FreeTouchDeck Upgrades Its Hardware And Its Name: ESP32 Touchdown

February 14, 2021 by 23 Comments

With many folks continuing to work from home for far longer than they ever thought, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing the rise of small DIY devices to make that video call or virtual presentation a little easier. [Dustin Watts] was interested in the functionality of the Elgato Stream Deck — a macro keyboard where each key is its own screen. But that kind of fancy hardware comes with a formidable price tag. So he built his own, and made it open source!

His first iteration — FreeTouchDeck — was built using commonly available modules but has since evolved into the ESP32 Touchdown which does it all with a single PCB. It’s a highly-customizable touchscreen macro keyboard which provide easy access shortcuts and macros for quick actions. Need a quick mute button, want to switch camera views on OBS, or maybe you want smarter shortcut keys for your CAD of choice. This will can get you there.

There a few key differences from the first version (FreeTouchDeck). The ESP32 dev board was ditched for a tidy PCB the directly integrates the module. This one has a capacitive touch controller (FT6236) rather than a resistive one as the capacitive screens deliver a far nicer user experience. A built-in battery and charger circuit (which the FreeTouchDesk didn’t have) allows for the extra bit of flexibility to stream from anywhere (within wireless range of course). Multiple case designs are available in STL form that allows it to be placed on a wall or desk with ease.

Datasheets, gerbers, kicad files, BOMs, and example firmware is provided on GitHub. The software is easily configurable so it can be set up to do any sort of macro, key combination, or action. This isn’t just limited to emulating a Bluetooth keyboard as there are examples showing how to connect to Home Assistant. All in all, this is a wonderful example of continued iteration on a project.

Thanks [Timothy Gregory] for sending this one in!

How To Bake Brownies With A Perfect Glossy Skin

February 14, 2021 by 35 Comments

If you’re anything at all like this writer, you don’t spend a lot of time inspecting brownies past the initial object identification phase, preferring to insert them directly into the mouth post-haste. But those with more of an aesthetic focus take great care to produce brownies with a glossy, attractive skin. [Adam Ragusea] decided to find out what it takes to get a perfect brownie skin, time after time.

After many, many trays of brownies, [Adam], with the assistance of [Dr. Pia Sörensen], determined that the key seems to be making a brownie mixture with very finely dissolved sugar, in sucrose form, with a carefully controlled amount of water in the mixture. This produces a thick mixture which can hold together against the gases bubbling out during the cooking process, and produces a nice glossy skin. Too much water, and the mixture isn’t viscous enough to hold up, leading to brownies full of pock marks, while alternative sugars like fructose and glucose likely disrupt the ordered structure of sucrose molecules necessary for a shiny surface.

Together, [Adam] and [Pia] do a great job of exploring the molecular chemistry behind the process, as well as ruling out several myths that have been perpetuated in the viciously insular brownie subculture. All they’re missing is a set of standardised reflectivity tests executed with an Arduino and some photodiodes, but we’ll assume that was just cut for time. We’ve seen other hacks in the realm of molecular gastronomy before, like this homebrew kitchen centrifuge. Video after the break.

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Stray Cat Shelter Is Nicer Than Our First Apartment

February 14, 2021 by 59 Comments

There are a lot of stray cats roaming around [Red Tie Projects’] neighborhood, and no one seems to care much about what happens to them. Fortunately for the cats, [Red Tie Projects] cares quite a lot, as evidenced by this colossal cat condo they built. The cats retain their freedom, but get food and a warm, sheltered bed whenever they decide to grace [Red Tie Projects] with their presence.

[Red Tie Projects] built this sturdy shelter from pallet wood and did a fine job of it, sealing all the seams and screws up with wood putty and waterproofing it with silicone. Inside there’s a heated pillow, a light, and a remote-controlled camera so RTP] can pan around and keep an eye on the cats. All the wires run out through a weatherproof junction box attached to the side and over to a control box made from an ATX power supply.

Most of the build is made from scrap, including the best part — an Arduino-driven motorized zip line for delivering food from the balcony to the cat porch. Details on the control box and the food delivery system are coming soon, as [Red Tie Projects] teases in the video after the break. We’re looking forward to seeing those. Oh, and don’t worry — there’s more than enough footage to cover the cat tax.

If [Red Tie Projects] ever takes any of those cats in, their demands will only increase. Maybe they can handle the sound of a motorized chair that follows the sun, since they’re tough street cats and all.

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Truck Bed Liners Improve 3D Prints

February 14, 2021 by 27 Comments

There are at least two kinds of 3D printer operators: those who work hard to make their prints look better after they come off the bed and those who settle for whatever comes off the printer. If you are in the latter camp, you probably envy people who have smooth prints with no visible layer lines. But the sanding and priming and multiple coats of paint can put you off.

[Teaching Tech] has a few tricks that might change your mind. He shares his technique for using different coatings for 3D prints that provide good quality with a lot less effort. The coatings in question are polyurethane used for coating pickup truck beds and bitumen rubber used for waterproofing. In the United States, bitumen is known as asphalt, and both materials are relatively cheap, available, and safe to use.

