Supercon 2023: Soft Actuators As Assistive Tech

August 21, 2024 by 1 Comment

When we think of assistive prostheses or braces, we often think of hard and rigid contraptions. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that prosthetic limbs were still being made out of wood. Even devices made of more modern materials tend to have a robotic quality that inevitably limits their dexterity. However, advancements in soft robotics could allow for assistive devices that more closely mimic their organic counterparts.

At Supercon 2023, Benedetta Lia Mandelli and Emilio Sordi presented their work in developing soft actuator orthosis — specifically, a brace that can help tetraplegics with limited finger and thumb control. Individuals with certain spinal cord injuries can move their arms and wrists but are unable to grasp objects.

A traditional flexor hinge brace

Existing braces can help restore this ability, but they are heavy and limited by the fact that the wearer needs to hold their wrist in a specific position to keep pressure on the mechanism. By replacing the rigid linkage used in the traditional orthosis, the experience of using the device is improved in many ways.

Not only is it lighter and more comfortable to wear, but the grip strength can also be more easily adjusted. The most important advancement however is how the user operates the device.

Like the more traditional designs, the wearer controls the grip through the position of their wrist. But the key difference with the soft actuator version is that the user doesn’t need to maintain that wrist position to keep the grip engaged. Once the inertial measurement units (IMUs) have detected the user has put their wrist into the proper position, the electronics maintain the pressure inside the actuator until commanded otherwise. This means that the user can freely move their wrist after gripping an object without inadvertently dropping it.

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Jangle Box Plucks Strings At The Press Of A Button

August 21, 2024 by 4 Comments

There are some that enjoy the human element of a musical performance, delighting in the unique way an artist teases the desired sound from their instruments. Then there are those of us who listen to random bleeps, bloops, and buzzes tortured out of some crusty sound chip pulled from an 8-bit computer. It’s all very subjective.

It seems to us that the Jangle Box, created by [Rich Bernett], lands somewhere in the middle. A human is still playing the instrument, but they aren’t directly touching the strings. Instead, buttons and a potentiometer on the front of the device are used to control four small hobby motors that slap their respective strings with what appears to be the remnants of plastic propellers — we’d guess these motors were pulled from cheap personal fans. Standard guitar tuner knobs can be used to adjust the tension of each string, providing further control over the sounds produced by the device.

In the video below, [Rich] briefly explains the operation of the Jangle Box, and then launches into a performance of sorts. The goal here really isn’t to “play” the instrument in the traditional sense. Rather, he records the various noises it produces, normalizes them, and sorts them into a full octave of notes so he can use them in future compositions. The last few minutes of the video contain some electronic beats made up of the samples created from the Jangle Box.

If you’re one of his Patreon supporters you can download the sample pack yourself, otherwise, you’ll have to make your own version of the instrument to get your hands on that electro-tangy sound.

This isn’t the first original [Rich Bernett] musical creation to grace these pages, back in 2020 we covered his Cassettone synth.

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Ask Hackaday: How Can We Leverage Tech For Education?

August 21, 2024 by 30 Comments

If you’re like us, you’ve studied the mathematician [Euler], but all you really remember is that you pronounce his name like “oiler” and not much else. [Welch Labs], on the other hand, not only remembers what he learned about logarithms and imaginary numbers but also has a beautiful video with helpful 3D graphics to explain the concepts.

This post, however, isn’t about that video. If you are interested in math, definitely watch it. It’s great. But it also got us thinking. What would it be like to be a high school math student today? In our day, we were lucky to have some simple 2D graph to explain concepts. Then it hit us: it probably is exactly the same.

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Raptor DID. Photo by Matt Mechtley.

How Jurassic Park’s Dinosaur Input Device Bridged The Stop-Motion And CGI Worlds

August 21, 2024 by 8 Comments

In a double-blast from the past, [Ian Failes]’ 2018 interview with [Phil Tippett] and others who worked on Jurassic Park is a great look at how the dinosaurs in this 1993 blockbuster movie came to be. Originally conceived as stop-motion animatronics with some motion blurring applied using a method called go-motion, a large team of puppeteers was actively working to make turning the book into a movie when [Steven Spielberg] decided to go in a different direction after seeing a computer-generated Tyrannosaurus rex test made by Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).

