A tiny CRT showing an eye, inside a plexiglass enclosure

This Eye Is Watching You From Its Tiny CRT

October 9, 2022 by Robin Kearey 25 Comments

The days of cathode ray tubes, or CRTs, are firmly behind us, and that’s generally a good thing. Display tubes were heavy, bulky and fragile, and needed complicated high-voltage electronics in order to work. But not all of them were actually large: miniature display tubes were also produced, for things like camcorder viewfinders, and [Tavis] from Sideburn Studios decided to turn one of those into a slightly creepy art project.

The heart of this build is a one-inch CRT that was salvaged from an RCA video camera. [Tavis] mounted the tiny tube inside an acrylic box on a 3D printed base. Inside that base sits a Raspberry Pi along with a high-voltage driver and a power management board. The Pi continuously plays a video that shows a human eye blinking and looking in various directions. Just an eye, floating in space, looking at the world around it.

The magic is briefly lost when the Pi starts up, because it then shows a microscopic version of the Pi’s standard bootup sequence, but once the thing is running it adds a weird vibe to a room. It actually looks like something you’d find in an avant-garde art exhibition — in the video (embedded below) it’s accompanied by eerie music that gives it an even more unsettling feel. Electronic eyes are always a bit scary, especially when they’re actually looking at you.

Continue reading “This Eye Is Watching You From Its Tiny CRT” →

Flux: A Forty Foot Long Kinetic Art Piece

October 7, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 5 Comments

No office space is complete without some eye-catching art piece to gawp at whilst you mull over your latest problem. But LED-based displays are common enough to be boring these days. Kinetic art pieces are where it’s at, and this piece called Flux is a perfect example.

Commissioned for the Toronto office of a very popular e-commerce platform and constructed by [Nicholas Stedman], Flux consists of twenty identical planks on the ceiling, arranged in a line forty feet long. Each plank has a pair of rotating prisms, constructed from a stack of foam sheets, finished with metallic paint. The prisms are spun by individual stepper motors, each of which is driven by a TMC2160-based module, making them whisper-quiet.

A simple 3D printed bracket holds a small PCB holding an AMS AS5600 rotary magnetic encoder, onto the rear of the stepper motor. This allows for closed-loop feedback to the shared Arduino, which is very important for a sculpture such as this. Each Arduino is hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, running a simple application written in node.js which is responsible for coordinating movement, as well as uploading updated firmware images as required. A simple, but very effective build, we think!

Even more fun are kinetic art installations that are reactive to some data source, such as Adad, which visualizes lightning strike data. If these builds are just too big and complex, we’ve seen many examples of smaller desktop toys, such as this 3D printed tumbling chain demo for example.

Continue reading “Flux: A Forty Foot Long Kinetic Art Piece” →

close-up image of a philodendron houseplant with electrodes attached, connected to a robot arm holding a machete

(Mostly) Harmless Houseplant Wields Machete

October 6, 2022 by Dave Walker 27 Comments

In a straight fight between a houseplant and a human, you might expect the plant to be at a significant disadvantage. So [David Bowen] has decided to even the odds a little by arming this philodendron with a robot arm and a machete.

The build is a little short on details but, from the video, it appears that adhesive electrodes have been attached to the leaves of the recently-empowered plant and connected directly to analog inputs of an Arduino Uno. From there, the text tells us that the signals are mapped to movements of the industrial robot arm that holds the blade.

It’s not clear if the choice of plant is significant, but an unarmed philodendron appears to be otherwise largely innocuous, unless you happen to be a hungry rodent. We hope that there is also a means of disconnecting the power remotely, else this art installation could defend itself indefinitely! (or until it gets thirsty, at least.) We at Hackaday welcome our new leafy overlords.

We have covered the capabilities of plants before, and they can represent a rich seam of research for the home hacker. They can tell you when they’re thirsty, but can they bend light to their will? We even held a Plant Communication Hack Chat in 2021.

Continue reading “(Mostly) Harmless Houseplant Wields Machete” →

In A Way, 3D Scanning Is Over A Century Old

October 2, 2022 by Donald Papp 23 Comments

In France during the mid-to-late 1800s, one could go into François Willème’s studio, sit for a photo session consisting of 24 cameras arranged in a circle around the subject, and in a matter of days obtain a photosculpture. A photosculpture was essentially a sculpture representing, with a high degree of exactitude, the photographed subject. The kicker was that it was both much faster and far cheaper than traditional sculpting, and the process was remarkably similar in principle to 3D scanning. Not bad for well over a century ago.

This article takes a look at François’ method for using the technology and materials of the time to create 3D reproductions of photographed subjects. The article draws a connection between photosculpture and 3D printing, but we think the commonality with 3D scanning is much clearer.