According to the video you can see below, there’s no need to sand or prime the print. In addition to covering imperfections and sealing gaps, it produces watertight prints that have UV resistance and some measure of protection against heating.

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Legacy Digital Photos, With A Side Of Murphy’s Law

February 14, 2021 by 26 Comments

[Dave Madison] came across some old digital photos, and in his quest to access them, he ran into quite a few challenges. The saga brings to mind both Murphy’s Law, and while [Dave] prevailed in the end, it required quite a few more steps than one might expect.

The one smooth part of the process was that Konica’s proprietary software had a handy JPEG export feature.

Here’s the scene: in the late 90s, Konica partnered with photo shops to provide a photo scanning service, delivering digital scans of film photos on 3.5″ floppy disks, and that’s exactly what [Dave] had to work with. The disks were in good condition, and since modern desktop computers still support floppy drives and the FAT filesystem, in theory all one needs to do is stick disks into the reader one at a time in order to access the photos.

Sadly, problems started early. A floppy drive is revoltingly slow compared to any modern storage device, so [Dave]’s first step was to copy all of the files to his machine’s local storage before working on them. This took a bit of wrangling to deal with 8.3 format file names and avoid naming collisions across disks while still preserving some metadata such as original creation date. It was nothing a quick python script couldn’t handle, but that soon led to the next hurdle.

The photos in question were in an obsolete and proprietary Konica .KQP format. [Dave] went through a number of photo viewing programs that claimed to support .KQP, but none of them actually recognized the images.

Fortunately, each disk contained a copy of Konica’s proprietary “PC PictureShow” viewer, but despite having a variety of versions dated between 1997 and 2001 (making them from the Windows 98 and Windows ME eras) [Dave] could not get any version of the program to run in Windows 10, even with compatibility mode for legacy programs enabled. The solution was to set up a Windows XP virtual machine using Oracle’s Virtualbox, and use that to ultimately run PC PictureShow and finally access the photos. After all that work, [Dave] finally had a stroke of luck: Konica’s software had a handy feature to export images in JPEG format, and it worked like a charm.

In the end, [Dave] was able to save 479 out of the 483 images on the old floppy disks, with a reminder that proprietary formats are a pain. The disks and images may have been over twenty years old, but the roots of digital imaging go considerably further back than that. Take a few minutes out your day to read a bit about Russell Kirsch and the first digitized image, that of his three-month old son in 1957.

RFID Music Player Gets The Whole House Pumping

February 13, 2021 by 11 Comments

RFID tags are normally used for pedestrian tasks like tracking shipping crates or opening doors to workplaces we’d rather be absent from, but they can also be cool and fun. [hoveeman] demonstrates this ably with a tidy jukebox project.

The build is based on a Raspberry Pi Zero, secreted away underneath a table with a USB RFID reader attached. Atop the table are a series of RFID cards upon which [hoveeman] printed the artwork from his favorite albums using a special caddy in an inkjet printer. Through some Python code and shell scripts, when scanning a card, the Pi Zero is able to trigger all the Google Home compatible devices in the house to play the album selected at the same time.

It’s a visually enjoyable way to cue up some music, and likely more reliable than most voice assistants, too. We can see this being particularly useful for Weezer fans; with the band’s many self-titled releases, Siri and the Google Assistant typically fail to play the right album on request. We’ve seen other beautiful RFID jukeboxes before, but one player that really sticks out ditched the RF and just uses computer vision with vinyl albums as the ID.

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Can You Code Without Google?

February 13, 2021 by 106 Comments

Imagine for a moment that something has taken out your phone line, cell, and fibre connection so you have no internet. For some of you this may even be reality, but go with it and imagine yourself deciding to use your unexpectedly disconnected lockdown time pursuing that code project you always promised yourself. You pull out your laptop and fire up a code editor. Can you write code that works, without the Internet as a handy crib sheet? [Austin Z. Henley] couldn’t, when he tried writing a straightforward web app. He uses it as a hook to muse on the nature of learning, and it’s certainly a thought-provoking subject.

It has become an indispensable tool for the engineer and the coder alike, to constantly refer to online knowledge. This makes absolute sense, as it provides a reference library that will be many orders of magnitude in excess of anything an individual can possibly hold personally.

This holds true whether the resource takes the form of code snippets from StackOverflow or GitHub, or data sheets from TI or Microchip. Even our calculations have moved online, as it’s often much quicker to use an online calculator on a web page to derive for example an impedance calculation. This is not necessarily a bad thing, instead it’s an enabler; skills that used to take months to master due to slow information access can now be acquired in an afternoon. But it does pose the interesting question, in the Internet age what is the measure of an expert coder? Is it the ability to produce the code effectively with whatever help is available, or is it a guru-like mastery of the code? Maybe it’s both. If you have the Internet, give us your views in the comments.