One Man’s Quest To Build A Baby Book With Brains

September 7, 2021 by 44 Comments

Regular readers will know that Hackaday generally steers clear of active crowdfunding campaigns. But occasionally we do run across a project that’s unique enough that we feel compelled to dust off our stamp of approval. Especially if the campaign has already blasted past its funding goal, and we don’t have to feel bad about getting you fine folks excited over vaporware.

It’s with these caveats in mind that we present to you Computer Engineering for Babies, by [Chase Roberts]. The product of five years of research and development, this board book utilizes an internal microcontroller to help illustrate the functions of boolean logic operations like AND, OR, and XOR in an engaging way. Intended for toddlers but suitable for curious minds of all ages, the book has already surpassed 500% of its funding goal on Kickstarter at the time of this writing with no signs of slowing down.

The electronics as seen from the rear of the book.

Technical details are light on the Kickstarter page to keep things simple, but [Chase] was happy to talk specifics when we reached out to him. He explained that the original plan was to use discreet components, with early prototypes simply routing the button through the gates specified on the given page. This worked, but wasn’t quite as robust a solution as he’d like. So eventually the decision was made to move the book over to the low-power ATmega328PB microcontroller and leverage the MiniCore project so the books could be programmed with the Arduino IDE.

Obviously battery life was a major concern with the project, as a book that would go dead after sitting on the shelf for a couple weeks simply wouldn’t do. To that end, [Chase] says his code makes extensive use of the Arduino LowPower library. Essentially the firmware wakes up the ATmega every 15 ms to see if a button has been pressed or the page turned, and updates the LED state accordingly. If no changes have been observed after roughly two minutes, the chip will go into a deep sleep and won’t wake up again until an interrupt has been fired by the yellow button being pressed. He says there are some edge cases where this setup might misbehave, but in general, the book should be able to run for about a year on a coin cell.

[Chase] tells us the biggest problem was finding a reliable way to determine which page the book was currently turned to. In fact, he expects to keep tinkering with this aspect of the design until the books actually ship. The current solution uses five phototransistors attached to the the MCU’s ADC pins, which receive progressively more light as fewer pages are laying on top of them. The first sensor is exposed when the second page of the book is opened, so for example, if three of the sensors are seeing elevated light levels the code would assume the user is on page four.

Opening to the last page exposes all five light sensors.

The books and PCBs are being manufactured separately, since as you might expect, finding a single company that had experience with both proved difficult. [Chase] plans on doing the final assembly and programming of each copy in-house with the help of family members; given how many have already been sold this early in the campaign, we hope he’s got a lot of cousins.

So what do you do with an Arduino-compatible book when Junior gets tired of it? That’s what we’re particularly interested in finding out. [Chase] says he’s open to releasing the firmware as an open source project after the dust settles from the Kickstarter campaign, which would give owners a base to build from should they want to roll their own custom firmware. Obviously the peripheral hardware of the book is fairly limited, but nothing is stopping you from hanging some sensors on the I2C bus or hijacking the unused GPIO pins.

If you end up teaching your copy of Computer Engineering for Babies some new tricks, we’ve love to hear about it.

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Review: Hands On With The Swarm Satellite Network Eval Kit

September 7, 2021 by 29 Comments

If you have devices out in the field, you probably want to connect with them. There was a time when that was hard to do, requiring telephone wires or specialized radio gear. Now cellular data is prevalent, but even cellular isn’t everywhere. If you have the cash, you can pay a number of satellite companies to carry your data, but that’s generally pricey and has its own challenges.

The age of satellite constellations is changing that. Of course everyone by now has heard of Starlink which is offering satellite internet via numerous satellites that are much smaller than traditional telecom satellites. But they’re not the only came in town.

A company called Swarm has put up a constellation of 1/4U cube satellites in low orbits. They offer a ground station that uses an omni antenna and a subscription access program for small amounts of data. They sent us a unit to review, and while I haven’t used the system in a real project yet, the kit was pretty impressive.

About Swarm

Swarm tile device
The Swarm Tile is made to mount on a PCB

The Swarm “tile” is a tiny radio that can talk bi-directionally with small satellites in low Earth orbit. The little unit is made to mount on a PCB, can control its power consumption, and talks to your system via a standard 3.3V UART connection. It does, however, require a small antenna and maybe even a smaller antenna for its GPS module. Small, in this case, is about a mid-size handy talkie antenna. There is a half-wave antenna that doesn’t need a ground plane and a shorter antenna that does need a ground plane.

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Scanning electron micrograph of a microfabricated lens array

Getting A Fly’s-Eye View With Microfabricated Lens Arrays

September 7, 2021 by 11 Comments

Atomic force microscopy, laser ablation, and etching with a witches brew of toxic chemicals: sounds like [Zachary Tong] has been playing in the lab again, and this time he found a way to fabricate arrays of microscopic lenses as a result.

Like many of the best projects, [Zach]’s journey into micro-fabrication started with a happy accident. It happened while he was working on metal-activated chemical etching (MACE), which uses a noble metal catalyst to selectively carve high-aspect-ratio features in silicon. After blasting at a silver-coated silicon wafer with a laser, he noticed the ablation pits were very smooth and uniform after etching. This led him to several hypotheses about what was going on, all of which he was able to test.

The experiments themselves are pretty interesting, but what’s really cool is that [Zach] realized the smooth hemispherical pits in the silicon could act as a mold for an array of microscopic convex lenses. He was able to deposit a small amount of clear silicone resin into the mold by spin-coating, and (eventually) transfer the microlens array to a glass slide. The lenses are impressively small — hundreds of them over only a couple hundred square microns — and pretty well-formed. There’s always room for improvement, of course, but for an initial attempt based on a serendipitous finding, we’d call it a win. As for what good these lenses are, your guess is as good as ours. But novel processes like these tend to find a way to be useful, and the fact that this is coming out of a home lab doesn’t change that fact.

