High-contrast pictures described on the article, put onto a wall beside a crib

High-Contrast Images For Hacker Family Harmonics

There’s a new addition to the Adafruit family, and it’s not a microcontroller board as you’d expect – however, we will still find plenty to learn from. On the Adafruit blog, [Phillip Torrone] shares a set of high-contrast images with us; the idea for such images is that they’re more appealing for a child during the first few months of its life, and not just that – they can support a kid’s development, too. The idea behind high-contrast images is twofold. During the first few months of life, a baby’s visual systems are only taking shape, and are nowhere near being advanced – so, sources of easily discernible and varied visual input can help it develop, as well as, perhaps, aid in holding attention.

The second part is – they look nice in their own way, and one would hope that a baby can appreciate them in the same way parents do. The images are quite varied, with some being somewhat electronics-themed (including an Adafruit logo, of course) and many being fairly neutral, which has to be an upside for us hackers when it comes to the spouse acceptance factor. For any of us interested, there are downloadable PDFs and

In a way, these are just like AprilTags – aiming to be helpful in development of visual algorithms. With such a family, we can’t wait to see what comes next – computer engineering books? Baby monitors with machine learning? Sleep-data-driven knit blankets? No matter what’s in store for us, we hope that for the Adafruit family, this journey will be smooth sailing.

High Contrast Laser Etching

high-contrast-laser-etching

The problem with laser etching darkĀ materialsĀ is that the areas burnt away by the intense light don’t really stand out from the rest of the surface. [The 5th Fool] is taking a roundabout way of correcting this by topping his laser engravings with contrasting paint. The technique is still pretty simple and we think it looks great!

Basically he’s etching a layer of painter’s tape which becomes a stencil. But the surface it is masking also gets etched so the paint has an area below to the surface which it can fill in. We figure this will help with durability issues.

After etching the painters tape the design gets a few coatings of a high-contrast paint color and is left to dry. To remove the stencil, duct tape is applied to the entire area. This helps quite a bit in removing the tiny bits of tape from an intricate design.