Friday Hack Chat: Ladyada On Creative And Interactive Robotics

June 20, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Somewhere at the intersection of microcontrollers, open source toolchains, the Maker Movement, and the march of technology, there’s a fuzzy concept that can best be described as robotics or physical computing. Instead of a computer in a box or a dumb microcontroller, these projects interact with the outside world. Whether that’s through the Internet, tapping a bunch of sensors, or just waving the arm of a servo around, there’s a need for a platform that actually does all of this stuff. For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about creative and interactive robots, and you’re invited.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be Limor “Ladyada” Fried, the founder of Adafruit, and someone who needs no introduction but we’re going to do it anyway. Adafruit began as a weird side project selling exact reproductions of the Roland TB-303, building cell phone jammers, and making guides to build your own USB power bank before USB power banks were a thing. This has grown into Adafruit, a company with over 100 employees in the heart of New York City, one of the best places for learning and making electronics, and a place that does everything Open Source with zero loans or VC money. By any objective measure, Adafruit has become the most successful business story to come out of the Maker Movement, however nebulously that can be defined.

This week the Hack Chat will be focused on the CRICKIT, the Creative Robotics and Interactive Construction Kit. The CRICKIT is an add-on to Adafruit’s Circuit Playground that allows you to build your own robot with CircuitPython, MakeCode, or just Arduino. There’s support for arts, crafts, sensors, audio, animatronics, physical computing, kinetic sculptures, science experiments, and just about anything else you can think of. Need an example? Here’s Blue Öyster Cult. Here’s that robot that came with the NES. It’s all great fun.

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Hack Chat Event Page and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week is just like any other, and we’ll be gathering ’round our video terminals at noon, Pacific, on Friday, June 22nd. Here’s a clock counting down the time until the Hack Chat starts.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Ground-Effect Lighting For Your Bed.

March 23, 2018 by James Hobson 24 Comments

If you’ve ever disturbed your partner by getting up during the night and flicking on the bathroom light — or tripping over something and startling them awake completely in the ensuing catastrophe — [Kristjan Berce]’s idea to install motion-activated ground-effect lighting on his girlfriend’s bed might hold your attention.

[Berce] is using an Arduino Nano for the project’s brain, a PIR sensor from Adafruit, and an L7805 voltage regulator to handle load spikes. He doesn’t specify the type of LED strip he’s using, but Neopixels might be a safe bet here. Soldering issues over with, he mounted his protoboard in a 3D printed project box. Instead of reinventing the LED, [Berce] copied the code from Adafruit’s PIR tutorial before sticking the project to the side of the bed with adhesive strips so the on/off switch within handy reach to flick before meeting Mr. Sandman. Check out the build video after the break!

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IoT Doorman: Eye-Controlled Door For A Girl With Cerebral Palsy

January 27, 2018 by James Hobson 11 Comments

Kyleigh has an eye-controlled computer on her wheelchair but something as simple as her bedroom door was still beyond her reach… until now! [Bill Binko], recently filmed a demo of an automatic, IoT door opener built for the young girl with cerebral palsy. [Bill] is a co-founder of ATMakers, an organization that enables makers interested in assistive technologies to collaborate with users to improve quality of life.

Using her eye tracking tablet (PRC Device), Kyleigh has two new icons that make the relevant call to a website, pushing a simple command to either open or close her bedroom door. The device attached to the door uses an Adafruit M0 WiFi Feather board, a DC stepper motor and wheel, a UBEC buck converter, and a potentiometer.

Since other family members are also going to be opening and closing the door, there’s potentiometer which measures the door position for proper operation next time Kyleigh wishes to use the door. The installation also maintains a fairly inconspicuous profile for the assistance it gives — the ‘brain’ is enclosed in a small box on the door, with the motor only slightly larger on the door’s base.

[Bill] believes the project has a few quibbles and wants to work out a smaller wait before the open/close process is executed and optimizing the open/close speed. You have to check out the video below to see that it works really really. We’re also excited to see Kyleigh using her gaze control to talk to an Amazon Echo. [Bill] foresee a door control improvement that links it to Alexa. And how much did it cost to improve the quality of life for this young girl? $70.

