Flying A Drone With An Oculus Rift

August 31, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 15 Comments

Controlling autonomous vehicles remotely with the use of virtual reality headsets seems like an obvious next step. Already, a few UAV companies have begun experimenting with these types of ideas by integrating Oculus Rift developer kits into their hovering quadcopters and drones. Parrot released a video on their blog showing that they developed a head-tracking system for their Bebop Drone in an effort to bring FPV flights to fruition. It looks like a lot of fun and we want to try one of these out asap!

As for technical specifications, they can be found in the YouTube description of the video embedded below. A quick glance showed that the operating system is based on Android and uses WiFi to connect the handheld tablet to the autonomous vehicle floating above. The range is a whopping 2km, giving plenty of freedom to explore. Moving one’s head swivels the attached camera giving a more immersive flying experience.

This isn’t the first example of FPV drones that we have seen. Previously, we covered an Oculus Rift + Head Tracking setup and another similar integration with a Black Armor Drone. We are bound to see virtual reality equipment used to control drones more and more as developers get their hands on cutting edge hardware like the Oculus developer kit 2 hardware which is currently shipping.

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Hackaday Links: July 20, 2014

July 20, 2014 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Etch-a-Sketch spray-painted silver with electronics bolted onto the side? Sign us up! This art installation adds one thing that we don’t often see in these types of hacks, eerie audio.

If you’re still mining bitcoin you need to do it faster than anyone else… that’s pretty much how the whole thing works. [Lewin] has been using the Antminer USB ASIC and toyed around with overclocking to 2.2 GH/s (gighashes per second) but to make sure his hardware holds up to the overwork he hacked his own water cooling system for the dongle.

Smart phones are the best bang for your buck on portability and power. Better yet you can get slightly broken ones for a song. If you manage to find an Android device with a broken touch screen but functioning LCD try this trick to add a mouse to it. There must be another life for this in a future hack!

We have a love-hate relationship with this particular crowd-funding campaign. First this hate: It’s basically a 100% clip-art video presentation with an $800,000 ask. Yeah… good luck buddy. On the other hand, this is the type of stuff we actually want to see as crowd funding. The idea is to use modern materials and techniques to build [Nikola Tesla’s] Wardenclyffe Tower, which was designed and built to research wireless energy (both as a means of communication and actual energy transfer). It was never fully functional and ended up being demolished. Wouldn’t it be great if teams of highly skilled and motivated people took grand ideas like this, crossing every theoretical “t” and dotting every theoretical “i”, and then proposed a crowd funding campaign to build a test platform? Oh wait, that sounds very much like a government research grant. Anywhoo… check out the Global Energy Transmission’s campaign.

Is Your Wearable Tech Too Subtle?

July 19, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

wrist

With any con, you’re going to have people walking around with things they’ve built. It’s the perfect venue for wearable tech, and the cream of the crop for HOPE X is [Zack]’s SmarTwatCh. Billed as a 3D printed big ass smart watch, it’s anything but subtle and has enough gadgets and gizmos to make even the biggest tech aficionado blush

The front of the SmarTwatCh is an authentic 2×20 glass encapsulated VFD running at 160 Volts, chosen for its danger and character. Inside the 3D printed enclosure is a Teensy 3.0, pots, knobs, and switches, a laser, LEDs, and an alcohol sensor because, “the future is quantified drinking”.

‘Apps’ for this smart watch include a TV-B-Gone, laser pointer, breathalyzer, flashlight, and just about anything else [Zack] can think of that would involve a Bluetooth adapter and a text display. Video of [Zack] demoing the watch at HOPE below.

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DIY Newton’s Cradle Uses Parts Designed On A Smart Phone

June 6, 2014 by Rick Osgood 13 Comments

Injection Molded Parts

As far as physics demonstrations go, the Newton’s Cradle is probably one of the most recognizable. Named after Sir Isaac Newton, the Newton’s Cradle demonstrates the law of conservation of momentum using swinging ball bearings.

[Scorchworks] decided he wanted to build his own Newton’s Cradle. The frame appears to be cut from MDF or particle board and then screwed together. That material is really easy to obtain and also to work with using inexpensive tools. The tricky part was the ball bearings. Most of the time when you see a Newton’s Cradle, the ball bearings have a small hole drilled in the top with an eye hook attached. The string is then attached to the eye hook.

