Tech Tattoos Trace Two Dimensions

January 5, 2019 by Brian McEvoy 7 Comments

Flexible circuit boards bend as you might expect from a playing card, while skin stretches more like knit fabric. The rules for making circuit boards and temporary tattoos therefore need to be different. Not just temporary tattoos, there are also circuits that reside on the skin so no unregulated heat traces, please. In addition to flexing and stretching, these tattoos can be applied to uneven surfaces and remain intact. Circuits could be added to the outside of projects or use the structure as the board to reduce weight and size. Both are possible with the research from Carnegie Mellon’s Soft Machines Lab and the Institute of Systems and Robotics at the University of Coimbra.

These circuits are an improvement over the existing method which relies on cropping away metal foil with a magnifying glass, tweezers and a steady hand. Instead, silver particles are printed with an inkjet printer before the traces are coated in eutectic gallium indium which is liquid metal at room temperature. If we were to oversimplify, we might describe it as similar to a non-toxic equivalent of mercury that we have also seen used in DIY OLEDs. This is a development likely to be interesting in a range of fields from medicine to cosplay.

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Homemade Daft Punk Helmet

December 29, 2018 by Richard Baguley 2 Comments

You may not be French, and you may not have had a series of hit records, but you can still have the blinky LED helmet, thanks to this build from [Electronoobs]. They have put together a neat Daft Punk helmet built from 3D printed parts, an Arduino, a Bluetooth module, a string of WS2812 addressable LEDs and a simple app. The helmet itself is 3D printed, and the Arduino, Bluetooth, and battery are mounted in the chin. The LED panel is a series of WS2812 LED light strips wired together in series. The whole thing is controlled over a Bluetooth connection to an Android app that was built with the MIT App Inventor.

It’s a nice, simple build, but as we’ve discussed before choosing diffusers is hard. We’re not sure if a thicker panel covering the LED strips, or flipping the LEDs over and adding a reflective layer would be the right moves to improve upon the diffused look. Either way, it’s a neat place to start with your own build and a good way to learn about how to have fun with LED strips.

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Lenses For DIY Augmented Reality Will Get A Bit Less Unobtainable

December 25, 2018 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

You may remember that earlier this year Leap Motion revealed Project North Star, a kind of open-source reference design for an Augmented Reality (AR) headset. While it’s not destined to make high scores in the fashion department, it aims to be hacker-friendly and boasts a large field of view. There’s also an attractive element of “what you see is what you get” when it comes to the displays and optical design, which is a good thing for hackability. Instead of everything residing in a black box, the system uses two forward-facing displays (one for each eye) whose images are bounced off curved reflective lenses. These are essentially semitransparent mirrors which focus the images properly while also allowing the wearer to see both the displays and the outside world at the same time. This co-existence of both virtual and real-world visuals are a hallmark of Augmented Reality.

A serious setback to the aspiring AR hacker has been the fact that while the design is open, the lenses absolutely are not off the shelf components. [Smart Prototyping] aims to change that, and recently announced in a blog post that they will be offering Project North Star-compatible reflective lenses. They’re in the final stages of approving manufacture, and listed pre-orders for the lenses in their store along with downloadable 3D models for frames.

When Leap Motion first announced their open-source AR headset, we examined the intruiguing specifications and the design has since been published to GitHub. At the time, we did note that the only option for the special lenses seemed to be to CNC them and then spring for a custom reflective coating.

If the lenses become affordable and mass-produced, that would make the design much more accessible. In addition, anyone wanting to do their own experiments with near-eye displays or HUDs would be able to use the frame and lenses as a basis for their own work, and that’s wonderful.

Get Your Tweets Without Looking

December 22, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 5 Comments

Head-mounted displays range from cumbersome to glass-hole-ish. Smart watches have their niche, but they still take your eyes away from whatever you are doing, like driving. Voice assistants can read to you, but they require a speaker that everyone else in the car has to listen to, or a headset that blocks out important sound. Ignoring incoming messages is out of the question so the answer may be to use a different sense than vision. A joint project between Facebook Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have a solution which uses the somatosensory reception of your forearm.

