Hackaday And Tindie Are Coming To London On Sunday!

April 12, 2018 by Jenny List 8 Comments

Hackaday and Tindie have arrived in London at the weekend, fresh from our Dublin Unconference. Join us this Sunday afternoon, as we convene at the Artillery Arms, a pub on the northeastern edge of the City. It’s a free event, we ask though that you sign up for it via Eventbrite if you’d like to attend.

We’re following our usual Bring-a-Hack style format, so come along and hang out with members of the London Hackaday community, and if you have a project to bring along then don’t be shy as we’d love to see it. And especially if you have a Hackaday Prize entry to show then we’d particularly like to see it. You never cease to amaze us with the work you do, be it the simplest of hacks or the most technically advanced. Just one thing though, if you bring something, make sure it’s handheld or portable enough to easily sit on a pub tabletop, space may be limited.

In attendance will be Tindie’s [Jasmine Brackett] and Hackaday’s [Jenny List], as well as quite a few of our community regulars. What better way could there be to spend a spring Sunday afternoon in London?

But what if you can’t make London, and face the prospect of missing out on us entirely? Fortunately, this one is not the only meetup we have planned, we’re heading to Nottingham and Cambridge on the 18th and 19th of April, respectively, and might even squeeze in another date if we can.

Leap Motion Announces Open Source Augmented Reality Headset

April 10, 2018 by Adam Fabio 29 Comments

Leap Motion just dropped what may be the biggest tease in Augmented and Virtual Reality since Google Cardboard. The North Star is an augmented reality head-mounted display that boasts some impressive specs:

Dual 1600×1440 LCDs
120Hz refresh rate
100 degree FOV
Cost under $100 (in volume)
Open Source Hardware
Built-in Leap Motion camera for precise hand tracking

Yes, you read that last line correctly. The North Star will be open source hardware. Leap Motion is planning to drop all the hardware information next week.

Now that we’ve got you excited, let’s mention what the North Star is not — it’s not a consumer device. Leap Motion’s idea here was to create a platform for developing Augmented Reality experiences — the user interface and interaction aspects. To that end, they built the best head-mounted display they could on a budget. The company started with standard 5.5″ cell phone displays, which made for an incredibly high resolution but low framerate (50 Hz) device. It was also large and completely unpractical.

The current iteration of the North Star uses much smaller displays, which results in a higher frame rate and a better overall experience. The secret sauce seems to be Leap’s use of ellipsoidal mirrors to achieve a large FOV while maintaining focus.

We’re excited, but also a bit wary of the $100 price point — Leap Motion is quick to note that the price is “in volume”. They also mention using diamond tipped tooling in a vibration isolated lathe to grind the mirrors down. If Leap hasn’t invested in some injection molding, those parts are going to make the whole thing expensive. Keep your eyes on the blog here for more information as soon as we have it!

Applications Open: Ada Lovelace Fellowships For 2018 Open Hardware Summit

April 7, 2018 by Christopher Wang 2 Comments

The Open Source Hardware Association is now accepting applications for the Ada Lovelace fellowship which provides free admission to the Open Hardware Summit and a $500 travel stipend. One of OSHWA’s goals is to foster a more diverse community within open source. As part of this, Ada Lovelace Fellowships are open to women, LGBTA+, and people of color. There are a total of 10 fellowships available and applications are due by April 30th. The Open Hardware Summit will be held on September 27th at MIT.

The fellowship program, founded by Addie Wagenknecht and Alicia Gibb in 2013, builds on the ideal that Open Hardware is one way to reduce the barriers associated in access to technology. Removing some of the financial barriers associated with attending the Summit will help to ensure more people of diverse backgrounds are involved in shaping the Open Hardware world. In addition to the talks shared at the gathering, over the last several year OSWHA has been evolving the Open Hardware definition and an Open Hardware certification.

Disclaimer: [Christopher Wang] is a board member of the Open Source Hardware Association

Firefox Reality, A Browser For VR Devices

April 6, 2018 by Jenny List 31 Comments

The browser you are reading this page in will be an exceptionally powerful piece of software, with features and APIs undreamed of by the developers of its early-1990s ancestors such as NCSA Mosaic. For all that though, it will very probably be visually a descendant of those early browsers, a window for displaying two-dimensional web pages.

Some of this may be about to change, as in recognition of the place virtual reality devices are making for themselves, Mozilla have released Firefox Reality, in their words “a new web browser designed from the ground up for stand-alone virtual and augmented reality headset“. For now it will run on Daydream and GearVR devices as a developer preview, but the intended target for the software is a future generation of hardware that has yet to be released.