[Scorchworks] decided to do something different. His plan was to make custom injection molded plastic rings that would fit perfectly around the ball bearings. The most interesting thing is that he designed the injection molding plates entirely on his smart phone while at his child’s baseball practice. To do this, [Scorchworks] used his own Android app, ScorchCAD. ScorchCAD is a free clone of OpenSCAD that is designed to run on Android devices. Most of the functionality of OpenSCAD has been implemented in ScorchCAD, though not all functions work yet. You can find a list of all the supported functions on the project’s website or in the Google Play store.

Once the plates were designed within ScorchCAD, [Scorchworks] exported the STL file and then used Meshcam to generate the gcode for his CNC milling machine. Once he had the plates machined, he just placed the ball bearing into the mold and injected the molten plastic around it. The plastic formed a perfectly shaped ring around the bearing with small loops for the string. [Scorchworks] repeated the process several times to get all of the ball bearings finished.

Finally, the bearings were strung up using some fishing line. A Newton’s Cradle is very sensitive to the positioning of the ball bearings. To account for this, [Scorchworks] tied each end of the fishing line to two different screws on top of the cradle. This way, each screw can be tightened or loosened to adjust the position of each ball bearing.

Android Based Wireless ECG

June 5, 2014 by Nick Conn 10 Comments

ECG

The title of [Nuclearrambo’s] post says it all, “Android based wireless ECG monitoring (Temperature sensor and glucometer included).” Wow! What a project!

The project is built around the HC-06 bluetooth module and the Stellaris LaunchPad from TI, an inexpensive ARM developer kit. Building an ECG is a great way to learn about instrumentation amplifiers, a type of differential amplifier used for its extremely high common mode rejection ratio (CMRR). Please be sure to keep in mind that there are a myriad of safety issues and regulation concerns for medical device, and there is no doubt that an ECG is considered a medical device. Sadly, [Nuclearrambo’s] post does not include all of the code and design files you need to build the system, which is understandable considering this is a medical device. That being said, he provides a lot of information about building high-quality ECG instrumentation and the web interface.

It would be great if [Nuclearrambo] could post the Android application code and Stellaris LaunchPad code. Even with these omissions, this post is still worth reading. Designing medical devices requires a lot of know-how, but who knows, maybe your next project can save your life!

Magsafe On An Android, Cats And Dogs Living Together

May 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

Mag

We’re thinking most Hackaday readers have at one time or another been tasked with replacing the power connector in a laptop. Anyone who has done so can easily see the genius behind the Apple Magsafe connector. Since the second gen iPhone, there have been rumors Apple will release a cellphone with the Magsafe connector, a great idea, seeing as how cell phones are thrown around even more than laptops. [Tony] got tired of waiting, and had an Android device anyway, so he decided to retrofit a Magsafe power adapter to his Note II.

In the interest of excess, [Tony] is using the absurdly large ZeroLemon 9300mAh battery and case for his device, giving him a lot of room for this hardware mod. A tiny 3D printed adapter fits around a slightly modified Magsafe connector, and with a little bit of super glue and solder, the connector is wired up to the charging port.

Of course the charger isn’t a stock Apple power supply; it’s just another Magsafe plug wired into a 5V wall wart. We’re not going to take a guess at what would happen if [Tony] plugged a stock Apple charger into his modded phone, but the mod works perfectly without the danger of ripping a USB port out of his phone.

Open Source Humanoid Robot Is Awesom-o

March 25, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

awesome-o

Coming from a lab in France is The Poppy Project, an open source humanoid robot that’s at least as cool as ASIMO.

Poppy was designed as an affordable bipedal robot for use in education and art. It’s a small robot at just over 80 cm in height, but it can walk, move its arms, rotate its torso, and interact with bags-of-meat humans with two cameras and an LCD face.

Although Poppy is open source, that doesn’t mean it’s exactly cheap; the current design includes twenty-one Robotis Dynamixels MX-28 robotic actuators, actually servos with magnetic encoders, temperature sensor, and an ARM microcontroller. These actuators sell for about $200, meaning Poppy contains $4000 in motors alone. The estimated cost of the entire robot is €7500-8000, or about $10,000 to $11,000 USD.

Still, there’s an incredible software platform that comes along with Poppy, and being open source any enterprising engineer can take up the project and attempt to bring the costs down. We’d love to take one out for a walk. Just get rid of the hands. That’s too far down the uncanny valley for us. Video below.

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