Silicone And AI Power This Prayerful Robotic Intercessor

March 25, 2020 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

Even in a world that is as currently far off the rails as this one is, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that this machine learning, servo-powered prayer bot is going to be the strangest thing you see today. We’re happy to be wrong about that, though, and if we are, please send links.

“The Prayer,” as [Diemut Strebe]’s work is called, may look strange, but it’s another in a string of pieces by various artists that explores just what it means to be human at a time when machines are blurring the line between them and us. The hardware is straightforward: a silicone rubber representation of a human nasopharyngeal cavity, servos for moving the lips, and a speaker to create the vocals. Those are generated by a machine-learning algorithm that was trained against the sacred texts of many of the world’s major religions, including the Christian Bible, the Koran, the Baghavad Gita, Taoist texts, and the Book of Mormon. The algorithm analyzes the structure of sacred verses and recreates random prayers and hymns using Amazon Polly that sound a lot like the real thing. That the lips move in synchrony with the ersatz devotions only adds to the otherworldliness of the piece. Watch it in action below.

We’ve featured several AI-based projects that poke at some interesting questions. This kinetic sculpture that uses machine learning to achieve balance comes to mind, while AI has even been employed in the search for spirits from the other side.

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Hot Wire Ribbon Cutter Ceremoniously Heats Up Productivity

March 16, 2020 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

Anyone who’s ever cut ribbon, grosgrain or otherwise, may be dismayed by the frayed edge. There are methods of avoiding this, like cutting the ribbon diagonally, or double-diagonally into a forked point, or cutting it straight across and cauterizing the threads with a lighter. But if you have a thirteen dozen baker’s dozens’ worth of goodies to festoon, ain’t nobody got time for that.

[IgorM92] made this hot wire ribbon cutter for his wife, who has a yummy-looking baking business. It combines the cutting and the heat-sealing into a single step by using the heating element from an old soldering iron. If you don’t have one of those, you could just as easily use the nichrome wire from an old hair dryer, a toaster, or wire-wound resistor.

Since the idea is essentially shorting a power source to heat up a wire, it should be done safely. [IgorM92] used a phone charger to condition mains power down to 5 V. There isn’t much else to the circuit, just a rocker switch, a power-indicating LED, and its resistor, but this simple project will no doubt save a lot of time and labor. Burn past the break to watch it ramp up production.

Nichrome wire is good for cutting foam, too. Here’s a bare-bones version that can be made in minutes.

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Wire Wrapping Skills Put To Use For Sign Making

March 4, 2020 by Tom Nardi 20 Comments

We don’t see many wire wrapped circuits these days, and you could be forgiven for thinking it was nearly a lost art at this point. But that doesn’t mean the technique can’t be applied elsewhere. [MiHu-Works] recently wrote in to share a sign they recently made for a client’s restaurant that looks an awful lot like the back panel of a homebrew computer to us.

Before you get a chance to scroll down and complain about it in the comments, we admit this one is fairly deep into the crafts side of the spectrum. But it’s also a gorgeous piece that we’d be happy to hang up in the hackerspace, so we don’t care. There might not be any angry pixies zipping around through all that lovingly wrapped copper wire, but it certainly feels like you’re looking at the internals of some complex machine.

To make it, [MiHu-Works] first printed out the lettering on paper and put it on the wood to serve as a guide. Roofing nails were then driven into the wood to create the outline of the text. A simple tool made from a forked piece of wood was placed under the head of each nail as it was hammered in to make sure the depth was consistent. It also made sure there was adequate room underneath to wrap the copper wires through them. Then it was time for the wrapping…so much wrapping. (Who is going to come through with the robot to do this?)

A few years back we asked the Hackaday readers if they thought the days of wire wrapped circuits were over. It generated a lot of discussion and interesting ideas, but looking at projects like this, perhaps we were asking the wrong question.

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Esper Makes Virtual Reality From Live Reality

March 2, 2020 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

There’s a scene in Bladerunner where Deckard puts a photograph in a magical machine that lets him zoom and enhance without limit, and even see around obstacles. In today’s climate, this is starting to seem more plausible, what with all the cameras everywhere. [Jasper van Loenen] explores this concept in Esper, a technological art installation he created in Seoul, Korea during an artist residency.

