Tiny House Forecasts Weather

September 15, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield 6 Comments

Before the information age, it wasn’t quite as easy to glean information about the weather. Sure, there were thermometers and barometers and rhymes about the sky, but if you lived in or near Germany back then you might have also had access to something called a “weather house” which could help predict rain. [Moritz] aka [Thinksilicon] found one of these antequated devices laying around, and went about modernizing it. (Google Translate from German)

A traditional weather house is essentially a hygrometer housed in an intricate piece of artwork. Two figures, typically a man and woman, are balanced on a platform that is suspended in the middle by a small section of horsehair. When the humidity is low, the hair tightens up and turns the platform one way, and when humidity is high — suggesting rain is coming — it turns the other way. When the man comes out of the house, it predicts rainfall.

To get the weather house upgraded, [Moritz] outfitted the front with an OLED display which replaced the traditional thermometer. Instead of using horsehair to spin the figures he installed a small servo on the platform. The entire house is controlled by an ESP8266 which pulls data from the Open Weather API and spins the figures based on the information it receives.

Much like unique clocks, we enjoy interesting weather indicating/forecasting builds. This one’s right up there with using squirrels to predict the weather, or having a small weather-recreation right on your bookshelf.

Complex, Beautiful Device Is Limited To Text-speak And Cat Pictures (WTF, LOL)

September 13, 2016 by Donald Papp 27 Comments

Beautifully documented, modular, and completely open-source, this split flap display project by [JON-A-TRON] uses 3D printing, laser cutting and engraving, and parts anyone can find online to make a device that looks as sharp as it is brilliantly designed. Also, it appears to be a commentary on our modern culture since this beautifully engineered, highly complex device is limited to communicating via three-letter combos and cat pictures (or cat video, if you hold the button down!) As [JON-A-TRON] puts it, “Why use high-resolution, multi-functional devices when you can get back to your industrial revolution roots?” Video is embedded below.

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A Windowless Elevator With A 360º Panoramic View

August 20, 2016 by Cameron Coward 23 Comments

The Amoreiras Tower, in Lisbon, Portugal, recently added a rooftop viewing area that is open to the public. The top of the tower is one of the highest spots in the city, and the viewing area gives an impressive 360º view of the surrounding area. However, the elevator to get to the top left a lot to be desired. It’s an interior elevator, and didn’t itself offer any view.

So, Artica, along with Schindler, were brought in to solve that problem. The solution was to mount displays on the interior of the elevator, in order to simulate a 360º panoramic view of the city outside. The video is synced up with the elevator, so the view changes as the elevator passengers move up and down between floors.

Artica, who was responsible for the concept, design, and electronics installation accomplished this by first building a prototype in their office building. This was a full-size elevator replica with which they could test the design and get it ready for installation. They then partnered with Schindler to actually install the system in the elevator of the Amoreiras Tower, which necessitated almost completely rebuilding the elevator. As you can see in the video, the resulting view and accompanying music (definitely not elevator music) are fantastic, and it was even done in time for the public opening of the rooftop viewing area.

Like us, you may be wondering where the video footage came from. The scene moves in apparent parallax so video was obviously captured with continuous motion and isn’t a scrolling image. This is the work of a camera toting drone.

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Tattoos By Robotic Arm With Pinpoint Accuracy

August 12, 2016 by James Hobson 66 Comments

Tattoos are an ancient art, and as with most art, is usually the domain of human expertise. The delicate touch required takes years to master, but with the capacity for perfect accuracy and precision movements, enlisting a robotic arm and some clever software to tattoo a willing canvas is one step closer thanks to the efforts of [Pierre Emm] and [Johan da Silveira].

They began by using a 3D printer modified to ‘print’ with a tattoo needle. Catching the interest of the Applied Research Lab at Autodesk, the next logical step was to use an industrial robot arm get a human under the tattooing machine — dubbed Tatoué — after scanning the limb in question and loading it into Dynamo, their parametric design environment to map the design onto the virtual limb.

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Drone Doesn’t Know Much About Art, But Knows What It Likes

August 10, 2016 by Al Williams 18 Comments

There is an artistic technique known as stippling where an artist creates a picture using small dots of ink or paint. The result is almost like using a dot matrix printer at low resolution. [Paul Kry] at McGill University doesn’t directly teach art, but he did teach drones to produce pictures using the stippling technique.

As you can see in the video below, the drones carry an ink-soaked sponge. Internal sensors and a motion capture system get them to the right spot and then they move to put the ink down on the work surface. It isn’t perfect, but it does make recognizable drawings and presumably a little inconsistency makes it even more artsy.

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Art And Creepy Mechanisms

August 5, 2016 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

Latvian artist [Krists Pudzens] just put on a show in Sweden and sent us the video of his amazing kinetic sculpture. (Embedded below.) We found an arty-theory writeup of another exhibition of his to share, but we had so many technical questions that we had to write him back asking for details. And boy, did he answer.

In the video, a couple of animatronic faces watch you as crab-like rope-climber bots inch upwards and red wings flap in the background. There’s a lot of brilliant mechanisms here, and aside from whatever it all means, we just like to watch machines go.

The details! Most of the pieces are plasma-cut steel or hand-cut-and-filed aluminum, and almost all of the motors are windshield wiper motors from old Russian KAMAZ and LADA cars. In another installation, the red wings (“Red Queens’ Race”) were installed in a public square and used to track the crowd, flapping faster as people moved more quickly by.

The robotic faces also use OpenCV to track you, and stare you down. One mask is vacuum-formed plastic, and the other is a copy in polyester resin and gelcoat. Here is a video of them on their own, and another of the development.

The twin rope-climbers, “Unbalanced Force”, just climb upwards at different paces. We were more than a little curious about what happens to the rope-climbers when they reach the top. [Krists] says the gallery staff grabs ladders and goes to fetch them. When he exhibited them in Poland on 20m ropes, they actually had to hire professional climbers. Life imitates art.

Some of us here at Hackaday are suckers for tech-art, whether it’s 3D-printed baroque columns, dancing with metal-bending machines, or just glowing globs of ferrofluid. There’s a lot of the same “wonder what would happen if…” tendency in the hacker and the artist — seeing possibilities and making them real.

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The Most Useless Book Scanner

August 1, 2016 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

How do artificial intelligences get so intelligent? The same way we do, they get a library card and head on over to read up on their favorite topics. Or at least that’s the joke that [Jakob Werner] is playing with in his automaton art piece, “A Machine Learning” (Google translated here).

Simulating a reading machine, a pair of eyeballs on stalks scan left-right and slowly work their way down the page as another arm swings around and flips to the next one. It’s all done with hand-crafted wooden gears, in contrast to the high-tech subject matter. It’s an art piece, and you can tell that [Jakob] has paid attention to how it looks. (The all-wooden rollers are sweet.) But it’s also a “useless machine” with a punch-line.

Is it a Turing test? How can we tell that the machine isn’t reading? What about “real” AIs? Are they learning or do they just seem to be? OK, Google’s DeepMind is made of silicon and electricity instead of wood, but does that actually change anything? It’s art, so you get license to think crazy thoughts like this.

We’ve covered a few, less conceptual, useless machines here. Here is one of our favorite. Don’t hesitate to peruse them all.