Twitch And Blink Your Way Through Typing With This Facial Keyboard

April 9, 2022 by 17 Comments

For those that haven’t experienced it, the early days of parenthood are challenging, to say the least. Trying to get anything accomplished with a raging case of sleep deprivation is hard enough, but the little bundle of joy who always seems to need to be in physical contact with you makes doing things with your hands nigh impossible. What’s the new parent to do when it comes time to be gainfully employed?

Finding himself in such a boat, [Fletcher]’s solution was to build a face-activated keyboard to work around his offspring’s needs. Before you ask: no, voice recognition software wouldn’t work, at least according to the sleepy little boss who protests noisy awakenings. The solution instead was to first try OpenCV and the dlib facial recognition library to watch [Fletcher] blinking out Morse code. While that sorta-kinda worked, one’s blinkers can’t long endure such a workout, so he moved on to an easier set of gestures. Mouthing Morse code covers most of the keyboard, while a combination of eye, eyebrow, and other facial twitches and tics cover the rest, with MediaPipe’s Face Mesh doing the heavy-lifting in terms of landmark detection.

The resulting facial keyboard, aptly dubbed “CheekyKeys,” performed well enough for [Fletcher] to use for a skills test during an interview with a Big Tech Company. Imagining the interviewer on the other end watching him convulse his way through the interview was worth the price of admission, and we don’t even care if it was a put-on. Video after the break.

CheekyKeys is pretty cool, doing something with a webcam and Python that we thought would have needed a dedicated AI depth camera to accomplish. But perhaps the real hack here was how [Fletcher] taught himself Morse in fifteen minutes.

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Night Vision: Now In Color

April 9, 2022 by 36 Comments

We’ve all gotten used to seeing movies depict people using night vision gear where everything appears as a shade of green. In reality the infrared image is monochrome, but since the human eye is very sensitive to green, the false-color is used to help the wearer distinguish the faintest glow possible. Now researchers from the University of California, Irvine have adapted night vision with artificial intelligence to produce correctly colored images in the dark. However, there is a catch, as the method might not be as general-purpose as you’d like.

Under normal illumination, white light has many colors mixed together. When light strikes something, it absorbs some colors and reflects others. So a pure red object reflects red and absorbs other colors. While some systems work by amplifying small amounts of light, those don’t work in total darkness. For that you need night vision gear that illuminates the scene with infrared light. Scientists reasoned that different objects might also absorb different kinds of infrared light. Training a system on what colors correspond to what absorption characteristics allows the computer to reconstruct the color of an image.

The only thing we found odd is that the training was on printed pictures of faces using a four-color ink process. So it seems like pointing the same camera in a dark room would give unpredictable results. That is, unless you had a huge database of absorption profiles. There’s a good chance, too, that there is overlap. For example, yellow paint from one company might look similar to blue paint from another company in IR, while the first company’s blue looks like something else. It is hard to imagine how you could compensate for things like that.

Still, it is an interesting idea and maybe it will lead to some other interesting night vision improvements. There could be a few niche applications, too, where you can train the system for the expected environment and the paper mentions a few of these.

Of course, if you have starlight, you can just use a very sensitive camera, but you still probably won’t get color. You can also build your own night vision gear without too much trouble.

Enjoy This Animatronic Eyeball’s Smooth Moves

April 8, 2022 by 10 Comments

[Enza3D] shows off a surprisingly compact articulated animatronic eyeball that can be intuitively controlled with a Wii nunchuk controller. The design uses 3D printed parts and some tiny servos, and all of the necessary electronics can be easily purchased online. The mechanical design of the eye is very impressive, and [Enza3D] walks through several different versions of the design, the end result of which is a tidy little assembly that would fit nicely into masks, costumes, or other projects.

A Wii nunchuk is ideal for manual control of such a device, thanks to its ergonomic design and ease of interface (the nunchuk communicates over I2C, which is easily within the reach of even most modest of microcontrollers.) Of course, since driving servos is also almost trivial nowadays, it doesn’t look like working this into an automated project would pose much of a challenge.

The eyeball looks great, but if you want to try for yourself, accessing the design files and code will set you back $10 which might look attractive if an eye like this is the missing link for a project.

On the other hand, enjoying the video (embedded below) and getting ideas from [Enza3D]’s design notes will only cost you a few minutes.

