Ski Season Sees Apple’s Crash Detection System Fire Deluge Of False Positives

February 9, 2023 by 39 Comments

Smartphone features used to come thick and fast. Cameras proliferated, navigation got added, and then Apple changed the game by finally making touch computing just work. Since then, truly new features have slowed to a trickle, but Apple’s innovative crash detection system has been a big deal where safety is concerned.

The problem? It’s got a penchant for throwing false positives when iPhone and Apple Watch users are in no real danger at all. We first covered this problem last year, but since then, the wintery season has brought yet more issues for already-strained emergency responders.

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Does Programming A Robot With ChatGPT Work At All?

February 9, 2023 by 41 Comments

ChatGPT has been put to all manner of silly uses since it first became available online. [Engineering After Hours] decided to see if its coding skills were any chop, and put it to work programming a circular saw. Pun intended.

The aim was to build a line following robot armed with a circular saw to handle lawn edging tasks.  The circular saw itself consists of a motor with a blade on it, and precisely no safety features. It’s mounted on the front of a small RC car with a rack and pinion to control its position. [Engineering After Hours] has some sage advice in this area: don’t try this at home.

ChatGPT was not only able to give advice on what parts to use, it was able to tell [Engineering After Hours] on how to hook everything up to an Arduino and even write the code. The AI language model even recommended a PID loop to control the position of the circular saw. Initial tests were messy, but some refinement got things impressively functional.

As a line following robot, the performance is pretty crummy. However, as a robot programmed by an AI, it does pretty okay. Obviously, it’s hard to say how much help the AI had, and how many corrections [Engineering After Hours] had to make to the code to get everything working. But the fact that this kind of project is even possible shows us just how far AI has really come.

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Ask Hackaday: Incidental Earthquake Detection

February 9, 2023 by 13 Comments

It never seems to fail: at the very moment that human society seems to reach a new pinnacle of pettiness, selfishness, violence, and self-absorption, Mother Nature comes along and reminds us all who’s really in charge. The obvious case in point here is the massive earthquakes near the border of Turkey and Syria, the appalling loss of life from which is only now becoming evident, and will certainly climb as survivors trapped since the Monday quakes start to succumb to cold and starvation.

Whatever power over nature we think we can wield pales by comparison with the energy released in this quake alone, which was something like 32 petajoules. How much destruction such a release causes depends on many factors, including the type of quake and its depth, plus the soil conditions at the epicenter. But whatever the local effects on the surface, quakes like these have a tendency to set the entire planet ringing like a bell, with seismic waves transmitted across the world that set the needles of professionally maintained seismometers wiggling.

For as valuable as these seismic networks are, though, there’s a looser, ad hoc network of detection instruments that are capable of picking up quakes as large as these from half a planet away. Some are specifically built to detect Earth changes, while some are instruments that only incidentally respond to the shockwaves traveling through the planet. And we want to know if this quake showed up in the data from anyone’s instruments.

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Five Years On, Where Is Starman And Where Will He Go?

February 9, 2023 by 55 Comments

On 6 February 2018, a Tesla Roadster was launched as the mass simulator on the first ever Falcon Heavy launch — putting for the first time ever a car on a Mars-crossing orbit. While undoubtedly a bit of a stunt, the onboard cameras provided an amazing view of our planet Earth as the Starman dummy in the Roadster slowly drifted away from that blue marble, presumably never to be seen again.

This “never” is the point that researchers at the University of Toronto would like to clarify in a paper published after the launch titled The Random Walk of Cars and Their Collision Probabilities with Planets. Using N-body simulations, they come to the conclusion that there’s a 22%, 12%, and 12% chance of the Roadster impacting the Earth, Venus, and the Sun, respectively. But don’t get too excited, it’s not due to happen for a few million years, so it isn’t something any of us will be around to see.

