Sit Pretty On Would-Be Garbage With An Upcycled Chair

What’s the coolest thing about doing upholstery work? Aside from the fact that you end up with a new thing to sit on, sometimes the work only involves clever stapling, and no sewing is necessary. Such is the case with [wyldestyle]’s upcycled jeans chair, which started as a bare-wood swivel number from the dump. In fact, this project is almost completely made from recycled materials, except of course for those staples that hold it all together. And really, that heavy-duty stapler is likely the fanciest tool you’d need to make your own.

[wyldestyle] didn’t have any furniture foam, and we think that stuff is too expensive, anyway. So the padding treatment begins with a piece of thick Styrofoam that covers the seat screws and bolts. This is glued in place and trimmed down to match the contours of the chair’s seat and back.

Here’s where things gets tricky: the next step is wrapping over the stiff foam board with a few layers of that foam sheeting stuff that’s often used as packing material. This sheeting needs to be taut, but pull it too tight, and it will rip.

To add some loft to the chair, [wyldestyle] stretched and stapled the stuffing from an old pillow that was headed for the garbage. The final step is strategically scissoring jean scraps to fit, then stretching and stapling those to cover all the layers underneath. We like the way this chair looks, and would probably try to place pockets somewhere useful, like the back of the chair.

It’s a shame that so much denim goes to waste all over the world. There’s often a lot of life left in most of the fabric, which can be repurposed into all kinds of things, including eyeglasses frames using a wicked set of jigs.

Otters Deliver A High Power Stationary Audio Experience

Our favorite raft of otters is back at it again with another display of open source audio prowess as they bring us the OtterCastAmp, the newest member of the OtterCast family of open source audio multitools. If you looked at the previous entry in the series – the OtterCastAudio – and thought it was nice but lacking in the pixel count or output power departments then this is the device for you.

The Amp is fundamentally a very similar device to the OtterCastAudio. It shares the same Allwinner S3 Cortex-A application processor and runs the same embedded Linux build assembled with Buildroot. In turn it offers the same substantial set of features and audio protocol support. It can be targeted by Snapcast, Spotify Connect or AirPlay if those are your tools of choice, or act as a generic PulseAudio sink for your Linux audio needs. And there’s still a separate line in so it source audio as well.

One look at the chassis and it’s clear that unlike the OtterCastAudio this is not a simple Chromecast Audio replacement. The face of the OtterCastAmp is graced by a luscious 340×800 LCD for all the cover art your listening ear can enjoy. And the raft of connectors in the back (and mountain of inductors on the PCBA) make it clear that this is a fully fledged class D amplifier, driving up to 120W of power across four channels. Though it may drive a theoretical 30W or 60W peak across its various outputs, with a maximum supply power of 100W (via USB-C power delivery, naturally) the true maximum output will be a little lower. Rounding out the feature set is an Ethernet jack and some wonderfully designed copper PCB otters to enjoy inside and out.

As before, it looks like this design is very close to ready for prime time but not quite there yet, so order at your own risk. Full fab files and some hints are linked in the repo mentioned above. If home fabrication is a little much it looks like there might be a small manufacturing run of these devices coming soon.

Historical Hackers: Emergency Antennas Launched By Kite

Your airplane has crashed at sea. You are perched in a lifeboat and you need to call for help. Today you might reach for a satellite phone, but in World War II you would more likely turn a crank on a special survival radio.

These radios originated in Germany but were soon copied by the British and the United States. In addition to just being a bit of history, we can learn a few lessons from these radios. The designers clearly thought about the challenges stranded personnel would face and came up with novel solutions. For example, how do you loft a 300-foot wire up to use as an antenna? Would you believe a kite or even a balloon?

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Scanner Captures View-Master Discs As Glorious 3D Videos

The toys of the past may have been cheesy, but you can’t deny the creativity needed to build something engaging without any electronics. One stalwart toy from this category is View-Master, the little stereoscopic slide viewer that brought the world to life in seven vibrant scenes. And digitizing these miniature works of art is the purpose of this neat View-Master reel scanner project.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of using a View-Master, the gist is that a flat cardboard disc ringed with 14 color transparencies was inserted into a plastic viewer. Binocular eyepieces showed scenes from opposing pairs of slides, which were illuminated by a frosted screen and room lighting. The scenes were photographed from slightly different angles, leading to a stereoscopic image that was actually pretty good quality.

In the video below, project creator [W. Jason Altice] describes View-Master as “the YouTube of the 1950s.” We partially agree; with only seven frames to tell a story, we’d say it’s more like TikTok than YouTube. Regardless, capturing these mini-movies requires quite a bit of complexity. All the parts for the reel carousel are 3D-printed, with a small stepper to advance the reel and an optical sensor to register its position. A ring of RGB LEDs beneath the reel illuminates the slides; being able to control the color of the light helps with color balancing for slides with faded colors. An 8-megapixel camera captures each slide, and some pretty slick software helps with organizing the image pairs, tweaking their alignment, capturing the captions from the disc, and stitching everything into a video.

There’s a whole YouTube channel devoted to View-Master captures, which are best viewed with a Google Cardboard or something similar. Even without the 3D effect, it’s still pretty cool to watch [Popeye] beat up a nuke again.

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Simple Encryption You Can Do On Paper

It’s a concern for Europeans as it is for people elsewhere in the world: there have been suggestions among governments to either outlaw, curtail, or backdoor strong end-to-end encryption. There are many arguments against ruining encryption, but the strongest among them is that encryption can be simple enough to implement that a high-school student can understand its operation, and almost any coder can write something that does it in some form, so to ban it will have no effect on restricting its use among anyone who wants it badly enough to put in the effort to roll their own.

With that in mind, we’re going to have a look at the most basic ciphers, the kind you could put together yourself on paper if you need to.

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Mind-Controlled Flamethrower

Mind control might seem like something out of a sci-fi show, but like the tablet computer, universal translator, or virtual reality device, is actually a technology that has made it into the real world. While these devices often requires on advanced and expensive equipment to interpret brain waves properly, with the right machine learning system it’s possible to do things like this mind-controlled flame thrower on a much smaller budget. (Video, embedded below.)

[Nathaniel F] was already experimenting with using brain-computer interfaces and machine learning, and wanted to see if he could build something practical combining these two technologies. Instead of turning to an EEG machine to read brain patterns, he picked up a much less expensive Mindflex and paired it with a machine learning system running TensorFlow to make up for some of its shortcomings. The processing is done by a Raspberry Pi 4, which sends commands to an Arduino to fire the flamethrower when it detects the proper thought patterns. Don’t forget the flamethrower part of this build either: it was designed and built entirely by [Nathanial F] as well using gas and an arc lighter.

While the build took many hours of training to gather the proper amount of data to build the neural network and works as the proof of concept he was hoping for, [Nathaniel F] notes that it could be improved by replacing the outdated Mindflex with a better EEG. For now though, we appreciate seeing sci-fi in the real world in projects like this, or in other mind-controlled projects like this one which converts a prosthetic arm into a mind-controlled music synthesizer.

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