Hackaday Links: December 29, 2019

December 29, 2019 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

The retrocomputing crowd will go to great lengths to recreate the computers of yesteryear, and no matter which species of computer is being restored, getting it just right is a badge of honor in the community. The case and keyboard obviously playing a big part in that look, so when a crowdfunding campaign to create new keycaps for the C64 was announced, Commodore fans jumped to fund it. Sadly, more than four years later, the promised keycaps haven’t been delivered. One disappointed backer, Jim Drew, decided he was sick of waiting, so he delved into the world of keycaps injection molding and started his own competing campaign. Jim details his adventures in his ~~Kickstarter~~ Indiegogo campaign, which makes for good reading even if you’re not into Commodore refurbishment. Here’s hoping Jim has better luck than the competition did.

Looking for anonymity in our increasingly surveilled world? You’re not alone, and in fact, we predict facial recognition spoofing products and methods will be a growth industry in the new decade. Aside from the obvious – and often illegal – approach of wearing a mask that blocks most of the features machine learning algorithms use to quantify your face, one now has another option, in the form of a colorful pattern that makes you invisible to the YOLOv2 algorithm. The pattern, which looks like a soft-focus crowd scene rendered in Mardi Gras colors, won’t make the algorithm think you’re someone else, but it will prevent you from being classified as a person. It won’t work with any other AI algorithm, but it’s still an interesting phenomenon.

We saw a great hack come this week about using an RTL-SDR to track down a water leak. Clayton’s water bill suddenly skyrocketed, and he wanted to track down the source. Luckily, his water meter uses the encoder receive-transmit (ERT) protocol on the 900 MHz ISM band to report his usage, so he threw an SDR dongle and rtlamr at the problem. After logging his data, massaging it a bit with some Python code, and graphing water consumption over time, he found that water was being used even when nobody was home. That helped him find the culprit – leaky flap valves in the toilets resulting in a slow drip that ran up the bill. There were probably other ways to attack the problem, but we like this approach just fine.

Are your flex PCBs making you cry? Friend of Hackaday Drew Fustini sent us a tip on teardrop pads to reduce the mechanical stress on traces when the board flexes. The trouble is that KiCad can’t natively create teardrop pads. Thankfully an action plugin makes teardrops a snap. Drew goes into a bit of detail on how the plugin works and shows the results of some test PCBs he made with them. It’s a nice trick to keep in mind for your flexible design work.

Lego Machine Uses Machine Learning To Sort Itself Out

December 16, 2019 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

In our opinion, the primary evidence of a properly lived childhood is an enormous box of every conceivable Lego piece, from simple bricks to girders and gears, all with a small town’s worth of minifigs swimming through it. It takes years of birthdays and Christmases to accumulate a Lego collection best measured by the pound, but like anything worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

But what to do with such a collection? Digging through it to find Just the Right Piece™ can be frustrating, and bringing order to the chaos with manual sorting is just so impractical. How about putting some of those bricks to work with a machine-vision Lego sorter built from Lego?

[Daniel West]’s approach is hardly new – we’ve even featured brick-built Lego sorters before – but we’re impressed by its architecture. First, the mechanical system is amazing. It uses a series of conveyors to transport bricks from a hopper, winnowing the stream down as it goes. The final step is a vibratory feeder that places one piece on a conveyor at a time. Those pass under a camera attached to a Raspberry Pi, where OpenCV does background subtraction from the video stream, applies bounding boxes to the parts, and runs the images through a convolutional neural network (CNN) that’s been trained on a database of every Lego part. Servo-controlled gates then direct the parts into one of 18 bins. See it in action in the video below.

We must admit that we’re not sure what the sorting criteria are, as some bins seem nearly as chaotic as the input mix. Still, we appreciate the fine engineering, and award extra style points for all the Lego goodness.

Continue reading “Lego Machine Uses Machine Learning To Sort Itself Out” →

AI Knows If The Pitch Is On Target Before You Do

December 10, 2019 by Lewin Day 21 Comments

Pitching a baseball is about accuracy and speed. A swift ball on target is the goal, allowing the pitcher to strike out the batter. [Nick Bild] created an AI system that can determine a ball’s trajectory in mid-flight, based on a camera feed.

