Cellphone startup Fairphone is now taking pre-orders for their modular smartphone, which is expected to start shipping in December of this year. Although I’m much more familiar with Google’s project Ara, this is the first modular concept to make it to market. It does lead me to a few questions though: is this actually a modular smartphone, and how widely will modular concepts be adopted?
These days, our automobiles sport glittering consoles adorned with dials and digits to keep us up-to-date with our car’s vitals. In the future, though, perhaps we just wont need such vast amounts of information at our fingertips if our cars are driving themselves around. No information? How will we tell the car what to do? On that end, [Felix] has us covered with Stewart, a tactile gesture-input interface for the modern, self driving car.
Stewart is a 6-DOF “Stewart Interface” capable of both gesture input and haptic-output. Gesture input enables the car’s passenger to deliver driving suggestions to the car. The gentle twist of a wrist can signal an upcoming turn at the next intersection; pulling back on Stewart’s head “joystick style” signals a “whoa–slow down, there, bub!” Haptic output via 6 servos pushes around Stewart’s head in the car’s intended direction. If the passenger agrees with the car, she can let Stewart gesture itself in the desired direction; if she disagrees; she can veto the car’s choices by moving her hand directly against Stewart’s current output gesture. Overall, the interface unites the intentions of the car and the intentions of the passenger with a haptic device that makes the connection feel seamless!
We know we’re not supposed to comment on the “how” with art projects–but we’re engineers–and this one makes us giddy with delight. We’re imagining those rc car shock absorbers dramatically dampening the jittery servos and giving the user a nice resistive feel. Interconnects are laser cut acrylic, and the shell is a smoothly contoured 3d print. We’ve seen Stewart Interfaces before, but nothing with the look-and-feel of a sleek design feature on its way to being dropped into the cockpit of our future self-driving cars.
Continue reading “Palm Interface Has You Suggest Where Self Driving Car Should Go”
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a horrible piece of legislation that we’ve been living with for sixteen years now. In addition to establishing a de-facto copyright for the design of boat hulls (don’t get us started!), the DMCA includes a Section 1201 which criminalizes defeating encryption in cases where such could be used to break copyright law.
Originally intended to stop the rampant copying of music in the Napster era, it’s been abused to prevent users from re-filling their inkjet cartridges and to cover up rootkits. In short, it’s scope has vastly exceeded its original aims. And we take it personally, because we like to take stuff apart and see how it works.
The only bright light in this otherwise dark, dark tunnel is the possibility to petition for exemptions to Section 1201 for certain devices and purposes. Just a few days ago, the EFF won a slew of DMCA exemptions, including the contentious exemption for bypassing automobiles’ encryption to check out what’s going on in the car’s firmware. The obvious relevance of the ability for researchers to inspect cars’ firmware in light of the VW scandal may have helped overcome strong pushback from the car manufacturers and the EPA.
The other exemption that caught our eye was the renewal of protection for people who need to hack old video games to keep them playable, jailbreak phones so that you can run an operating system of your choosing on it, and even the right to copy content from a DVD for remixes and excerpts.
This is all good stuff, but it’s a little bit sad that the EFF has to beg every three years to enable us all to do something that wasn’t illegal until the DMCA was written. But don’t take my word for it, have a listen to Cory Doctorow’s much more eloquent rant.
(Banner image courtesy [Kristoffer Smith], who we covered on car hacking way back when.)
This is some seriously cool stuff. Researchers at MIT recently came up with a device that can “see” through walls. It can actually identify a person (or people) behind a solid object.
They call it RF-Capture and it uses radio waves to identify people. Kind of like some high tech radio-frequency sonar. Using a very complex algorithm it can reconstruct the human figure by analyzing the various reflections of the signals transmitted. It’s so accurate it can even distinguish between different people based on size and posture, and even trace a person’s handwriting in the air.
Sounds like whatever they’re doing, it’s probably blasting a lot of radiation to do it. You’d think so, but no.
We’ve covered a number of diabetes-related hacks in the past, but this project sets its goals especially high. [Tim] has diabetes and needs to monitor his blood glucose levels and administer insulin accordingly. As a first step, he and a community of other diabetics have been working on Android apps to log the data when combined with a self-made Bluetooth re-transmitter.
But [Tim] is taking his project farther than previous projects we’ve seen and aiming at eventually driving an insulin pump directly from the app. (Although he’s not there yet, and user input is still required.) To that end, he’s looking into the protocols that control the dosage pumps.
