Obscure Sci Fi Robots

August 7, 2024 by 38 Comments

Even if you don’t like to build replicas of movie robots, you can often draw inspiration from cinema. Everyone knows Robby the Robot, Gort, and R2D2. But [Atomic Snack Bar] treats us to some lesser-known robots from movies in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. While we are pretty up on movies, we have to admit that the video, which you can see below, has a few we didn’t know about.

The robots are mostly humanoid. The comedy vampire flick from the 1950s could have inspired Robby, who appeared four years later. The exception that proves the rule is the Twonky which was a TV set turned robot turned mind controller.

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Kali Cyberdeck Looks The Business

August 7, 2024 by 17 Comments

Even though we somewhat uncharacteristically don’t have a cyberdeck contest currently underway, there’s never a bad time to get your [Gibson] on. That’s especially true when fate hands you an enclosure as perfect as the one that inspired this very compact Kali Linux cyberdeck.

Now, that’s not to say that we don’t love larger cyberdecks, of course. The ones built into Pelican-style shipping containers are particularly attractive, and it’s hard to argue against their practicality. But when [Hans Jørgen Grimstad], who somehow just sounds like a person who should be building cyberdecks, found a new-old-stock stash of US Army Signal Corps spare parts kits from the 1950s, designation CY-684/GR, he just had to spring into action. After carefully gutting the metal case of the dividers that once protected tubes and other parts, he had some PCB panels made up for the top and bottom. The bottom had enough room for a compact USB keypad, with room left over on the panel for a cooling fan and various connectors. A 7″ HDMI display was added to the panel on the top lid, while a Raspberry Pi 5 with a 500-GB NVMe SSD went below the lower panel. The insides are properly decorated with cyberpunk-esque regalia including a “Self Destruct” button. Sadly, this appears to be unimplemented in the current version, at least for the stated purpose; there’s always hope for version two.

While we love the look and feel of this build and the subtle nods to the cyberpunk aesthetic, it sure seems like you could get some serious work done with a deck like this. Hats off to [Hans] for the build, and here’s hoping he left some of those cool cases for the rest of us.

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Tiny Trackpad Fits On Ergonomic Keyboard

August 6, 2024 by 5 Comments

Cats are notorious for interrupting workflow. Whether it’s in the kitchen, the garden, or the computer, any feline companion around has a way of getting into mischief in an oftentimes disruptive way. [Robin] has two cats, and while they like to sit on his desk, they have a tendency to interrupt his mouse movements while he’s using his Apple trackpad. Rather than solve the impossible problem of preventing cats from accessing areas they shouldn’t, he set about building a customized tiny trackpad that integrates with his keyboard and minimizes the chance of cat interaction.

The keyboard [Robin] uses is a split ergonomic keyboard. While some keyboards like this might use a standard USB connection to join the two halves, the ZSA Voyager uses I2C instead and even breaks the I2C bus out with a pogo pin-compatible connector. [Robin] originally designed a 3D-printed integrated prototype based on a Cirque trackpad that would clip onto the right side of the keyboard and connect at this point using pogo pins, but after realizing that the pogo pin design would be too difficult for other DIYers to recreate eventually settled on tapping into the I2C bus on the keyboard’s connecting cable. This particular keyboard uses a TRRS connector to join the two halves, so getting access to I2C at this point was as simple as adding a splitter and plugging in the trackpad.

With this prototype finished, [Robin] has a small trackpad that seamlessly attaches to his ergonomic keyboard, communicates over a standard protocol, and avoids any unwanted cat-mouse action. There’s also a build guide if you have the same keyboard and want to try out this build. He does note that using a trackpad this small involves a bit of a learning curve and a larger-than-average amount of configuration, but after he got over those two speed bumps he hasn’t had any problems. If trackpads aren’t your style, though, with some effort you can put a TrackPoint style mouse in your custom mechanical keyboard instead.

A black guitar with red rings on its body is held by a man in a black shirt. Text pointing to the red ring of guitar picks says, "This spins."

1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar

August 6, 2024 by 1 Comment

String instruments have a long history in civilization, helping humans make more complex and beautiful music. We wonder what our forebears would think of this guitar strummed with 1000 picks?

[Mattias Krantz] wondered what the best number of picks was to play guitar and took the experiment to its illogical extreme. Starting with zero picks and working up through various 3D printed multi-picks he tests all the feasible combinations of handheld picks.

After that, he switches gears to a fishing rod-actuated system of several picks in a ring. Not pleased with the initial acoustics of the picks in this system, he switched to printing his picks in a more flexible filament to better approximate the characteristics of the human thumb. Finally, he takes us to the undiscovered country of a spinning ring of 1000 picks strumming the underside of the strings and the… interesting acoustic result. As many pointed out in the comments, this blurs the line between a guitar and a hurdy gurdy.

