Teardown Video: What’s Inside The Self-Solving Rubik’s Cube Robot

May 18, 2019 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

You can find all kinds of robots at Bay Area Maker Faire, but far and away the most interesting bot this year is the Self-Solving Rubik’s Cube built by [Takashi Kaburagi]. Gently mix up the colored sides of the cube, set it down for just a moment, and it will spring to life, sorting itself out again.

I arrived at [Takashi’s] booth at just the right moment: as the battery died. You can see the video I recorded of the battery swap process embedded below. The center tile on the white face of the cube is held on magnetically. Once removed, a single captive screw (nice touch!) is loosened to lift off the top side. From there a couple of lower corners are lifted out to expose the tiny lithium cell and the wire connector that links it to the robot.

Regular readers will remember seeing this robot when we featured it in September. We had trouble learning details about the project at the time, but since then Takashi has shared much more about what went into it. Going back to 2017, the build started with a much larger 3D-printed version of a cube. With proof of concept in hand, the design was modeled in CAD to ensure everything had a carefully planned place. The result is a hand-wired robotic core that feels like science fiction but is very, very real.

I love seeing all of the amazing robots on the grounds of the San Mateo County Event Center this weekend. There is a giant mech wandering the parking lot at the Faire. There’s a whole booth of heavy-metal quadruped bots the size of dogs. And if you’re not careful where you walk you’ll step on a scaled-down Mars rover. These are all incredible, out of this world builds and I love them. But the mental leap of moving traditional cube-solvers inside the cube itself, and the craftsmanship necessary to succeed, make this the most under-appreciated engineering at this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area. I feel lucky to have caught it during a teardown phase! Let’s take a look.

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Hackaday Links: May 12, 2019

May 12, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

The future of the musical instrument industry is in tiny, cheap, handheld synthesizers. They’re sold as ‘musical toys’. They bleep and bloop, and that’s about it. Korg may have just released the minimum viable product for this category, and thus the most popular product for this category. On the surface, the Korg Nu:Tekt doesn’t look like much, just a box with three knobs, a speaker, a (crappy) keyboard, and a few buttons. I/O includes MIDI in, Sync in and out, audio in, and headphones out. What’s inside is what counts. There’s a high-powered ARM core (STM32F446, a Cortex-M4 running at 180 MHz) and a ton of RAM. What’s the play here? It’s compatible with the Korg Prologue/Minilogue SDK, so you can put the same sounds from the flagship synthesizer on a tiny box that fits in your pocket. Things are starting to get weird, man. This is a toy, with the same sounds as the ‘pro’ level synth. Let it be known that the synth market is the most interesting segment of consumer electronics right now.

Bird, that ride share scooter startup, is now selling their scooters. It costs thirteen hundred dollars. Alternatively, you can pick some up for cheap at your city’s impound lot. Or for the low, low, price of free.

Razer, the company that makes garish computer peripherals aimed at ‘gamers’ and other people who are sucked deep into the existential turmoil of disempowerment, depression, and playing video games all day, are building a toaster. Gamers aren’t known for eating food that isn’t prepared by their mom, but the Razer consumer community has been clamoring for a professional gaming toaster since it was first teased on April Fool’s Day three years ago. You only eat so many cold Pop Tarts straight out of the box, I guess.

Everyone loves cupcake cars, and this year we’re in for a treat! We’re ringing the bell this weekend with the 6th annual Hackaday x Tindie meetup for the Bay Area Maker Faire. We got a few things going on here. Next Thursday we’ll be greeted with talks by The Only Makers That You Want To Meet. That’s HDDG, the monthly San Francisco meetup happening at the Supplyframe office, and it’s going to be packed to the gills this month. Don’t miss it. Next Saturday, we’re renting a bar close to the Faire. The 6th Annual Hackaday x Tindie MFBA Meetup w/ Kickstarter is usually at an Irish pub in San Mateo, but we’re getting a bigger venue this year. You’ll be able to move around in this venue.

After The Sun Set On San Mateo, LED Takes Over Hackaday’s BAMF Meetup

June 27, 2018 by Roger Cheng 5 Comments

After this Spring’s Bay Area Maker Faire closed down for Saturday night and kicked everybody out, the fun moved on to O’Neill’s Irish Pub where Hackaday and Tindie held our fifth annual meetup for fellow Maker Faire attendees. How do we find like-minded hackers in a crowded bar? It’s easy: look for tables lit by LEDs and say hello. It was impossible to see everything people had brought, but here are a few interesting samples.

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Hacking For Learning And Laughs: The Makers Of Oakwood School

May 25, 2018 by Roger Cheng 3 Comments

The tagline of Bay Area Maker Faire is “Inspire the Future” and there was plenty of inspiration for our future generation. We have exhibits encouraging children to get hands-on making projects to call their own, and we have many schools exhibiting their student projects telling stories of what they’ve done. Then we have exhibitors like Oakwood School STEAM Council who have earned a little extra recognition for masterfully accomplishing both simultaneously.

[Marcos Arias], chair of the council, explained that each exhibit on display have two layers. Casual booth visitors will see inviting hands-on activities designed to delight kids. Less obvious is that each of these experiences are a culmination of work by Oakwood 7th to 12th grade students. Some students are present to staff activities and they were proud to talk about their work leading up to Maker Faire with any visitors who expressed interest.

