Forget Sudoku, Build Yourself A Minimalist Rubik’s Solver Robot

February 2, 2022 by 12 Comments

Some people like crossword puzzles, some are serious sudoku ninjas, but [Andrea Favero] likes to keep himself sharp, by learning coding and solving control problems, and that is something we can definitely relate to. When learning a new platform, it’s a very good idea to have a substantial project or goal in mind, and learn what is needed on the way there. [Andrea] chose to build an autonomous Rubik’s cube solver, and was kind enough to document exactly how how to do it, and we’re glad of it!

The result of the openCV processing chain

Working in python with OpenCV, [Andrea] uses the methodology by [Oussama Barkouki] to process each face image and convert it into a table of the colours of individual facelets. The basics of that, are first to convert the image to grayscale, then use a gaussian blur to denoise the image. Edges are identified using the canny algorithm, the result of which is then dilated and passed into a contour detector. The contours are sent into a cunning filter that identifies square contours, and those the wrong size are filtered off. What you’re left with are the outlines of the actual coloured facelets. Once you have a list of squares, these can be used to form image masks, and thence select the average colour from each square. The colour is then quantised and stored as a labelled colour from the standard Western Rubik’s cube colour scheme. Finally, once all face images are captured and facelets colours identified, the data are passed into a Rubik’s cube solving algorithm developed by [Hegbert Kociemba,] a guide to which is available on the speedsolving site. The result of the solving step is a sequence of descrambling moves, in the move notation developed by [David Singmaster]. Fascinating stuff, if you ask us! Continue reading “Forget Sudoku, Build Yourself A Minimalist Rubik’s Solver Robot” →

That’s No Moon… It’s An Algae Robot

January 27, 2022 by 10 Comments

When you think of a robot, you probably don’t think of a ball of underwater algae. But a team of university researchers used a 3D-printed exoskeleton and a ball of marimo algae to produce a moving underwater sensor platform. It is really at a proof-of-concept stage, but it seems as though it would be possible to make practical use of the technology.

Marimo are relatively rare balls of algae that occur in some parts of the world. A robot powered by algae runs on sunlight and could be electromagnetically quiet.

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SHERLOC And The Search For Life On Mars

January 27, 2022 by 24 Comments

Humanity has been wondering about whether life exists beyond our little backwater planet for so long that we’ve developed a kind of cultural bias as to how the answer to this central question will be revealed. Most of us probably imagine that NASA or some other space agency will schedule a press conference, an assembled panel of scientific luminaries will announce the findings, and newspapers around the world will blare “WE ARE NOT ALONE!” headlines. We’ve all seen that movie before, so that’s the way it has to be, right?

Probably not. Short of an improbable event like an alien spacecraft landing while a Google Street View car was driving by or receiving an unambiguously intelligent radio message from the stars, the conclusion that life exists now or once did outside our particular gravity well is likely to be reached in a piecewise process, an accretion of evidence built up over a long time until on balance, the only reasonable conclusion is that we are not alone. And that’s exactly what the announcement at the end of last year that the Mars rover Perseverance had discovered evidence of organic molecules in the rocks of Jezero crater was — another piece of the puzzle, and another step toward answering the fundamental question of the uniqueness of life.

Discovering organic molecules on Mars is far from proof that life once existed there. But it’s a step on the way, as well as a great excuse to look into the scientific principles and engineering of the instruments that made this discovery possible — the whimsically named SHERLOC and WATSON.

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Can Robots Give Good Hugs?

January 24, 2022 by 29 Comments

We could all use a hug once in a while. Most people would probably say the shared warmth is nice, and the squishiness of another living, breathing meatbag is pretty comforting. Hugs even have health benefits.

But maybe you’re new in town and don’t know anyone yet, or you’ve outlived all your friends and family. Or maybe you just don’t look like the kind of person who goes for hugs, and therefore you don’t get enough embraces. Nearly everyone needs and want hugs, whether they’re great, good, or just average.

So what makes a good hug, anyway? It’s a bit like a handshake. It should be warm and dry, with a firmness appropriate to the situation. Ideally, you’re both done at the same time and things don’t get awkward. Could a robot possibly check all of these boxes? That’s the idea behind HuggieBot, the haphazardly humanoid invention of Katherine J. Kuchenbecker and team at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany (translated). User feedback helped the team get their arms around the problem.

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A bird-shaped yellow PCB with legs wound out of wire, perched on its creator's arm. The bird has a lot of through-hole components on it, as well as an assortment of different-colored LEDs.

