One of the great things about new tech tools is just having fun with them, like embracing your inner trickster god to mess with ‘Milton’, an AI trapped in an empty room.
Milton is trapped in a room is a pixel-art game with a simple premise: use a basic paint interface to add objects to the room, then watch and listen to Milton respond to them. That’s it? That’s it. The code is available on the GitHub repository, but there’s also a link to play it live without any kind of signup or anything. Give it a try if you have a few spare minutes.
Under the hood, the basic loop is to let the user add something to the room, send the picture of the room (with its new contents) off for image recognition, then get Milton’s reaction to it. Milton is equal parts annoyed and jumpy, and his speech and reactions reflect this.
The game is a bit of a concept demo for Open Souls whose “thing” is providing AIs with far more personality and relatable behaviors than one typically expects from large language models. Maybe this is just what’s needed for AI opponents in things like the putting game of Connect Fore! to level up their trash talking.
If you don’t happen to have a traditional stone-floored domed clay oven on hand, it can be surprisingly challenging to make a pizza that’s truly excellent. Your domestic oven does a reasonable job, but doesn’t really get hot enough. Even a specialist pizza oven such as [Yvo de Haas]’ Ooni doesn’t quite do the best possible, so he’s upgraded it with the SpinMeister — a system for precise timing of the heat, and controlled rotation of the cooking stone for an even result.
The spinning part is handled by a stepper motor, driving a hex shaft attached to the bottom of the stone through a chuck. The rotating bearing itself is from an aftermarket stone rotator kit. The controller meanwhile is a smart 3D printed unit with a vacuum-fluorescent display module, powered from an Arduino Nano. There’s a motor controller to handle driving the stepper, and an MP3 module for audible warning. It’s all powered from a USB-C powerbank, for true portability. He’s produced a video showing it cooking a rather tasty-looking flatbread, which we’ve placed below. Now for some unaccountable reason, we want pizza.
On the face of it, harnessing wind power to heat your house seems easy. In fact some of you might be doing it already, assuming you’ve got a wind farm somewhere on your local grid and you have an electric heat pump or — shudder — resistive heaters. But what if you want to skip the middleman and draw heat directly from the wind? In that case, wind-powered induction heating might be just what you need.
Granted, [Tim] from the Way Out West Blog is a long way from heating his home with a windmill. Last we checked, he didn’t even have a windmill built yet; this project is still very much in the experimental phase. But it pays to think ahead, and with goals of simplicity and affordability in mind, [Tim] built a prototype mechanical induction heater. His design is conceptually similar to an induction cooktop, where alternating magnetic fields create eddy currents that heat metal cookware. But rather than using alternating currents through large inductors, [Tim] put 40 neodymium magnets with alternating polarity around the circumference of a large MDF disk. When driven by a drill press via some of the sketchiest pullies we’ve seen, the magnets create a rapidly flipping magnetic field. To test this setup, [Tim] used a scrap of copper pipe with a bit of water inside. Holding it over the magnets as they whiz by rapidly heats the water; when driven at 1,000 rpm, the water boiled in about 90 seconds. Check it out in the video below.
It’s a proof of concept only, of course, but this experiment shows that a spinning disc of magnets can create heat directly. Optimizing this should prove interesting. One thing we’d suggest is switching from a disc to a cylinder with magnets placed in a Halbach array to direct as much of the magnetic field into the interior as possible, with coils of copper tubing placed there. Continue reading “Using The Wind And Magnets To Make Heat”→
There is perhaps no more important time to have a business card than when you’re in college, especially near the end when you’re applying for internships and such. And it’s vital that you stand out from the crowd somehow. To that end, Electrical & Computer Engineer [Ryan Chan] designed a tidy card that plays tic-tac-toe.
Instead of X and O, the players are indicated by blue and red LEDs. Rather than having a button at every position, there is one big control button that gets pressed repeatedly until your LED is in the desired position, and then you press and hold to set it and switch control to the other player. In addition to two-player mode, the recipient of your card can also play alone against the ATMega.
The brains of this operation is an ATMega328P-AU with the Arduino UNO bootloader for ease of programming. Schematic and code are available if you want to make your own, but we suggest implementing some type of changes to make it your own. Speaking of, [Ryan] has several next steps in mind, including charlieplexing the LEDs, using either USB-C or a coin cell for power, upgrading the AI, and replacing the control button with a capacitive pad or two. Be sure to check it out in action in the two videos after the break.
Displays are crucial to modern life; they are literally everywhere. But modern flat-panel LCDs and cheap 7-segment LED displays are, well, a bit boring. When we hackers want to display the progress of time, we want something more interesting, hence the plethora of projects using Nixie tubes and various incantations of edge-lit segmented units. Here is [upir] with their take on the simple edge-lit acrylic 7-segment design, with a great video explanation of all the steps involved.