We love seeing makers help people, and cannot wait to see what 2018 will bring! If you’re looking for more inspiration, don’t miss the eye-controlled wheelchair project called Eyedrivomatic which won the 2015 Hackaday Prize. There’s also the top Assistive Technology projects from the Hackaday Prize.

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What Is It, R2? Have Something To Share?

October 27, 2017 by James Hobson 5 Comments

Sometimes great projects keep evolving. [Bithead942] built himself an R2-D2 to accompany him when he goes a-trooping — but something didn’t feel quite right. Turns out, R2 was missing its signature beeping banter, so he made it more contextually responsive by implementing a few voice commands.

[Bithead942]’s main costume is that of an X-Wing pilot, and the replica helmet works perfectly; it already has a fake microphone — easily replaced with a working model — and the perfect niche to stash the electronics in the ‘mohawk.’

Even though the helmet has the perfect hiding spot for a circuit, space is still at a premium. Services like Alexa tend to be pretty accurate, but require WiFi access — not a guarantee on the convention floor. Instead, [bithead942] found that the EasyVR Shield 3.0 voice recognition board provided a suitable stand-in. It needs a bit of training to work properly(cue the montage!), but in the end it compares fresh audio commands to the ‘training’ files it has stored, and if there’s a match, triggers a corresponding serial port. It’s not perfect, but it most certainly works!

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Hackaday Links: October 22, 2017

October 22, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

A few weeks ago, the popcorn overflowed because of an ambiguous tweet from Adafruit. Did Adafruit just buy Radio Shack? While everyone else was foaming at the mouth, we called it unlikely. The smart money is that Adafruit just bought a few fancy stock certificates, incorporation papers, and other official-looking documents at the Radio Shack corporate auction a few months ago. They also didn’t pick up that monster cache of Trash-80s, but I digress.

Here’s some more popcorn: Adafruit just applied for the ‘Radiofruit’ trademark. Is this Adafruit’s play to take over the Radio Shack brand? Probably not; they put a bunch of radio modules on Feather boards, and are just doing what they do. It does demonstrate Adafruit’s ~~masterful manipulation~~ effective use of social media, though.

Remember those 2D tilty maze rolling marble labyrinth game things? Here’s a 3D version on Kickstarter. It’s handheld, so this really needs a gimbal and associated twisty knobs.

In a video making the meme rounds, someone found an easter egg in the gauge cluster of a Russian GAZ van. It plays Tetris.

It’s Sunday, so it’s time to talk Star Trek. Here’s something interesting that hit my email: a press release telling me, “Trekkies Scramble To Get The First Toothbrush In Space As Seen On Star Trek Discovery”. This is the toothbrush, and here is the press kit. Dumb? Not at all. Star Trek has a long history of using off-the-shelf tools and devices for props. For example, the hyperspanners seen in Star Trek: Enterprise were actually this non-contact thermometer available from Harbor Freight. At least the hyperspanners and thermometers came out of the same injection mold.

There’s a new LimeSDR board on CrowdSupply. It extends any LimeSDR to 10 GHz.

Kerf bending is the application of (usually laser-cut) slots to bend plywood around corners. You’ve seen it a million times before, and done correctly the technique can produce some very interesting results. What about metal, though? You need a pretty big laser for that. [Proto G] is using a 2000 W fiber laser to experiment with kerf bending in stainless steel. It works as you would expect, and we eagerly await someone to replicate this, if only to see another 2000 Watt laser in action.

Hackaday Links: October 8, 2017

October 8, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

On the top of the popcorn pile for this weekend is an ambiguous tweet from Adafruit that was offered without comment or commentary. [Lady Ada] is holding some sort of fancy incorporation papers for Radio Shack. The smart money is that Adafruit just bought these at the Radio Shack auction a month or so ago. The speculation is that Adafruit just bought Radio Shack, or at least the trademarks and other legal ephemera. Either one is cool, but holy crap please bring back the retro 80s branding.