Naturally, this left [Phil Tippett] and his crew rather flabbergasted, leading to a range of puppeteering-related extinction jokes. Of course, it was the early 90s, with computer-generated imagery (CGI) animators being still very scarce. This led to an interesting hybrid solution where [Tippett]’s team were put in charge of the dinosaur motion using a custom gadget called the Dinosaur Input Device (DID). This effectively was like a stop-motion puppet, but tricked out with motion capture sensors.

This way the puppeteers could provide motion data for the CG dinosaur using their stop-motion skills, albeit with the computer handling a lot of interpolation. Meanwhile ILM could handle the integration and sprucing up of the final result using their existing pool of artists. As a bridge between the old and new, DIDs provided the means for both puppeteers and CGI artists to cooperate, creating the first major CGI production that holds up to today.

Even if DIDs went the way of the non-avian dinosaurs, their legacy will forever leave their dino-sized footprints on the movie industry.

Thanks to [Aaron] for the tip.

Top image: Raptor DID. Photo by Matt Mechtley.

Pulling Apart A Premium WebCam

August 21, 2024 by 29 Comments

Over at EDN, [Brian Dipert] has been tearing down web cameras. A few months ago, he broke into a bargain basement camera. This time, he’s looking into a premium unit. Although we have to admit from some of what he reports, we are a little surprised at some of the corners cut. For example, it’s a 4K camera that doesn’t quite provide a 4K image. Despite a Sony CMOS sensor, [Brian] found the low-light performance to be poor. However, it does carry a much larger price tag than the previous camera examined.

The interesting part is about half way down the page when he tries to open the unit up. It seems like it is getting harder and harder to get into things and this camera was no exception. The device finally gives up. Inside is a relatively unremarkable board with a host of unknown ICs. One interesting item is a gyro chip that determines if the camera is upside down.

[Brian] managed to get the camera back together with no harm. It is interesting to compare it to the $15 camera he took apart earlier.

If you want maximum cred, do your video calls with a Game Boy camera. Or, at least, add your own lens to a webcam.

Does Solar Energy Make Us Vulnerable?

August 20, 2024 by 86 Comments

Here’s a hypothetical situation. You decide to build your own steam generator plant and connect it to the electric grid. No matter where you live, you’d probably have to meet a ton of requirements from whoever controls your electric power, almost surely backed by your government. Yet, according to a recent post by [Bert], a version of this is going on in Europe and, probably, in many more places: unregulated solar power inverters driving the grid.

If you have just a few solar panels hanging around, that probably isn’t a problem. But there are a sizeable number of panels feeding power — and that number seems to grow daily — having control of the inverters could potentially allow you to limit the grid’s capacity or — if the inverters allowed it — possibly take the grid down by feeding power incorrectly back into the grid.

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WOW! It Wasn’t Aliens After All!

August 20, 2024 by 21 Comments

There may not be many radio astronomy printouts that have achieved universal fame, but the one from Ohio State University’s Big Ear telescope upon which astronomer [Jerry R. Ehman] wrote “WOW!” is definitely one of them. It showed an intense one-off burst that defied attempts to find others like it, prompting those who want to believe to speculate that it might have been the product of an extraterrestrial civilization. Sadly for them the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo has provided an explanation by examining historical data from the Arecibo telescope.

The radio signal in question lay on the hydrogen line frequency at 1420 MHz, and by looking at weaker emissions from cold hydrogen clouds they suggest that the WOW! signal may have come from a very unusual stimulation of one of these clouds. A magnetar is a type of neutron star which can create an intense magnetic field, and their suggestion is that Big Ear was in the lucky position of being in the right place at the right time to see one of these through a hydrogen cloud. The field would excite the hydrogen atoms to maser-like emission of radiation, leading to the unexpected blip on that printout.

There’s a question as to whether speculation about aliens is helpful to the cause of science, but in answer to that we’d like to remind readers that we wouldn’t be talking about magnetars now without it, and that the WOW! signal was in fact part of an early SETI experiment. Better keep on searching then!

Meanwhile readers with long memories will recollect us looking at the WOW! signal before.