A client uses an Augmented Alternative Communication board that speaks.

Tactile Communication Board Speaks The Truth

September 5, 2024 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

Sometimes, simple things can make a world of difference. Take for example a non-verbal person who can’t necessarily control a touch screen in order to tell someone else what they need or want or think.

This is where Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices come in. Recently tasked with building such a device, [Thornhill!] came up with a great design that houses 160 different phrases in a fairly small package and runs on CircuitPython.

Basically, the client presses the appropriate snap-dome button button and the corresponding phrase is spoken through the speaker. The 10×16 grid of buttons is covered with a membrane that both feels nice and gives a bit of protection from spills.

The buttons can achieve high actuation forces and have a crisp tactile response, which means they’re probably gonna go a long way to keep the user from getting frustrated.

This handy AAC board is built on the Adafruit RP2040 Prop-Maker Feather and two keypad matrices. If this weren’t useful enough as it is, [Thornhill!] also built an even smaller version with 16 buttons for the client to wear around their neck.

Did you know? AAC boards aren’t just for humans.

Teardown 2019: A Festival Of Hacking, Art, And FPGAs

July 3, 2019 by Helen Leigh 7 Comments

As hackers approached the dramatic stone entrance of Portland’s Pacific Northwest College of Arts, a group of acolytes belonging to The Church of Robotron beckoned them over, inviting them to attempt to earn the title of Mutant Saviour. The church uses hazardous environments, religious indoctrination, a 1980s arcade game and some seriously funny low tech hacks to test your abilities to save humanity. This offbeat welcome was a pretty good way to set the tone for Teardown 2019: an annual Crowd Supply event for engineers and artists who love hardware. Teardown is halfway between a conference and a party, with plenty of weird adventures to be had over the course of the weekend. Praise the Mutant! Embrace Futility! Rejoice in Error!

For those of us who failed to become the Mutant Saviour, there were plenty of consolation prizes. Kate Temkin and Mikaela Szekely’s talk on accessible USB tools was spectacular, and I loved following Sophi Kravitz’s journey as she made a remote-controlled blimp. Upstairs in the demo room, we had great fun playing with a pneumatic donut sprinkle pick and place machine from tinkrmind and Russell Senior’s hacked IBM daisywheel typewriter that prints ASCII art and runs a text-based Star Trek adventure game.

It wouldn’t be much of a hardware party if the end of the talks, demos and workshops meant the end of each day’s activities, but the Teardown team organised dinner and an afterparty in a different locations every night: Portland’s hackerspace ^H PDX, the swishy AutoDesk offices, and the vintage arcade game bar Ground Kontrol. There also was a raucous and hotly-contested scavenger hunt across the city, with codes to crack, locks to pick and bartenders to sweet talk into giving you the next clue (tip: tip).

Join me below for my favorite highlights of this three day (and night) festival.

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TI-83 Gets CircuitPython Upgrade

April 4, 2019 by Lewin Day 23 Comments

Graphing calculators are an interesting niche market these days. They’re relatively underpowered, and usually come with cheap, low resolution screens to boot. They remain viable almost solely due to their use in education and the fact that their limited connectivity makes them suitable for use in exams. The market is starting to hot up, though – and TI have recently been doing some interesting work with Python on their TI-83.

Rumor has it that TI have been unable to get Python to run viably directly on the TI-83 Premium CE. This led to the development of the TI-Python peripheral, which plugs into the calculator’s expansion port. This allows users to program in Python, with the TI-Python doing the work and the calculator essentially acting as a thin client. The chip inside is an Atmel SAMD21E18A-U, and is apparently running Adafruit’s CircuitPython platform.

This discovery led to further digging, of course. With some hacking, the TI-Python can instead be replaced with other boards based on Atmel SAMD21 chips. For those of you that aren’t in Atmel’s sales team, that means it’s possible to use things like the Adafruit Trinket M0 and the Arduino Zero instead, when flashed with the appropriate CircuitPython firmware. It’s a tricky business, involving USB IDs and some other hacks, but it’s nothing that can’t be achieved in a few hours or so.

This is a hack in its early days, so it’s currently more about building a platform at this stage rather then building fully-fledged projects just yet. We’re fully expecting to see Twitter clients and multiplayer games hit the TI-83 platform before long, of course. When you’ve done it, chuck us a link on the tip line.

[Thanks to PT for the tip!]

Code On Your Phone With CircuitPython Editor

January 10, 2019 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

[foamyguy] loves Python and messing around with electronics. Boards such as Adafruit’s Circuit Playground Express make it easy for him to take both anywhere. He recently found himself wanting to program Circuit Python boards in the field, but doesn’t always have a laptop on him. So he created an Android app to make on-the-go programming fast and easy.

Using CircuitPython Editor and one or two USB cables, you can program Circuit Python boards with most Android device, including Tinkerboards. It features serial communication, a basic code editor, and a REPL sandbox for code-based castle building. [foamyguy]’s most recent addition to this work in progress is a macro creation tool that lets you edit and store modular, repeatable tasks, like turning all the NeoPixels blue, or lighting them up in a smiley face pattern. The Circuit Python board will draw its power from the Android device, so keep that in mind before you program some crazy light show.

You can get the app in the Play store or download it directly from the ‘hub. If you have any trouble setting it up, check out [foamyguy]’s Adafruit guide.