As the Where Is Starman? website shows, the Roadster never reached escape velocity from the Sun’s gravity, meaning that it’s still zipping around in an orbit around our day star. Exposed to the harsh UV and other radiation, it’s likely that very little is left at this point of the Tesla, or Starman himself. Even so, scientists to this day are feeling less than amused by what they see as essentially littering, adding to the discarded rocket stages, dead satellites and other debris that occasionally makes it into the news when it smashes into the Moon, or threatens the ISS.

Utility Mat Turns Waste Epoxy Into Useful Tools

February 9, 2023 by 46 Comments

Epoxy is a great and useful material typically prepared by mixing two components together. But often we find ourselves mixing too much epoxy for the job at hand, and we end up with some waste left behind. [Keith Decent’s] utility mat aims to make good use of what is otherwise waste material.

The concept is simple yet ingenious. It’s a flexible mat that serves as a mold for all kinds of simple little plastic workshop tools. The idea is that when you have some epoxy left over from pouring a finish on a table or laying up some composites, you can then pour the excess into various sections of the utility mat. The epoxy can then be left to harden, producing all manner of useful little tools.

It may seem silly, but it could save your workshop plenty of nickels and dimes. Why keep buying box after box of stir sticks when you can simply make a few with zero effort from the epoxy left from your last job? The utility mat also makes other useful nicknacks like glue spreaders, scrapers, wedges, and painter’s pyramids.

We’ve seen other great recycling hacks over the years too. Video after the break.

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The ARPANET Of Things And CMU’s History Of Networked Soda Machines

February 8, 2023 by 10 Comments

When the computer science department of Carnegie Mellon University expanded in the 1970s, this created a massive issue for certain individuals who now found that they had to walk quite a distance to the one single Coke machine. To their dismay, they’d now find that after braving a few flights of stairs, they’d find that the Coke machine (refilled randomly by grad students) was empty, or worse, had still warm Coke bottles inside. What happened next is detailed by the Coke machine itself, straight from the CMU’s servers.

A follow-up by the IBM Industrious blog adds more feedback from those responsible for we now refer to as an IoT device, though technically it was an AoT at the time, being a pre-Internet era. For the bottle-based, 1970s machine, microswitches were installed by students in the machine to keep track of the fill state of each column and for how long the bottles had been inside. After about 3 hours newly added bottles were registered as being ‘COLD’, which could be queried from the PDP-10’s mainframe (CMUA) or via ARPANET using the finger command on the special ‘coke’ user account with finger coke@cmua.

As time moved on and the coke machine was replaced  in the early 90s with a newer (and very much non-IoT) model, students would once again attempt to modify it, much to the chagrin of the Coke company’s maintenance people, resulting in the students reverting modifications prior to a maintenance appointment. This tracking system used the empty column lights on the machine, leading to a similar tracking system as on the 1970s machine, except now running on a PC-XT class computer that also tracked the status of the M&M snack machine nearby.

Whether CMU CS students can still query such highly relevant information today is not mentioned, but we presume it is an issue of paramount importance that has been addressed in an expedient fashion over the intervening years.

(Thanks to [Daniel T Erickson] for the tip)

Understanding AI Chat Bots With Stanford Online

February 8, 2023 by 8 Comments

The news is full of speculation about chatbots like GPT-3, and even if you don’t care, you are probably the kind of person that people will ask about it. The problem is, the popular press has no idea what’s going on with these things. They aren’t sentient or alive, despite some claims to the contrary. So where do you go to learn what’s really going on? How about Stanford? Professor [Christopher Potts] knows a lot about how these things work and he shares some of it in a recent video you can watch below.

One of the interesting things is that he shows some questions that one chatbot will answer reasonably and another one will not. As a demo or a gimmick, that’s not a problem. But if you are using it as, say, your search engine, getting the wrong answer won’t amuse you. Sure, you can do a conventional search and find wrong things, but it will be embedded in a lot of context that might help you decide it is wrong and, hopefully, some other things that are not wrong. You have to decide.
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