Measuring Gait Speed Passively To Diagnose Diseases

May 6, 2017 by 5 Comments

You may not realize it, but how fast a person walks is an important indicator of overall health. We all instinctively know that we lag noticeably when a cold or the flu hits, but monitoring gait speed can help diagnose a plethora of chronic diseases and conditions. Wearables like Fitbit would be one way to monitor gait speed, but the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT thinks there’s a better way:  a wireless appliance that measures gait speed passively.

CSAIL’s sensor, dubbed WiTrack (PDF), is a wall-mounted plaque that could be easily concealed as a picture or mirror. It sends out low-power RF signals between about 5- and 7-GHz to perform 3D motion tracking in real time. The WiTrack sensor has a resolution of about 8 cm at those frequencies. With their WiGait algorithms (PDF), the CSAIL team led by [Chen-Yu Hsu] is able to measure not only overall walking speed, but also stride length. That turns out to be critical to predicting the onset of such diseases as Parkinson’s, which has a very characteristic shuffling gait in the early phase of the disease. Mobility impairments from other diseases, like ALS and multiple sclerosis, could also be identified.

WiTrack builds on [Hsu]’s previous work with through-wall RF tracking. It’s nice to see a novel technique coming closer to a useful product, and we’ll be watching to see where this one goes.

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Ad Hoc MIDI To Music Box Project Shows Power Of Hacker Community

May 6, 2017 by 9 Comments

Fair warning: when you post a video of you doing an incredibly tedious process like manually punching holes in a paper tape to transfer a MIDI file to a music box, don’t be surprised when a bunch of hackers automates the process in less than a week.

The back story on this should be familiar to even casual Hackaday readers. [Martin] from the Swedish group “Wintergatan” is a prolific maker of unusual musical instruments. You’ll no doubt recall his magnificent marble music machine, a second version of which is currently in the works. But he’s also got a thing for music boxes that are programmed by paper tape, and recently posted a video showing his time-consuming and totally manual process for punching the holes in the tape. Since his source material was already in a MIDI file, a bunch of his fans independently came up with ways to automate the process.

The video below shows what he learned from his fans about automating his programming, but also what he learned about the community we all work and play in. Without specifically asking for help, random strangers brought together by common interests identified the problems, came up with solutions, sorted through the good and the bad ideas, and made the work publically available. Not bad for less than a week’s work.

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Converting Parallel Port CNCs To USB

May 5, 2017 by 45 Comments

If you’re looking for a small, benchtop CNC machine for PCBs and light milling the ubiquitous Sherline CNC machine is a good choice. There’s a problem with it, though: normally, the Sherline CNC controller runs off the parallel port. While some of us still have a Windows 98 battlestation sitting around, [David] doesn’t. Instead, he built a USB dongle and wrote the software to turn this mini CNC into something usable with a modern computer.

First up, the hardware. The core of this build is the rt-stepper dongle based around the PIC18F2455 microcontroller. With a bare minimum of parts, this chip converts USB into a parallel port for real-time control. It’s fast — at least as fast as the parallel port in the ancient laptops we have sitting around and plugs right into the CNC controller box for the Sherline.

The software is where this really shines. the application used to control this dongle is a hack of the EMC/LinuxCNC project written in nice, portable Python. This application generates the step pulses, but the timing is maintained by the dongle; no real-time kernel needed.

There are a lot of choices out there for a desktop CNC machine made for routing copper clad board, wood, brass, and aluminum. The Othermill is great, and Inventables X-Carve and Carvey are more than up for the task. Still, for something small and relatively cheap, the Sherline is well-regarded, and with this little dongle you can actually use it with a modern computer. Check out the demo video below.

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DARPA Plans To Begin Hacking Human Brains

May 5, 2017 by 26 Comments

So [DARPA] wants to start hacking human brains, With the help of the biomedical device center at the university of Texas in Dallas. This does sound a bit crazy but DARPA does crazy. Conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this one.

