AI Camera Knows Its S**t

January 17, 2022 by 13 Comments

[Caleb] shares a problem with most dog owners. Dogs leave their… byproducts…all over your yard. Some people pick it up right away and some just leave it. But what if your dog has run of the yard? How do you know where these piles are hiding? A security camera and AI image detection is the answer, but probably not the way that you think.

You might think as we did that you could train the system to recognize the–um–piles. But instead, [Caleb] elected to have the AI do animal pose estimation to detect the dog’s posture while producing the target. This is probably easier than recognizing a nondescript pile and then it doesn’t matter if it is, say, covered with snow.

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Alexa, Bring Me A Beer!

June 14, 2021 by 11 Comments

Voice controlled home assistants are the wonder of our age, once you’ve made peace with the privacy concerns of sharing the intimacies of your life with a data centre owned by a massive corporation, anyway. They provide a taste of how the future was supposed to be in those optimistic predictions of decades past: Alexa and Siri can crack jokes, control your lights, answer questions, tell you the news, and so much more.

But for all their electronic conversational perfection, your electronic pals can’t satisfy your most fundamental needs and bring you a beer. This is something [luisengineering] has fixed, an he’s provided the appropriate answer to the question “Alexa: bring mir ein bier!“. The video which we’ve also put below the break is in German with YouTube’s automatic closed captions if you want them, but we think you’ll be able to get the point of it if not all his jokes without needing to learn to speak a bit of Deutsch.

As he develops his beer-delivery system we begin to appreciate that what might seem to be a relatively straightforward task is anything but. He takes an off-the-shelf robot and gives it a beer-bottle grabber and ice hopper, but the path from fridge to sofa still needs a little work. The eventual solution involves a lot of trial and error, and a black line on the floor for the ‘bot to follow. Finally, his electronic friend can bring him a beer!

We like [Luis]’s entertaining presentational style, and the use of props as microphone stands. We’ll be keeping an eye out for what he does next, and you should too. Meanwhile it may not surprise you that this is not the first beer-delivery ‘bot we’ve brought you.

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Robot Clings To Ceiling

June 9, 2021 by 6 Comments

Imagine you are at the movies and you see a Roomba-like robot climbing a wall or clinging to a ceiling. How would that work? If you are like us, you might think of suction cups or something mechanical or magnetic in the wall. Then again, it is a movie, so maybe it is just a camera trick. The robots from the Bioinsipired Robotics and Design Lab at UCSD are no camera trick, though. As [Evan Ackerman] mentions in a post on IEEE Spectrum, “It’s either some obscure fluid effect or black magic.” You can watch a video about the bots, below.

It turns out, the answer is closer to a suction cup than you might think. According to the paper from the lab, a small flexible disk vibrates at 200 Hz. This generates a thin (less than 1 mm) layer of low pressure air in between the disk and the underlying surface. The robot can resist a force of up to 5 newtons from the suction from the disk.

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Hackaday Links: March 7, 2021

March 7, 2021 by 13 Comments

It’s March, which means Keysight is back in the business of giving away a ton of test gear. Keysight University Live starts on March 15, with daily events the first week followed by a string of weekly live events through April. We always enjoy these Keysight events; sure, they’re clearly intended to sell more gear, but the demos and tutorials are great, and we always learn a lot. There’s also a feeling of community that feels similar to the Hackaday community; just a bunch of electronics nerds getting together to learn and share. If you’re interested in that community, or even if you’re just looking for a chance to win something from the $300,000 pile of goodies, you’ll need to register.

There’s another event coming up that you’ll want to know about: the 2021 Open Hardware Summit. Because 2021 is the new 2020, the summit is being held virtually again, this year on April 9. Tickets are on sale now, and we’re told there are still plenty of Ada Lovelace Fellowships available to those who consider themselves to be a minority in tech. The Fellowship covers the full cost of a ticket; it usually covers travels costs too, but sadly we’re still not there yet.

Once we do start traveling again, you might need to plan more carefully if cities start following the lead of Petaluma, California and start banning the construction of gas stations. The city, about 40 miles (64 km) north of San Francisco, is believed to be the first city in the United States to ban new gas station construction. The city council’s decision also prevents gas station owners from expanding, reconstructing, or relocating existing gas stations. The idea is to create incentives to move toward non-fossil fuel stations, like electric vehicle charging stations and hydrogen fueling. Time will tell how well that works out.

Go home Roomba — you’re drunk. That could be what Roomba owners are saying after an update semi-bricked certain models of the robotic vacuum cleaners. Owners noted a variety of behaviors, like wandering around in circles, bumping into furniture, and inability to make its way back to base for charging. There’s even a timelapse on reddit of a Roomba flailing about pathetically in a suspiciously large and empty room. The drunken analogy only goes so far, though, since we haven’t seen any reports of a Roomba barfing up the contents of its dust bin. But we’re still holding out hope.

