This Bike Sonar Is Off The Chain

January 11, 2017 by Kristina Panos 45 Comments

On paper, bicycling is an excellent form of transportation. Not only are there some obvious health benefits, the impact on the environment is much less than anything not directly powered by a human. But let’s face it: riding a bike can be quite scary in practice, especially along the same roads as cars and trucks. It’s hard to analyze the possible threats looming behind you without a pair of eyes in the back of your head.

[Claire Chen] and [Mark Zhao] have come up with the next best thing—bike sonar. It’s a two-part system that takes information from an ultrasonic rangefinder and uses it to create sound-localized pings in a rider’s ears. The rangefinder is attached to a servo mounted on the seat post. It sweeps back and forth to detect objects within 4 meters, and this information is displayed radar-sweep-style graphic on a TFT screen via a PIC32.

Though the graphic display looks awesome, it’s slow feedback and a bit dangerous to have to look down all the time — the audio feedback is by far the most useful. The bike-side circuits sends angle and distance data over 2.4GHz to another PIC mounted on a helmet. This PIC uses sound localization to create a ping noise that matches the distance and location of whatever is on your tail. The ping volume is relative to the distance of the object, and you just plug headphones into the audio jack to hear them. Bunny-hop your way past the break to check it out.

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A Shareable Wireless Biometric Flash Drive

January 15, 2016 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

Wireless storage and biometric authentication are both solved problems. But as [Nathan] and [Zhi] have noticed, there is no single storage solution that incorporates both. For their final project in [Bruce Land]’s ECE 4760, they sought to combine the two ideas under a tight budget while adding as many extras as they could afford, like an OLED and induction coil charging.

Their solution can be used by up to 20 different people who each get a slice of an SD card in the storage unit There are two physical pieces, a base station and the wireless storage unit itself. The base station connects to the host PC over USB and contains an Arduino for serial pass-through and an nRF24L01+ module for communicating with the storage side. The storage drive’s components are crammed inside a clear plastic box. This not only looks cool, it negates the need for cutting out ports to mount the fingerprint sensor and the OLED. The sensor reads the user’s credentials through the box, and the authentication status is displayed on an OLED. Files are transferred to and from the SD card over a second nRF24L01+ through the requisite PIC32.

Fingerprint authorization gives the unit some physical security, but [Nathan] and [Zhi] would like to add an encryption scheme. Due to budget limitations and time constraints, the data transfer isn’t very fast (840 bytes/sec), but this isn’t really the nRF modules’ fault—most of the transmission protocol was implemented in software and they simply ran out of debugging time. There is also no filesystem architecture. In spite of these drawbacks, [Nathan] and [Zhi] created a working proof of concept for wireless biometric storage that they are happy with. Take a tour after the break.
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Color Sonification Could Be Key To Rainbow Connection

December 28, 2015 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

Have you seen any loud sweaters this holiday season? Now there is a way to quantify their vibrancy and actually hear them at the same time. Cornell engineering students [Mengcheng Qi] and [Ryan Land] focused on the sonification of color and translated the visible spectrum into audible sounds.

They originally planned to use pixel samples from an OV7670 camera module, but weren’t able to extract any useful color data from it. We prefer their Plan B anyway, which was to use CdS photo resistors and the plastic color filters used for photography in red, blue, and green. The varying intensity of light falling on the photo resistors creates different patterns according to the voltage levels. The actual sound generation was done with FM sound synthesis.

There wasn’t a lot of natural sound variation between different RGB values, so in order to make it more fun, they created different instruments which play different patterns at variable speeds and pitch according to the colors. In addition to the audio feedback, the RGB values are displayed in real-time on a small TFT. Below those are dynamic bar graphs that show the voltages of each color.

Check out the demo after the break; they walk through the project and try it out on different things to hear their colors.