Esper is a two-part piece that turns virtual reality on its head by showing actual reality in VR. It covers two adjoining rooms, one to record reality, and the other for real-time virtual viewing on headsets. The first is outfitted with 60 ESP32 cameras on custom mounts, all pointing in different directions from various perches and ceiling drops. [Jasper] used an Android app based on openFrameworks to map the cameras’ locations in 3D space. The room next door is so empty, it’s even devoid of FOMO. You don’t want to miss this one, so check it out after the break.

Recreating sci-fi props is all fun and games until the dystopia arrives. Then again, the fact that we can all easily access 70,000 or so insecure surveillance cameras is a pretty good start.

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Single Bolt Transformed Into A Work Of Art

March 1, 2020 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

Every once in a while, this job helps you to discover something new and completely fascinating that has little to do with hacking but is worth sharing nonetheless. Turning a single brass bolt into a beautiful Cupid’s bow is certainly one of those times.

Watching [Pablo Cimadevila] work in the video below is a real treat, on par with a Clickspring build for craftsmanship and production values. His goal is to use a largish brass bolt as the sole source of material for a charming little objet d’art, which he achieves mainly with the use of simple hand tools. The stave of the bow is cut from the flattened shank of the bolt with a jeweler’s saw, with the bolt head left as a display stand. The offcuts are melted down and drawn out into wire for both the bowstring and the shaft of the arrow, a process that’s fascinating in its own right. The heart-shaped arrowhead and the faces of the bolt head are bedazzled with rubies; the technique [Pablo] uses to create settings for the stones is worth the price of admission alone. The complete video below is well worth a watch, but if you don’t have the twelve minutes to spare, a condensed GIF is available.

[Pablo]’s artistry reminds us a bit of this not-quite-one-bolt combination lock. We love the constraint of sourcing all a project’s materials from a single object, and we really appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into builds like these.

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Ghost Frame Shows People (and Cats) That Don’t Exist

February 25, 2020 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

[Dan]’s project from last year slipped past us until now, but his Ghost Frame is a great example of tying some modern hackable hardware together with online resources into a clean result, and we like the clear idea behind it. The Ghost Frame is so named because its purpose is literally to show pictures of people (and cats) that do not exist in the physical world.

This cat does not exist (thank goodness.) The computer doesn’t always get it right.

To make it all work, [Dan] used an Adafruit PyPortal as the guts of the device. It pulls images from ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com (which displays computer-assembled images of faces that do not represent actual living people) and displays them as though they were pictures in a digital photo frame. Formatting the image to show up nicely on the PyPortal’s 320 x 240 display took a little extra work; [Dan] solved that problem with a small PHP script to convert the image to a bitmap and scale it correctly in the process. The PyPortal makes fetching resources from the web simple, so this kind of fiddling didn’t present much of an obstacle to [Dan]’s artistic vision.

What about the cats? Well, it turns out that ThisCatDoesNotExist.com is also out there, and Ghost Frame can happily display computer-generated images of nonexistent cats as easily as it shows imaginary people. However, it does seem that the state of nonexistent cat generation is lagging somewhat behind that for people. The site usually gets it right, but results are occasionally (amusingly) bizarre as you can see here.

The PyPortal is perfect for this kind of project, and it can do more than just display static content. It has some GUI functionality baked in, as we saw showcased recently in this touchscreen Blackjack game.

Origami Butterfly: A Flex PCB Adventure Unfolds

February 24, 2020 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

Flexible circuits have been around longer than you might expect, although they only recently rounded the bend and bounced into the hobbyist’s toolbox. When Boldport fanatic [Laura Lindzey] found out about them, her immediate dream project was to make an origami butterfly that does something cool, though she wasn’t sure what.

The idea she landed on is this: when the butterfly alights on a power-providing flower, it draws electrical nectar through its diode legs and lights up the LEDs on its wings. As long as one leg touches a ground petal and another touches a VIN petal, there will be light.

Though the idea may be simple, it’s the execution that’s mind-bending. After meticulous planning and a lot of paper prototyping, she sent off the gerbers and got version one back. The circuit worked, but assembly was tedious — not what you want when you’re trying to stay friendly with the other people in your PCB exchange club.

We imagine that hard creases are probably not what the flexible PCB purveyors have in mind, but this origami butterfly is an awesome exercise in what can be done with flexible PCBs. Not only that, it’s a great insight into some design rules where almost none exist, learned through firsthand experience. Every technology can benefit from trailblazers like [Laura].

If you want to do some flexible prototyping at home, just print your own pliable PCBs.