Corona Cancels Cons

March 14, 2020 by Elliot Williams 32 Comments

As you read this, the Open Hardware Summit is taking place, but differently than in previous years. This year, it’s taking place in cyberspace! To what do we owe this futuristic development? Unfortunately, COVID-19, the corona virus.

And OHS isn’t alone. Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest was cancelled outright. In Germany, where I live, the national health board has recommended cancelling all events with more than 1,000 attendees, and both the Maker Faire Berlin and the Chaos Computer Club’s 20th annual Easterhegg have been called off.

And just announced yesterday, our own Hackaday Belgrade event is going to be postponed and rescheduled for later this year. It’s truly sad, but we’re still looking forward to seeing you all a little bit later in the summer. If you can’t make the new date, tickets will of course be refunded. We’ll keep you informed when we get a new venue and time.

The best way to slow the spread of a global pandemic, according to the WHO who should know best, is washing your hands and avoiding contact with other people. “Social distancing” is the new catch-phrase, and that means keeping a few meters away from other folks whenever reasonable. And clearly, gathering people from all over the world, packing them into a single auditorium, and spending quality time together doesn’t meet this requirement.

So we’re all probably going to be laying low globally for a little while. On the positive side, this means more time for hacking here in the lab, and I’m excited to be able to watch the online version of the Open Hardware Summit. If you’re working from home, it’s that much easier to keep up to date with Hackaday. Still, I can’t wait to be on the other side of this thing, and it makes me appreciate the various social gatherings that much more.

And of course I have Isaac Newton in my thoughts, who developed the groundwork for his Calculus and laws of gravitation while at home because Cambridge was closed to stop the spread of the Great Plague. Wash your hands!

Augmented Reality Aids In The Fight Against COVID-19

March 12, 2020 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

“Know your enemy” is the essence of one of the most famous quotes from [Sun Tzu]’s Art of War, and it’s as true now as it was 2,500 years ago. It also applies far beyond the martial arts, and as the world squares off for battle against COVID-19, it’s especially important to know the enemy: the novel coronavirus now dubbed SARS-CoV-2. And now, augmented reality technology is giving a boost to search for fatal flaws in the virus that can be exploited to defeat it.

The video below is a fascinating mix of 3D models of viral structures, like the external spike glycoproteins that give coronaviruses their characteristic crown appearance, layered onto live video of [Tom Goddard], a programmer/analysts at the University of California San Francisco. The tool he’s using is called ChimeraX, a molecular visualization program developed by him and his colleagues. He actually refers to this setup as “mixed reality” rather than “augmented reality”, to stress the fact that AR tends to be an experience that only the user can fully appreciate, whereas this system allows him to act as a guide on a virtual tour of the smallest of structures.

Using a depth-sensing camera and a VR headset, [Tom] is able to manipulate 3D models of the SARS virus — we don’t yet have full 3D structure data for the novel coronavirus proteins — to show us exactly how SARS binds to its receptor, angiotensin-converting enzyme-2 (ACE-2), a protein expressed on the cell surfaces of many different tissue types. It’s fascinating to see how the biding domain of the spike reaches out to latch onto ACE-2 to begin the process of invading a cell; it’s also heartening to watch [Tom]’s simulation of how the immune system responds to and blocks that binding.

It looks like ChimeraX and similar AR systems are going to prove to be powerful tools in the fight against not just COVID-19, but in all kinds of infectious diseases. Hats off to [Tom] and his team for making them available to researchers free of charge.

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Ultimate Medical Hackathon: How Fast Can We Design And Deploy An Open Source Ventilator?

March 12, 2020 by Gerrit Coetzee 898 Comments

[Gui Cavalcanti], whose name you might recognize from MegaBots, got on a call with a medical professional in San Francisco and talked about respirators. The question being, can we design and deploy an open source version in time to help people?

Unnerving reports from Italy show that when the virus hits the susceptible population groups the device that becomes the decider between life and death is a ventilator. Unfortunately they are in short supply.

