We do love a bit of maths around these parts, too. If you’ve been making your own topological creation, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

Very Tiny Cube Has 384 RGB LEDs

October 1, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 2 Comments

When it comes to making things that glow, there are two ways to stand out from the crowd. You can make something very big, or something very small. [DIY GUY Chris] has done the latter, producing a tiny LED cube that he says is the world’s smallest.

As is so often the way, the build relies on tiny WS2812B-compatible LEDs in a 1 mm x 1 mm form factor. They’re mounted on a series of teeny interlocking PCBs that come together to build a cube that’s just 8 cubic centimeters in volume. Power is courtesy of a small lithium-ion cell that lives inside the cube. Data and power signals flow around the cube via solder connections along the edges of the faces of the cube. Running the show is an ATmega328P, the same microcontroller you’d find in an Arduino Uno. It’s responsible for sending out commands to the LEDs to create various animations.

We can’t speak to [Chris’s] claim about being the world’s smallest, but it is small. We’ve seen other builds in a similar vein, like this barely-larger D20 with a full 2400 LEDs, though. Video after the break.

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Doing 1080p Video, Sort Of, On The STM32 Microcontroller

September 30, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 12 Comments

When you think 1080p video, you probably don’t think STM32 microcontroller. And yet! [Gabriel Cséfalvay] has pulled off just that through the creative use of on-chip peripherals. Sort of.

The build is based around the STM32L4P5—far from the hottest chip in the world. Depending on the exact part you pick, it offers 512 KB or 1 Mbyte of flash memory, 320 KB of SRAM, and runs at 120 MHz. Not bad, but not stellar.

Still, [Gabriel] was able to push 1080p at a sort of half resolution. Basically, the chip is generating a 1080p widescreen RGB VGA signal. However, to get around the limited RAM of the chip, [Gabriel] had to implement a hack—basically, every pixel is RAM rendered as 2×2 pixels to make up the full-sized display. At this stage, true 1080p looks achievable, but it’ll be a further challenge to properly fit it into memory.

Output hardware is minimal. One pin puts out the HSYNC signal, another handles VSYNC. The same pixel data is clocked out over R, G, and B signals, making all the pixels either white or black. Clocking out the data is handled by a nifty combination of the onboard DMA functionality and the OCTOSPI hardware. This enables the chip to hit the necessary data rate to generate such a high-resolution display.

There’s more work to be done, but it’s neat to see [Gabriel] get even this far with such limited hardware. We’ve seen others theorize similar feats on chips like the RP2040 in the Pi Pico, too. Video after the break.

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