Macro Foot Stool Helps Me Get A Leg Up On Work

December 20, 2019 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

Macros are meant to make our lives easier, but they live up to this promise with mixed results. Generally speaking, a macro is a special combination of keys on the keyboard that execute a custom task — their goal is to speed up your productivity by getting away from mousing through menus. But once a macro requires more than two keys, they can get a bit cumbersome to input. I have personally found that repeated use of macros that require ctrl+shift can potentially cause problems. I don’t know about you (and your repetitive stress mileage may vary), but personal injury is the polar opposite of what I want from something that’s supposed to be convenient.

The more I thought about how nice it would be to have a field of dedicated one-punch macro keys, the more incomplete my life seemed without it. Every uncomfortable three-key shortcut I chorded was more motivational than the last.

I love keyboard shortcuts, and not just because I prefer keyboard navigation in general. A lot of little things about writing for the web can be streamlined with shortcuts, like writing html tags and doing image manipulation. And I’m always looking for a better workflow to pin down my fleeting mental fragments, at least until that dark day that I can turn on Dropbox Thoughts™ and burn my brainwaves directly to disk.

Continue reading “Macro Foot Stool Helps Me Get A Leg Up On Work” →

Electric Dreams Help Cows Survive The Desert Of The Real

December 3, 2019 by Tom Nardi 64 Comments

Pictures of a cow wearing a pair of comically oversized virtual reality goggles recently spread like wildfire over social media, and even the major news outlets eventually picked it up. Why not? Nobody wants to read about geopolitical turmoil over the holidays, and this story was precisely the sort of lighthearted “news” people would, if you can forgive the pun, gobble up.

But since you’re reading Hackaday, these images probably left you with more questions than answers. Who made the hardware, what software is it running, and of course, why does a cow need VR? Unfortunately, the answers to the more technical questions aren’t exactly forthcoming. Even tracking the story back to the official press release from the Ministry of Agriculture and Food of the Moscow Region doesn’t tell us much more than we can gather from the image itself.

But it does at least explain why somebody went through the trouble of making a custom bovine VR rig: calm cows produce more milk. These VR goggles, should they pass their testing and actually be adopted by the Russian dairy industry, will be the newest addition to a list of cow-calming hardware devices that farmers have been using for decades to get the most out of their herds.

Continue reading “Electric Dreams Help Cows Survive The Desert Of The Real” →

Giant Analog CO2 Meter Sweeps Away Doubt

November 14, 2019 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

Most of us are aware that trees turn CO₂ into oxygen, but we’d venture to guess that many people’s knowledge of this gas ends there. Is it feast or famine out there for the trees? Who can say? We admire [rabbitcreek]’s commitment to citizen science because he’s so focused on making it easy for people to understand their environment. His latest offering, a giant analog CO₂ meter, might be our favorite so far.

The brains of the operation is an Adafruit Feather Adalogger. It reads the CO₂ sensor that’s mounted close to the business end of the nautilus, and becomes the quill that writes the CO₂ value to a FeatherWing e-ink screen. For the giant needle, this lovely meter uses one of those fiberglass poles you mark your driveway with so you can find it under a blanket of snow. The needle is counter-balanced with washers encased in printed plastic.

As you can see in the GIF, there’s a decent delay between the CO₂ blast and the needle response — we like to imagine the CO₂ spiraling slowly through the nautilus like a heavy, ill wind on its way to gravely move the needle.

Want a way to monitor air quality that’s a bit more discreet? Slip this portable meter into your pocket.

Tool Rolls, The Fabric Design Challenge That Can Tidy Up Any Workshop

September 18, 2019 by Kristina Panos 31 Comments

You’ve designed PCBs. You’ve cut, drilled, Dremeled, and blow-torched various objects into project enclosurehood. You’ve dreamed up some object in three dimensions and marveled as the machine stacked up strings of hot plastic, making that object come to life one line of g-code at a time. But have you ever felt the near-limitless freedom of designing in fabric?

I don’t have to tell you how satisfying it is to make something with your hands, especially something that will get a lot of use. When it comes to that sweet cross between satisfaction and utility, fabric is as rewarding as any other medium. You might think that designing in fabric is difficult, but let’s just say that it is not intuitive. Fabric is just like anything else — mysterious until you start learning about it. The ability to design and implement in fabric won’t solve all your problems, but it sure is a useful tool for the box.

WoF? Fat quarter? How much is a yard of fabric, anyway?

To prove it, I’m going to take you through the process of designing something in fabric. More specifically, a tool roll. These two words may conjure images of worn, oily leather or canvas, rolled out under the open hood of a car. But the tool roll is a broad, useful concept that easily and efficiently bundles up anything from socket wrenches to BBQ utensils and from soldering irons to knitting needles. Tool rolls are the best in flexible, space-saving storage — especially when custom-designed for your need.

In this case, the tools will be pens, notebooks, and index cards. You know, writer stuff. But the same can just as easily organize your oscilloscope probes. It’s usefully and a great first foray into building things with fabric if this is your first time.

