Actuator Opens The Door To Drier Dishes

November 18, 2020 by Kristina Panos 41 Comments

Dishwashers are great at washing dishes and even rinsing them, most of the time. Where they tend to fail is in the drying part. Somehow these things dry hot enough to warp stoneware dishes, but not so well that things are actually dry when you open the door. Blame it on the lack of air movement.

Ideally, the dishwasher cycle is started soon after dinner time so it can be finished and opened up before it’s time for bed. But if you do that, then you miss all the dishes from late-night snacking and the occasional wine glass. Wait until bedtime to start it, and it has to sit several hours with moisture inside. Obviously, the answer is to listen for the victory beeps at the end of the cycle, and use a slow but forceful actuator to push the door open.

[Ivan Stepaniuk] is listening for the dishwasher’s frequencies with a microphone, amplifying them with a trusty LM386, and using an STM32 blue pill to crunch the audio. [Ivan] has plans to incorporate an ESP8266 board for IoT, presumably to get a notification when the door has been opened successfully. Check out the demo after the break.

Yes, dishwashers are great until they aren’t, and some little part breaks. But why pay for a new detergent compartment cover when you can just print one?

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Wireless Earphones And Getting Them Back After They Fall On Tram Tracks

November 13, 2020 by Maya Posch 34 Comments

Over the past years, the trend has become to ditch anything with wires. This has led to many people dropping wired earphones and headphones for wireless (Bluetooth) versions. Yet along with the freedom from having the wires snagged on something and having earphones painfully torn out of your ears comes the very real risk of having them drop out of your ears to land potentially very inconvenient.

In Japan this has led to a big issue for railway companies, where throngs of commuters will often accidentally drop possessions onto the tracks. Staff members will then use a mechanical claw (‘magic hand’) to fetch them without having to risk their life by jumping down. With small items such as wireless earphones, this is however not so easy. With 947 cases of dropped earphones in the period of July-September in just the Tokyo area, this has led to desperate staff members coming up with new methods of easily retrieving the small gadgets.

Solutions range from putting something sticky like tape at the end of a stick, to modifying vacuum cleaners. Most recently Tokyo railway company JR East has collaborated with Panasonic to develop a vacuum cleaner-like device that is especially designed to easily retrieve such small items from the tracks, according to the Japan Times article.

The embedded video (also found after the break) from a Japanese broadcaster describes the issue in detail, along with tips on how to properly wear earphones so that they’re far less likely to fall out when you’re waiting on the tram or walking down the street. While it’s possible to fetch your dropped wireless earphones from the tracks, having someone step on it right after it falls out of your ear on the street is less easy to recover from.

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Door Mutes Microphone To Prevent Remote Learning Humiliation

November 8, 2020 by Chris Lott 16 Comments

In a kind of reverse twist on the doorbell, [TheStaticTurtle] whipped up a system to mute his computer’s microphone whenever someone opens the door to his room. He lives in France, where the government announced a strict lockdown last Friday. Like many university students around the world these days, he is now forced to take online classes. Even though he has his own room, occasionally someone will barge in and announce something, often to [TheStaticTurtle]’s embarrassment. When his classmates suddenly heard “Do you want some pie?” the other day, it was the last straw.

His first decision was to sense the door opening with a magnet and sensor, which he stuck to the door and frame with hot glue. He then ran a long cable to his desk, where it connected to an ATTiny 85 with a DigiSpark boot-loader. He wrote firmware to simulate special key combinations, which were then registered with his audio routing software Voicemeeter Potato. We presume he isn’t using an external mic, in which case muting might have been easier to accomplish with a hardware switch. All in all, this is a pretty clever and timely hack. Should you be in a similar predicament and want to try this out, he’s published the source code on GitHub.

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Emmanuelle Charpentier And Jennifer Doudna Sharpened Mother Nature’s Genetic Scissors And Won The Nobel For It

November 3, 2020 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

It sounds like science fiction — and until 2012, the ability to cheaply and easily edit strings of DNA was exactly that. But as it turns out, CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing is a completely natural function in which bacteria catalogs its interactions with viruses by taking a snippet of the virus’ genetic material and filing it away for later.

Now, two women have won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for developing a method for genome editing”. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna leveraged CRISPR into a pair of genetic scissors and showed how sharp they are by proving that they can edit any string of DNA this way. Since Emmanuelle and Jennifer published their 2012 paper on CRISPR/Cas9, researchers have used these genetic scissors to create drought-resistant plants and look for new gene-based cancer therapies. Researchers are also hoping to use CRISPR/Cas9 to cure inherited diseases like Huntington’s and sickle cell anemia.

The discovery started with Emmanuelle Charpentier’s investigation of the Streptococcus pyogenes bacterium. She was trying to understand how its genes are regulated and was hoping to make an antibiotic. Once she teamed up with Jennifer Doudna, they found a scientific breakthrough instead.

Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier via Wikimedia Commons

Emmanuelle Charpentier Fights Flesh-Eating Bacteria

Emmanuelle Charpentier was born December 11th, 1968 in Juvisy-sur-Orge, France. She studied biochemistry, microbiology, and genetics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, which is now known as Sorbonne University. Then she received a research doctorate from Institut Pasteur and worked as a university teaching assistant and research scientist. Dr. Charpentier is currently a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, and in 2018, she founded an independent research unit.

