We Are The Borg. We Will Add Heat And Distance Sensing To Your Vision.

December 20, 2012 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

we-are-borg

[Gregory McRoberts] was born with reduced vision in one eye and has never experienced the three dimensional sight which most of us take for granted. Recently he was inspired by the concept of a hearing aid to build a device which can augment his vision. Behold, the very Borg-like eye-patch that he wears to add distance and heat to his palette of senses.

The hardware he chose is an Arduino-compatible Lilypad board. It is wired to an ultrasonic rangefinder and an infrared sensor which monitor the area in front of him. The function of his right eye is still capable of seeing light and color, so a pair of LED boards are mounted on the inside. One is connected to the thermal sensor, displaying blue when below eighty degrees Fahrenheit and red when above. The other LED is green and flashes at a different speed based on the range sensor’s reading.

This is distracting when a person with normal sight wears it because of the intensity of the LEDs. We found [Gregory’s] explanation of this (called Helmet Fire) quite interesting.

[via Adafruit]

Turning 3D Shutter Glasses Into Automatic Sunglasses

November 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 62 Comments

[Dino’s] hack this week seeks to create sunglasses that dim based on the intensity of ambient light. The thought is that this should give you the best light level even with changing brightness like when the sun goes behind a cloud or walking from inside to outside. He started with a pair of 3D shutter glasses. These have lenses that are each a liquid crystal pane. The glasses monitor an IR signal coming from a 3D TV, then alternately black out the lenses so that each eye is seeing a different frame of video to create the stereoscopic effect. In the video after the break he tears down the hardware and builds it back up with his own ambient light sensor circuit.

It only takes 6V to immediately darken one of the LCD panes. The interesting thing is that it takes a few seconds for them to become clear again. It turns out you need to bleed off the voltage in the pane using a resistor in order to have a fast response in both directions. Above you can see the light dependent resistor in the bridge of the frame that is used to trigger the panes. [Dino] shows at the end of his video that they work. But the main protective feature of sunglasses is that they filter out UV rays and he’s not sure if these have any ability to do that or not.

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A Wearable Pipboy 3000

November 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

[Zachariah Perry] builds a lot of replica props, and judging from the first few offerings on his blog he’s quite good at it. We enjoyed looking in on the Captain America shield and Zelda treasure chest (complete with music, lights, and floating heart container). But his most recent offering is the wearable and (kind of) working Pipboy 3000 from the Fallout series.

From his description in the video after the break it sounds like the case itself came as a promotional item that was part of a special edition of the game. He’s done a lot to make it functional though. The first thing to notice is the screen. It’s domed like the surface of a CRT, but there’s obviously not enough room for that kind of thing. The dome is made from the lens taken out of a slide viewer. It sits atop the screen of a digital picture frame. [Zachariah] loaded still images from the game into the frame’s memory, routing its buttons to those on the Pipboy. He also added a 12 position rotary switch which toggles between the lights at the bottom of the screen.

A little over a year ago we saw a more or less fully functional Pipboy. But that included so many added parts it was no longer wearable.

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The Wedding Band: Milling Titanium And Wrapping It In Palladium

November 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

You’ve got to admit that custom milling your own wedding band is pretty hard-core. In this case [Jeremy Swerdlow] is making it for his friend, but that doesn’t diminish the fun of the project. After the break you can watch him mill a titanium ring and wrap it with a palladium inlay.

To solder palladium to titanium [Jeremy] would need special equipment, so he found another way to mate the dissimilar metals. He milled a dovetail groove in the center of the titanium band. To do that, he had to make a special cutting tool that was just the right size. Once had milled the ring’s rough dimensions, he had to fabricate a custom mandrel to hold the ring for the rest of the job. The dovetail was then filled with a palladium strip using a combination of heat and hammering. The two ends are soldered together using palladium solder. The ring in the middle shows this solder joint. To the right is a ring after the inlay is milled flush but before the final polishing which will bring out the best qualities of both metals.

If you don’t have the machine shop skills to pull this off you could always try your hand at 3d printed rings.

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Thinking Cap Is Also Party Hat

November 5, 2012 by Eric Evenchick 10 Comments

The Thinking Cap is a piece of wearable signage that lets you display what’s on your mind. The hat uses a Teensy 2.0 connected to a Bluetooth radio to allow the wearer to update the message on the fly, letting the room know what their thinking at that instant.

This hack is based off of LPD8806 controlled LED strips, which are becoming very popular for adding lots of LEDs to anything. There are five strips that need to be controlled over SPI, but the Teensy only has one SPI peripheral.

This lead to the use of multiplexer to allow for controlling each strip individually. The hat uses an interesting and low cost scheme to multiplex five channels using two 744052 dual 4 channel multiplexors and a 7400 inverter.

The Teensy can receive messages using the Bluetooth serial port protocol. The 5 x 7 pixel characters are stored in a framebuffer, and shifted around the hat to create the animation.

The result is a bright message circling around the user’s head, which can be updated with a smartphone over Bluetooth. Check out a video demo of the hat after the break.

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Nyan Cat Hat Will Be The Hit Of The Party…. For About One Minute

October 30, 2012 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

Seriously, this Nyan Cat hat is the only part needed for a fantastic Halloween costume. It looks pretty good in this still image, but we dare you to watch the clip of it in action (embedded after the break) without letting a beaming grin creep onto your face. Everyone’s going to just love this… until it starts to get really annoying.

When switched on, the iconic meme rotates around the headgear, bobbing its head and tail as she sings the song of her people. There are also stars made of white LEDs that twinkle very brightly in the process. The presentation is quite good, but even better is seeing the build process. Luckily [Ben Katz] posted a series of detailed articles during the adventure. The mechanism responsible for driving the cat around the hat was laser cut from acrylic. It includes a large gear with teeth on the inside, which is interface by a continuously rotating servo motor with a much smaller gear. The head and tail bobbing are purely mechanical, using the revolving motion to turn a spindle as the cat makes its way around the brim.

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TinyMatrix Derivative Uses PIC Instead Of AVR

October 22, 2012 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

[Stu] has a teenage niece whose birthday is coming up and he wanted to give her something unique as a gift. He’s working on an LED matrix pendant that can display pixel graphics, play animations, and scroll messages.

He began the work after drawing inspiration from the TinyMatrix project. That clever design uses a DIP AVR chip soldered directly to the legs of a 5×7 LED matrix. It was powered by a coin cell with the power and ground wires acting as the necklace for the pendant. [Stu] is more comfortable developing using PIC chips, so he based his project on a 16F88. It will not run from a 3V source so he’s got a few issued to work out before the final design is finished.

One thing that’s quite interesting is his side project. After growing weary of hand coding the arrays for each frame of an animation he wrote a GUI in C# that let him design the image and output the code with a few clicks of the mouse.