The problem gets tricky when it comes to what kind of respirator is needed CPAP, BIPAP, or Hi-Flo oxygen NIV are all out. These systems aerosolize the virus making it almost guaranteed that anyone around them will get infected.

What we need is a Nasal cannula-based NIV. This system humidifies air, mixes it with oxygen and then pushes a constant stream of it into people’s lungs. If we can design a simple and working system we can give those plans to factories around the globe and get these things made. If the factories fail us, let’s also have a version people can make at home.

If you aren’t sure if a ventilator is something you can work on there are other problems. Can you make algorithms to determine if a person needs a ventilator. Can we recycle n95 masks? Can we make n95 masks at home? Workers also require a negative pressure tent for housing patients. This will be especially useful if we need to build treatment facilities in gyms or office spaces. Lastly if you’re a medical professional, can you train people how to help?

Let’s beat this thing. The ultimate medical hackathon begins.

Open-Source Collaboration Tackles COVID-19 Testing

March 10, 2020 by Lewin Day 18 Comments

When you think of open source, your mind likely jumps to projects such as Linux, Firefox, and other now-mainstream software. The ideals of the movement are applicable to other areas, too, however – and a group have come together to pool resources to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

The group has formed around Just One Giant Lab, a non-profit organisation operating out of Paris, France. They aim to create an open platform for scientific collaboration on a broad range of issues facing humanity. The current project aims to create an open-source method for safely testing for COVID-19 infection, in an attempt to help better manage cases popping up around the world.

Thus far, the group has collected a variety of resources and begun to host conference calls discussing best practices for testing for the virus. There’s discussion of various PCR assays and virus sequences that are all useful in detecting the virus, along with data from WHO reports in China. The current state of play has been boiled down in the lab notebook the group has prepared, available online.

It’s inspiring to see open-source ideals put to work in new arenas outside computer software. Time will tell if this is the new way forward, but it certainly can’t hurt to have more minds tackling the problems of today and tomorrow.

A Reminder Not To Touch Your Face

March 9, 2020 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

In 2020, the world is focused on the rampant spread of a new virus by the name of COVID-19. Like many infectious diseases, transmission can be reduced by good hygiene practices. To help in the fight, [Nick Bild] threw together a device he calls Sentinel.

The concept is simple. Reduce the user touching their own face by shining a warning light when such behaviour is detected. This is achieved through the use of an Arduino, which controls an LED through feedback from an ultrasonic proximity sensor. The LED is placed in the user’s peripheral vision, glowing when the sensor detects hands (or other objects) approaching the face.

While it’s unlikely to be rolled out en-masse, it’s a project that nevertheless reminds us to practice good self-care routines. And, as the adage goes, prevention is better than cure. As governments and industry grapple with the ongoing problem, consider how your supply chain may be exposed to the crisis. Video after the break.

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Hackaday Links: March 8, 2020

March 8, 2020 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

A lot of annoying little hacks are needed to keep our integer-based calendar in sync with a floating-point universe, and the big one, leap day, passed us by this week. Aside from the ignominy of adding a day to what’s already the worst month of the year, leap day has a tendency to call out programmers who take shortcuts with their code. Matt Johnson-Pint has compiled a list of 2020 leap day bugs that cropped up, ranging from cell phones showing the wrong date on February 29 to an automated streetlight system in Denmark going wonky for the day. The highest-profile issue may have been system crashes of Robinhood, the online stock trading platform. Robinhood disagrees that the issues were caused by leap day code issues, saying that it was a simple case of too many users and not enough servers. That seems likely given last week’s coronavirus-fueled trading frenzy, but let’s see what happens in 2024.

Speaking of annoying time hacks, by the time US readers see this, we will have switched to Daylight Saving Time. Aside from costing everyone a precious hour of sleep, the semiannual clock switch always seems to set off debates about the need for Daylight Saving Time. Psychologists think it’s bad for us, and it has elicited a few bugs over the years. What will this year’s switch hold? Given the way 2020 has been going so far, you’d better buckle up.
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