A Rubik’s Cube is a fantastic mechanical puzzle, and if you’ve never taken one apart, oh boy are you in for a treat. Here’s an RGB LED Rubick’s Cube with not enough detail as to how each square is getting powered. Here’s an open challenge for anyone: build an RGB LED Rubick’s Cube, and Open Source the design.

Last weekend, the front fell off the engine of an Air France A380 flying over Greenland. As with all aircraft incidents, someone has to find the missing bits. It only took a week to find a mangled cowling on an ice sheet. This is incredibly impressive; if you want a comparison to another accident, it took three months to find the fan disk for UA 232 in an Iowa cornfield.

Poorly thought out Kickstarters don’t grab our attention like they used to, but this is an exception. The Aire is a mashup of one of those voice-activated home assistants (Alexa, whatever the Google one is named…) and a drone. The drone half of the build is marginally interesting as a ducted fan coaxial thingy, and building your own home assistant isn’t that hard with the right mics and a Raspberry Pi. The idea is actually solid — manufacturing is another story, though. It appears no one thought about how annoying it would be to have a helicopter following them around their house, or if the mics would actually be able to hear anyone over beating props. Here’s the kicker: this project was successfully funded. People want to buy this. A fool and his or her money…

Processing is cool, although we’re old skool and still reppin’ Max/MSP. It looks like the first annual Processing Community Day is coming up soon. The Processing Community Day will be at the MIT Media Lab on October 21st, with talks from the headliners of the Processing community.

Maker Faire NYC was two weekends ago, the TCT show in Birmingham was last week, and Open Hardware Summit was in Denver this weekend. Poor [Prusa] was at all of them, racking up the miles. He did, however, get to ride [James from XRobots.co.uk]’s electric longboard. There’s some great videos from [James] right here and here.

Speaking of Open Hardware Summit, there was a field trip to Sparkfun and Lulzbot this Friday. The highlight? The biggest botfarm in the states, and probably the second largest in the world. That’s 155 printers, all in their own enclosures, in a room that’s kept at 80° F. They’re printing ABS. Control of the printers is through a BeagleBone running Octoprint. These ‘Bones and Octoprint only control one printer each, and there is no software layer ‘above’ the Octoprint instances for managing multiple printers simultaneously. That probably means the software to manage a botfarm doesn’t exist. There have been attempts, though, but nothing in production. A glove thrown down?

Building This TARDIS Is Anything But A Snap

September 23, 2017 by James Hobson 9 Comments

As an avid fan of the show Dr Who, [Adam Sifounakis] saw a model for a laser-cut TARDIS that piqued his curiosity that eventually grew into a multi-week project involving multiple setbacks, missteps, revamps and — finally — gratification. Behold, his sound activated TARDIS.

First and foremost, assembling and painting the model was a fun puzzle — despite a few trips to the store — with a little backtracking on the painting due to impatience. Next, the creation of a pulsing soft white LED circuit timed with an audio clip to really sell the image of a mini-TARDIS proved to be a tedious ordeal, paying off in the end with a satisfying glow through the vellum-diffused windows on the model.

How to trigger the lights? [Sifounakis] initially wanted a capacitive sensor to trigger the sound effects, but that way lay dragons — and madness — so he went with snap-activated effect to activate the TARDIS like the Doctor himself. After struggling with building his own microphone setup, he switched to an electret mic with adjustable gain which worked like a charm. Setting up this TARDIS’ Adafruit Pro Trinket brain involved a snag or two, and after that it was smooth sailing!

Until he hit another hitch with the power circuit too, that is. Luckily enough, adding a capacitor to give the circuit a bit more juice on boot solved the issue. All that was left to do was dismantle and rebuild his circuit after all this troubleshooting and substitutions, and — finally — install it in his model.

With much satisfaction and a final rework of the LED pulsing effect, it was done. Check it out!

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