Continue reading “In A Way, 3D Scanning Is Over A Century Old” →

Rib Cage Lamp Kicks It Up A Notch With Party Mode

October 1, 2022 by Donald Papp 8 Comments

We think [Michelle]’s sound-reactive rib cage lamp turned out great, and the photos and details around how it was made are equally fantastic. The lamp is made of carved and waxed wood, and inside is a bundle of LED lighting capable of a variety of different color palettes and patterns, including the ability to react to sound. Every rib cage should have a party mode, after all.

The LED strip is fashioned into an atom-like structure.

Turns out that designing good rib cage pieces is a bigger challenge than one might think. [Michelle]’s method was to use an anatomical 3D model as reference, tracing each piece so that it could be cut from a flat sheet of wood.

The resulting flat pieces then get assembled into a stack, with each rib pointed downward at a roughly 20 degree angle. This process is a neat hack in itself: instead of drilling holes all at exactly the same angle, [Michelle] simply made the holes twice the diameter of the steel rod they stack on. The result? The pieces angle downward on their own.

The LED lighting is itself a nice piece of work. The basic structure comes from soldered solid-core wire. The RGB LED strip gets wound around that, then reinforced with garden wire. The result is an atomic-looking structure that sits inside the rib cage. An ESP32 development board drives everything with the FastLED library.

Code for everything, including the sound-reactive worky bits, which rely on an INMP441 I²C microphone module is all available on GitHub. And if you want to make your own sound-reactive art, make sure to check out these arms as well.

Want to see the rib cage in action? A short demo video is embedded below that demonstrates the sound reactivity. Equally applicable to either party or relaxation modes, we think.

Continue reading “Rib Cage Lamp Kicks It Up A Notch With Party Mode” →

AI Dreaming Of Time Travel

September 28, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 20 Comments

We love the intersection between art and technology, and a video made by an AI (Stable Diffusion) imagining a journey through time (Nitter) is a lovely example. The project is relatively straightforward, but as with most art projects, there were endless hours of [Xander Steenbrugge] tweaking and playing with different parts of the process until it was just how he liked it. He mentions trying thousands of different prompts and seeds — an example of one of the prompts is “a small tribal village with huts.” In the video, each prompt got 72 frames, slowly increasing in strength and then decreasing as the following prompt came along.

There are other AI videos on YouTube, often putting the lyrics of a song into AI-generated form. But if you’ve worked with AI systems, you’ll notice that the background stays remarkably stable in [Xander]’s video as it goes through dozens of feedback loops. This is difficult to do as you want to change the image’s content without changing the look. So he had to write a decent amount of code to try and maintain visual temporal cohesion over time. Hopefully, we’ll see an open-source version of some of his improvements, as he mentioned on Twitter.

In the meantime, we get to sit back and enjoy something beautiful. If you still aren’t convinced that Stable Diffusion isn’t a big deal, perhaps we can do a little more to persuade your viewpoint.

Continue reading “AI Dreaming Of Time Travel” →

laser cut acrylic coaster with rgb leds inside

Your Mug Will Like This Glowy Coaster

September 28, 2022 by Abe Connelly 2 Comments

[Charlyn] wanted to highlight their friends beautiful mug collection, so the Glowy Coaster was born.

The coaster is made up of six layers of laser cut acrylic. The top and bottom layer are cut out of clear acrylic, providing a flat surface for the coaster. A top pattern layer made of pearl acrylic has a thin piece of vellum put underneath it to provide diffusion for the LED strip sandwiched inside. The middle layers are made of peach acrylic and have their centers hollowed out to provide room for the electronics inside. The top pearl acrylic layer gives the coaster, as [Charlyn] writes, a “subtle touch of elegance”. The coaster itself is screwed together by an M3 screw at each point of the hexagon that feed through to heat-set inserts.

The electronics consist of a short NeoPixel strip, cut to include 12 LEDs pointed in towards the center of the coaster. The LEDs are driven by a Trinket M0 microcontroller with a LiPo “backpack” to provide power, attachment points for the exposed power switch and recharging capability to the 110 mAh 3.7 V battery. The code is a slightly modified NeoPixel “rainbow” wheel loop (source available as a gist). The design files are available through Thingiverse.

Creations like these highlight how much care and work goes into a project with minimal beauty, where decisions, like the opacity and thickness of the acrylic or countersinking the M3 screws, can have huge consequences for the overall aesthetic. [Charlyn] has an attention to detail that brings an extra touch of professionalism and polish to the project.

Coasters are a favorite for laser cutting and we’ve covered many different types, including
coaster bots, coaster engravers and even a color changing, drink sensing coasters.

Continue reading “Your Mug Will Like This Glowy Coaster” →