AI-Controlled Twitch V-Tuber Has More Followers Than You

January 12, 2023 by 45 Comments

Surely we have all at least heard of Twitch by now. For the as-yet uninitiated: imagine you had your own TV channel. What would you do on it? Although Twitch really got going as a place for gamers to stream the action, there are almost as many people jamming out on their guitars, or building guitars, or just talking about guitars. And that’s just the example that uses guitars — if you can think of it, someone is probably doing it live on Twitch, within the Terms of Service, of course.

Along with the legions of people showing their faces and singing their hearts out, you have people in partial disguise, and then you have v-tubers. That stands for virtual tubers, and it just means that the person is using an anime avatar to convey themselves.

Now that you’re all caught up, let’s digest the following item together: there’s a v-tuber on Twitch that’s controlled entirely by AI. Let me run that by you again: there’s a person called [Vedal] who operates a Twitch channel. Rather than stream themselves building Mad Max-style vehicles and fighting them in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or singing Joni Mitchell tunes, [Vedal] pulls the strings of an AI they created, which is represented by an animated character cleverly named Neuro-sama. Not only does Neuro-sama know how to play Minecraft and osu!, she speaks gamer and interacts regularly with chat in snarky, 21st century fashion. And that really is the key behind Twitch success — interacting with chat in a meaningful way.

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plantpot made from recycled audio tape filament in a 3D printer. Pot contains a succulent plant and is surrounded by tape

3D Printer Filament From Reel-to-Reel Audio Tapes

January 12, 2023 by 18 Comments

At heart, 3D printers are just machines that can melt plastic “wire” into interesting shapes. It’s well-known and oft-lamented that plastic of various sorts has been used to make all manner of household objects that might eventually end up in landfill or otherwise littering the environment. With these facts in mind and a surplus of tape, [brtv-z] decided to see if he could recycle some old reel-to-reel audio tapes into working filament for a 3D printer.

The homebrew rig to convert old audio tape into the unconventional filament

This isn’t the first time he has tried to print with unusual second-hand polymers, back in 2020 he pulled of a similar trick using VHS tape. Through experimentation, it was soon determined that seven strands of quarter-inch tape could be twisted together and fused to form a very tough-looking filament approximately 1.7 mm in diameter, which could then be fed into the unsuspecting printer.

The resulting prints are certainly different in a number of respects from using virgin filament. The material is porous, brittle and (unsurprisingly) rather rusty-looking, but it does have some interesting properties.  It retains its magnetism and it catches the light in an unusual way. The video is after the break (in Russian, but YouTube does a reasonable job of generating English captions).

Don’t have any tape handy? No worries, we’ve also covered machines that can recycle plastic waste into filament before. In fact, two of them even won the 2022 Hackaday Prize. What else could you melt down that might otherwise be thrown away?

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Organic Fibonacci Clock Is All About The Spiral

January 12, 2023 by 5 Comments

Whether you’re a fan of compelling Tool songs, or merely appreciate mathematical beauty, you might be into the spirals defined by the Fibonacci sequence. [RuddK5] used the Fibonacci curve as the inspiration for this fun clock build.

The intention of the clock is not to display the exact time, but to give a more organic feel of time, via a rough representation of minutes and hours. A strip of addressable LEDs is charged with display duty. The description is vague, but it appears that the 24 LEDs light up over time to show the amount of the day that has already passed by. The LEDs are wound up in the shape of a Fibonacci spiral with the help of a 3D printed case, and is run via a Wemos D1 microcontroller board.

It’s a fun build, and one that we can imagine would scale beautifully into a larger wall-hanging clock design if so desired. It at once could display the time, without making it immediately obvious, gradually shifting the lighting display as the day goes on.

We’ve seen other clocks rely on the mathematics of Fibonacci before, too. If you’ve cooked up your own fun clock build, don’t hesitate to let us know!