A similar idea came across our desk years ago and seemed promising, but it is hard to sell something that is more difficult than the current technique, even if it is advantageous in the long run. In 2013, a wearer had his or her back covered in vibrator motors, and it acted like the haptic version of a spectrum analyzer. Now, the vibrators have been reduced in number to fit under a sleeve by utilizing patterns. It is being developed for people with hearing or vision impairment but what drivers aren’t impaired while looking at their phones?

Patterns are what really set this version apart. Rather than relaying a discrete note on a finger, or a range of values across the back, the 39 English phenomes are given a unique sequence of vibrations which is enough to encode any word. A ~~phenome~~ phoneme is the smallest distinct unit of speech. The video below shows how those phonemes are translated to haptic feedback. Hopefully, we can send tweets without using our hands or mouths to upgrade to complete telepathy.

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Kitty Yeung On Tech-Fashion Designs And The Wearables Industry

December 20, 2018 by Jenny List 9 Comments

If there is a field which has promise verging on a true breakout, it is that of wearable electronics. We regularly see 3D printing, retrocomputing, robotics, lasers, and electric vehicle projects whose advances are immediately obvious. These are all exciting fields in which the Hackaday community continually push the boundaries, and from which come the astounding pieces of work you read on these pages daily. Of course the projects that merge textiles and electronics are pushing boundaries in the same way, except for that it’s often not obvious at first glance. Why is that?

Wearables are a field in which hard work and ingenuity abound, but pulling off the projects that stand out and go beyond mere ordinary garments adorned with a few twinkly LEDs or EL wire is hard. Wearables have a sense of either still seeking its killer application or its technological enabler, and it was this topic that physicist, textilist, and artist Kitty Yeung touched upon in her talk at the recent Hackaday Superconference.

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Wearable Speeder Bikes Are Ready For A Night Out

December 7, 2018 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

While Hackaday is about as far from a fashion blog as you can possibly get, we have to admit we’re absolutely loving the [bithead942] Winter 2018 Collection. His wife and daughter recently got to model his latest must have design: wearable Star Wars speeder bikes; and judging by the video after the break they were certainly some of the best dressed at the Thanksgiving parade.

[bithead942] started the build by taking careful measurements of a vintage speeder bike model kit his wife had, which allowed to accurately recreate the iconic look of the vehicles as they were seen in Return of the Jedi . But to do them justice, the final “bikes” would need to be around three meters (ten feet) long, which immediately posed a problem. What kind of material could support itself over that length while still being light enough to wear for extended periods of time?

The answer came, as it often does, from the local hardware store. He found that a combination of Schedule 80 and 40 PVC pipe was a perfect material: strong enough to support the desired dimensions without bending, light enough that the final bike wouldn’t be uncomfortable to wear, easy to bend with heat, and perhaps best of all, cheap and readily available. The PVC frame was then covered with chicken wire and thin flexible foam to give it a filled out look without weighing them down.

Even though he had a strict weight limit on the build, [bithead942] couldn’t help but add in some electronics to complete the effect. The LED festooned control panel allows the ladies to trigger different sound effects from the movie stored on a Adafruit Mini FX Sound Board, which is connected to a 20W Class D amplifier and a pair of 400 watt car stereo speakers. He says the resulting playback was loud enough to hear outside during the parade, and only added a few pounds to the overall build.

These may be the bikes you’re looking for, but they’re definitely not the first we’ve featured on Hackakday. Meanwhile you’d be wise not to underestimate the lowly PVC pipe when designing your next project. From a hacked together drill press for your Dremel to a planetarium for you and your closest dozen or so friends, there’s little you can’t build with this plentiful material.

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Collecting, Repairing, And Wearing Vintage Digital Watches

November 28, 2018 by Gregory L. Charvat 91 Comments

Electronics enthusiasts have the opportunity to be on the very cusp of a trend with vintage digital watches (VDW). Vintage digital watches are those watches that from the late 70’s and throughout the 80’s. They’re unlike any watch style today, and for anyone around when they made their debut these deliver a healthy dose of nostalgia.

Monetarily speaking, it is not worth the money to pay a watch maker to restore a digital watch but for those of us with basic electronics skills we can put the time and effort into making them run again and be one of the few in possession of functioning VDW. It’s a statement as well as a sign of your own aptitude.

Earlier this year, Steven Dufresne walked us through the history of the digital watch. In this article we will dive into the world of vintage digital watch repair.

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