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Students Set Sights On DIY Eye Exams

December 23, 2015 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

What if you could give yourself a standard eye exam at home? That’s the idea behind [Joel, Margot, and Yuchen]’s final project for [Bruce Land]’s ECE 4760—simulating the standard Snellen eye chart that tests visual acuity from an actual or simulated distance of 20 feet.

This test is a bit different, though. Letters are presented one by one on a TFT display, and the user must identify each letter by speaking into a microphone. As long as the user guesses correctly, the system shows smaller and smaller letters until the size equivalent to the 20/20 line of the Snellen chart is reached.

Since the project relies on speech recognition, the group had to consider things like background noise and the differences in human voices. They use a bandpass filter to screen out frequencies that fall outside the human vocal range. In order to determine the letter spoken, the PIC32 collects the first 256 and last 256 samples, stores them in two arrays, and performs FFT on the first set. The second set of samples undergoe Mel transformation, which helps the PIC assess the sample logarithmically. Finally, the system determines whether it should show a new letter at the same size, a new letter at a smaller size, or end the exam.

While this is not meant to replace eye exams done by certified professionals, it is an interesting project that is true to the principles of the Snellen eye chart. The only thing that might make this better is an e-ink display to make the letters crisp. We’d like to see Snellen’s tumbling E chart implemented as well for children who don’t yet know the alphabet, although that would probably require a vastly different input method. Be sure to check out the demonstration video after the break.

Don’t know who [Bruce Land] is? Of course he’s an esteemed Senior Lecturer at Cornell University. But he’s also extremely active on Hackaday.io, has many great embedded engineering lectures you can watch free-of-charge, and every year we look forward to seeing the projects — like this one — dreamed and realized by his students. Do you have final projects of your own to show off? Don’t be shy about sending in a tip!

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Microcontroller Lectures By Bruce Land

December 21, 2015 by Brandon Dunson 18 Comments

[Bruce Land] is no stranger to Hackaday as you can see from his Hackaday.io profile, if you aren’t familiar with his work [Bruce Land] is a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University. One of the courses he teaches: Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers (ECE4760) was recorded in 2012 and again in 2015 and the videos are available on YouTube.

AVR to PIC32

[Bruce Land]s previous set of ECE4760 lectures (2012) used an Atmel ATmega1284 AVR Microcontroller for the laboratory portion of the course. This means the lectures are also based on the AVR and if you haven’t watched them through a few times you should do. The recently updated set of lectures is based on the Microchip PIC32, more specifically the Microstick II.

Open Curriculum

You can follow the ECE4760 rabbit hole as far as you want with all the available content provided by [Bruce Land] on his ECE4760 course webpage. You can watch the ECE4760 lectures on YouTube, try your hand at the homework assignments, and work through the labs at your own pace.

New Lectures = New Shirts

One area that [Bruce Land] is unmatched and arguably uncontested is his shirt collection, we are continuously impressed with these original works and wish they were available for purchase (wink/hint c’mon [Bruce] throw us a bone!). If you don’t know why the rest of us aren’t able to obtain the wonderful shirts [Bruce Land] wears you clearly aren’t subscribed to [Bruce Land]s YouTube channel, you should rectify that wrong and log some ECE4760 lecture hours starting with the video after the break.

Cornell ECE 4760 Lecture Videos Now Online

November 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

Whenever we hear about ECE 4760 we take notice. That’s because a ton of fantastic hacked together projects have resulted from the class. It’s offered at Cornell University and focuses on designing projects based on microcontrollers. We look at it as a ‘how to connect everything to your microcontroller’ guide. The good news for you is that 34 lecture videos from the Spring 2012 ECE 4760 class are now available to watch for free online. When coupled with the course webpage itself (which outlines the reading, labs, and homework) this turns into an opportunity to work through the entire course on your own schedule.

If you need a brief preview, here’s a couple random things we’ve seen as final projects from the course: a digital saxophone, a handwriting decoder, and a haptic feedback unit for building your biceps.

We’re still working our way through the Nand2Tetris project, but we’re putting these lectures on our watch list for later.

[via Reddit]