Upon completion of her doctorate, Dr. Charpentier spent a few years working in the States before winding up at the University of Vienna where she started a research group. Her focus was still on the bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes, which causes millions of people to suffer through infections like tonsillitis and impetigo each year. It also causes sepsis, which officially makes it a flesh-eating bacterium.

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Shocking Tinnitus Therapy Is Music To Sufferers’ Ears

October 16, 2020 by Kristina Panos 67 Comments

Do you suffer from tinnitus? We were surprised to learn that 15-20% of people have this condition that amounts to constant ringing in the ears. Science doesn’t fully understand the ringing part, but one possible explanation is that the brain is compensating for the frequencies it can’t hear any more.

[Hubert Lim], a biomedical engineer at the University of Minnesota discovered that the brain can be stimulated to the point of suppressing tinnitus for as long as one year. [Lim] discovered this by accident while doing deep brain stimulation on a patient with tinnitus. The electrode strayed a bit, touching other areas of the brain and the patient suddenly exclaimed that they couldn’t hear their tinnitus anymore.

Then [Lim] and his team tested guinea pigs, searching here, there, and under the armpits for the best place to suppress tinnitus. As it turns out, the tongue is one of the best places when used along with a specific soundscape. So then they did a human trial with 326 people. Each person had a small paddle electrode on their tongue and headphones on their ears.

As the electrodes sparkled like Pop Rocks against their tongues, the trial participants listened to pure frequencies played over a background of sound resembling vaporwave music. The combination of the two overstimulates the brain, forcing it to suppress the tinnitus reaction. This discovery certainly seems like a game changer for tinnitus sufferers. If we had tinnitus, we would be first in line to try this out given the chance. Armed with the soundscape, we’re left to wonder how many 9V batteries we’d have to lick to approximate the paddle.

Speaking of taste, have you ever experienced all five at once? Here’s a device that simulates them all.

DIY Braille Embosser Is Really Impressive

October 10, 2020 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

We weren’t surprised to learn that Braille tools are quite expensive. But it’s interesting to hear that there’s another class of tools altogether, and they are very cheap and imprecise. In devising the Braille Embossing Experience, aka BEE, [alatorre] sought to find an open-source middle ground. We think they succeeded marvelously.

Another surprising thing — while handheld embossers do exist, there is no system for filling out an A4 sheet of paper, say, to write a letter.

For Braille to be readable, the characters and lines must be properly spaced, and this requires some kind of moveable type-like device to correctly register the characters onto paper. BEE fills this void as well. The amazing thing is, there’s not much more to it than a marked-up piece of aluminum and some clever 3D printing.

There are two parts to this system — the positioning rail, which includes a landing box for the embosser with six holes in the bottom. The other part is a pair of embossers, one for letters A-M, and another for letters N-Z. To use BEE, just slide the rail to the right and start embossing letters right to left, then flip the paper over when finished.

Need to create something more permanent? Make a Braille PCB.

Keep Your YouTube Habits To Yourself With FreeTube

October 7, 2020 by Sven Gregori 43 Comments

If your usual YouTube viewing selection covers a wild and random variety of music, tech subjects, cooking, history, and anything in-between, you will sooner or later be baffled by some of the “Recommended for you” videos showing up. When it features a ten-hour mix of Soviet propaganda choir music, you might start wondering what a world taken over by an artificial intelligence might actually look like, and realize that your browser’s incognito / private mode really isn’t just for shopping birthday presents in secret. Things get a bit tricky if you actually enjoy or even rely on the whole subscribing-to-channels concept though, which is naturally difficult to bring in line with privacy in today’s world of user-data-driven business models.

Entering the conversation: the FreeTube project, a cross-platform application whose mission is to regain privacy and put the control of one’s data back into the user’s hands. Bypassing YouTube and its player, the watch history and subscriptions — which are still possible — are kept only locally on your own computer, and you can import either of them from YouTube and export them to use within FreeTube on another device (or back to YouTube). Even better, it won’t load a video’s comments without explicitly telling it to, and of course it keeps out the ads as well.

Originally, the Invidious API was used to get the content, and is still supported as fallback option, but FreeTube comes with its own extractor API nowadays. All source code is available from the project’s GitHub repository, along with pre-built packages for Linux (including ARM), Windows, and Mac. The application itself is created using Electron, which might raise a few eyebrows as it packs an entire browser rendering engine and essentially just disguises a website as standalone application. But as the FAQ addresses, this allows easy cross-platform support and helps the project, which would have otherwise been Linux-only, to reach as many people as possible. That’s a valid point in our book.

Keep in mind though, FreeTube is only a player, and more of a wrapper around YouTube itself, so YouTube will still see your IP and interaction with the service. If you want to be fully anonymous, this isn’t a silver bullet and will require additional steps like using a VPN. Unlike other services that you could replace with a local alternative to avoid tracking and profiling, content services are just a bit trickier if you want to actually have a useful selection. So this is a great compromise that also just works out of the box for everyone regardless of their technical background. Let’s just hope it won’t break too much next time some API changes.