DIY Electrical Body Fat Analyzer

January 10, 2015 by Rick Osgood 34 Comments

Whether you are trying to drop some fat or build some muscle, it’s important to track progress. It’s easy enough to track your weight, but weight doesn’t tell the whole story. You might be burning fat but also building muscle, which can make it appear as though you aren’t losing weight at all. A more useful number is body fat percentage. Students from Cornell have developed their own version of an electrical body fat analyzer to help track body fat percentage.

Fat free body mass contains mostly water, whereas fat contains very little water. This means that if you were to pass an electrical current through a body, the overall bioelectrical impedance will vary depending on how much fat or water there is. This isn’t a perfect system, but it can give a rough approximation in a relatively easy way.

The students’ system places an electrode on one hand and another on the opposite foot. This provides the longest electrical path possible in the human body to allow for the most accurate measurement possible. An ATMega1284P is used to generate a 50kHz square wave signal. This signal is opto-isolated for user safety. Another stage of the circuit then uses this source signal to generate a 10ua current source at 50kHz. This is passed through a human body and fed back to the microcontroller for analysis.

The voltage reading is sent to a MATLAB script via serial. The user must also enter in their weight and age. The MATLAB script uses these numbers combined with the voltage reading to estimate the body fat percentage. In order to calibrate the system, the students measured the body fat of 12 of their peers using body fat calipers. They admit that their sample size is too small. All of the sample subjects are about 21 years old and have a similar body fat percentage. This means that their system is currently very accurate for people in this range, but likely less accurate for anyone else. Continue reading “DIY Electrical Body Fat Analyzer” →

Fischertechnik CNC Machine Looks Innocent Whilst Cutting Your Face

August 1, 2014 by Rich Bremer 6 Comments

FischerTechnik + Arduino CNC Milling Machine

Hallo iedereen! All the way from the Netherlands comes this fairly unique CNC milling machine built by a handful of Mechanical Engineering students over at the Delft University of Technology. These guys only had one week to build the mill in order to fulfill a requirement of their Mechtronics class. Unfortunately, directly after showing the machine worked, it had to be disassembled.

If the frame looks a little toy-ish, it’s because it is. This particular system is called Fischertechnik and the main support beams are similar to that of aluminum extrusion (ex 80/20, Misumi) except that it is made from nylon. Notice the extremely long cutting bit and comparatively abnormal large Z axis travel capability. What this system lacks in rigidity is made up by being able to carve a very 3D shape with steep sides without the machine hitting the work piece. The loss of rigidity was totally acceptable since the team was only planning on cutting foam and the project’s purpose was to learn mechanics and automation.

Continue reading “Fischertechnik CNC Machine Looks Innocent Whilst Cutting Your Face” →

Measuring Magnetic Fields With A Robotic Arm

March 30, 2014 by Nick Conn 13 Comments

MagneticArm

Learning how magnets and magnetic fields work is one thing, but actually being able to measure and see a magnetic field is another thing entirely! [Stanley’s] latest project uses a magnetometer attached to a robotic arm with 3 degrees of freedom to measure magnetic fields.

Using servos and aluminium mounting hardware purchased from eBay, [Stanley] build a simple robot arm. He then hooked an HMC5883L magnetometer to the robotic arm. [Stanley] used an Atmega32u4 and the LUFA USB library to interface with this sensor since it has a high data rate. For those of you unfamiliar with LUFA, it is a Lightweight USB Framework for AVRs (formerly known as MyUSB). The results were plotted in MATLAB (Octave is free MATLAB alternative), a very powerful mathematical based scripting language. The plots almost perfectly match the field patterns learned in introductory classes on magnetism. Be sure to watching the robot arm take the measurements in the video after the break, it is very cool!

[Stanley] has graciously provided both the AVR code and the MATLAB script for his project at the end of his write-up. It would be very cool to see what other sensors could be used in this fashion! What other natural phenomena would be interesting to map in three dimensions?

Continue reading “Measuring Magnetic Fields With A Robotic Arm” →

24-hour Hackathon Project Adds Object-based Automation To Hackerspace

July 10, 2013 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

hackerspace-automation

[Jeremy Blum], [Jason Wright], and [Sam Sinensky] combined forces for twenty-four hours to automate how the entertainment and lighting works at their hackerspace. They commandeered the whiteboard and used an already present webcam as part of their project. You can see the black tokens which can be moved around the blue tape outline to actuate the controls.

MATLAB is fed an image from the webcam which monitors the space. Frames are received once every second and parsed for changes in the tokens. There are small black squares which either skip to the next track of music or affect pause/play. Simply move them off of their designated spot and the image processing does the rest. This goes for the volume slider as well. We think the huge token for the lights is to ensure that the camera can sense a change in a darkened room.

If image processing isn’t your thing you can still control your audio entertainment with a frickin’ laser.

Continue reading “24-hour Hackathon Project Adds Object-based Automation To Hackerspace” →

Tweaking Designs For [Theo Jansen] Walking Machines

May 23, 2013 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

We love the look, and most especially the gait, of [Theo Jansen’s] walker designs. We don’t fully understand them or the math behind them. But that could change if we spend enough time studying [Aaron Birenboim’s] body of work. He wants to incorporate the legs in a project so he’s been trying to optimize the Jansen leg design.

The calculations are delivered in a source code package available from his site. To make heads or trails out of the numbers you need a way to visualize them. He has provided that as well in the form of a MATLAB script which shows leg piece design and can even spit out an animated .gif file of the virtual legs in motion.

If you have no idea what we’re talking about make sure to check out [Jansen’s] original creations. We’re also excited to read more about the Klann and Ghassaei linkage designs which [Aaron] talks about in his post.

Virtual Chess Uses Glove Controllers

December 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

chess-using-glove-controllers

Check out the game of chess going on above. It’s a virtual game where each player uses a glove as the controller. Or course the game board and pieces are missing from this image. They’re displayed on a computer monitor which both players can see.

The hardware rather simple, and we think it would be a great project to challenge your microcontroller skills. Each glove has an accelerometer attached to it, as well as a ring of copper foil on the pointer finger and thumb. One ATmega1284 monitors both gloves. The accelerometer data is used to move the mouse cursor on the screen, while the contacts are used to grip or release a playing piece. The game board and pieces are displayed using MATLAB with controller commands fed to it via a USB connection.

If you’re more into building a mechanized game check out this pair of telepresence chess boards.

Continue reading “Virtual Chess Uses Glove Controllers” →

3D Whiteboard Without The Whiteboard

April 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

This one is so simple, and works so well, we’d call it a hoax if April 1st hadn’t already passed us by. But we’re confident that what [William Myers] and [Guo Jie Chin] came up with exists, and we want one of our own. The project is a method of drawing in 3 dimensions using ultrasonic sensors.

They call it 3D Paint, and that’s fitting since the software interface is much like the original MS Paint. It can show you the movements of the stylus in three axes, but it can also assemble an anaglyph — the kind of 3D that uses those red and blue filter glasses — so that the artists can see the 3D rendering as it is being drawn.

The hardware depends on a trio of sensors and a stylus that are all controlled by an ATmega644. That’s it for hardware (to be fair, there are a few trivial amplifier circuits too), making this an incredibly affordable setup. The real work, and the reason the input is so smooth and accurate, comes in the MATLAB code which does the trilateration. If you like to get elbow deep in the math the article linked above has plenty to interest you. If you’re more of a visual learner just skip down after the break for the demo video.

Continue reading “3D Whiteboard Without The Whiteboard” →