When Adding Noise Helps

January 25, 2015 by Elliot Williams 20 Comments

It’s a counterintuitive result that you might need to add noise to an input signal to get the full benefits from oversampling in analog to digital conversion. [Paul Allen] steps us through a simple demonstration (dead link, try Internet Archive) of why this works on his blog. If you’re curious about oversampling, it’s a good read.

Oversampling helps to reduce quantization noise, which is the sampling equivalent of rounding error. In [Paul’s] one-bit ADC example, the two available output values are zero volts and one volt. Any analog signal between these two values is rounded off to either zero or one, and the resulting difference is the quantization error.

In oversampling, instead of taking the bare minimum number of samples you need you take extra samples and average them together. But as [Paul] demonstrates, this only works if you’ve got enough noise in the system already. If you don’t, you can actually make your output more accurate by adding noise on the input. That’s the counterintuitive bit.

We like the way he’s reduced the example to the absolute minimum. Instead of demonstrating how 16x oversampling can add two bits of resolution to your 10-bit ADC, it’s a lot clearer with the one-bit example.

[Paul’s] demo is great because it makes a strange idea obvious. But it got us just far enough to ask ourselves how much noise is required in the system for oversampling to help in reducing quantization noise. And just how much oversampling is necessary to improve the result by a given number of bits? (The answers are: at least one bit’s worth of noise and 2^2B, respectively, but we’d love to see this covered intuitively.) We’re waiting for the next installment, or maybe you can try your luck in the comment section.

Real World AdBlock

January 23, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 42 Comments

Every day your eyeballs are assaulted by advertisements on your box of cereal, billboards, t-shirts, magazines, milk cartons, plastered on the side of buses, buildings, bananas, and written in the sky. [Reed], [Jonathan], [Tom], and [Alex] came up with a solution to this: a Brand Killer that censors all the advertisements and brands you see every minute of every day. It’s a real-world adblock that you can build right now.

The team’s system uses a custom head mounted display made from cardboard, goggles, a webcam, and a seven-inch display. The software for the system uses Python and OpenCV to monitor the images from the webcam, compares them against a list of brands and logos, and filters them out with an unobtrusive blur.

Right now the system just has a few brands and logos that include Dr. Pepper, Hershey’s, McDonalds, Facebook, Starbucks, and clear evidence this was built at UPenn, Wawa and Tastykake. In the video below, the detection and tracking of these various brands is very good. The system is also stereoscopic, meaning this is wearable all day, every day, without a loss of depth perception.

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An Adjustable Sit/Stand Desk For Under $100

January 23, 2015 by Rick Osgood 33 Comments

[Cornel Masson] is a 46-year-old computer programmer. He’s been working on his computer for the last 30 years. Computer work can be good for the wallet but it can be bad for our health, particularly the neck and back. You can purchase adjustable desks to allow you to change positions from sitting to standing, but unfortunately these desks are often expensive. [Cornel] took matters into his own hands and build his own adjustable riser for under $100.

To start, [Cornel] used a typical computer desk. He didn’t want to build the entire thing from scratch. Instead he focused on building a riser that sits on top of the desk, allowing him to change the height of both the monitor and keyboard. His design used mostly wood, aluminum stock, threaded rods, and drawer slides.

The main component is the monitor stand and riser. The riser is able to slide up and down thanks to four drawer slides mounted vertically. [Cornel] wanted his monitor to move up and down with ease, which meant he needed some kind of counter weight. He ended up using a gas strut from the trunk of a Nissan, which acts as a sort of spring. The way in which it is mounted makes for a very close approximation of his monitor’s weight. The result is a monitor that can be raised or lowered very easily. The stand also includes a locking mechanism to keep it secured in the top position.

The keyboard stand is also mounted to drawer slides, only these are in the horizontal position. When the monitor is lowered for sitting, the keyboard tray is removed from the keyboard stand. The stand can then be pushed backwards, overlapping the monitor stand and taking up much less space. The keyboard stand has small rollers underneath to help with the sliding. The video below contains a slideshow of images that do a great job explaining how it all works.

Of course if replacing the entire desk is an option go nuts.

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Laser Etched Surface Redefines Dry

January 22, 2015 by Sarah Petkus 89 Comments

Just the other day we stood in the kitchen making eggs, staring suspiciously at a long scratch carved in the center of the frying pan. With all the articles passing through social media prompting us to be wary of things in our environment that are supposedly killing us, Teflon included, I wondered to myself if humans would ever start coming up with solutions to daily problems… like sticky eggs, which don’t involve the use of complex chemicals. Alas, the universe responds with uncanny timing. A group of researchers led by [Chunlei Guo] from Rochester University’s Institute of Optics has recently published their development of a surface textured by lasers which repels fluid like a rubber ball… without any chemical treating involved. You really need to see this happen in the video below.

This physical magic trick gets its inspiration from nature, mimicking properties of surface tension from living things that repel water such as lotus leaves or butterfly wings. To achieve a similar effect, a precision laser is used to etch nanoscale patterns onto metal which change the surface properties in such a way that fluid molecules prefer not to stick. The benefit to texturizing a material’s surface as opposed to glazing it in some other repellant, is that the pattern becomes intrinsically part of the surface structure and will not fade over time the way a chemical seal will chip or flake. This hydrophobic technology could improve the way we keep surfaces sanitary as well as lend itself to new methods of frost prevention. Not to mention the dozens of other less important applications that we’ve just thought of for our own amusement.