Readers with long memories may remember some of the hype surrounding VR in browsers back in the 1990s, when crystal-ball-gazers who’d read about VRML would hail it as the Next Big Thing without pausing to think about whether the devices to back it up were on the market. It could be that this time the hardware will match the expectation, and maybe one day you’ll be walking around the Hackaday WrencherSpace rather than reading this in a browser. See you there!

They’ve released a video preview that disappointingly consists of a 2D browser window in a VR environment. But it’s a start.

Continue reading “Firefox Reality, A Browser For VR Devices” →

The Amazing Hacks Of World Create Day

April 4, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

For this year’s Hackaday Prize, we started an amazing experiment. World Create Day organized hundreds of hackerspaces around the world to come together and Build Hope for the future. This was an experiment to bring community shops and workspaces together to prototype their entries for the Hackaday Prize, and boy was it a success. We had hackerspaces from Portland to Pakistan taking part, and these are just a few of the amazing hacks they pulled off.

Students In Canada Repairing LipSyncs!

The theme of this year’s Hackaday Prize is to Build Hope, and students in Burnaby, British Columbia worked on some very cool projects that did just that. They created custom video game controllers, prototyped a few exoskeleton arms, and repaired LipSyncs. A LipSync is a mouth-operated joystick that allows a person to control a cursor on a computer with a minimum amount of head and neck movement. The idea behind the LipSync is to give wheelchair-bound people access to computers. This is important because an estimated one million people in Canada and the United States have limited or no use of their arms, rendering touchscreens inoperable.

The LipSync was an entry into the 2016 Hackaday Prize, and while it didn’t win the grand prize, it did bring a device that usually costs $3,000 down to about $300. That’s an order of magnitude of cost reduction that Builds Hope for the future. It’s amazing!

Raspberry Pis and Tschunk Slushies!

You might think that mixing alcohol and electronics might be dangerous, but not the people of kraut space, the hackerspace in Jena, Germany. For their World Create Day adventures, they made Tschunk Slushies! What is Tschunk? It’s rum and Club Mate, the definitive hacker drink! You might even say the addition of ethanol made it even more of a hacker drink. Ha ha.

While the Tschunk Slushies were mixing up, the team at the Jena Hackerspace set to work on their World Create Day project, an interface that logs their electricity usage. In reality this is just a photosensor taped to their power meter, but they’ve hooked everything up to a Raspberry Pi, giving them the ability to monitor electricity consumption over the Internet. That’s amazing. Governments and utility companies have spent billions of dollars developing ‘smart’ electricity meters, but a few ‘hackers’ have created their own in just hours! It’s almost as if that ‘hacker’ title isn’t bad at all, and being a ‘hacker’ is a good thing!

Making Laser Cutters Safe And Soldering Keychains

You’ll shoot your eye out, kid! Or at least you stand a decent chance of suffering irreversible eye damage if you’re running a laser cutter with the lid open. And for some reason, most of the cheap laser cutters out there come without safety interlocks if you can believe it. For his World Create Day Project, [RoboterFreak] made a laser cutter more secure. By putting a relay, microswitch, and Arduino in line with the laser tube, you can safely modify an off-the-shelf laser cutter to be vastly safer.

It’s not much, but it goes a long way toward making a laser cutter safe. With the simple addition of a switch, this laser cutter is now a machine that can be used within a quarter mile of children. This is something simple that you should do at your own hackerspace.

But World Create Day and the Hackaday Prize isn’t only about fretting over safety concerns. The folks at Thimble.io had fun soldering their own keychain flashlight. This is an awesome way to learn how to solder and hardware development. That’s exactly what we’re looking for in this year’s Hackaday Prize, by the way. We want people who will Build Hardware to Change The World.

The Hackaday Prize is running until November, and there’s still plenty of time to get your entry in. It doesn’t even have to be related to World Create Day, the most amazing virtual congregation of hackerspaces the world has ever seen. You can start your entry for the Hackaday Prize right here, build a project that will Build Hope, and be in the running to win tens of thousands of dollars. It’s an amazing contest, and we couldn’t have done it without the support of our amazing online community.

Is This The End For The C.H.I.P.?

