Two University of Washington students exercised their creativity in a maker space and created a pair of gloves that won them a $10,000 prize. Obviously, they weren’t just ordinary gloves. These gloves can sense American Sign Language (ASL) and convert it to speech.
The gloves sense hand motion and sends the data via Bluetooth to an external computer. Unlike other sign language translation systems, the gloves are convenient and portable. You can see a video of the gloves in action, below.
Wafer level chips are cheap and very tiny, but as [Kevin Darrah] shows, vulnerable to bright light without the protective plastic casings standard on other chip packages.
We covered a similar phenomenon when the Raspberry Pi 2 came out. A user was taking photos of his Pi to document a project. Whenever his camera flash went off, it would reset the board.
[Kevin] got a new Arduino 101 board into his lab. The board has a processor from Intel, an accelerometer, and Bluetooth Low Energy out of the box while staying within the same relative price bracket as the Atmel versions. He was admiring the board, when he noticed that one of the components glittered under the light. Curious, he pulled open the schematic for the board, and found that it was the chip that switched power between the barrel jack and the USB. Not only that, it was a wafer level package.
So, he got out his camera and a laser. Sure enough, both would cause the power to drop off for as long as the package was exposed to the strong light. The Raspberry Pi foundation later wrote about this phenomenon in more detail. They say it won’t affect normal use, but if you’re going to expose your device to high energy light, simply put it inside a case or cover the chip with tape, Sugru, or a non-conductive paint to shield it.
EDIT: [Kevin] also tested it under the sun and found conditions in which it would reset. Videos after the break.
Continue reading “Don’t Take Photos Of Your Arduino 101 Either, It’s Light Sensitive”
Before you zip to the comments to scream “not a hack,” watch a few minutes of this teardown video. This 48 minute detailed walkthrough of a one-off art piece shows every aspect of the project: every requirement, design decision, implementation challenge, and mistake. Some notable details:
It’s not often that one sees teardowns of professional projects like this, and there’s quite a bit to learn from in here, besides it being a beautiful piece of art. See more about the Caviar House “Emergence” project at the Heathrow Airport, along with stunning pictures and video of the display in action.
If you’re thinking about how you’d control 350,000 individual LEDs with 12 bit grayscale and have it look smooth, check out the processor requirements behind the megascroller, which only handles 98,000 LEDs. More recently, we asked how many LEDs are too many, and the answer was quite a bit lower than 350k.
Continue reading “Amazing Analysis Of A 350,000 LED Airport Art Project”
It seems these days all the electronics projects are wireless in some form. Whether you choose WiFi, Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Thread, NFC, RFID, Cell, IR, or even semaphore or carrier pigeon depends a lot on the constraints of your project. There are a lot of variables to consider, so here is a guide to help you navigate the choices and come to a conclusion about which to use in your project.
We can really quickly reduce options down to the appropriate tech with just a few questions.
You can find flex PCBs in just about every single piece of consumer electronics. These traces of copper laminated in sheets of Kapton are everywhere, and designing these cables, let alone manufacturing them, is a dark art for the garage electronics wizard. Having these flat flex cables and PCBs manufactured still requires some Google-fu or a contact at a fab house, but at least now designing these cables is a solved problem.
[Oli] needed a way to connect two PCBs together over a moving part. Usually this means some sort of connector or cable, but he’s developed an even better solution – flexible PCB connections. To generate these copper traces sandwiched between a few layers of Kapton, [Oli] wrote a Python script to take a set of parameters, and produces an design for Eagle that includes all the relevant bits.
Of course, with a flexible PCB layout, the question of how to get these manufactured comes up. we’ve seen a few creative people make flexible PCBs with a 3D printer and there’s been more than one Hackaday Prize project using these flex PCBs. [Oli] says any manufacturer of flexible circuits should be able to reproduce everything generated from his script without much thinking at all. All we need now is for OSH Park to invent purple Kapton.
You can grab [Oli]’s script on his GitHub.
Students of the Samara State Aerospace University are having trouble getting a signal from their satellite, SamSat-218D. They are now reaching out to the radio amateur community, inviting everybody with sufficiently sensitive UHF VHF band (144 MHz) equipment to help by listening to SamSat-218D. The satellite was entirely built by students and went into space on board of a Soyuz-2 rocket on April 26, 2016. This is their call (translated by Google):
Back in the day where the microprocessor was our standard building block, we tended to concentrate on computation and processing of data and not so much on I/O. Simply put there were a lot of things we had to get working just so we could then read the state of an I/O port or a counter.
Nowadays the microcontroller has taken care of most of the system level needs with the luxury of built in RAM memory and the ability to upload our code. That leaves us able to concentrate on the major role of a microcontroller: to interpret something about the environment, make decisions, and often output the result to energize a motor, LED, or some other twiddly bits.
Often the usefulness of a small microcontroller project depends on being able to interpret external signals in the form of voltage or less often, current. For example the output of a photocell, or a temperature sensor may use an analog voltage to indicate brightness or the temperature. Enter the Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) with the ability to convert an external signal to a processor readable value.
