Balloons Are The User Interface Of The Future

July 26, 2022 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

We’ve seen all kinds of interfaces come and go over the years, from keyboards and mice to lightpens and touchscreens. Now, a group of researchers at the University of Tokyo have built a device that enables haptic interaction with a balloon.

It takes quite a rig to achieve this feat. A vaguely-spherical frame is used, which mounts eleven airborne ultrasound phased arrays, or AUPA. Each phased array is made up of many ultrasonic transducers, with the machine having 2739 individual transducers in total. The phased arrays are controlled in such a way to create a sound field that moves the balloon around and holds it in various desired positions. Closed loop control is achieved with the use of stereo cameras, which track the balloon’s position at high speed.

The system allows the balloon to be moved around quickly in three dimensions. Plus, a user can touch and interact with the balloon directly as it floats in mid-air. They can even drag and redirect the balloon, which can be tracked by the stereo camera system.

The research team don’t highlight any particular applications for this technology at this stage. We’re not expecting the Touch Balloon on next year’s Surface Pro or the next MacBook, that’s for sure. However, it’s great fun to look at and likely has some creative applications that we can’t think of off the top of our heads. Share yours in the comments.

The 2022 Hackaday Prize has a special focus on odd inputs and peculiar peripherals, so be sure to check out that whole scene. Video after the break.

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Omnidirectional Walker With Wheeled Feet

July 26, 2022 by Danie Conradie 4 Comments

[James Bruton] is on a quest to explore all the weird and wonderful methods of robot locomotion, and in his latest project created an omnidirectional walker that can move in any direction instantaneously.

The walker actually makes use of three independent four-legged Strider mechanisms, connected in a triangle at 120deg. Wheels are attached to the bottom of each leg, oriented at a right angle to the leg’s plane of motion to allow the foot to slide. Varying the relative speed and direction of each of the mechanisms lets the robot move in any direction, similar to his ball-wheeled robot. Each strider mechanism uses a single motor and looks similar to Strandbeest walkers, but it lifts its feet to traverse rougher terrain. [James] demonstrates this with some obstacles, and found that moving in such an orientation that all three sets of legs provide the best results.

[James] planes to build a larger rideable version, but we think he should mount a chest of Sapient Pearwood to carry all his stuff and name it The Luggage.

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A New Way To Produce PCBs With Your 3D Printer

July 26, 2022 by Tom Nardi 50 Comments

With the low-cost PCB fabrication services available to hackers and makers these days, we’ll admit that making your own boards at home doesn’t hold quite the appeal that it did in the past. But even if getting your boards professionally made is cheaper and easier than it ever has been before, at-home production still can’t be beat when you absolutely must have a usable board before the end of the day.

If you find yourself in such a situation, this new method of DIY PCB production detailed by [Adalbert] might be just what you need. This unique approach uses a desktop fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer throughout all of its phases, from creating a stencil based on the exported board design, to warming the UV soldermask to accelerate the curing process. It may not be an ideal choice for densely packed boards with fine-pitch components, but could definitely see it being useful for many prototypes.

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Hackaday Prize 2022: Digital Dice Towers Built In Beautiful Retro Cases

July 26, 2022 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Retro hardware often looks fantastic, but we may find we no longer need it for its original function. [John Anderson] found that to be the case with some old Heathkit gear, and set about giving them a fun overhaul.

With the help of AVR microcontrollers, the devices have been repurposed into electronic dice towers for playing Dungeons & Dragons. A seed is generated based on the chip’s uptime, and supplied to a pseudorandom number generator that emulates dice rolls. The devices can be configured to roll a variety of dice, including the usual 6, 8, 10, and 20-sided varieties. Plus, they can be set to roll multiple dice at a time — useful when you’re rolling complicated spells and attacks in combat.

[John] has converted a variety of Heathkit devices, from Morse code trainers to digital multi-meters. They provide their beautiful cases and a great retro aesthetic, and we think they’d make fitting table decoration for retro cyberpunk tabletop games, too.

Creating your own electronic dice is a great way to get familiar with programming microcontrollers. Video after the break.

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Biomimetic Surfaces: Copying Nature To Deter Bacteria And Keep Ship Hulls Smooth

July 26, 2022 by Maya Posch 25 Comments

You might not think that keeping a boat hull smooth in the water has anything in common with keeping a scalpel clean for surgery, but there it does: in both cases you’re trying to prevent nature — barnacles or biofilm — from growing on a surface. Science has looked to nature, and found that the micro-patterning formed by the scales of certain sharks or the leaves of lotus plants demonstrate a highly elegant way to prevent biofouling that we can copy.

In the case of marine growth attaching to and growing on a ship’s hull, the main issue is that of increased drag. This increases fuel usage and lowers overall efficiency of the vessel, requiring regular cleaning to remove this biofouling. In the context of a hospital, this layer of growth becomes even more crucial. Each year, a large number of hospital patients suffer infections, despite the use of single-use catheters and sterile packaging.

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DOOM Runs On The EMFCamp Tidal Badge

July 26, 2022 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

If it’s got a chip and a screen, someone’s trying to run DOOM on it. The latest entry in this fad is from [Phil Ashby], who figured out how to get the game running on the EMFCamp Tidal Badge as seamlessly as possible.

The badge is based on the ESP32-S3. It’s the latest version of the ESP32, which can run the iconic shooter pretty easily. However, [Phil] set himself a trickier challenge. He wanted to port DOOM to the badge while having it remain compatible with the MicroPython platform already on it. Plus, he wanted to be able to distribute it easily with the TiDAL Hatchery, a platform for sharing apps for the badge.

In the end, it took some deft hacking to make the game run on a microcontroller platform that isn’t really set up for running “applications.” It took some tricks to scale the video output and get the colors right, of course, but it’s there and working.

The state of the art is now so advanced that they managed to port DOOM into DOOM so you can DOOM while you DOOM. Video after the break.

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Protecting The Hughes H4 Hercules With… Beach Balls?

July 26, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 45 Comments

While visiting the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, OR, USA over the weekend, I came across a hack.

In addition to the excellent displays on site and an area where one can watch a video on repeat, the museum offers guided tours for a very reasonable price. And it was during this tour that my life as an aviation geek changed forever. Why? I got to visit the flight deck of the H4 and even sit in the pilots seat where Howard Hughes sat when he flew the plane almost 75 years ago.

It was later in the tour, after I’d had a moment to take in the enormity of sitting in the seat, that I found a wonderful hack to share with you all: and it’s all about beach balls. Continue reading “Protecting The Hughes H4 Hercules With… Beach Balls?” →