Table Held Up By Strings Teaches Physics

March 25, 2020 by Al Williams 34 Comments

If you’ve never heard of a tensegrity structure, you should stop now and watch the video below. In it, [The Action Lab] shows a 3D printed table that is held up only with strings. We didn’t say suspended by strings but held up. Or so it appears. The model is from Thingiverse, but it is one of those things you have to see to believe.

The basic idea is pretty simple. Strings have a lot of tensile strength but collapse under the slightest compressive force. The arrangement of strings puts the force on the center string which is essentially hanging — the force is pulling the string down. The other three strings aren’t just for show, though, they keep the structure from tipping over in any one direction.

There are actually real-life examples of these kinds of structures. The video shows the Skylon at the Festival of Britain as one example and an Australian bridge. The video also makes the point that the human body uses tensegrity, since tendons are very similar to the strings in the model.

This would be a great experiment for a homeschooler or even kids cooped up in quarantine. The print itself doesn’t look very challenging, although the assembly might be a bit tricky.

This isn’t the first structure like this that we’ve seen. If the talk about tendons makes you think this might be useful in robotics, you’d be correct.

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Silicone And AI Power This Prayerful Robotic Intercessor

March 25, 2020 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

Even in a world that is as currently far off the rails as this one is, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that this machine learning, servo-powered prayer bot is going to be the strangest thing you see today. We’re happy to be wrong about that, though, and if we are, please send links.

“The Prayer,” as [Diemut Strebe]’s work is called, may look strange, but it’s another in a string of pieces by various artists that explores just what it means to be human at a time when machines are blurring the line between them and us. The hardware is straightforward: a silicone rubber representation of a human nasopharyngeal cavity, servos for moving the lips, and a speaker to create the vocals. Those are generated by a machine-learning algorithm that was trained against the sacred texts of many of the world’s major religions, including the Christian Bible, the Koran, the Baghavad Gita, Taoist texts, and the Book of Mormon. The algorithm analyzes the structure of sacred verses and recreates random prayers and hymns using Amazon Polly that sound a lot like the real thing. That the lips move in synchrony with the ersatz devotions only adds to the otherworldliness of the piece. Watch it in action below.

We’ve featured several AI-based projects that poke at some interesting questions. This kinetic sculpture that uses machine learning to achieve balance comes to mind, while AI has even been employed in the search for spirits from the other side.

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Cesium Clock Teardown, Or Quantum Physics Playground

March 25, 2020 by Al Williams 20 Comments

Half the fun of getting vintage test equipment is getting to open it up. Maybe that’s even more than half of the fun. [CuriousMarc] got an HP 5061A Cesium clock, a somewhat famous instrument as the model that attempted to prove the theory of relativity. The reason? The clock was really the first that could easily be moved around, including being put on an airplane. You can watch the video below.

According to the video, you can simplify special relativity to saying that time slows down if you go fast — that is known as time dilation. General relativity indicates that time slows down with increasing gravity. Therefore, using airborne Cesium clocks, you could fly a clock in circles high up or fly at high speeds and check Einstein’s predictions.
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Electromagnetic Field 2020 Cancelled

March 25, 2020 by Jenny List 4 Comments

It’s the news we were all expecting but not looking forward to hearing: this summer’s EMF Camp which was to be held at the end of July in Herefordshire, UK, has been cancelled. This is of course due to the ongoing public health measures surrounding the COVID-19 virus pandemic. With the country on lockdown for the forseeable future, this is a responsible decision for a gathering the size of EMF which hosted around 2,500 attendees in 2018.

Existing ticket holders will be refunded, and will be guaranteed a ticket to the next event in 2022. According to the announcement, EMF is in the red to the tune of at least £25,000 ($29,523) because of non-refundable payments associated with booking the event, something to remember in two years time when faced with the choice of a normal ticket or a supporters ticket.

Work on starting conference badge production has been halted, but development continues apace and will not go to waste as it will form the basis of the 2022 item. This will make them the event badge team with the earliest preparation ever, and from what we saw when we had a brief look at an early prototype last year it should be a badge worth waiting for.

We’re sure all readers will understand the gravity of the situation, and that the EMF team have taken an appropriate response to what is an extraordinary series of events. Organising a hacker camp is a tough job at the best of times, and this must have been particularly hard on them. We thank them for their work on our behalf at previous events and in preparing for this aborted one, and we look forward to the next EMF Camp in 2022.

GSM Module Does More Than Advertised

March 25, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

For many projects, a WiFi connection is overkill, too complicated, or too far away to work properly. Even though it’s relatively ubiquitous, sometimes the best choice for getting data to or from the real world is a connection to the cellular network, which can be done with the M590 module for about a dollar each. For that price, lots of people have had the opportunity to explore the module itself, and [marcrbarker] shows some of the extra, unadvertised, features it has.

Acting as a GSM module that can send and receive SMS messages is just the tip of the iceberg for this tiny device which we saw once before for a DIY GPS tracker. With a USB TTL serial data module, a lot more is on the table including answering voice calls and responding with DTMF tones, operate as a dial-up modem, connect with TCP, and even has some FTP capabilities. [marcrbarker] also suggests that it could do “call pranking” where it can send signals without being charged for a call.

There are a lot of details on the project site about all of this newfound functionality, and it reminds us of a time when it was discovered that not only was the ESP8266 a cheap WiFi module, but it could also run custom programs on its own. While the M590 probably can’t do all of that, it does seem to have a lot more locked away than most of us had thought before.

Geofence Warrant Sends Bicyclist’s Privacy Over The Handlebars

March 25, 2020 by Kristina Panos 98 Comments

About a year ago, Zachary McCoy took a bike ride around his neighborhood in Gainesville, Florida. It may have been forgettable to him, but not to history. Because McCoy used an app to track his mileage, the route was forever etched in the Google-verse and attached to his name.

On the day of this ill-fated bike ride, McCoy passed a certain neighbor’s house three times. While this normally wouldn’t raise alarm, the neighbor happened to be the victim of a burglary that day, and had thousands of dollars worth of jewelry stolen. The Gainesville police had zero leads after a four-day investigation, so they went to the county to get a geofence warrant. Thanks to all the location data McCoy had willingly generated, he became the prime suspect.

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Thunder Pack Is A Bolt Of Lightning For Wearables

March 25, 2020 by Kristina Panos 19 Comments

Do you need portable power that packs a punch? Sure you do, especially if you want to light up the night by mummifying yourself with a ton of LED strips. You aren’t limited to that, of course, but it’s what we pictured when we read about [Jeremy]’s Thunder Pack. With four PWM channels at 2.3 A each, why not go nuts? [Jeremy] has already proven the Thunder Pack out by putting it through its paces all week at Burning Man.

After a few iterations, [Jeremy] has landed on the STM32 microcontroller family and is currently working to upgrade to one with enough flash memory to run CircuitPython.

The original version was designed to run on a single 18650 cell, but [Jeremy] now has three boards that support similar but smaller rechargeable cells for projects that don’t need quite as much power.

We love how small and powerful this is, and the dongle hole is a great touch because it opens up options for building it into a wearable. [Jeremy] made a fantastic pinout diagram and has a ton of code examples in the repo. If you want to wade into the waters of wearables, let whimsical wearables wizard [Angela Sheehan] walk you through the waves.