And finally, if you’re not exactly astronaut material but still covet a trip to space, you might luck out courtesy of Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. He’s offering to pay the way for eight people from around the world on a planned flight to the Moon and back in 2023. Apparently, Maezawa bought up all the seats for the flight back in 2018 with the intention of flying a group of artists to space. His thinking has changed, though, and now he’s opening up the chance to serve as ballast join the crew to pretty much any rando on the planet. Giving away rides on Starship might be a harder sell after this week’s test, but we’re sure he’ll find plenty of takers. And to be honest, we wish the effort well — the age of routine civilian space travel can’t come soon enough for us.

Ben Krasnow Measures Human Calorie Consumption By Collecting The “Output”

February 23, 2021 by 37 Comments

It’s a bit icky reading between the lines on this one… but it’s a fascinating experiment! In his latest Applied Science video, [Ben Krasnow] tries to measure how efficient the human body is at getting energy from food by accurately measuring what he put in and what comes out of his body.

The jumping off point for this experiment is the calorie count on the back of food packaging. [Ben] touches on “bomb calorimetry” — the process of burning foodstuff in an oxygen-rich environment and measuring the heat given off to establish how much energy was present in the sample. But our bodies are flameless… can we really extract similar amounts of energy as these highly controlled combustion chambers? His solution is to measure his body’s intake by eating nothing but Soylent for a week, then subjects his body’s waste to the bomb calorimetry treatment to calculate how much energy was not absorbed during digestion. (He burned his poop for science, and made fun of some YouTubers at the same time.)

The test apparatus is a cool build — a chunk of pipe with an acrylic/glass laminated window that has a bicycle tire value for pressurization, a pressure gauge, and electrodes to spark the combustion using nichrome wire and cotton string. It’s shown above, burning a Goldfish® cracker but it’s not actually measuring the energy output as this is just a test run. The actual measurements call for the combustion chamber to be submerged in an insulated water bath so that the temperature change can be measured.

Now to the dirty bits. [Ben] collected fecal matter and freeze-dried it to ready it for the calorimeter. His preparation for the experiment included eating nothing but Soylent (a powdered foodstuff) to achieve an input baseline. The problem is that he measures the fecal matter to have about 75% of the calories per gram compared to the Soylent. Thinking on it, that’s not surprising as we know that dung must have a high caloric level — it burns and has been used throughout history as a source of warmth among other things. But the numbers don’t lead to an obvious conclusion and [Ben] doesn’t have the answer on why the measurements came out this way. In the YouTube comments [Bitluni] asks the question that was on our minds: how do you correlate the volume of the input and output? Is comparing 1g of Soylent to 1g of fecal matter a correct equivalency? Let us know what you think the comments below.

The science of poop is one of those 8th-grade giggle topics, but still totally fascinating. Two other examples that poop to mind are our recent sewage maceration infrastructure article and the science of teaching robot vacuums to detect pet waste.

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Modded Robot Vacuum Can Whistle While It Works

January 28, 2021 by 7 Comments

While repairing his Neato Botvac D85, [elad] noticed the little fellow was packing a real speaker and not just a piezo buzzer. Thinking this was a bit overkill just for the occasional beep and bloop, he decided to round things out with a Bluetooth receiver and a second speaker so the bot can spin some stereo tunes while it gets down and dirty.

It wasn’t a very expensive modification. Between the VHM-314 Bluetooth receiver, the 3 watt PAM8403 amplifier, and a matching speaker, [elad] says he was only a few bucks out of pocket. Truly a small price to pay for a robotic vacuum that plays its own theme music as it travels around the house. A small demonstration of the Neato’s new musical talents can be heard in the video after the break.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the audio hardware puts enough of a drain on the robot’s batteries at max volume that there’s a noticeable reduction in runtime. He’s not too worried about it right now, but [elad] mentions that if it ends up keeping the vacuum from being able to complete it’s whole cleaning cycle, that he might look into adding a dedicated power source to keep the music going.

Despite some early encouragement from iRobot, we haven’t seen quite as much robot vacuum hacking as you might think. It’s always interesting to get a glimpse inside of these automated housekeepers, especially when it’s a custom built machine.

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Hybrid Respirator Uses Repurposed Filters

December 5, 2020 by 15 Comments

With the coronavirus raging worldwide, 2020 has seen major shortages of personal protective equipment impact healthcare workers and individuals alike. This has led many to improvise their own solutions. One of the more complete offerings we’ve seen is this hybrid respirator build from [Ben Howard].

[Ben’s] build goes above and beyond the usual craft project masks. It uses a laser-cut chipboard frame to fit three HEPA filters, originally designed for the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. Two are used for exhalation, while one is used for inhalation. A small blower fan is installed with the intake filter, to provide mild positive pressure when breathing in. The assembly is wrapped up in fabric, using layers of spandex, fleece, and ripstop nylon to provide the best possible seal against the wearer’s face.

It’s a build that should appeal to those who want to breathe cleaner air and also protect others from exhaled particles that can spread respiratory viruses. We’ve seen all kind of masks hit the scene this year; the graphene-impregnated variety is one of the more interesting designs. Still, one can hope that future years lead to less reliance on such measures!