Visually impaired people know something the rest of us often overlooks: we actually don’t see with our eyes, but with our brains. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Ray Lynch] is building a tongue vision system, that will help blind people to see through one of the human brain’s auxiliary ports: the taste buds.
Okay, that’s probably not fair since we never gave the Wii-U a try at all. But doesn’t this seem like a much better idea for controlling a robot than playing a gaming console?
The photo above is a bit deceiving because the unit actually has quite a bit of depth. Despite that, the cleanliness of the build is very impressive. [Alec Waters] started off with a backup monitor meant for automotive use (we’d estimate 7″). There’s a radio receiver, two analog joysticks where your thumbs line up when holding the controller, and an Arduino to pull it all together. If you haven’t figured it out already, this displays the wireless video from the robot he’s controlling. He’s also include an auxiliary port which lets you bypass the radio receiver and plug in a video feed directly.
Still convinced you need Nintendo’s consumer controller with a built-in screen. Yes, that can be hacked to work with all your projects. But seriously, this is way more fun.
Wondering what the heck a lift kit is? You know those low-riding cars that bounce? That’s the idea with this hack. [Justblair] added automatic height adjustment to his Cherry G80, and hid a few other extras while he was at it. Since there’s a fair amount of room inside the case of this model he was able to hide everything and keep just a single cord to run it all.
Certainly what catches your eye is the keyboard’s ability to rise to a typing height automatically. This is accomplished with a few servo motors and some 3D printed replacement feet. There were some hiccups along the way with under-powered servos, but bulking up to some HXT 900 9G models provide more power than is currently necessary. The automatic feature is thanks to a capacitive sensor built with a wire that loops the perimeter of the keyboard.
Of course to monitor the sensor and drive the servos you need some kind of brain. For that [Justblair] went with an ATmega32U4 breakout board. Since he had to patch into USB for power anyway he added a USB hub and routed one of the ports out the left side of the keyboard as a convenient way to connect other peripherals. There was even room to include an RFID reader which he uses to unlock his sessions (similar to the desk install from earlier this year). There’s still a lot of potential left in that hardware. To make future improvements easier the hack includes an IDC socket as an auxiliary port.
[Justblair] did a great job of sharing his work. His post links to a Github repo for the code and a Thingiverse project for the 3D printed legs. And it wouldn’t be complete without the demo video which is found below.
Continue reading “Pimp My Keyboard: Automatic Lift Kit And More”
[Michael] just sent us this nice example of some good ol’ fashioned radio hacking.
He originally received the radio from his grandmother, and while he doesn’t listen to the radio much, he felt he couldn’t just let it go to waste. So like any good hacker he cracked open the case and took a look inside.
The beauty with radios from the 80’s is the simplicity of it all. They typically have single layer PCBs and nice big components which makes it so much easier to tinker with.
He used a bench power supply to bypass the main transformer for safety’s sake, and began probing the various points. The cassettes audio output was the easiest to find, but unfortunately it required the play button to be activated. Not wanting to lose functionality (or have an annoying rattling cassette mechanism), he continued probing and eventually found similar wires coming from the radio part of the PCB. Upon further probing he discovered he could trick the radio band button so that the radio would be off, but the output could still be used. After that it was just a matter of wiring, soldering, and adding an auxiliary plug to the case.
We’ve covered lots of auxiliary port hacks in the past, but this one is a great example of saving old technology from the dump.
[Thanks Michael!]
At 5:20 PM on November 9, 1965, the Tuesday rush hour was in full bloom outside the studios of WABC in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The drive-time DJ was Big Dan Ingram, who had just dropped the needle on Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.” To Dan’s trained ear, something was off about the sound, like the turntable speed was off — sometimes running at the usual speed, sometimes running slow. But being a pro, he carried on with his show, injecting practiced patter between ad reads and Top 40 songs, cracking a few jokes about the sound quality along the way.
Within a few minutes, with the studio cart machines now suffering a similar fate and the lights in the studio flickering, it became obvious that something was wrong. Big Dan and the rest of New York City were about to learn that they were on the tail end of a cascading wave of power outages that started minutes before at Niagara Falls before sweeping south and east. The warbling turntable and cartridge machines were just a leading indicator of what was to come, their synchronous motors keeping time with the ever-widening gyrations in power line frequency as grid operators scattered across six states and one Canadian province fought to keep the lights on.
They would fail, of course, with the result being 30 million people over 80,000 square miles (207,000 km2) plunged into darkness. The Great Northeast Blackout of 1965 was underway, and when it wrapped up a mere thirteen hours later, it left plenty of lessons about how to engineer a safe and reliable grid, lessons that still echo through the power engineering community 60 years later.
As you can probably imagine, we get tips on a lot of really interesting projects here at Hackaday. Most are pretty serious, at least insofar as they aim to solve a specific problem in some new and clever way. Some, though, are a little more lighthearted, such as a fun project that came across the tips line back in May. Charmingly dubbed “pISSStream,” the project taps into NASA’s official public telemetry stream for the International Space Station to display the current level of the urine tank on the Space Station.
Now, there are a couple of reactions to a project like this when it comes across your desk. First and foremost is bemusement that someone would spend time and effort on a project like this — not that we don’t appreciate it; the icons alone are worth the price of admission. Next is sheer amazement that NASA provides access to a parameter like this in its public API, with a close second being the temptation to look at what other cool endpoints they expose.
But for my part, the first thing I thought of when I saw that project was, “How do they even measure liquid levels in space?” In a place where up and down don’t really have any practical meaning, the engineering challenges of liquid measurement must be pretty interesting. That led me down the rabbit hole of low-gravity process engineering, a field that takes everything you know about how fluids behave and flushes it into the space toilet.
Continue reading “Where There Is No Down: Measuring Liquid Levels In Space”
On 31 March of this year we had to bid farewell to Charlotte Elizabeth “Betty” Webb (née Vine-Stevens) at the age of 101. She was one of the cryptanalysts who worked at Bletchley Park during World War 2, as well as being one of the few women who worked at Bletchley Park in this role. At the time existing societal biases held that women were not interested in ‘intellectual work’, but as manpower was short due to wartime mobilization, more and more women found themselves working at places like Bletchley Park in a wide variety of roles, shattering these preconceived notions.
Betty Webb had originally signed up with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), with her reasoning per a 2012 interview being that she and a couple of like-minded students felt that they ought to be serving their country, ‘rather than just making sausage rolls’. After volunteering for the ATS, she found herself being interviewed at Bletchley Park in 1941. This interview resulted in a years-long career that saw her working on German and Japanese encrypted communications, all of which had to be kept secret from then 18-year old Betty’s parents.
Until secrecy was lifted, all her environment knew was that she was a ‘secretary’ at Bletchley Park. Instead, she was fighting on the frontlines of cryptanalysis, an act which got acknowledged by both the UK and French governments years later.
Continue reading “Remembering Betty Webb: Bletchley Park & Pentagon Code Breaker”
