Automated Blinds Open The Window To Our Heart

April 21, 2016 by 17 Comments

[Brian Harms] made his living room window blinds open and close automatically using servos, an Arduino, and a SmartThings Arduino shield. Best of all, it’s connected to his Amazon Echo so that merely saying “Alexa, turn on/off the blinds” will open and close them.

To accomplish the feat [Brian] used two laser cut acrylic gears; one of which was attached to the servo horn, and the other to the long square rod running the length of the blinds. Despite using the bulky Arduino and shield, the finished product is inconspicuous and streamlined, and the single Arduino controls all three of the blinds in the living room. [Brian] answered a bunch of questions on a Reddit thread.

Blinds are a common connected home hack, and while none of the hacks we’ve covered in the past were voice activated, we have seen temp-sensitive blinds and a Raspberry Pi-based solution.

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DIY Arduino Watch

April 21, 2016 by 17 Comments

We first thought [Alexis Ospitia]’s watch was a sports watch made with an Arduino, but it’s actually a sporty watch made with an Arduino. This explains the watch’s strange ability to tell you the current temperature and humidity.

The core of the watch is an Arduino Mini. To make it good for time telling, a real-time clock module was added. A DHT11 monitors the temperature and humidity. A charge circuit and lithium battery provide power. Finally, the watch displays the date, time, and other data with an LCD from a Nokia 5110. We can tell you the last part that’s going to break on this.

Even if you think the watch is a bit chunky, the tutorial is very slick. [Alexis] has taken the trouble to individually draw and describe each portion of the watch’s construction. He explains each pin, what they do, and provides a Fritzing drawing of the wires to the Arduino. The code is provided; to program the watch a USB-to-serial module must be used.

For the housing he made a box from a thin gauge aluminum sheet and attached leather straps to the assembly. The final construction is cool looking in a techno-punk way, and is fairly compact. One might even say sporty.

“That’s Not A Knife…”

April 21, 2016 by 38 Comments

[Robin Baumgarten] likes to play dangerously. His latest creation, Knife To Meet You cuts to the quick of cooperative gaming. 3 humans play together against the machine. The object of the game is to hold your button down as long as possible. The game makes this difficult by sweeping a knife across the play field, right at finger level. (Video below.)

Knife to meet you is controlled by a flesh eating Arduino. In addition to reading the controls and driving a servo to move the knife, the Arduino also displays encouraging messages on a 2×20 character LCD.

The idea is to scare people, not to actually slice them up. To this end, the knife is actually a capacitive sensor. When the game detects the knife has contacted soft human flesh, it stops the knife before blood starts flowing. The game indicates a player has been defeated by making several chopping motions toward the loser. If the losing player still has all their digits, a new round begins.

The project was created as part of a 24 hour game jam. The final product is quite nice, built into a wood case that closes up for travel. It even has a carrying handle, so you can bring it to parties and find fresh victims players.

We’re not sure what it is about knives and Arduinos. It was only a few months ago that we saw an Arduino driving a knife wielding tentacle. Could the world’s friendliest microcontroller board be turning on us?
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World Create Day: A Subcontinent, An Island Continent, And Asia

April 21, 2016 by 3 Comments

Hackaday’s own World Create Day is just two days away. This Saturday, April 23rd, the Hackaday community will rise up, come together, have fun, share a few stories, and build something cool in the process.

ausasiaWhen we announced World Create Day a few weeks ago, we were inundated with responses. Hackerspaces across the globe have offered up their spaces for the Hackaday community to brainstorm the latest entries for The Hackaday Prize.

We have hackerspaces from Islamabad to Adelaide and from Mumbai to Shenzhen opening their doors to the world. If you’re near any of these events, join in on the festivities. If you don’t see one in your neck of the woods, you can still host your own meetup. Just click here to get your town on the map.

What’s going on at these meetups? [Robert] and [Steven] in Adelaide are planning several events including a meet and greet, a few lightning talks, and snacks. They’re also live streaming their event. Maker’s Asylum in Mumbai is doing project demos and forming some teams for the Hackaday Prize. It’s going to be a great event at every hackerspace, and the largest distributed meetup we’ve ever done. Don’t miss this.

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Pine64: The Un-Review

April 21, 2016 by 160 Comments

Even before the announcement and introduction of the Raspberry Pi 3, word of a few very powerful single board ARM Linux computers was flowing out of China. The hardware was there – powerful 64-bit ARM chips were available, all that was needed was a few engineers to put these chips on a board, a few marketing people, and a contract manufacturer.

One of the first of these 64-bit boards is the Pine64. Introduced to the world through a Kickstarter that netted $1.7 Million USD from 36,000 backers, the Pine64 is already extremely popular. The boards are beginning to land on the doorsteps and mailboxes of backers, and the initial impressions are showing up in the official forums and Kickstarter campaign comments.

I pledged $15 USD to the Pine64 Kickstarter, and received a board with 512MB of RAM, 4K HDMI, 10/100 Ethernet and a 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex A53 CPU in return. This post is not a review, as I can’t fully document the Pine64 experience. My initial impression? This is bad. This is pretty bad.

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All Prior Art

April 21, 2016 by 31 Comments

Disclosed herein is a device for gauging medication dosage. The method may include displaying first, second and third navigation controls. A switch is connected in parallel to the relay contacts and is configured for providing a portion of the input power as supplemental load power to the output as a function of back EMF energy.

We’ve had patents on the mind lately, and have been reading a fair few of them. If you read patent language long enough, though, it all starts to turn into word-salad. But with his All Prior Art and All the Claims websites, [Alexander Reben] tosses this salad for real. He’s got computers parsing existing patents and randomly reassembling them.

Rather than hoping that his algorithm comes up with the next great idea, [Alexander] is hoping to nip the truly trivial ones in the bud. Because prior art — the sum of all pre-existing ideas — is enough to disqualify a patent, if an idea is so trivial that his algorithm could have come up with it, it’s sooner or later going to be off the table.

Most of the results are insane, of course. And it seems to be producing a patent at a rate of about one per 10-15 seconds, so we’re guessing that it’ll take quite a few years for these cyber-monkeys to come up with the works of Shakespeare. But with bogus and over-broad patents filtering through the system every day, it’s not implausible that some day it’ll prove useful.

[Via New Scientist, thanks Frank!]

Hacking When It Counts: POW Canteen Radios

April 21, 2016 by 55 Comments

Of all the horrors visited upon a warrior, being captured by the enemy might count as the worst. With death in combat, the suffering is over, but with internment in a POW camp, untold agonies may await. Tales of torture, starvation, enslavement and indoctrination attend the history of every nation’s prison camps to some degree, even in the recent past with the supposedly civilizing influence of the Hague and Geneva Conventions.

But even the most humanely treated POWs universally suffer from one thing: lack of information. To not know how the war is progressing in your absence is a form of torture in itself, and POWs do whatever they can to get information. Starting in World War II, imprisoned soldiers and sailors familiar with the new field of electronics began using whatever materials they could scrounge and the abundance of time available to them to hack together solutions to the fundamental question, “How goes the war?” This is the story of the life-saving radios some POWs managed to hack together under seemingly impossible conditions.

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