Continue reading “Tool Rolls, The Fabric Design Challenge That Can Tidy Up Any Workshop” →

GymCam Knows Exactly What You’ve Been Doing In The Gym

September 15, 2019 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Getting exact statistics on one’s physical activities at the gym, is not an easy feat. While most people these days are familiar with or even regularly use one of those motion-based trackers on their wrist, there’s a big question as to their accuracy. After all, it’s all based on the motions of just one’s wrist, which as we know leads to amusing results in the tracker app when one does things like waving or clapping one’s hands, and cannot track leg exercises at the gym.

To get around the issue of limited sensor data, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA) developed a system based around a camera and machine vision algorithms. While other camera solutions that attempt this suffer from occlusion while trying to track individual people as accurately as possible, this new system instead doesn’t try to track people’s joints, but merely motion at specific exercise machines by looking for repetitive motion in the scene.

The basic concept is that repetitive motion usually indicates forms of exercise, and that no two people at the same type of machine will ever be fully in sync with their motions, so that merely a handful of pixels suffice to track motion at that machine by a single person. This also negates many privacy issues, as the resolution doesn’t have to be high enough to see faces or track joints with any degree of accuracy.

In experiments at the university’s gym, the accuracy of their system over 5 days and 42 hours of video. Detecting exercise activities in the scene was with a 99.6% accuracy, disambiguating between simultaneous activities was 84.6% accurate, while recognizing exercise types was 93.6% accurate. Ultimately repetition counts for specific exercises were within 1.7 counts.

Maybe an extended version of this would be a flying drone capturing one’s outside activities, giving one finally that 100% accurate exercise account while jogging?

Thanks to [Qes] for sending this one in!

These Tips Make Assembling A Few Hundred PCBs Easier

September 12, 2019 by Donald Papp 7 Comments

There are a few common lessons that get repeated by anyone who takes on the task of assembling a few hundred PCBs, but there are also unique insights to be had. [DominoTree] shared his takeaways after making a couple hundred electronic badges for DEFCON 26 (that’s the one before the one that just wrapped up, if anyone’s keeping track.) [DominoTree] assembled over 200 Telephreak badges and by the end of it he had quite a list of improvements he wished he had made during the design phase.

Some tips are clearly sensible, such as adding proper debug and programming interfaces, or baking an efficient test cycle into the firmware. Others are not quite so obvious, for example “add a few holes to your board.” Holes can be useful in unexpected ways and cost essentially zero. Even if the board isn’t going to be mounted to anything, a few holes can provide a way to attach jigs or other hardware like test fixtures.

[DominoTree] ended up having to attach multiple jumper wires to reprogram boards after assembly, and assures us that “doing this a bunch of times really sucked.”

Other advice is more generic but no less important, as with “eliminate as many steps as possible.” Almost anything adds up to a significant chunk of time when repeated hundreds of times. To the basement hacker, something such as pre-cut and pre-tinned wires might seem like a shameful indulgence. But cutting, stripping, tinning, then hand-soldering a wire adds up to significant time and effort by iteration number four hundred (that’s two power wires per badge) even if one isn’t staring down a looming deadline.

[DominoTree] also followed up with additional advice on making assembly easier. Our own [Brian Benchoff] has also shared his observations on the experience of developing and assembling a large number of Hackaday Superconference badges, including what it took to keep things moving along when inevitable problems surfaced.

You don’t need to be making batches of hundreds for these lessons to pay off, so keep them in mind and practice them on your next project.

High Voltage Protects Low Denominations

September 6, 2019 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

How do you keep people out of your change jar? If you didn’t say with a 3D printed iris mechanism and high-voltage spark gap, then clearly you aren’t [Vije Miller]. Which is probably for the best, as we’re not sure we actually want to live in a world where there are two of these things.

Regular Hackaday readers will know that [Vije] has a way of using electromechanical trickery to inject a bit of excitement, and occasionally a little danger, into even the most mundane aspects of life. His latest project is an automated change jar that uses a pinpad to authenticate users, while everyone else gets the business end of a spark gap if the PIR sensor detects them getting to close.

You can see a demonstration of the jar in the video after the break, where he shows the jar’s ability to stop…himself, from getting access to it. Hey, nobody said it was meant to keep out real intruders. Though we do think a similar gadget could be a fun way to keep the kids out of the cookie jar before dinner, though we’d strongly suggest deleting the high-voltage component from the project before deploying it with a gullet full of Keebler’s best.

[Vije] was able to adapt a printable iris design he found on Thingiverse to fit over the mouth of the jar, and uses servos in the base to rotate the whole assembly around and open it up. The internal Arduino Nano handles reading from the pinpad, controlling the stepper, and of course firing up the spark generator for 1000 milliseconds each time the PIR sensor detects somebody trying to be cute. Just the sound of the arc should be enough to get somebody to reconsider the value of literal pocket change.

Some of the design elements used in this change jar’s high voltage components were influenced by the lessons learned when [Vije] was building his plasma-powered toilet air freshener. There’s a sentence we bet you never expected to read today.

Continue reading “High Voltage Protects Low Denominations” →