Make Your Own Remy The Rat This Halloween

October 19, 2024 by Donald Papp 10 Comments

[Christina Ernst] executed a fantastic idea just in time for Halloween: her very own Remy the rat (from the 2007 film Ratatouille). Just like in the film Remy perches on her head and appears to guide her movements by pulling on hair as though operating a marionette. It’s a great effect, and we love the hard headband used to anchor everything, which also offers a handy way to route the necessary wires.

Behind Remy are hidden two sub-micro servos, one for each arm. [Christina] simply ties locks of her hair to Remy’s hands, and lets the servos do the rest. Part of what makes the effect work so well is that Remy is eye-catching, and the relatively small movements of Remy’s hands are magnified and made more visible in the process of moving the locks of hair.

Originally Remy’s movements were random, but [Christina] added an MPU6050 accelerometer board to measure vertical movements of her own arm. She uses that sensor data to make Remy’s motions reflect her own. The MPU6050 is economical and easy to work with, readily available on breakout boards from countless overseas sellers, and we’ve seen it show up in all kinds of projects such as this tiny DIY drone and self-balancing cube.

Want to make your own Remy, or put your own spin on the idea? The 3D models and code are all on GitHub and if you want to see more of it in action, [Christina] posts videos of her work on TikTok and Instagram.

[via CBC]

Java Ring: One Wearable To Rule All Authentications

October 1, 2024 by Kristina Panos 30 Comments

Today, you likely often authenticate or pay for things with a tap, either using a chip in your card, or with your phone, or maybe even with your watch or a Yubikey. Now, imagine doing all these things way back in 1998 with a single wearable device that you could shower or swim with. Sound crazy?

These types of transactions and authentications were more than possible then. In fact, the Java ring and its iButton brethren were poised to take over all kinds of informational handshakes, from unlocking doors and computers to paying for things, sharing medical records, making coffee according to preference, and much more. So, what happened?

Continue reading “Java Ring: One Wearable To Rule All Authentications” →

VR Headset With Custom Face Fitting Gets Even More Custom

September 28, 2024 by Donald Papp 7 Comments

The Bigscreen Beyond is a small and lightweight VR headset that in part achieves its small size and weight by requiring custom fitting based on a facial scan. [Val’s Virtuals] managed to improve fitment even more by redesigning a facial interface and using a 3D scan of one’s own head to fine-tune the result even further. The new designs distribute weight more evenly while also providing an optional flip-up connection.

It may be true that only a minority of people own a Bigscreen Beyond headset, and even fewer of them are willing to DIY their own custom facial interface. But [Val]’s workflow and directions for using Blender to combine a 3D scan of one’s face with his redesigned parts to create a custom-fitted, foam-lined facial interface is good reading, and worth keeping in mind for anyone who designs wearables that could benefit from custom fitting. It’s all spelled out in the project’s documentation — look for the .txt file among the 3D models.

We’ve seen a variety of DIY approaches to VR hardware, from nearly scratch-built headsets to lens experiments, and one thing that’s clear is that better comfort is always an improvement. With newer iPhones able to do 3D scanning and 1:1 scale scanning in general becoming more accessible, we have a feeling we’re going to see more of this DIY approach to ultra-customization.

See The Hands-on Details Behind Stunning Helmet Build

September 28, 2024 by Donald Papp 6 Comments

[Zibartas] recently created wearable helmets from the game Starfield that look fantastic, and we’re happy to see that he created a video showcasing the whole process of design, manufacture, and assembly. The video really highlights just how much good old-fashioned manual work like sanding goes into getting good results, even in an era where fancy modern equipment like 3D printing is available to just about anyone.

The secret to perfectly-tinted and glassy-smooth clear visors? Lots and lots of sanding and polishing.

The visor, for example, is one such example. The usual approach to making a custom helmet visor (like for Daft Punk helmet builds) is some kind of thermoforming. However, the Starfield helmet visors were poor candidates due to their shape and color. [Zibartas]’s solution was to 3D print the whole visor in custom-tinted resin, followed by lots and lots of sanding and polishing to obtain a clear and glassy-smooth end product.

