MenoPlay Through The Pain Of Menopause

August 4, 2020 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

Menopause, that fireworks finale of fertility, is like a second puberty that works in reverse. At least, that’s what we hear. Along with mood swings and acne, there are new joys like hot flashes that make you want to jump naked into the nearest snowdrift, or at least put your head in the freezer for a while. Sounds great; can’t wait.

The biggest problem with menopause is that it gives suffers pause when it comes to getting help. This is natural, they think. There’s nothing I can do but ride it out. Those who do seek relief are likely to find expensive products that only treat single symptoms. This dearth of solutions inspired [Moinak Ghosh] to create one system to rule them all, a wearable with a suite of sensors that’s designed to take the pause out of menopause.

MenoPlay will take temperature readings at the neck and pelvis and switch on a Peltier module worn on the back of the neck when it senses a hot flash in progress. Exercise is a natural defense against hormonal imbalance, but step counters are too easy to cheat or ignore. The MenoPlay system will model the user’s movements using 9DoF accelerometers and suggest exercises that fill in the gaps.

We particularly like the automation aspect of this wearable. After decades of manually tracking menstrual cycles and everything that implies, the idea of so much useful biological data being collected automatically and fed over BLE to a NodeRed application sounds wonderful.

Hot flashes may not feel useful internally, but would do a fine job of powering the right kind of flashlight.

Toilet Paper Chase And Indoor Cycling Race With Unity And Arduino

May 29, 2020 by Sven Gregori 4 Comments

While we’re still far away from returning to a pre-Corona everyday life, people seem to have accepted that toilet paper will neither magically cease to exist, nor become our new global currency. But back at the height of its madness, like most of us, [Jelle Vermandere] found himself in front of empty shelves, and the solution seemed obvious to him: creating a lifelike toilet paper chasing game in hopes to distract the competition.

Using Unity, [Jelle] created a game world of an empty supermarket, with the goal to chase after distribution tubes and collect toilet paper packs into a virtual cart. Inspired by the Wii Wheel, he imitated a shopping cart handle built from — as it appears — a sunshade pole that holds an Arduino and accelerometer in a 3D-printed case as game controller. For an even more realistic feel, he added a sound sensor to the controller, and competing carts to the game, which can be pushed out of the way by simply yelling loud enough. You can witness all of this delightful absurdity in his build video after the break.

From racing shopping carts to racing bicycles

But that’s not all. With the toilet paper situation sorted out, [Jelle] found himself in a different dilemma: a cloud foiled his plans of going for a bicycle ride. In the same manner, he ended up building a cycling racing game, once again with Unity and Arduino. From a 3D-scanned model of himself and his bicycle, to automatically generating tracks on the fly and teaching an AI to ride a bike, [Jelle] clearly doesn’t joke around while he’s joking around.

However, the best part about the game has to be the controller, which is his actual bicycle. Using a magnetic door sensor to detect the speed, and a potentiometer mounted with an obscure Lego construction to the handlebar, it’s at least on par with the shopping cart handle — but judge for yourself in another build video, also attached after the break. The only thing missing now is to level up the difficulty by powering the Arduino with the bicycle itself.

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Arduband Gives Your Eyes A Hand

May 24, 2020 by Kristina Panos 14 Comments

Let’s face it, we probably all sit at our computers for way too long without getting up. Yes, there’s work to be done, games to be played, and the internet abounds with people who are wrong and must be down-voted and/or corrected. We totally get and respect all that. However, if you want to maintain your middle- and long-range vision, you should really get up regularly and gaze out the window for a bit.

In fact, the Arduband does you one better. Its Arduino Nano and accelerometer check your position every ten minutes. If you haven’t changed your Z by the third check, then it’s time for a break. The combination of an RGB LED, buzzer, and vibrating disc motor working together should be enough to pull you out of any computerized stupor, and they won’t give up and go back to sleep until you have stood up and remained upright for one minute.

We like that [ardutronics123] spun up a board and made it small enough to be wrist-mounted using a watch strap. It would work just as well worn around your neck, and would probably even fit in your pocket. Blink a few times before you check out the build video after the break.

Arduband would be great on the go, but who does that anymore? If you spend every day at the same desk, you could point a time-of-flight sensor at your chair and start a timer.

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Touch Face, Lights Chase, Sirens Race

April 13, 2020 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

Let’s face it — people are gonna touch their faces. Sometimes faces itch, especially during allergy season. But the first step toward quitting something like that is to become cognizant of just how often you do it.

With a bracelet like this one from [Mauricio Martins], your face-touching frequency will quickly become apparent. Strap it to your favorite face-scratching arm and go about your day. The code constantly polls the accelerometer to see if your hand is in the vicinity of your visage. If so, red lights circle around and an emergency vehicle-type siren goes off to let everyone around you know you’ve sinned.

