Project Starline Realizes Asimov’s 3D Vision

May 20, 2021 by Al Williams 36 Comments

Issac Asimov wrote Caves of Steel in 1953. In it, he mentions something called trimensional personification. In an age before WebEx and Zoom, imagining that people would have remote meetings replete with 3D holograms was pretty far-sighted. We don’t know if any Google engineers read the book, but they are trying to create a very similar experience with project Starline.

The system is one of those that seems simple on the face of it, but we are sure the implementation isn’t easy. You sit facing something that looks like a window. The other person shows up in 3D as though they were on the other side of the window. Think prison visitation without the phone handset. The camera is mounted such that you look naturally at the other person through your virtual window.

Continue reading “Project Starline Realizes Asimov’s 3D Vision” →

PSA: Amazon Sidewalk Rolls Out June 8th

May 19, 2021 by Kristina Panos 41 Comments

Whether you own any Amazon surveillance devices or not, we know how much you value your privacy. So consider this your friendly reminder that Amazon Sidewalk is going live in a few weeks, on June 8th. A rather long list of devices have this setting enabled by default, so if you haven’t done so already, here’s how to turn it off.

Don’t know what we’re talking about? Our own Jenny List covered the topic quite concretely a few months back. The idea behind it seems innocent enough on the surface — extend notoriously spotty Wi-Fi connectivity to devices on the outer bounds of the router’s reach, using Bluetooth and LoRa to talk between devices and share bandwidth. Essentially, when Amazon flips the switch in a few weeks, their entire fleet of opt-in-by-default devices will assume a kind of Borg hive-mind in that they’ll be able to share connectivity.

A comprehensive list of Sidewalk devices includes: Ring Floodlight Cam (2019), Ring Spotlight Cam Wired (2019), Ring Spotlight Cam Mount (2019), Echo (3rd Gen), Echo (4th Gen), Echo Dot (3rd Gen), Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Dot (3rd Gen) for Kids, Echo Dot (4th Gen) for Kids, Echo Dot with Clock (3rd Gen), Echo Dot with Clock (4th Gen), Echo Plus (1st Gen), Echo Plus (2nd Gen), Echo Show (1st Gen), Echo Show (2nd Gen), Echo Show 5, Echo Show 8, Echo Show 10, Echo Spot, Echo Studio, Echo Input, Echo Flex. — Amazon Sidewalk FAQ

Now this isn’t a private mesh network in your castle, it’s every device in the kingdom. So don’t hesitate, don’t wait, or it will be too late. Grab all your Things and opt-out if you don’t want your doorbell cam or Alexa machine on the party line. If you have the Alexa app, you can allegedly opt out on all your devices at once.

Worried that Alexa is listening to you more often than she lets on? You’re probably right.

River Cleanup Aims To Expand In Earnest To Tackle Plastic Pollution

May 19, 2021 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is just one of a number of pollution disasters affecting the world’s oceans. All over the globe, huge amounts of plastic enter waterways every day, causing havoc in delicate ecosystems.

Heading up the charge to deal with the problem, The Ocean Cleanup have been working on a variety of projects to help clean up plastic pollution. Chief among these is their river cleanup efforts, aiming to stop plastic pollution from reaching the ocean in the first place. The non-profit group intends to rapidly scale up its efforts, partnering with Finnish industrial manufacturer Konecranes in order to put its latest river cleaning design into series production.

We last reported on the group’s efforts in 2020, with their Interceptor craft operating in rivers in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Dominican Republic. They’ve since refined the design for better functionality and easier deployment. Let’s jump in and see what they’ve learned and how their hunt for plastic pollution is shaping up.

Continue reading “River Cleanup Aims To Expand In Earnest To Tackle Plastic Pollution” →

Toolchanging Printers Get A Nozzle Hanky Like No Other

May 18, 2021 by Sonya Vasquez 7 Comments

When it comes to toolchanging 3D printers, idle nozzles tend to drool. Cleaning out that nozzle goo, though, is critical before switching them into use. And since switching nozzles can happen hundreds of times per print, having a rock-solid cleaning solution is key to making crisp clean parts. [Kevin Mardirossian] wasn’t too thrilled with the existing solutions for cleaning, so he developed the Pebble Wiper, a production worthy nozzle wicking widget that’s wicked away nozzles thousands of times flawlessly.

With a little inspiration from [BigBrain3D’s] retractable purge mechanism, [Kevin] is first purging tools onto a brass brad. Rather than have filament extrude into free space, it collects into a small bloblike “pebble” that cools quickly into a controlled shape. From here, after one quick flick with a servo arm and a small wipe with a silicone basting brush, the nozzle is ready to use. The setup might sound simple, but it’s the result of thousands and thousands of tests with the goal of letting no residual ooze attach itself to the actual part being printed. And that’s after [Kevin] put the time into scratch-building his own toolchanging 3D printer to test it on first. Finally, he’s kindly made the files available online on Github for other hackers’ tinkering and mischief.