The initial plans to turn us all into mindless zombies seem to be shelved for now, however they are working on what they call Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT), which they explain means using the body’s nervous system to enhance and speed up the learning process. This could be achieved by using a process known as ‘synaptic plasticity‘ which opens and closes the brains synapses with electrical stimulation. They hope that by tuning the neural networks responsible for cognitive function it will enhance learning. Let’s just hope they don’t turn any humans into DARPA falling robots.

A Smart Table For Gamers

May 5, 2017 by 9 Comments

When makers take to designing furniture for their own home, the results are spectacular. For their senior design project, [Phillip Murphy] and his teammates set about building a smart table from the ground up. Oh, and you can also use it to play games, demonstrated in the video below.

The table uses 512 WS2812 pixels in a 32 x 16 array which has enough resolution to play a selection of integrated games — Go, 2-player Tetris, and Tron light cycle combat — as well as some other features like a dancing bird party mode — because what’s the point of having a smart table if it can’t also double as rave lighting?

A C2000-family microcontroller on a custom board is the brains, and is controlled by an Android app via Bluetooth RN-42 modules. The table frame was designed in Sketchup, laser-cut, and painstakingly stained. [Murphy] and company used aluminum ducting tape in each of the ‘pixels’, and the table’s frame actually forms the pixel grid. Check out the overview and some of the games in action after the break.

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4-LED Octal Clock Demands Colorful Math

May 5, 2017 by 12 Comments

We’ve all seen LED clocks where RGB LEDs are used to display time. It seems like the simpler the interface, the more likely you’d need to do math to figure out the time. This Octal Clock by [Alex Kurrasch] proves the point by using only four LEDs: the top two show hours and minutes, and the bottom two LEDs are multipliers.

Using octal numbering, [Alex] translates the data using a Venn diagram of color mixing. The mapping uses 1 as red, 2 as green, followed by yellow, blue, magenta, and cyan. It ends with 7 as white (all on) and 0 as black (all off).

As the time changes, a fading algorithm changes the display to match. He offers the time of 7:38pm as an example in the grid shown here. Base-8 math is provided; don’t worry, you’ll get really good at this if you make your own wristwatch version… people will learn to never ask you about the time.

The clock uses a ATMega64 running assembly language firmware with a DS1306E+ RTC chip keeping track of time. The enclosure is cool too; [Alex] milled the case out of mahogany and the front and back plates are anodized aluminum. The unique looking diffusers on the LEDs are actually paraffin, a trick that [Elliot Williams] mentioned in his recent article on diffuser materials.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Electro-Magnetic Enabled Bagpipes

May 5, 2017 by 11 Comments

Bagpipes are an instrument at least a millennia old, the most popular of which, in modern times, is the Great Highland bagpipe. There are other types of bagpipes, some of which have a bellows rather than requiring the player to manually inflate the bag by breathing into it. The advantage of the bellows is that it delivers dry air to the bag and reed (instead of the moist air from the player’s breath) and this dryness means that the instrument stays in tune better and the reed lasts longer.

[TegwynTwmffat] has built his own Irish uilleann pipes, (one of the types that use a bellows) using a carbon steel chanter (the part with the finger holes) and a steel reed. The reed vibrates and a pickup is used to convert this vibration into an electric signal, similar to the way a guitar pickup converts a vibrating string into an electric signal. This means that the signal from [Tegwyn]’s pipes can be sent to an amplifier. It also means that the signal can be processed the same way as the signal from an electric guitar – through distortion, flanger, wah, or delay pedals, for example.

[Tegwyn] has put up a drawing of the chanter showing dimensions and locations of the holes and has posted a couple of songs so you can hear the pipe in action. The first has the pipes without any effects on them, the second with effects. The comments for the second say that there are no electric guitars in the song – it’s all the pipes! Bagpipes seem to be a (relatively) popular instrument to hack and we’ve seen a couple of them over the years, such as this one made from duct tape, and this one – an electronic version.

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