Printed Circuit Bird Family Calls For Us To Consider Analog

January 23, 2022 by 16 Comments

On our favourite low-attention-span content site, [Kelly Heaton] has recently started sharing a series of “Printed Circuit Birds”. These are PCBs shaped like birds, looking like birds and chirping like birds – and they are fully analog! The sound is produced by a network of oscillators feeding into each other, and, once tuned, is hardly distinguishable from the bird songs you might hear outside your window. Care and love was put into making this bird life-like – it perches on Kelly’s arm with legs woven out of single-strand wire and talons made out of THT resistors, in the exact same way you would expect a regular bird to sit on your arm – that is, if you ever get lucky enough. It’s not just one bird – there’s a family of circuit animals, including a goose, a crow and even a cricket.

Why did these animals came to life – metaphorically, but also, literally? There must be more to a non-ordinary project like this, and we asked Kelly about it. These birds are part of her project to explore models of consciousness in ways that we typically don’t employ. Our habit is to approach complex problems in digital domains, but we tend to miss out on elegance and simplicity that analog circuits are capable of. After all, even our conventional understanding of a neural network is a matrix of analog coefficients that we then tune, a primitive imitation of how we assume human brains to work – and it’s this “analog” approach that has lately moved us ever so closer to reproducing “intelligence” in a computer.

Kelly’s work takes a concept that would have many of us get the digital toolkit, and makes it wonderfully life-like using a small bouquet of simple parts. It’s a challenge to our beliefs and approaches, compelling in its grace, urging us to consider and respect analog circuits more when it comes to modelling consciousness and behaviours. If it’s this simple to model sounds and behaviour of a biological organism, a task that’d have us writing DSP and math code to replicate on a microcontroller – what else are we missing from our models?

Kelly has more PCBs to arrive soon in preparation for her NYC exhibit in February, and will surely be posting updates on her Twitter page! We’ve covered her work before, and if you haven’t seen it yet, her Supercon 2019 talk on Electronic Naturalism would be a great place to start! Such projects tend to inspire fellow hackers to build other non-conventional projects, and this chirping pendant follows closely in Kelly’s footsteps! The direction of this venture reminds us a lot of BEAM robotics, which we’ve recently reminisced upon as something that’s impacted generations of hackers to look at electronics we create through an entirely different lens.

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Robot Nerf Alarm Blasts You Awake With Foam

January 21, 2022 by 11 Comments

The sentry gun targets [Vinnie] with blasts of foam as he runs through the bedroom to the sounds of Your New Morning Alarm by [Marc Rebillet].
Waking up is hard; sometimes you need more than a little chiming alarm to get you out of bed. When [Vinnie Satriale] started unconsciously switching his alarms off, he went all out, deciding to build a Nerf sentry blaster to wake him up instead. 

A Nerf Rival Nemesis MXVII-10K flywheel blaster is the core of the build, with a 100-round capacity of soft foam balls. Stepper motors are used to control a pan and tilt system to aim the blaster. It’s moved under instruction from a Raspberry Pi that uses machine vision algorithms running on a Coral USB accelerator to track targets in the bedroom. A relay board is then used to activate the blaster’s firing action, blasting any targets until they wake up.

[Vinnie] had plenty of fun during build, also showing the sentry gun off to his coworkers in the office. It’s a hard sentry to dodge, with the machine vision algorithm using a full-body tracking model, so merely covering one’s face won’t be enough to get away.

We’ve seen all kinds of sentry guns over the years, from those firing rubber bands to others spraying jets of water. Video after the break.

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Peek Behind The Curtain Of This Robotic Mouse

January 9, 2022 by 9 Comments

At first glance, this little animatronic mouse might seem like a fairly simple affair. A door opens, our rodent friend pops its head out, looks around, and goes back in. But just like in The Wizard of Oz, a strategically placed curtain is hiding the impressive array of gadgetry that makes the trick possible.

Creator [Will Donaldson] has put together a fantastic write-up of just what went into creating this little fellow, and we think you’ll be surprised at just how serious the mechanics involved are. Take for example the rig that provides horizontal motion with a NEMA 17 stepper motor mated to a 200 mm leadscrew and dual 8 mm rail assembly that would like right at home as part of a 3D printer.

The star of the show rides atop a beefy sliding carriage assembly made of printed components and acrylic, which is linked to the door via a GT2 timing belt and pulley in such a way that it automatically opens and closes at the appropriate time. To inject some life into the puppet, [Will] stuffed it with a pair of SG90 servos in a sort of pan-and-tilt arrangement: the rear servo turns the mouse’s body left and right, while the forward one moves the head up and down.

An Arduino Uno controls the servos, as well as the stepper motor by way of a TB6600 controller, and optical limit switches are used to make sure nothing moves out bounds. [Will] is keeping the CAD files and source code to himself for the time being, though we imagine a sufficiently dedicated mouseketeer could recreate the installation based on the available information.

This would appear to be the first animatronic mouse to grace the pages of Hackaday, but we’re certainly no strangers to seeing folks imbue inanimate objects with lifelike motion.

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