This no-touch-face bracelet is awesome because it’s simple and it works. It uses a Circuit Playground Express programmed in Make code, but it would be easy to port it to Arduino or CircuitPython. If you want to make something more elegant, we’re all for it, but you could be using this in the meantime to help condition yourself away from the habit. Check out the demo after the break.

Sometimes you gotta take a step back and make something that just works without getting all fancy. Did you hear the one about the astrophysicist who got magnets stuck up his nose trying to solve this very problem?

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Offline Dinosaur-Jumping Becomes A Real Workout

April 6, 2020 by Kristina Panos 16 Comments

It’s great to see people are out there trying to find fun ways to exercise amid the current crisis. Although jumping up and down isn’t great for the knees, it does give decent cardio. But if you don’t have a rope or a puddle, we admit that jumping can lose its bounce pretty fast.

Quarantine has been a game-filled time for [fridaay]. Somewhere between a handful of FPS games, he decided to try to play Google’s offline dinosaur-based side scroller game by making the dinosaur spring over the saguaros whenever he physically jumps in the air. (Video, embedded below.)

Here’s how it works: [fridaay] holds a transmit circuit that consists of an Arduino UNO, an accelerometer module, and an nRF24L01 transceiver, all running on a 9 V battery. Whenever [fridaay] jumps, the accelerometer reads the change in Z and sends it to the receiving circuit, which is just another UNO and nRF. The receiving UNO is connected to a laptop and configured to press the space bar so the dinosaur canters over the cacti.

We’ve never been able to stay alive long enough in the game to see this happen, but apparently you need to crouch at some point in the game. [fridaay] has yet to implement a control for that, but we’re sure he’ll think of something. Jump past the break to see the video, and hit him up if you need the code.

If you have a lot of parts at your disposal, why not make a physical version?

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New Part Day: Ooh, The Things You Can Do With A CLUE

February 24, 2020 by Kristina Panos 29 Comments

There’s a new development board in town from Adafruit, and it’s called the CLUE. This tiny board can be programmed in Arduino or CircuitPython, and it is absolutely stuffed with sensors and functionality, including Bluetooth. It’s essentially a BBC Micro:bit with more sensors, a screen, and a much beefier processor. Sound interesting? Let’s get out the magnifying glass and take a look, shall we?

(Editor’s note: Adafruit ran out of the first alpha run of the hardware. While we didn’t run into any bugs, the next versions will presumably have even fewer, but will also cost $40 instead of $30. That said, they’re giving out 3,000 of them to attendants of PyCon in April, so you might also get your hands on one that way.)

And Bit:Bot takes the checkered flag! Image via Seeed Studio

First and foremost, there’s the form factor — if that bottom edge looks familiar, that’s because the CLUE is designed to work with micro:bit robot kits and anything else with that edge connector, like the CRICKIT for micro:bit, or the Bit:Bot from Seeed Studios. This is big news for the micro:bit ecosystem, and not just because the CLUE brings tons of sensors and a screen to the scene, although a 1.3″ screen at 240×240 resolution is nothing to sneeze at.

The main brain is a Nordic nRF52840, so you can pair it to your phone and stream your collected data. Or, use it to get two CLUE boards talking to each other. This is a major upgrade from the micro:bit’s nRF51822 — the CLUE is four times faster, has four times the flash memory, and has sixteen times as much RAM. We hope someone can find a way to make them into short-range messaging machines with Q10 keyboards.

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Up Your Game With DIY Headset Motion Tracking

February 2, 2020 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

While there’s been a lot of advancements in VR gaming over the last couple of years, plenty of folks are still happy enough to just stare at their monitor. But that’s not to say some of those fancy head-tracking tricks wouldn’t be a welcome addition to their repertoire. For players who are literally looking to get their head in the game, [Adrian Schwizgebel] has created qeMotion.

The idea here is simple enough: attach a motion sensor to a standard gaming headset (here a MPU-6050 IMU), and use the data from it to virtually “press” keys through USB HID emulation. Many first person shooter games offer the ability to lean left or right by pressing Q or E respectively, so all [Adrian] had to do was map the appropriate accelerometer readings to those keys for it to work seamlessly with popular titles such as Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and Insurgency.

The concept might be basic, but the execution is anything but. Rather than just duct taping an Arduino to his headset, [Adrian] designed a very slick 3D printed enclosure for the electronics that sits on his desk. While they haven’t all been implemented yet, the devices features indicator lights and buttons to switch through various modes. The sensor on the headset has similarly been encased in a very professional looking 3D printed box, complete with a nice braided cable to link it to the desk unit.

It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a head tracking project, and most of those utilized something like the Wii Remote. Adding sensors to a person’s head normally wouldn’t be an ideal situation, but if you’re going to be wearing the headset anyway to listen to the game and chat, it’s not really a problem. If your hair is too nice for the qeMotion, you could always try doing something similar with computer vision.

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