If you want more melodic musical mischief, perhaps try this optical guitar pickup, a $30 guitar build, or get fancy with a 3D printed violin?

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Old Time Stereographs Get New Photos

August 6, 2024 by 34 Comments

In the late 1800s, the stereograph — sometimes incorrectly called a stereopticon — was a big craze. You’d view two side-by-side images through some lenses and see a three-dimensional image. This, of course, later would morph into View-Masters and, eventually, virtual reality headsets. But if you have an old stereograph, where do you get new images for it? If you are [Engineers Need Art], you write a program to convert MPO files (a common 3D image format) to printable stereograms. Interestingly, he used AI to assist in the project and has observations about where it helped and where it didn’t.

The post goes into a lot of detail about how the author experimented with 3D imaging for many years. However, it eventually discusses a MacOS application built with the help of an AI chatbot.

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RC Car Gets Force Feedback Steering

August 6, 2024 by 8 Comments

Remote-controlled cars can get incredibly fast and complex (and expensive) the farther into the hobby you get. So much so that a lot of things that are missing from the experience of driving a real car start to make a meaningful impact. [Indeterminate Design] has a few cars like this which are so fast that it becomes difficult to react to their behavior fast enough through sight alone. To help solve this problem and bridge the gap between the experience of driving a real car and an RC one, he’s added force feedback steering to the car’s remote control.

The first thing to tackle is the data throughput required to get a system like this working wirelessly. Relying heavily on the two cores in each of a pair of ESP32s, along with a long-range, high-speed wireless communications protocol called ESP-NOW, enough data from the car can be sent to make this possible but it does rely on precise timing to avoid jitter in the steering wheel. Some filtering is required as well, but with the small size of everything in this build it’s also a challenge not to filter out all of the important high-frequency forces. With the code written, [Indeterminate Design] turned to the 3D printer to build the prototype controller with built-in motors to provide the haptic feedback.

The other half of the project involves sensing the forces in the RC car which will then get sent back to the remote. After experimenting with a mathematical model to avoid having to source expensive parts and finding himself at a deadend with that method, eventually a bi-directional load cell was placed inside the steering mechanism which solved this problem. With all of these pieces working together, [Indeterminate Design] has a working force feedback steering mechanism which allows him to feel bumps, understeer, and other sensations, especially while doing things like drifting or driving through grass, that would be otherwise unavailable to drivers of RC cars. The only thing we could think of to bring this even more into realistic simulation territory would be to add something like a first-person view like high-speed drones often have.

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Tickets For Supercon 2024 Go On Sale Now!

August 6, 2024 by 10 Comments

Tickets for the 2024 Hackaday Supercon are on sale now! Go and get yours while they’re still hot. True-Believer Tickets are half-price at $148 (plus fees), and when that pile of 100 is gone, regular admission is $296 (plus fees).

Come join us on November 1st-3rd in sunny Pasadena, CA, for three days of talks, demos, badge hacking, workshops, and the sort of miscellaneous hardware shenanigans that make Hackaday Hackaday! If you’ve never been to a Supercon, now is the best time to check that off your bucket list. And if you’re a seven-time veteran, we’re stoked to see you again. Supercon is like a year’s worth of posts in one weekend. You don’t want to miss it.

Friday, November 1st, is our chill-out day. You can roll in as soon as the doors open in the morning, get your badge and some bagels, and get down to hacking. Or you can start socializing early. Or, as it almost always happens, both at once. We’ll have food and music and even a few workshops, but for the most part, Fridays are what you all make of them. And we love it that way.

Talks start up on Saturday on both stages, along with the soldering contest and an alley full of hackers. We’ll close out the evening with a special celebration, but more on that in a minute.

On Sunday, in addition to the usual slate of talks, we’ve set aside a big block of time for Lightning Talks. These are seven-minute quickies where you get to tell the bigger Hackaday community what you’re up to. A short talk like this forces you to condense the story down to its essence while giving tons of people their fifteen minutes of fame in half the time! If you’ve got a Lightning Talk that you’d like to present, let us know! We’ll try to fit in everyone we can.

Wrapping up Sunday evening, we’ll give you a chance to show off whatever badge hacks you’ve been working on over the weekend. We love the badge hacking demo because it allows us to see a wide (and wild) range of projects, all of which were put together in record time. Whether funny, flashy, or phenomenal, we want to see what you’ve been up to. Continue reading “Tickets For Supercon 2024 Go On Sale Now!” →