In addition to creating the hydrophobic surface, the Institute of Optic has employed similar tactics to come up with a material capable of absorbing fluid and carrying it upward swiftly against gravity. With the knowledge of physics and the power of lasers combined, we’re glad to see humans coming up with smarter ways to manipulate the world we live in for a more comfortable daily life.

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Spliced Animations Come To Life On Their Pages

January 16, 2015 by Sonya Vasquez 15 Comments

Remember those flipbooks you doodled into your history textbooks while you waited for the lunch bell? [Maric] takes the general principles of flipbooks and turns them on their head, giving our brain a whirl in the process. By splicing multiple frames into one image, he can bring animations to life onto a single page.

The technique is simple, but yields impressive results. By overlaying a pattern of vertical black bars onto his image, only a small fraction of the image is visible at any given point. The gaps in the pattern belong to a single frame from the animation. As [Maric] slides the pattern over the image, subsequent frames are revealed to our eyes, and our brain fills in the rest.

A closer look reveals more detail about the constraints imposed on these animations. In this case, the number of frames per animation loop is given by the widths in the transparency pattern. Specifically, it is the number of transparent slits that could fit, side-by-side, within an adjacent black rectangle.

The trick that makes this demonstration work so nicely is that the animated clips finish where they start, resulting in a clean, continuous illusion.

Don’t believe what you see? [Maric] has linked the pattern and images on his video so you can try them for yourself. Give them a go, and let us know what you think in the comments.

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[Tesla500] Builds A High-Speed Video Camera

January 15, 2015 by Adam Fabio 41 Comments

[Tesla500] has a passion for high-speed photography. Unfortunately, costs for high-speed video cameras like the Phantom Flex run into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. When tools are too expensive, you do the only thing you can – you build your own! [Tesla500’s] HSC768 is named for the data transfer rate of its image sensor. 768 megapixels per second translates to about 960MB/s due to the 10 bit pixel format used by the On Semiconductor Lupa1300-2 image sensor.

This is actually [Tesla500’s] second high-speed camera, the first was HSC80, based upon the much slower Lupa300 sensor. HSC80 did work, but it was tied to an FPGA devboard and controlled by a PC. [Tesla500’s] experience really shows in this second effort, as HSC768 is a complete portable system running Linux with a QT based GUI and a touchscreen. A 3D printed case gives the camera that familiar DSLR/MILC shape we’ve all come to know and love.

The processor is a Texas Instruments TMS320DM8148 DaVinci, running TI’s customized build of Linux. The DaVinci controls most of the mundane things like the GUI, trigger I/O, SD card and SATA interfaces. The real magic is the high-speed image acquisition, which is all handled by the FPGA. High-speed image acquisition demands high-speed memory, and a lot of it! Thankfully, desktop computers have given us large, high-speed DDR3 ram modules. However, when it came time to design the camera, [Tesla500] found that neither Xilinx nor Altera had a FPGA under $1000 USD with DDR3 module support. Sure, they will support individual DDR3 chips, but costs are much higher when dealing with chips. Lattice did have a low-cost FPGA with the features [Tesla500] needed, so a Lattice ECP3 series chip went into the camera.

The final result looks well worth all the effort [Tesla500] has put into this project. The HSC768 is capable of taking SXGA (1280×1024) videos at 500 frames per second, or 800×600 gray·scale images at the 1200 frames per second. Lower resolutions allow for even higher frame rates. [Tesla500] has even used the camera to analyze a strange air oscillation he was having in his pneumatic hand dryer. Click past the break for an overview video of the camera, and the hand dryer video. Both contain some stunning high-speed sequences!

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Animate Your Artichoke With A Lathe And Camera

January 14, 2015 by Sarah Petkus 13 Comments

Spirals, fractals, and even bone length proportions whisper of a consistent ratio woven into the universe. Math is hidden in the fabric of things, and when this fact is observed in art, magic happens. Professor, artist, and inventor [John Edmark] draws inspiration from geometric patterns found in nature and builds sculptures using the golden ratio as a standard for design. In this project, he expresses these characteristics through animated biomorphic zoetropes.

[John] modeled several 3D sculptures in Rhino containing similar geometric properties to those found in pinecones and palm tree fronds. As the segments grow from those objects in nature, they do so in approximately 137.5 degree intervals. This spacing produces a particular spiral appearance which [John] was aiming to recreate. To do so, he used a Python script which calculated a web of quads stretched over the surface of a sphere. From each of the divisions, stalk-like protrusions extend from the top center outward. Once these figures were 3D printed, they were mounted one at a time to the center of a spinning base and set to rotate at 550 RPM. A camera then films the shape as it’s in motion at a 1/2000 sec frame rate which captures stills of the object in just the right set of positions to produce the illusion that the tendrils are blooming from the top and pouring down the sides. The same effect could also be achieved with a strobe light instead of a camera.

[John] has more information on his instructables page. He also provides a video of this trick working with an actual artichoke; one of the living examples of the golden ratio which this project was inspired by. Thank you, [Charlie Nordstrom] for helping him document these awesome sculptures and for telling us about them!

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