A model train car carrying a camera

2022 FPV Contest: Get The Train Driver’s View In Your N-Scale Railway

December 28, 2022 by 23 Comments

Model railroaders typically observe their project from high above. It would be neat to see what the world looks like to the residents of your little town, but getting down to their point of view is difficult, especially if you’re working in one of the smaller scales. For those working in the N scale, there’s now an easy way of observing your project as the train driver would see it: [Vassily98] managed to squeeze a wireless camera into an N-scale railcar.

The main challenge here was the extremely limited space available: the track in N-scale layouts is 9 mm wide, meaning that the whole system had to fit in just 23 x 20 mm2, the frontal area of a typical train car. One of the few cameras that fit within that profile was the RunCam Nano 4, which [Vassily98] connected to an ultra-tiny Team BlackSheep 5.8 GHz video transmitter.

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Decentralized Chaos In Germany

December 28, 2022 by 17 Comments

When you’re planning an event with 15,000 hackers in a tight space these days, the COVID logistics can take the wind right out of your sails. And so the Chaos Computer Club decided, for one more year, to put aside plans for the traditional year-end Chaos Communications Congress. In it’s place this year? Everyone is doing their own thing, together but apart, for the “Dezentrale Jahresendveranstaltungen”.

Some local clubs are putting on local events, some of them have talk streams, and it’s all happening everywhere and at once. If you’re not near one of the roughly 30 locations in Europe that are doing something live – check out the streams. But be warned, there’s a lot to process!

Maybe it’s best to start with the schedule, where you can see what’s coming up next. Live streams are going on throughout, until Dec 30. If you missed a talk, you can check out the pre-release versions on Relive, but note that start times and end times are approximate, so you might need to seek around. And once they’re edited and polished up, they’ll show up on the permanent event playlist, which is still just getting started as we write this.

Right now, we’re watching a talk in German about how to program laser shows, but yesterday there were some great talks on subjects as varied as the history of the C language, how perimeter cybersecurity is dead, how to find the Norwegian prime minister in an “anonymous” dataset, and how Hackaday friend [Dave Darko] made his LED dodecahedron that he was showing off at Supercon.

In short, there’s a lot going on. Check it out.

Supercon 2022: Mooneer Salem Goes Ham With An ESP32

December 28, 2022 by 10 Comments

After being licensed as a ham radio operator since the early 2000s, you tend to start thinking about combining your love for the radio with other talents. In a 20-minute talk at Hackaday Supercon 2022, [Mooneer Salem] tells the story of one such passion project that combined software and radio to miniaturize a digital ham radio modulator.

[Mooneer] works as a software developer and contributes to a project called FreeDV (free digital voice), a digital voice mode for HF radio. FreeDV first compresses the digital audio stream, then converts it into a modulation scheme sent out over a radio. The appeal is that this can be understandable down to very low signal-to-noise ratios and includes metadata and all the other niceties that digital signals bring.

Traditionally, this has required a computer to compress the audio and modulate the signal in addition to two sound cards. One card processes the audio in and out of your headset, and another for the audio coming in and out of the radio. [David Rowe] and [Rick Barnich] developed the SM1000, a portable FreeDV adapter based around the STM32F4 microcontroller. However, flash space was running low, and the cost was more than they wanted. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: Mooneer Salem Goes Ham With An ESP32” →

Giving Stable Diffusion Some Depth

December 28, 2022 by 55 Comments

You’ve likely heard quite a bit of buzz over the last few months about Stable Diffusion. The new version (v2) has come out, and in addition to the standard image-to-image and text-to-image modes, it also has a depth-image-to-image that can be incredibly useful. [Andrew] has a write-up that guides you on using this mode.

The basic idea is that you can take both an image and depth into the model, which allows you to control what gets put where. Stable Diffusion is a bit confusing, but we already have some great resources to wrap your head around it. In terms of input, you can use a depth map from a camera with lidar (many recent phones include this) or have another model (like MiDaS) estimate it from a 2D picture. This becomes powerful when you can preserve a specific composition, such as an iconic scene from a well-known movie. You can keep the characters’ poses on the screen but transform the style of the scene into whatever you wish (as seen above).