So how well does it work? Judging by the results he’s shared, we think spectacularly. Since adopting it, he’s dropped any sacrificial printing artefacts on the bed entirely and been able to consistently pull off stunning multimaterial prints flawlessly with no signs of residual nozzle drool. While toolchanging systems have been great platforms for hacking and exploration, [Kevin’s] Pebble Wiper takes these machines one step closer at hitting “production-level” of reliability that minimizes waste. And who knows? Maybe all those pebbles can be sized to be ground up, remade into filament, and respooled back into usable filament?

Continue reading “Toolchanging Printers Get A Nozzle Hanky Like No Other” →

Making Minty Fresh Music With Markov Chains: The After Eight Step Sequencer

May 18, 2021 by Adam Zeloof 7 Comments

Step sequencers are fantastic instruments, but they can be a little, well, repetitive. At it’s core, the step sequencer is a pretty simple device: it loops through a series of notes or phrases that are, well, sequentially ordered into steps. The operator can change the steps while the sequencer is looping, but it generally has a repetitive feel, as the musician isn’t likely to erase all of the steps and enter in an entirely new set between phrases.

Enter our old friend machine learning. If we introduce a certain variability on each step of the loop, the instrument can help the musician out a bit here, making the final product a bit more interesting. Such an instrument is exactly what [Charis Cat] set out to make when she created the After Eight Step Sequencer.

The After Eight is an eight-step sequencer that allows the artist to set each note with a series of potentiometers (which are, of course, housed in an After Eight mint tin). The potentiometers are read by an Arduino, which passes MIDI information to a computer running the popular music-oriented visual programming language Max MSP. The software uses a series of Markov Chains to augment the musician’s inputted series of notes, effectively working with the artist to create music. The result is a fantastic piece of music that’s different every time it’s performed. Make sure to check out the video at the end for a fantastic overview of the project (and to hear the After Eight in action, of course)!

[Charis Cat]’s wonderful creation reminds us of some the work [Sara Adkins] has done, blending human performance with complex algorithms. It’s exactly the kind of thing we love to see at Hackaday- the fusion of a musician’s artistic intent with the stochastic unpredictability of a machine learning system to produce something unique.

Thanks to [Chris] for the tip!

Continue reading “Making Minty Fresh Music With Markov Chains: The After Eight Step Sequencer” →

Do You Really Own It? Motorcycle Airbag Requires Additional Purchase To Inflate

May 18, 2021 by Al Williams 218 Comments

If you ride a motorcycle, you may have noticed that the cost of airbag vests has dropped. In one case, something very different is going on here. As reported by Motherboard, you can pick up a KLIM Ai-1 for $400 but the airbag built into it will not function until unlocked with an additional purchase, and a big one at that. So do you really own the vest for $400?

Given the nature of the electronics and computer business lately, we spend a good bit of time thinking of what it means to own a piece of technology. Do you own your cable modem or cell phone if you aren’t allowed to open it up? Do you own a piece of software that wants to call home periodically and won’t let you stop it? Sometimes it makes sense that you are paying for a service. But there have been times where, for example, a speaker company essentially bricks devices that could work fine on their own even though you — in theory — own the device.

Continue reading “Do You Really Own It? Motorcycle Airbag Requires Additional Purchase To Inflate” →

Telemetry Debate Rocks Audacity Community In Open Source Dustup

May 17, 2021 by Tom Nardi 102 Comments

Starting an open source project is easy: write some code, pick a compatible license, and push it up to GitHub. Extra points awarded if you came up with a clever logo and remembered to actually document what the project is supposed to do. But maintaining a large open source project and keeping its community happy while continuing to evolve and stay on the cutting edge is another story entirely.

Just ask the maintainers of Audacity. The GPLv2 licensed multi-platform audio editor has been providing a powerful and easy to use set of tools for amateurs and professionals alike since 1999, and is used daily by…well, it’s hard to say. Millions, tens of millions? Nobody really knows how many people are using this particular tool and on what platforms, so it’s not hard to see why a pull request was recently proposed which would bake analytics into the software in an effort to start answering some of these core questions.

Now, the sort of folks who believe that software should be free as in speech tend to be a prickly bunch. They hold privacy in high regard, and any talk of monitoring their activity is always going to be met with strong resistance. Sure enough, the comments for this particular pull request went south quickly. The accusations started flying, and it didn’t take long before the F-word started getting bandied around: fork. If Audacity was going to start snooping on its users, they argued, then it was time to take the source and spin it off into a new project free of such monitoring.

The situation may sound dire, but truth be told, it’s a common enough occurrence in the world of free and open source software (FOSS) development. You’d be hard pressed to find any large FOSS project that hasn’t been threatened with a fork or two when a subset of its users didn’t like the direction they felt things were moving in, and arguably, that’s exactly how the system is supposed to work. Under normal circumstances, you could just chalk this one up to Raymond’s Bazaar at work.

But this time, things were a bit more complicated. Proposing such large and sweeping changes with no warning showed a troubling lack of transparency, and some of the decisions on how to implement this new telemetry system were downright concerning. Combined with the fact that the pull request was made just days after it was announced that Audacity was to be brought under new management, there was plenty of reason to sound the alarm.

Continue reading “Telemetry Debate Rocks Audacity Community In Open Source Dustup” →