3D Printed Wind Turbine Has All The Features, Just Smaller

January 11, 2023 by 32 Comments

For anyone with even the slightest bit of engineering interest, wind turbines are hard to resist. Everything about them is just so awesome, in the literal sense of the word — the size of the blades, the height of the towers, the mechanical guts that keep them pointed into the wind. And as if one turbine isn’t enough, consider the engineering implications of planting a couple of hundred of these giants in a field and getting them to operate as a unit. Simply amazing.

Unfortunately, the thing that makes wind turbines so cool — their enormity — can make them difficult to wrap your head around. To fix that, [3DprintedLife] built a working miniature wind turbine that goes a bit beyond most designs of a similar size. The big difference here is variable pitch blades, a feature the big turbines rely on to keep their output maximized over a broad range of wind conditions. The mechanism here is clever — the base of each blade rides in a bearing and has a small cap head screw that rides in a hole in a triangular swash block in the center of the hub. A small gear motor and lead screw move the block back and forth along the hub’s axis, which changes the collective pitch of the blades.

Other details of full-sized wind turbines are replicated here too, like the powered nacelle rotation and the full suite of wind speed and direction sensors. The generator is a NEMA 17 stepper; the output is a bit too anemic to actually power the turbine’s controller, but that could be fixed with gearing changes. Still, all the controls worked as planned, and there’s room for improvement, so we’ll score this a win overall.

Looking for a little more on full-size wind turbines? You’re in luck — our own [Bryan Cockfield] shared his insights into how wind farm engineers deal with ice and cold.

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Lunar Rover Is No Toy

January 11, 2023 by 21 Comments

When you think of Tomy — more properly, Takara Tomy — you think of toys and models from Japan. After all, they have made models and toys as iconic as Transformers, Thomas, Jenga, Boggle, and Furby. They also made figures associated with Thunderbirds and Tron, two favorites in our circles. However, their recent design for SORA-Q is no toy. It is a tiny lunar rover designed at the request of JAXA, the Japanese space agency. The New Yorker recently posted about how this little rover came about.

The SORA-Q looks a bit like a modern Star Wars drone or — if it could fly — a training drone from some of the older movies. The rover caught a lift from a SpaceX Falcon 9 towards the moon with the Hakuto-R M1 lander. Another SORA-Q is scheduled to touch down later this year.

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NASA Help Wanted: Telescope Optional

January 11, 2023 by 31 Comments

If you’ve ever wanted to work for NASA, here’s your chance. Well, don’t expect a paycheck or any benefits, but the Agency is looking for volunteers to help process the huge amount of exoplanet data with their Exoplanet Watch program. If you have a telescope, you can even contribute data to the project. But if your telescope is in the back closet, you can process data they’ve collected over the years.

You might think the only way to contribute with a telescope is to have a mini-observatory in your backyard, but that’s not the case. According to NASA, even a six-inch telescope can detect hundreds of exoplanet transits using their software. You might not get paid, but the program’s policy requires that the first paper to use work done by program volunteers will receive co-author credit on the paper. Not too shabby!

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Building A Homemade Ambient Pressure Submarine

January 11, 2023 by 27 Comments

About two years ago, [Hyperspace Pirate] set to work on building his own two-seater submarine, because who doesn’t want to have a submarine when you have just moved to Florida? In the linked video (also attached below), he describes the reasoning behind the submarine design. Rather than going with a fully sealed submarine with ambient pressure inside and a hull that resists the crushing forces from the water, he opted to go for a semi-wet ambient pressure design.

What this essentially entails is a fancy equivalent of an old-school diving bell: much as the name suggests, these are sealed except for the bottom, which allows for water to enter and thus equalize the pressure. Although this has the distinct disadvantage of being not dry inside (hence the semi-wet), it does mean that going for a dive is as easy as letting the water in via the bottom hole, and to resurface only a small amount of air injected into two ballast tanks and a pump are all that are required.

So far this submarine has survived a few test runs, which uncovered a number of issues, but diving and resurfacing seems to be going pretty smoothly now, which is definitely a massive plus with a submarine.

(Thanks to [Drew] for the tip!)

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