Disney’s Designing A Smart Watch That Knows What You’re Touching

November 10, 2015 by James Hobson 47 Comments

Did you know Disney actually has a huge R&D subsidiary? It’s called Walt Disney Imagineering, and they’ve come up with some pretty interesting technology. They’re currently working on a smart watch interface called EM-Sense that uses an electromagnetic signal to detect and learn what the user is interacting with.

Basic machine learning allows the watch to learn what different devices “feel” like on an electromagnetic scale. It’s capable of detecting things you would expect, like appliances, power tools, and even electronic devices — but it’s apparently sophisticated enough to tell when you’re touching a door handle (and which one) depending on the structure and EM feedback!

They better explain the technology in the follow video, and demonstrate a use case for it where the smart watch can lead you through activities while giving you tutorials on skills you may need. Sounds like the beginning of a real-life PipBoy!

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Your Unhashable Fingerprints Secure Nothing

November 10, 2015 by Elliot Williams 95 Comments

Passwords are crap. Nobody picks good ones, when they do they re-use them across sites, and if you use even a trustworthy password manager, they’ll get hacked too. But you know what’s worse than a password? A fingerprint. Fingerprints have enough problems with them that they should never be used anywhere a password would be.

Passwords are supposed to be secret, like the name of your childhood pet. In contrast, you carry your fingers around with you out in the open nearly everywhere you go. Passwords also need to be revocable. In the case that your password does get revealed, it’s great to be able to simply pick another one. You don’t want to have to revoke your fingers. Finally, and this is the kicker, you want your password to be hashable, in order to protect the password database itself from theft.

In the rest of the article, I’ll make each of these three cases, and hopefully convince you that using fingerprints in place of a password is even more broken than using a password in the first place. (You listening Apple and Google? No, I didn’t think you were.)

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Replacing The CRT In A Vectrex

November 10, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

The Vectrex is a rare beast in the world of retro video games. Introduced in 1982, this was the only video game system to put a monitor right in the console, and it did so for good reason. This was a games system with vector graphics and rotating 3D objects, something that just couldn’t happen on the TV in the family room. A while ago, [John] dug his old Vectrex out of his basement and replaced a faulty logic board. The CRT was still broken, but with a little bit of research and a not-so-ugly kludge, he managed to replace the CRT in a Vectrex.

[John] found someone willing to part with an old CRT online, and after whipping out his credit card, the tube was on his way to his front door. This new tube wasn’t a direct drop in; The original Vectrex had small ears around the edges of the screen that served as mounting points. The new tube had no such ears. Now, a bit of plastic strapping holds the CRT in the chassis. It’s a bit of a kludge, but at least now [John] has a source of Vectrex CRTs.

While the rest of [John]’s repair work didn’t go as well – the Vectrex in question still has all the logic board problems it had when it was taken out of storage. This Vectrex does have a new CRT, and with a bit more work on rehabbing this old machine, it should keep on working for another thirty years.

Whenever you come cross an interesting CRT, make sure you snatch it up. Here’s another offering that uses a tiny screen for some classic MAME action.

3D Printed Peristalic Pump Has Impressive Capabilities

November 10, 2015 by James Hobson 31 Comments

[Frank Zhao’s] grandfather has esophageal cancer. Unfortunately for him, it means he’ll be eating through a tube for a while. This involves someone helping him with a big syringe to push a thick food liquid through the tube. [Frank] knew there had to be a better way. While [Frank] was in the hospital in China visiting, he started designing a 3D printed peristaltic pump. It’s what you would expect: a mechanism that massages a loop of plastic tubing to push the contents further down the path.

After he got back to the States he refined his design a bit more and started 3D printing. As it turns out — it works pretty damn well. In the following video he shows it pumping mayonaise — and since it’s peristalic, no priming of the pump required!

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Two Turntables And No Microphone

November 9, 2015 by Elliot Williams 23 Comments

It used to be that you had to spend real money to get an alternative controller for your electronic musical arsenal. These days, with cheap microcontrollers and easily-accessible free software libraries, you can do something awesome for pocket change. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make a sexy, functional piece of art along the way! [Jan Godde] did just that with his cleverly named Wooden Sensor Box With Two Rotary Disks. (If you’ve got a better name for this thing, toss it in the comments.)