A lot of patient sanding ended up being necessary for other reasons as well. Each helmet has a staggering number of individual parts, most of which are 3D printed with resin, and these parts didn’t always fit together perfectly well.

[Zibartas] also ended up spending a lot of time troubleshooting an issue that many of us might have had an easier time recognizing and addressing. The helmet cleverly integrates a faux-neon style RGB LED strip for internal lighting, but the LED strip would glitch out when the ventilation fan was turned on. The solution after a lot of troubleshooting ended up being simple decoupling capacitors, helping to isolate the microcontrollers built into the LED strip from the inductive load of the motors.

What [Zibartas] may have lacked in the finer points of electronics, he certainly makes up for in practical experience when it comes to wearable pieces like these. The helmets look solid but are in fact full of open spaces and hollow, porous surfaces. This makes them more challenging to design and assemble, but it pays off in spades when worn. The helmets not only look great, but allow a huge amount of airflow. This along with the fans makes them comfortable to wear as well as prevents the face shield from misting up from the wearer’s breathing. It’s a real work of art, so check out the build video, embedded just below.

Continue reading “See The Hands-on Details Behind Stunning Helmet Build” →

Stretch Goal: 300X Arduino

September 26, 2024 by Al Williams 5 Comments

The Faboratory at Yale University has set a number of stretch goals. We don’t mean that in the usual sense. They’ve been making, as you can see in the video below, clones of commercial devices that can stretch over 300%. They’ve done Ardunios and similar controllers along with sensors. The idea is to put computer circuits in flexible robots and other places where flexibility is key, like wearable electronics.

If you are interested in details, you’ll want to read the paper in Science Robotics. They take the existing PCB layout and use a laser to cut patterns in a paper mask over the stretchable substrate. They then apply oxidized gallium-indium to build conductors.

Continue reading “Stretch Goal: 300X Arduino” →

The JawnCon 0x1 Badge Dials Up A Simpler Time

September 16, 2024 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

For hackers of a certain age, the warbling of an analog modem remains something of a siren song. Even if you haven’t heard it in decades, the shrill tones and crunchy static are like a time machine that brings back memories of a bygone era. Alien to modern ears, in the 1980s and 90s, it was the harbinger of unlimited possibilities. An audible reminder that you were about to cross the threshold into cyberspace.

If you can still faintly hear those strangely comforting screeches in the back of your mind, the JawnCon 0x1 badge is for you. With a row of authentic vintage red LEDs and an impeccably designed 3D-printed enclosure, the badge is essentially a scaled-down replica of the Hayes SmartModem. But it doesn’t just look the part — powered by the ESP8266 and the open source RetroWiFiModem project, the badge will allow attendees to connect their modern computers to services from the early Internet via era-appropriate AT commands while they’re at the con.

Continue reading “The JawnCon 0x1 Badge Dials Up A Simpler Time” →

The Apple Watch As An Ammeter

September 10, 2024 by Jenny List 3 Comments

Your shiny new personal electronic device is likely to be designed solely as an app platform to run the products of faceless corporations, so the story goes, and therefore has an ever smaller hacking potential. Perhaps that view is needlessly pessimistic, because here’s [JP3141] with an example that goes against the grain. It’s an Apple Watch, being used as an ammeter. How it does that comes as the result of a delicious piece of lateral thinking.

Like many mobile devices, the device comes with a magnetometer. This serves as an electronic compass, but it’s also as its name might suggest, an instrument for sensing magnetic fields in three axes. With a 3D printed bobbin that slides over the watch, and a few turns of wire, it can sense the magnetic field created by the current, and a measurement can be derived from it. The software on the watch is only a simple proof of concept as yet, but it applies some fairly understandable high-school physics to provide a useful if unexpected measure of current.

We’re surprised to see just how many times the Apple Watch has appeared on these pages, but scanning past projects it was a cosmetic one which caught our eye. Who wouldn’t want a tiny Mac Classic!