The system uses an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, fitted with a USB camera running at 100FPS. A Nerf tennis ball launcher is used to fire a ball towards the batter. Once triggered, the AI uses the camera to capture two successive images of the ball in flight. These images are fed into a convolutional neural network (CNN), and the software determines whether the ball is heading for the strike zone, or moving off-target. It uses this information to light a green or red LED respectively to alert the batter.

While such a system is unlikely to appear in professional baseball anytime soon, it shows the sheer capability of neural network systems to quickly and effectively analyse data in ways simply impossible for mere humans. [Nick]’s future goals involve running the system on faster hardware, and expanding it to determine effects like spin and more accurate positioning within the strike zone.

We’ve seen CNNs do everything from naming tomatoes to finding parking spaces. Video after the break.

Continue reading “AI Knows If The Pitch Is On Target Before You Do” →

Sara Adkins Is Jamming Out With Machines

December 4, 2019 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

Asking machines to make music by themselves is kind of a strange notion. They’re machines, after all. They don’t feel happy or hurt, and as far as we know, they don’t long for the affections of other machines. Humans like to think of music as being a strictly human thing, a passionate undertaking so nuanced and emotion-based that a machine could never begin to understand the feeling that goes into the process of making music, or even the simple enjoyment of it.

The idea of humans and machines having a jam session together is even stranger. But oddly enough, the principles of the jam session may be exactly what machines need to begin to understand musical expression. As Sara Adkins explains in her enlightening 2019 Hackaday Superconference talk, Creating with the Machine, humans and machines have a lot to learn from each other.

To a human musician, a machine’s speed and accuracy are enviable. So is its ability to make instant transitions between notes and chords. Humans are slow to learn these transitions and have to practice going back and forth repeatedly to build muscle memory. If the machine were capable, it would likely envy the human in terms of passionate performance and musical expression.

Continue reading “Sara Adkins Is Jamming Out With Machines” →

The Golden Age Of Ever-Changing Computer Architecture

November 27, 2019 by Sharon Lin 32 Comments

Given the accuracy of Moore’s Law to the development of integrated circuits over the years, one would think that our present day period is no different from the past decades in terms of computer architecture design. However, during the 2017 ACM Turing Award acceptance speech, John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson described the present as the “golden age of computer architecture”.

Compared to the early days of MS-DOS, when designing user- and kernel-space interactions was still an experiment in the works, it certainly feels like we’re no longer in the infancy of the field. Yet, as the pressure mounts for companies to acquire more computational resources for running expensive machine learning algorithms on massive swaths of data, smart computer architecture design may be just what the industry needs.

Moore’s law predicts the doubling of transistors in an IC, it doesn’t predict the path that IC design will take. When that observation was made in 1965 it was difficult or even impossible to envision where we are today, with tools and processes so closely linked and widely available that the way we conceive processor design is itself multiplying.

Continue reading “The Golden Age Of Ever-Changing Computer Architecture” →

AI Phone App Learns Baseball Signals

November 24, 2019 by Al Williams 1 Comment

Watching a sport can be a bit odd if you aren’t familiar with it. Most Americans, for example, would think a cricket match looked funny because they don’t know the rules. If you were not familiar with baseball, you might wonder why one of the coaches was waving his hands around, touching his nose, his ears, and his hat seemingly at random. Those in the know however understand that this is a secret signal to the player. The coach might be telling the player to steal a base or bunt. The other team tries to decode the signals, but if you don’t know the code that is notoriously difficult. Unless you have the machine learning phone app you can see in the video below.

If you are not a baseball fan, it works like this. The coach will do a number of things. Perhaps touch his cap, then his nose, brush his left forearm, and touch his lips. However, the code is often as simple as knowing one attention signal and one action signal. For example, the coach might tell you that if they touch their nose and then their lips, you should steal. Touching their nose and then their ear is a bunt. Touching their nose and then the bill of their cap is something else. Anything they do that doesn’t start with touching their nose means nothing at all. If the signal is this easy, you really don’t even need machine learning to decode it. But if it were more complicated — say, the gesture that occurs third after they touch their nose unless they also kick dirt at which point it means nothing — it would be much harder for a human to figure out.

Continue reading “AI Phone App Learns Baseball Signals” →