From what we can see, the box has two potentiometer sliders, two touch-sensitive potentiometers, two force sensitive resistors, a slew of knobs, and a whole bunch of (capacitive?) touch points. In short, a ton of continuous controllers of all sizes and shapes in an aesthetic case. But stealing the show, and giving the device its name, are two platters from old hard drives that serve as jog wheels.

As shown in the video below the break, the two jog wheels are covered with alternating stripes on the underside. Each platter has a dedicated pair of IR LEDs and photodetectors underneath serving as a quadrature encoder that allows [Jan] to tell which direction the platters are rotating, and how far.

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Trivia Lock Box Spices Up Wedding Reception

November 9, 2015 by Adam Fabio 19 Comments

Any hardware hacker will tell you, a significant other who embraces your passion is a keeper. [Nathan] found a keeper in [Jessica] – they even worked together on a hardware hack for their own wedding. The couple wanted an interactive element for their guests. Disposable cameras are getting a bit hard to find these days, so the solution was a trivia powered lock box designed and built by [Nathan] himself. Guests arrived at their tables to find locked boxes and cards with trivia questions about the couple. Only by answering the questions correctly would they unlock the box to access the prizes inside.

Each box consists of a Really Bare Bones Board, which is essentially an ATmega328 breakout board. The user interface consists of five tactile switches and a 16×2 character based LCD. The box is a clear Vaultz pencil box (Yes, the same brand Ahmed used for his clock). The final element is of course the locking mechanism. One of [Nathan’s] friends noticed that the Vaultz box latch was riveted in, and was spring loaded. It only took a bit of work to flip the latch from the outside to the inside. Cheap 9g micro servos from the far east pull the latch open with a string. The only thing we haven’t figured out is how [Nathan] closed the latches while they were inside the box. Obviously some black magic was involved! [Jessica] decorated the box with circuit traces created on her vinyl cutter.

On the eve of the big day, [Nathan] realized that his tactile switches were… not really switching. The superglue he had used to mount them had seeped into the switch body, freezing it solid. Nathan saved the project with a herculean effort of soldering 5 switches on each of 12 boxes the night before his own wedding.

What was in the box? Alka-Seltzer tablets. When added to vases filled with oil and water, the fizzy tablets turned the vases into mini lava lamps. The boxes also contained coins which were redeemable for Hawaiian Leis.

Click past the break to see the boxes in action on [Nathan] and [Jessica’s] big day and if you’re looking to build a fleet of hardware for your own wedding, take a look at the centerpieces [Bill Porter] created a couple of years ago.

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The Most Powerful DIY Railgun

November 9, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 107 Comments

The US Navy is working on a few railgun projects that will eventually replace the largest guns on the fleet’s cruisers and destroyers. These rail guns will fire a projectile away from the ship at around Mach 7 on a ballistic trajectory to a target one hundred miles away. It’s an even more impressive piece of artillery than a gun with a nuclear warhead, and someday, it will be real.

Until then, we’ll have to settle with [Zebralemur]’s DIY mobile railgun. He built this railgun capable of firing aluminum projectiles through pumpkins, cellphones, and into car doors and blocks of ballistics gelatin.

All rail guns need a place to store energy, and in all cases this is a gigantic bank of capacitors. For this project, [Zebralemur] is using fifty-six, 400 Volt, 6000 microfarad caps. The MSRP for these caps would be about $50,000 total, but somehow – probably a surplus store – [Zebralemur] picked them up for $2,400.

These caps are just the power supply for the rail gun, and aren’t part of the structure of this already large, 250 pound gun. Luckily, with the seats down in [Zebralemur]’s car, they fit in the back of his hatchback.

These caps are charged by a bunch of 9V batteries stuck end to end. When the caps are charged, all the power is dumped into two copper bars in the gun, accelerating the aluminum projectile to speeds fast enough to kill. It’s an incredible build, but something that should not be attempted by anyone. Although this does seem to be the year that all danger seekers are busting out their electromagnetic projection flingers.

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