April 3, 2018 by Jenny List 99 Comments

There have been so many launches of very capable little single-board computers, that it is easy to forget an individual one among the crowd. You probably remember the C.H.I.P though, for its audacious claim back in 2015 to be the first $9 computer. It ran Linux, and included wireless connectivity, composite video output, and support for battery power. As is so often the case with ambitious startups, progress from the C.H.I.P’s creator Next Thing Co came in fits and starts.

In recent months there has been something of a silence, and now members of the community have discovered evidence that Next Thing CO are the subject of a Notice of General Assignment from Insolvency Services Group. This is followed up by the discovery that their office is available for rent.

A process called Assignment to the Benefit of Creditors is an alternative to bankruptcy proceedings yet still signals the end of a company as the service liquidates remaining assets. Despite the website and forum remaining online it appears that we may have seen the end of the C.H.I.P. and its stablemates. Hackaday has reached out to Next Thing Co for comment and will update this article if we hear back.

At the time it was launched, the C.H.I.P. was a pretty impressive product, and though it has since been eclipsed by products like the Raspberry Pi Zero, the board remains a useful item. The addition of the PocketCHIP all-in-one keyboard and display peripheral made it an instantly recognizable device, and it and its more powerful companion C.H.I.P. Pro module found their way into quite a few projects. For us the most impressive C.H.I.P. project is a retrocomputer, this miniature Apple II complete with monitor. If this really is the end for this particular little board, we’ll be sorry to see it go.

Thanks [smerrett79] for the tip.

Header image: Kiwamu Okabe [CC BY-SA 2.0].

Self-Driven: Uber And Tesla

April 2, 2018 by Elliot Williams 164 Comments

Self-driving cars have been in the news a lot in the past two weeks. Uber’s self-driving taxi hit and killed a pedestrian on March 18, and just a few days later a Tesla running in “autopilot” mode slammed into a road barrier at full speed, killing the driver. In both cases, there was a human driver who was supposed to be watching over the shoulder of the machine, but in the Uber case the driver appears to have been distracted and in the Tesla case, the driver had hands off the steering wheel for six seconds prior to the crash. How safe are self-driving cars?

Trick question! Neither of these cars were “self-driving” in at least one sense: both had a person behind the wheel who was ultimately responsible for piloting the vehicle. The Uber and Tesla driving systems aren’t even comparable. The Uber taxi does routing and planning, knows the speed limit, and should be able to see red traffic lights and stop at them (more on this below!). The Tesla “Autopilot” system is really just the combination of adaptive cruise control and lane-holding subsystems, which isn’t even enough to get it classified as autonomous in the state of California. Indeed, it’s a failure of the people behind the wheels, and the failure to properly train those people, that make the pilot-and-self-driving-car combination more dangerous than a human driver alone would be.

A self-driving Uber Volvo XC90, San Francisco.

You could still imagine wanting to dig into the numbers for self-driving cars’ safety records, even though they’re heterogeneous and have people playing the mechanical turk. If you did, you’d be sorely disappointed. None of the manufacturers publish any of their data publicly when they don’t have to. Indeed, our glimpses into data on autonomous vehicles from these companies come from two sources: internal documents that get leaked to the press and carefully selected statistics from the firms’ PR departments. The state of California, which requires the most rigorous documentation of autonomous vehicles anywhere, is another source, but because Tesla’s car isn’t autonomous, and because Uber refused to admit that its car is autonomous to the California DMV, we have no extra insight into these two vehicle platforms.

Nonetheless, Tesla’s Autopilot has three fatalities now, and all have one thing in common — all three drivers trusted the lane-holding feature well enough to not take control of the wheel in the last few seconds of their lives. With Uber, there’s very little autonomous vehicle performance history, but there are leaked documents and a pattern that makes Uber look like a risk-taking scofflaw with sub-par technology that has a vested interest to make it look better than it is. That these vehicles are being let loose on public roads, without extra oversight and with other traffic participants as safety guinea pigs, is giving the self-driving car industry and ideal a black eye.

If Tesla’s and Uber’s car technologies are very dissimilar, the companies have something in common. They are both “disruptive” companies with mavericks at the helm that see their fates hinging on getting to a widespread deployment of self-driving technology. But what differentiates Uber and Tesla from Google and GM most is, ironically, their use of essentially untrained test pilots in their vehicles: Tesla’s in the form of consumers, and Uber’s in the form of taxi drivers with very little specific autonomous-vehicle training. What caused the Tesla and Uber accidents may have a lot more to do with human factors than self-driving technology per se.

You can see we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Read on!

Continue reading “Self-Driven: Uber And Tesla” →