Engraving the acrylic sheets by hand using 3D printed stencils
The idea behind this concept is not new. Older displays of this type used tiny tungsten filament bulbs and complex light paths to direct light to the front of the display. The modern version, however, uses edge-lit panels with a grid of small LEDs beneath each segment, which are concealed within a casing. This design relies on the principle of total internal reflection, created by the contrast in refractive indices of acrylic and air. Light entering the panel from below at an angle greater than 42 degrees from normal is entirely reflected inside the panel. Fortunately, tiny LEDs have a wide dispersion angle, so if they are positioned close enough to the edge, they can guide sufficient light into the panel. Once this setup is in place, the surface can be etched or engraved using a CNC machine or a laser cutter. A rough surface texture is vital for this process, as it disrupts some of the light paths, scattering and directing some of it sideways to the viewer. Finally, to create your display, design enough parallel-stacked sheets for each segment of the display—seven in this case, but you could add more, such as an eighth for a decimal point.
How you arrange your lighting is up to you, but [upir] uses an off-the-shelf ESP32-S3 addressable LED array. This design has a few shortcomings, but it is a great start—if a little overkill for a single digit! Using some straightforward Arduino code, one display row is set to white to guide light into a single-segment sheet. To form a complete digital, you illuminate the appropriate combination of sheets. To engrave the sheets, [upir] wanted to use a laser cutter but was put off by the cost. A CNC 3018 was considered, but the choice was bewildering, so they just went with a hand-engraving pick, using a couple of 3D printed stencils as a guide. A sheet holder and light masking arrangement were created in Fusion 360, which was extended into a box to enclose the LED array, which could then be 3D printed.
[Luizão] wanted to create some hardware to honour the memory of the technology used to put man on the moon and chose the literal core of the project, that of the hardware used to store the software that provided the guidance. We’re talking about the magnetic core rope memory used in the Colossus and Luminary guidance computers. [Luizão] didn’t go totally all out and make a direct copy but instead produced a scaled-down but supersized demo board with just eight cores, each with twelve addressable lines, producing a memory with 96 bits.
The components chosen are all big honking through-hole parts, reminiscent of those available at the time, nicely laid out in an educational context. You could easily show someone how to re-code the memory with only a screwdriver to hand; no microscope is required for this memory. The board was designed in EasyEDA, and is about as simple as possible. Being an AC system, this operates in a continuous wave fashion rather than a pulsed operation mode, as a practical memory would. A clock input drives a large buffer transistor, which pushes current through one of the address wires via a 12-way rotary switch. The cores then act as transformers. If the address wire passes through the core, the signal is passed to the secondary coil, which feeds a simple rectifying amplifier and lights the corresponding LED. Eight such circuits operate in parallel, one per bit. Extending this would be easy.
It is funny how sometimes things you think are bad turn out to be good in retrospect. Like many of us, when I was a kid, I was fascinated by science of all kinds. As I got older, I focused a bit more, but that would come later. Living in a small town, there weren’t many recent science and technology books, so you tended to read through the same ones over and over. One day, my library got a copy of the relatively recent book “The Amateur Scientist,” which was a collection of [C. L. Stong’s] Scientific American columns of the same name. [Stong] was an electrical engineer with wide interests, and those columns were amazing. The book only had a snapshot of projects, but they were awesome. The magazine, of course, had even more projects, most of which were outside my budget and even more of them outside my skill set at the time.
If you clicked on the links, you probably went down a very deep rabbit hole, so… welcome back. The book was published in 1960, but the projects were mostly from the 1950s. The 57 projects ranged from building a telescope — the original topic of the column before [Stong] took it over — to using a bathtub to study aerodynamics of model airplanes.
X-Rays
[Harry’s] first radiograph. Not bad!However, there were two projects that fascinated me and — lucky for me — I never got even close to completing. One was for building an X-ray machine. An amateur named [Harry Simmons] had described his setup complaining that in 23 years he’d never met anyone else who had X-rays as a hobby. Oddly, in those days, it wasn’t a problem that the magazine published his home address.
You needed a few items. An Oudin coil, sort of like a Tesla coil in an autotransformer configuration, generated the necessary high voltage. In fact, it was the Ouidn coil that started the whole thing. [Harry] was using it to power a UV light to test minerals for flourescence. Out of idle curiosity, he replaced the UV bulb with an 01 radio tube. These old tubes had a magnesium coating — a getter — that absorbs stray gas left inside the tube.
