The Beginning Of A DIY Vehicle Night Vision System

February 5, 2014 by James Hobson 57 Comments

night vision car

[Stephen] has just shared with us the current progress of his night vision vehicle system, and it’s looking quite promising!

The idea of the project is to provide the driver with a high contrast image of the road, pedestrians and any other obstacles that may not be immediately visible with headlights. It’s actually becoming a feature on many luxury cars including BMW, Audi, GM and Honda. This is what inspired [Stephen] to try making his own.

The current system consists of an infrared camera, two powerful IR light spot lights, and a dashboard LCD screen to view it. It may be considered “not a hack” by some of our more exuberant readers, but [Stephen] does such a great job explaining his future plans for it, which include object recognition using OpenCV, so we felt it was more than worth a share, even at this point.

You see, the idea of vehicle night vision is not to constantly watch a little screen instead of the road — it’s designed to be there when you need it — and to let you know when you need it, [Stephen’s] planning on adding a Raspberry Pi to the mix running OpenCV to detect any anomalies on the road that could be of concern. We shudder at the amount of training a system like that might need — well, depending on the complexity of this image recognition.

Anyway, stick around after the break to hear [Stephen] explain it himself — it is a long video, but if you want to skip to the action there are clips of it on the road at 1:53 and 26:52.

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Reverse Engineering An HDMI Extender

January 25, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 63 Comments

There’s a number of devices out there that extend HDMI over IP. You connect a video source to the transmitter, a display to the receiver, and link the two with a CAT5/5e/6 cable. These cables are much cheaper than HDMI cables, and can run longer distances.

[Daniel] didn’t care about extending HDMI, instead he wanted a low cost HDMI input for his PC. Capture cards are a bit expensive, so he decided to reverse engineer an IP HDMI extender.

After connecting a DVD player and TV, he fired up Wireshark and started sniffing the packets. The device was using IP multicast on two ports. One of these ports had a high bitrate, and contained JPEG headers. It looked like the video stream was raw MJPEG data.

The next step was to write a listener that could sniff the packets and spit the data into a JPEG file. After dealing with some quirks, JPEG images could be saved from the remote device. Some more code was needed to have the computer initiate the streaming, and to extract audio from the second port.

In the end, video capture with the low cost device was possible. [Daniel] also provided a bonus teardown of the device in his writeup.

Update From Wayback: AVGA Reborn As RetroWiz

January 25, 2014 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

retrowiz-vga-avr-gaming-system

This one has been a long time coming. We’re finally seeing an update to [Jaromir’s] retro gaming platform based around and ATmega chip. The thing that was novel about it back in 2009, and continues to be to this day, is the use of VGA output (PAL) from an AVR chip rather than composite video like most offerings.

Good projects never die and recently he picked the hardware up again, spinning a mostly surface mount board and putting together a new website to feature his work. Above you can see a demo of Commander Keen 4 running on the hardware (video below). He’s also has a rather trippy Super Mario port and adapted [Albert Seward’s] PacMan source for the hardware.

The chip is being clocked at 32MHz with VGA clock running at 19.6608 MHz. This gives him sixteen colors with a resolution of 192×144. He concedes that you get better resolution out of composite video, but who needs resolution for retro gaming?

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8-Bit Video Game Is Best Of Retro Gaming On A Shoestring Budget

November 28, 2013 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[Petri] wrote in to show off the 8-bit gaming system and original platformer which he and [Antti] developed. Don’t get us wrong now, it’s impressive that the duo were able to put together what looks like a very interesting game. But we’ve seen many industry-leading video games developed with just one or two people (we’re thinking all the way back to the days of Atari). Nope, what’s most interesting to us is that the console is also their creation. We should note that the title screen was the work of their friend [Juho].

Take this with a grain of salt, as the bottom right image in the vignette obviously includes an Arduino. But isn’t it a testament to the state of open hardware and the sharing of knowledge through the Internet that this is even possible on the hobby level? And just because we call it “hobby” doesn’t mean you have to lower your expectations. This thing is full featured. Watch the clip after the break to see the ATmega328 driving a 104×80 resolution screen with a 256 color palette, while using four audio channels for the chiptunes. The thing even utilizes an original NES controller port for user input.

And for those of you who are thinking we’ve seen the same thing before, we never get tired of seeing projects where a lot of hard work has obviously paid off!

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7-Segment Display Matrix Visualizes More Than Numbers

November 21, 2013 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

digit-7-segment-visualization

You can pretty much tell that this is an outstretched hand shown on a large grid of 7-segment displays. But the only reason you have to look twice is because it is a still photo. When you see the video below it’s more than obvious what you’re looking at… partly because the device is being used as an electronic mirror.

In total there are 192 digits in the display. To make things easier, four-digit modules were used, although we still couldn’t resist showing you the well-organized nightmare that is the wiring scheme. Each module is driven by its own discrete Arduino (driving 28 LEDs as they’re apparently not connecting the decimal point). All 48 Arduino boards receive commands from a Raspberry Pi which is running openFrameworks to generate the animations.

Now of course the project was well under way before [Peter] discovered a similar display from more than a year ago. But we’re glad that didn’t stop them from forging ahead and even building on the idea. They added a camera to the display’s frame which lets it mirror back whatever is in front of it.

What popped into our minds was one of the recent entries for the Trinket contest.

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Building A More Nyan Planet

November 17, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

Video

In an effort to give salespeople something impressive to hand out, IBM recently had a bunch of very cool promotional materials printed up. It’s basically a greeting card-sized cardboard folder with a bit of text, an LCD screen, buttons, battery and display controller. This video in print device is meant to display how IBM is building a smarter planet, but [Cookie] and [Stitch] over at the Hack42 hackerspace in The Netherlands decided Nyan Cat would be a much better use of this free, portable video player. (Google translation) UPDATE: Site has gone down. Here’s the Google Cache but you’ll need a browser like Chrome that can do the translation for you (we can’t figure out how to link a translation of cache).

This video card uses tech licensed from Americhip, a company that has been putting video in magazines for a few years now. By connecting the USB charging port up to his computer, the guys were able to switch the device over to USB mode where the actual video files could be read and rewritten.

By encoding a few videos to match the format of what was on the card – including some old IBM promotional material by [Jim Henson] – the team were able to get videos playing on a hackable flyer. Very cool, and if you can get your hands on some sales brochures, a free source of tiny displays.

The Tiniest Video Game

November 7, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

As we read [Adam]’s writeup for an extremely tiny video game system through coke bottle glasses, we’re reminded of the countless times we were told that sitting, ‘too close to the Nintendo’ would ruin our eyes. We’ll happily dismiss any article from a medical journal that says there was any truth to that statement, but [Adam]’s tiny video game system will most certainly hurt your eyes.

A few years ago, Atari sold keychain-sized joysticks that contained classics such as Pong, Breakout, Centipede, and Asteroids. [Adam] apparently ran into a cache of these cool classic baubles and immediately thought of turning them into a stand-alone video game system.

For the display, [Adam] used a CRT module from an old Sony Handicam. These modules had the right connections – power, ground, and composite video input – to connect directly to the Atari keychain games. The result is a video game that’s even smaller than a postage stamp. The picture above shows the tiny CRT next to a 25mm postage stamp; it’s small by any measure.