“Enhance” Is Now A Thing, But Don’t Believe What You See

November 25, 2020 by 64 Comments

It was a trope all too familiar in the 1990s — law enforcement in movies and TV taking a pixellated, blurry image, and hitting the magic “enhance” button to reveal suspects to be brought to justice. Creating data where there simply was none before was a great way to ruin immersion for anyone with a modicum of technical expertise, and spoiled many movies and TV shows.

Of course, technology marches on and what was once an utter impossibility often becomes trivial in due time. These days, it’s expected that a sub-$100 computer can easily differentiate between a banana, a dog, and a human, something that was unfathomable at the dawn of the microcomputer era. This capability is rooted in the technology of neural networks, which can be trained to do all manner of tasks formerly considered difficult for computers.

With neural networks and plenty of processing power at hand, there have been a flood of projects aiming to “enhance” everything from low-resolution human faces to old film footage, increasing resolution and filling in for the data that simply isn’t there. But what’s really going on behind the scenes, and is this technology really capable of accurately enhancing anything?

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Building A Mask To Induce Lucid Dreaming

November 25, 2020 by 33 Comments

While dreams are generally thought of as the unconscious wanderings of the mind, that’s not the full story. Lucid dreams are ones in which the individual is conscious or semi-conscious in the dream state, and may be able to control the dream environment. Over the years, various devices have been used to generate these dream states more reliably. [Ben] decided to have a go at building his own, inspired by designs from the 1990s.

To induce lucid dreaming, the aim is to first detect that the mask wearer is in REM sleep. This is commonly done with an infrared eye tracker, which detects the rapid twitching of the eye. [Ben] used the onboard IR proximity sensor on the Adafruit Circuit Playground Express to pull this off. The accelerometer hardware was then used to detect if the wearer was still, indicating they are indeed fully asleep. Once the user is in the correct state, the mask then flashes LEDs which are intended to be visible to the wearer while dreaming. This allows them to realise they are dreaming, and thus enter a conscious, lucid state.

[Ben] doesn’t report the success rate at using the mask, but we’d love to know more about how well the mask works. We’ve seen others do similar work before, and even a recent Hackaday Prize entry. Video after the break.

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The Wow! Signal And The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence

November 25, 2020 by 54 Comments

On a balmy August evening in 1977, an enormous radio telescope in a field in the middle of Ohio sat silently listening to the radio universe. Shortly after 10:00 PM, the Earth’s rotation slewed the telescope through a powerful radio signal whose passage was noted only by the slight change in tone in the song sung every twelve seconds by the line printer recording that evening’s data.

When the data was analyzed later, an astronomer’s marginal exclamation of the extraordinarily powerful but vanishingly brief blip would give the signal its forever name: the Wow! Signal. How we came to hear this signal, what it could possibly mean, and where it might have come from are all interesting details of an event that left a mystery in its wake, one that citizen scientists are now looking into with a fresh perspective. If it was sent from a region of space with habitable planets, it’s at least worth a listen.

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A Raspberry Pi 400 UPS Add-On, It’s Not All Plain Sailing

November 25, 2020 by 51 Comments

Since the recent launch of the all-in-one Raspberry Pi 400, the global hardware community have taken to the new platform and are investigating its potential for hardware enhancements. On the back it has the same 40-pin expansion connector as its single-board siblings, but it’s horizontal rather than vertical, which means that all of the conventional HATs sit in a rather ungainly upright position.

One of the first Pi 400 HATs we’ve seen comes from [Patrick Van Oosterwijck], who has made a very neat 18650-based UPS add-on that is intended to eventually fit in the back of the machine in a similar way to the home computer cartridge peripherals of old. Unfortunately not all has gone according to plan, and in finding out why that is the case we learn something about the design of the 400, and maybe even take a chance to reflect on the Pi Foundation itself.

On the face of it the 400’s interface is the same as that of its single board computer stablemates, but something this project reveals is that its 5 V pins have a current limit of 1 A. This turns out to preclude the type of plug-in Pi UPS that sits on a HAT that we’re used to, in that 1 A through the 5 V pin is no longer enough to run the computer.