We find this kind of micro-fabrication fascinating. Whether it’s making OLED displays, micro-machining glass with plasma, or even rolling your own semiconductors, we can’t get enough of this stuff.

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Pandemic Gives Passersby A Window On Cyborg Control

September 7, 2021 by 3 Comments

What’s this? Another fabulous creation from [Niklas Roy] and [Kati Hyyppä] that combines art and electronics with our zeitgeist and a lot of recycled bits and bobs? You got it. Their workshop in eastern Berlin used to be a retail shop and has a large display window as a result. This seems perfect for a pair of artists in a pandemic, because they can communicate with the community through the things they display in the window. Most recently, it was this interactive cyborg baby we are choosing to call Cybaby.

You might recognize Cybaby as one of the very hackable Robosapien robots, but with a baby doll head. (It also has a single red eye that really pulls its look together.) In the window, Cybaby comes alive and toddles around against a backdrop that grew and evolved over several weeks this spring and summer. Passersby were able to join the network and control Cybaby from outside with their smartphone to make it walk around, press various buttons that change its environment, and trigger a few sensors here and there. Robosapien has been around for about 20 years, so there is already Arduino code out there that essentially simulates its R/C signals. [Niklas] and [Kati] used a NodeMCU (ESP12-E) to send pulses to the IR input of the robot.

Back on the zany zeitgeist front, there’s a hair salon, a convenience store, and a nightclub for dancing that requires a successful trip through the testing center first (naturally). Oh, and there’s a lab next door to the nightclub that can’t be accessed by Cybaby no matter what it tries or how it cries. Check it out after the break.

There’s a dearth of Robosapien posts for some reason, so here’s what [Niklas] and [Kati] had in their window before the World of Cybaby — a really cool pen plotter that prints out messages sent by people walking by.

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Squares of sample materials placed on the laser bed awaiting the sensing head

Smart Laser Cutter Ad-on Detects Material Optically

September 6, 2021 by 9 Comments

Come on now, admit it. You’ve done it. We’ve done it. You know — you were really sure that sheet of plastic stock you found lying around the hackerspace was acrylic right? You dialled in the settings, loaded the design, set the focus and pushed the little green ‘start’ button. Lots of black smoke, fire, and general badness ensued as you lunged for the red ‘stop’ button, before lifting the lid to work out how you’re going to clean this one up.

That was not acrylic. That was polycarbonate.

What you need is the latest gadget from MIT: SensiCut: A smart laser cutter system that detects different materials automatically.

The technique makes use of so-called ‘speckle imaging’ where a material illuminated by a laser will produce a unique pattern of reflected spots, or speckles into a camera. By training a deep neural model with a large set of samples, it was found possible to detect up to 30 types of material with 98% accuracy.

The pre-baked model runs on a Raspberry PI zero with an off-the-shelf camera all powered from a power bank. This allows the whole assembly to simply drop onto an existing laser cutter head, with no wiring needed.

Even if you’re a seasoned laser cutter user, with a well-controlled stock pile, the peace-of-mind this could give would definitely be worth the effort. A more detailed description and more videos may be found by reading the full paper. Here’s hoping they release the system as open source, one day in the not-to-distant future. If not, then, you know what to do :)

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the introduction page of "a summary of electronics"

This Electronics Overview Guides New Hackers In The Right Direction

September 6, 2021 by 12 Comments

Many of us don’t have a formal background to build off when taking on new hacks, we have had to teach ourselves complex concepts and learn by doing (or more commonly, by failing). To help new hackers get off the ground a bit easier, [PhilosopherFar3847] created a fantastic starter’s resource on electronics, The Electroagenda Summary of Electronics.

[PhilosipherFar3847] created Electroagenda with the goal of helping amateurs, students, and professionals alike better understand electronics. The Summary of Electronics, one of the more recent additions to the website, is split across 26 sections each breaking down a different electrical concept into easy-to-understand facts with no math or unfamiliar jargon. The summary covers a broad range of electronics, from simple passive components and their uses, up to the basic operating concepts of a microcontroller.

While this resource on its own will not be enough to get a fledgling hacker started making cool circuits, it does provide a very important skill; knowing how to ask the right questions. This base of knowledge provides enough context and keywords to better articulate a challenge and Google-fu a bit more effectively.

Are you the aforementioned fledgling hacker, looking to learn more? check out these nifty logic gates you can plug into each other to build a basic circuit.

[via r/diyelectronics]

Homebrew Sounder Maps The Depths In Depth

September 6, 2021 by 10 Comments

For those who like to muck around in boats, there’s enough to worry about without wondering if you’re going to run aground. And there’s really no way to know that other than to work from charts that show you exactly what lies beneath. But what does one do for places where no such charts exist? Easy — make your own homebrew water depth logger.

Thankfully, gone are the days when an able seaman would manually deploy the sounding line and call out the depth to the bottom. [Neumi]’s sounding rig uses an off-the-shelf sonar depth sounder, one with NMEA, or National Marine Electronic Association, output. Combined with a GPS module and an Arduino with an SD card, the rig can keep track not only of how much water is below it, but exactly where the measurement point is. The whole thing is rigged up to an inflatable dinghy which lets it slowly ply the confines of a small marina, working in and out of the nooks and crannies. A bit of Python and matplotlib stitches that data together into a bathymetric map of the harbor, with pretty fine detail. The chart also takes the tides into account, as the water level varies quite a bit over the four hours it takes to gather all the data. See it in action in the video after the hop.

There’s something cool about revealing the mysteries of the deep, even if they’re not that deep. Want to go a little deeper? We’ve seen that before too.

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