We have already covered a technique to generate textures right in blender, but this new depth information has already been implemented to provide better accuracy of the textures.

[Justin Alvey] used it to create architectural photos from dollhouse furniture. Using the MiDaS model, he estimated the depth and threw away the RGB aspects by setting the denoising strength to maximum. The simplified dollhouse furniture was easily recognizable to the model, which helped produce great results.

However, the only downside is that the perspective produces a rather dollhouse feel. Changing the focal length and moving farther away helps. Overall, it’s a clever use of what the new AI model can do. It’s a fast-moving space, so this will likely be out of date in a few months.

 

Linux Fu: Miller The Killer Makes CSV No Pest

December 28, 2022 by 27 Comments

Historically, one of the nice things about Unix and Linux is that everything is a file, and files are just sequences of characters. Of course, modern practice is that everything is not a file, and there is a proliferation of files with some imposed structure. However, if you’ve ever worked on old systems where your file access was by the block, you’ll appreciate the Unix-like files. Classic tools like awk, sed, and grep work with this idea. Files are just characters. But this sometimes has its problems. That’s the motivation behind a tool called Miller, and I think it deserves more attention because, for certain tasks, it is a lifesaver.

The Problem

Consider trying to process a comma-delimited file, known as a CSV file. There are a lot of variations to this type of file. Here’s one that defines two “columns.” I’ve deliberately used different line formats as a test, but most often, you get one format for the entire file:

Slot,String 
A,"Hello" 
"B",Howdy 
"C","Hello Hackaday" 
"D","""Madam, I'm Adam,"" he said." 
E 100,With some spaces!
X,"With a comma, or two, even"

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Fiberglass Mesh For Stronger 3D Prints

December 28, 2022 by 32 Comments

There are many clever ways to make stronger 3D prints, be they by the use of special slicing algorithms or by unusual filaments. [Brtv-z] has taken a more straightforward tack, by making glass-reinforced prints using painters fiberglass mesh tape.

It’s a laborious technique that involves stopping the print to manually place the fiberglass at each successive millimeter of print. The resulting test piece comes off the print bed festooned with fiberglass mesh, and once it’s been trimmed, he subjects it to some tests which you’ll see in the video below the break(Russian language, but there are subtitles).

The tests are fairly rough and ready involving a hammer (we winced at the hammering in a vice, but of course this piece isn’t forged steel!) and standing on a flat piece of print balanced between two blocks. As you’d expect, the reinforced piece appears the stronger, but these tests would benefit from a calibrated set-up to quantify the strength.

So if you’re of a mind to experiment, this certainly seems like an accessible if rather tedious way to make glass reinforced 3D prints. If you then want to characterize them, remember this can be done with a bit of farmyard engineering if you have nothing better.

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Mouse Enjoys Its Freedom

December 28, 2022 by 29 Comments

Although it took a little while to standardize on the two-button-with-scroll-wheel setup, most computers have used a mouse or mouse-like device to point at objects on the screen since the 80s. But beyond the standard “point and click” features of the mouse, there have been very few ground-breaking innovations beyond creature comforts. At least, until the “Space Mushroom” mouse from [Shinsaku Hiura] hit our tips line.

This mouse throws away most of the features a typical mouse might have in favor of a joystick-like interface that gives it six degrees of freedom instead of the usual two — while still being about mouse-sized and held in the hand. It doesn’t even have a way of mapping motion directly to movements on the screen. Instead, it maps each degree of freedom to a similar movement of the mouse itself using these three joystick sensors physically linked together, with some underlying programming to translate each movement into the expected movement on the screen.

While this might not replace a standard mouse for every use case anytime soon, it does seem to have tremendous benefit in 3D modeling software, CAD, or anything where orienting a virtual object is the primary goal. Plus, since there’s no limit to the number of mice that can be attached to a computer (beyond USB limitations) this mouse could easily be used in conjunction with a normal mouse much like macro keyboards being used alongside traditional ones.

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