We just read about [Tim] in this article in the Guardian which covers the diabetic-hacker movement from a medical perspective — the author currently runs a healthcare innovation institute and is a former British health minister, so he’s not a noob. One passage made us pause a little bit. [Tim] speaks the usual praises of tech democratization through open source and laments “If you try to commercialize [your products], you run up against all sorts of regulatory barriers.” To which the author responds, “This should ring alarm bells. Regulatory barriers are there for a reason.”
We love health hacking, and we’re sure that if we had a medical condition that could be helped by constant monitoring, that we’d absolutely want at least local smart-phone logging of the relevant data. But how far is too far? We just ran an article on the Therac-25 case study in which subtle software race conditions ended up directly killing people. We’d maybe hesitate a bit before we automated the insulin pump, but perhaps we’re just chicken.
The solution suggested by [Lord Ara Darzi] in the Guardian piece is to form collaborations between patients motivated by the DIY spirit, and the engineers (software and hardware) who would bring their expertise, and presumably a modicum of additional safety margin, to the table. We like that a lot. Why don’t we see more of that?
Self-driving cars are starting to pop up everywhere as companies slowly begin to test and improve them for the commercial market. Heck, Google’s self-driving car actually has its very own driver’s license in Nevada! There have been minimal accidents, and most of the time, they say it’s not the autonomous cars’ fault. But when autonomous cars are widespread — there will still be accidents — it’s inevitable. And what will happen when your car has to decide whether to save you, or a crowd of people? Ever think about that before?
It’s an extremely valid concern, and raises a huge ethical issue. In the rare circumstance that the car has to choose the “best” outcome — what will determine that? Reducing the loss of life? Even if it means crashing into a wall, mortally injuring you, the driver? Maybe car manufacturers will finally have to make ejection seats a standard feature!
Continue reading “The Ethics Of Self-Driving Cars Making Deadly Decisions”
Today, Hackaday.io passed 100,000 registered users. It seems like yesterday that I wrote a post about passing 10k but that was last year already! Much has happened in that year, and there is much more to come. Thank you to everyone that makes Hackaday.io great by interacting with each other, posting about what is going on in basements, garages, hackerspaces, and workplaces, and finding new and interesting ways of making the site your very own. Your involvement has made Hackaday.io the greatest open source hardware resource in the world.
We don’t call it project hosting. The seed idea did start as project hosting for the hardware hacker, but Hackaday.io has long since outgrown that pair of shoes. It’s become a self-sustaining reaction that grows ever bigger and more awesome as everyone gets involved and decides how and what they want to do.
One of the major additions to Hackaday.io this year was group messaging. This spawned an explosion of new communities within Hackaday.io starting with the Hacker Channel. Anyone may request to be a team member and will then gain access to the group messaging; there are now well over 500 members. We’ve scheduled many somewhat-formal events on the channel over the last few months that invited people to show off what they’re building and ask for feedback. That evolved into topic-based sessions on things like FPGA design and what you need to know about manufacturing. Many of these were co-hosted by Hackaday Staff and community members.
A curious event on the site was the appearance of the user itanimulli who join and registered the vanity URL: /conspiracy. This is an enigma. The user is a puzzler and has posted a number of images and other challenges that appear to include hidden data. How do you solve something like this? Get all of your friends involved, of course! Thomas Wilson started a project to solve the itanimulli puzzle and posted about it on the stack to invite teammates to the challenge.
Hackaday.io has spilled over into the real world too. Do you ever look at the valuable odds and ends in your workshop that you know someone will use, but you never will? The Travelling Hacker Box is the answer to that conundrum. It’s the “take a penny, leave a penny” of the hacker world. Get on the project and get in line to receive the box. When it hits your workshop, take out something cool but then we want to see you build something with it! Replace what you took with something of your own and send it to the next person. International shipping has not been solved yet for this particular box, but nothing is stopping you from starting an EU version.
The support we’ve seen from the hardware community for Hackaday.io is one of the reasons we’ve set out to do something new. In just a few weeks the first ever Hackaday SuperConference will be held. Two days of talks and workshops let us meet in person the users we’ve grown close to through the site. I hope to see you there. But if not just ping me on Hackaday.io!
Or course 100k isn’t the only interesting number. We’ve got more juicy statistics in the image below.