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Modern Wizard Summons Familiar Spirit

May 24, 2018 by Roger Cheng 10 Comments

In European medieval folklore, a practitioner of magic may call for assistance from a familiar spirit who takes an animal form disguise. [Alex Glow] is our modern-day Merlin who invoked the magical incantations of 3D printing, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi to summon her familiar Archimedes: The AI Robot Owl.

The key attraction in this build is Google’s AIY Vision kit. Specifically the vision processing unit that tremendously accelerates image classification tasks running on an attached Raspberry Pi Zero W. It no longer consumes several seconds to analyze each image, classification can now run several times per second, all performed locally. No connection to Google cloud required. (See our earlier coverage for more technical details.) The default demo application of a Google AIY Vision kit is a “joy detector” that looks for faces and attempts to determine if a face is happy or sad. We’ve previously seen this functionality mounted on a robot dog.

[Alex] aimed to go beyond the default app (and default box) to create Archimedes, who was to reward happy people with a sticker. As a moving robotic owl, Archimedes had far more crowd appeal than the vision kit’s default cardboard box. All the kit components have been integrated into Archimedes’ head. One eye is the expected Pi camera, the other eye is actually the kit’s piezo buzzer. The vision kit’s LED-illuminated button now tops the dapper owl’s hat.

Archimedes was created to join in Google’s promotion efforts. Their presence at this Maker Faire consisted of two tents: one introductory “Learn to Solder” tent where people can create a blinky LED badge, and the other tent is focused on their line of AIY kits like this vision kit. Filled with demos of what the kits can do aside from really cool robot owls.

Hopefully these promotional efforts helped many AIY kits find new homes in the hands of creative makers. It’s pretty exciting that such a powerful and inexpensive neural net processor is now widely available, and we look forward to many more AI-powered hacks to come.

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Visit Tapigami Tape City, Where Tape Is The Fabric Of Society

May 19, 2018 by Roger Cheng 2 Comments

With so many cool things going on at Bay Area Maker Faire, it takes something special to stand out from the crowd. Covering several hundred square feet of floor and wall with creations made of tape would do the trick. Welcome to Tapigami Tape City, a traveling art exhibit by [Danny Scheible].

Many of us used construction paper, glue, and tape to express our creativity in our youth. Tapigami’s minimalism drops the paper and glue, practitioners of the art stick to tape. It is an accessible everyday material so there is no barrier to entry to start having fun. And while tape does have some obvious limitations, it is possible to get quite creatively elaborate and still use tape almost exclusively.

The Tapigami booth is very happy to accommodate those wishing to learn the way of tape. At their table, young and old alike are welcome to sit down and start building basic shapes out of masking tape. This begins with cones, cylinders, and cubes which are then combined into more complex creations — it’s kind of like OpenSCAD, but all with tape.

Attendees of Bay Area Maker Faire should not miss seeing Tape City in person, it’s quite the sight to behold in the south-east corner of Zone 2. (Not far from the Tindie/Hackaday booth, stop by and say hi!) And while it’s plenty of fun to stick to tape, we can see the Hackaday demographic taking these concepts up a few notches. If you’ve pulled off something mind blowing using tape, you know where our tip line is.

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This Weekend: Hackaday X Tindie Meetup At Bay Area Maker Faire.

May 14, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

Maker Faire Bay Area is this weekend, and the Hackaday and Tindie crew are getting ready to jack some cupcake cars. The Bay Area Maker Faire is one of the greatest gatherings of all the cool people we know, and five years ago we started host a meetup. This Saturday, we’re blowing the roof off our favorite joint in San Mateo yet again. Join us at O’Neill’s Irish Pub for the 5th annual Hackaday x Tindie BAMF Meetup!

This meetup is a well established tradition — it’s all the cool kids at Maker Faire, hanging out in a bar. Well, all the cool 21+ kids that is. There will be blinky, there will be bring-a-hack, and there will be the people who build stuff and make things happen. This is the mixer for everyone who is passionate about hardware, and a refreshing escape from the heat and the five dollar bottles of water.

Want an idea of what’s in store for the Hackaday x Tindie Bay Area Meetup? Last year it spilled into the streets. We cajoled [Josef Prusa] to head out, we had tiny 3D printers in action, [Ben Heck] made an appearance, and someone brought a HoloLens. the MOnSter 6502 was there, slowly increasing its program counter. If you want to see the coolest DIY hardware without the dealing with the masses at Maker Faire, this is the event you want to hit up.

But wait, there’s more: HDDG is Thursday!

Are you heading to San Fransisco early? Awesome, because we’re also hosting the Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic on the Thursday before the Faire! The HDDG is our monthly expand-your-mind gathering for hardware developers in the Bay Area. We have some amazing guests that will be talking about the latest hardware they’ve been developing.

On deck for this installment of HDDG is [Tanya Fish] who has been working at Pimoroni for the past couple of years. She’ll be discussing the ‘invisible magic’ of electronics and how to explain electrons to the uninitiated. Also on board for HDDG is [Roy Jui Liang Hung], the founder of Perkūnas Studio, one of the most renowned 3D printing experts in Taiwan. He’ll be talking about 3D sculpture. Also on board is [Jason Kridner], co-founder of BeagleBone.org, who will be talking about simplifying hardware design with the BeagleBone On A Chip.