This effectively puts a stop to [Patrick]’s project, though he can repurpose it for a Pi 4 and its siblings once he’s dealt with a converter chip overheating problem. He does however make a complaint about the Pi Foundation’s slowness in releasing such data about their products, and given that long-time Pi-watchers will remember a few other blips in the supply of Pi hardware data he has a point. A quick check of the Raspberry Pi GitHub repository reveals nothing related to the Pi 400 at the time of writing, and though it shares much with its Pi 4 sibling it’s obvious that there are enough differences to warrant some extra information.

Hardware hackers may not be part of the core education focus of the Pi range, but a healthy, interested, and active hardware community that feels nurtured by its manufacturer remains key to the supply of interesting Pi-related products feeding into that market. We’d like to urge the Pi Foundation to never forget the hardware side of their ecosystem, and make hardware specification an integral part of every product launch on day one.

If the Pi 400 catches your interest, you can read our review here.

SMD Challenge Extreme Edition Gets Our Flux Flowing

November 25, 2020 by 15 Comments

Skills challenges have become a fun way to facilitate friendly competition amongst anyone who appreciates a fine solder joint. If you’ve seen any Supercon / Remoticon coverage there’s surely been a mention of the infamous soldering skills challenge, where competitors test their mettle against surface mount components sized to be challenging but fair. What if there was a less friendly SMD challenge designed to make you hold your breath lest you blow the components away? Well now there is, the SMD Challenge Extreme Edition by friend-of-the-Hackaday and winner of the 2019 Supercon soldering challenge [Freddie].

When assembled the SMD Extreme Edition uses a 555 timer and a 74HC4017 decade counter to light a ring of 10 LEDs lights around its perimeter, powered by a coin cell. However the  Extreme Edition deviates from the typical SMD Challenge format. Instead of ramping up in difficulty with ever-shrinking components, the Extreme Edition only has one size: torturous. See those gray blobs in the title image? Those are grains of rice.

The Extreme Edition’s 0201-sized LEDs aren’t the absolute smallest components around, but to minimize enjoyment all passives are 01005. (Check out the SMD Challange Misery Edition for even 01005 LED action.)

The Extreme Edition has other tricks up its sleeve, too. That 555 may be venerable in age, but this version is in an iron-frustrating 1.41 x 1.43 mm BGA package, which pairs nicely with that decade counter in 2.5 mm x 3.5 mm QFN.

Despite the wordwide pandemic locking down travel and conferences, a few brave challengers have already taken up their iron and succeeded at Extreme SMD. Want to see it in action? Check out the original Tweets after the break.

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True Networked KVM Without Breaking The Bank

November 24, 2020 by 27 Comments

For administering many computers at once, an IP KVM is an invaluable piece of equipment that makes it possible to get the job done over the network without having to haul a keyboard, monitor, and mouse around to each computer. The only downside is that they can get pricey, unless of course you can roll one out based on the Raspberry Pi and the PiKVM image for little more than the cost of the Pi itself.

The video linked below shows how to set all of this up, which involves flashing the image and then setting up the necessary hardware. The build shows an option for using HDMI over USB, but another option using the CSI bus would allow for control over options like video resolution and color that a USB HDMI dongle doesn’t allow for. It also makes it possible to restart the computer and do things like configure BIOS or boot from removable media, which is something that would be impossible with a remote desktop solution like VNC.

The creator of PiKVM was mentioned in a previous post about the creation of the CSI bus capture card, and a Pi hat based on this build will be available soon which would include options for ATX controls as well. Right now, though, it’s possible to build all of this on your own without the hat, and is part of what makes the Pi-KVM impressive, as well as its very low cost.

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Real Spectrum Analysis Goes Virtual

November 24, 2020 by 4 Comments

One of the hard things about electronics is that you can’t really see the working parts without some sort of tool. If you work on car engines, fashion swords, or sculpt clay, you can see with your unaided eye what’s going on. Electronic components are just abstract pieces and the real action requires a meter or oscilloscope to understand. Maybe that’s what [José] was thinking of when he built a-radio. This “humble experiment” pipes a scan from a software-defined radio into VR goggles, which can be as simple as a smartphone and some cardboard glasses.

The resulting image shows you what the radio spectrum looks like. Granted, so will a spectrum analyzer, but perhaps the immersion will provide a different kind of insight into radio frequency analysis.

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