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Just In Case You Want To Charge Your Neighbor’s Tesla

April 8, 2022 by 67 Comments

Tesla vehicles have a charging port that is under a cover that only opens on command from a charging station. Well, maybe not only. [IfNotPike] reports that he was able to replay the 315MHz signal using a software defined radio and pop the port open on any Tesla he happened to be near.

Apparently, opening the charging port isn’t the end of the world since there isn’t much you can do with the charging port other than charging the car. At least, that we know of. If history shows anything, it is that anything you can get to will be exploited eventually.

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A Bargain In Bionic Knees

April 8, 2022 by 17 Comments

You probably don’t want to lose a leg, but if you have to there are many options now that were unthinkable not long ago. That is, if you can afford them. A microprocessor knee — a prosthetic with some smarts in it — can run anywhere from $25,000 to well over $100,000. However [Lucas Galey], a PhD candidate at the University of Texas El Paso in a recent paper claims to be able to produce a comparable artificial knee for under $1,000. If the paper is too long to read, Amplitude has a good summary including what it means to people who need them.

Of course, the cost of making something like this is almost incidental. The cost of approvals, testing, and other factors mean that even with about $500 in parts, the retail price would be much higher. Probably not $25,000, though.

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Wordle Comes To The Nokia N-Gage Thanks To New SDK

April 8, 2022 by 3 Comments

You probably never imagined you’d be reading about new software getting developed for Nokia’s infamous N-Gage handheld game system in 2022, and we certainly never thought we’d be writing about it. But here we are. Of course, we aren’t talking about a commercial title — this is an unofficial port of Wordle by “taco phone” superfan [Michael Fitzmayer].

[Michael] tells us that this first version is pretty simplistic, and currently uses a single word list with all 2,309 terms in the New York Times version. Translations to Finnish, Russian, and German are in the works, though interestingly it looks like the effort is currently stymied by the fact that the code doesn’t support words with hyphens in them; meaning it’s possible to find yourself in an unwinnable situation if you’re playing in Russian. We’re sure that’s just a coincidence and not meant as any kind of political commentary, but still…you can’t make this stuff up.

In Soviet Russia, N-Gage plays you!

So how does one go about developing a new game for a failed console from the early 2000s? The answer is by using the modern N-Gage SDK that’s is currently in development, which lets you write code for the system using popular tools and libraries like Visual Studio 2022, CMake, and SDL. But [Michael] isn’t just a user of this new SDK, he’s also the brains behind the operation.

The hope is this new development platform will lead to something of a renaissance for the maligned device, and he’s even started a Discord server to discuss the past, future, and present of sidetalkin’. If you’re surprised to find yourself looking up what a used N-Gage goes for on eBay these days, join the club.

A Close Look At A Little Known 8-bit Computer

April 8, 2022 by 47 Comments

If you read about the history of personal computing, you hear a few familiar names like Microsoft, Apple, and even Commodore. But there were a host of companies that were well known and well regarded back then that are all but forgotten today. Godbout computing, Ohio Scientific, and Southwest Technical Products (SWTP). SWTP is probably best remembered for having a relatively cheap printer and “TV typewriter”, but they also made a 6800-based computer and [Adrian] takes us inside of one.

The 6800 was Motorola’s entry into the microprocessor fray, competing with the Intel 8080. The computer came out scant months after the introduction of the famous Altair 8800. Although the Altair is often credited as being the first hobbyist-grade computer, there were a few earlier ones based on the 8008, but the Altair was the first to be successful.

The SWTP was notable for its day for its blank appearance. Most computers in those days had lots of switches and lights. The SWTP has a blank front with only a power switch and a reset button. A ROM monitor let you use the machine with a terminal. For about the same price as a bare-bones Altair that had no interfaces or memory, you could pick one of these up with most of the extras you would need. The memory was only 2K, but that was 2K more than you got with an Altair at that price point.

The $450 sounds fairly cheap, but in the early 70s, that was a lot of lawns to mow. Of course, while you’d need to add memory to the Altair, you’d have to add some kind of terminal to the SWTP. However, you’d wind up with something more usable but the total bill was probably going to approach $1,000 to get a working system.

Inside the box were some old-fashioned-looking PC boards and connectors that will look familiar to anyone who has been inside 1970s gear. Will it work? We don’t know yet, but we hope it does. [Adrian] promises that will be in the next video.

It is amazing how far we’ve come in less than 50 years. A postage-stamp sized $10 computer now has enough speed and memory to emulate a bunch of these old machines all at once. The SWTP has been on our pages before. A lot of these old machines and companies are all but forgotten, but not by us!

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