Open Source Kitchen Helps You Watch What You Eat

November 20, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 6 Comments

Every appliance business wants to be the one that invents the patented, license-able, and profitable standard that all the other companies have to use. Open Source Kitchen wants to beat them to it.

Every beginning standard needs a test case, and OSK’s is a simple one. A bowl that tracks what you eat. While a simple concept, the way in which the data is shared, tracked, logged, and communicated is the real goal.

The current demo uses a Nvidia Jetson Nano as its processing center. This $100 US board packs a bit of a punch in its weight class. It processes the video from a camera held above the bowl of fruit, suspended by a scale in a squirrel shaped hangar, determining the calories in and calories out.

It’s an interesting idea. One wonders how the IoT boom might have played out if there had been a widespread standard ready to go before people started walling their gardens.

Robot Joints Go Modular With This Actuator Project

October 22, 2019 by Donald Papp 4 Comments

[John Lauer] has been hard at work re-thinking robot arms. His project to create modular, open source actuators that can be connected to one another to form an arm is inspiring, and boasts an impressively low parts cost as well. The actuators are each self-contained, with an ESP32 and a design that takes advantage of the form factors of inexpensive modules and parts from vendors like Aliexpress.

Flex spline in action, for reducing backlash

Each module has 3D printed gears (with an anti-backlash flex spline), an RGB LED for feedback, integrated homing, active cooling, a slip ring made from copper tape, and a touch sensor dial on the back for jogging and training input. The result is a low backlash, low cost actuator that keeps external wiring to an absolute minimum.

Originally inspired by a design named WE-R2.4, [John] has added his own twist in numerous ways, which are best summarized in the video embedded below. That video is number three in a series, and covers the most interesting developments and design changes while giving an excellent overview of the parts and operation (the video for part one is a basic overview and part two shows the prototyping process, during which [John] 3D printed the structural parts and gears and mills out a custom PCB.)

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Open Hardware Month Hack Chat

October 21, 2019 by Dan Maloney No comments

Join us on Wednesday, October 23 at noon Pacific for the Open Hardware Month Hack Chat with Michael Weinberg!

It seems like everything and everyone has a special day set aside on the calendar. You know the drill – a headline declaring it National Grilled Cheese Day (sorry, you missed it – April 12) or National Bundt Pan Day (not even kidding, November 15). It seems only fair with all these silly recognition days floating around that we in the hacking community should have a day of our own, too, or even a whole month. That’s why the Open Source Hardware Association declared the entire month of October to be Open Hardware Month.

Open hardware is all about accessible, collaborative processes that let everyone see and understand the hardware they’re using. The technological underpinnings of our lives are increasingly hidden from us, locked away as corporate secrets. Open hardware tries to turn that on its head and open up devices to everyone, giving them the freedom to not only use their devices but to truly understand what’s happening in them, and perhaps repair, extend, and even modify them to do something new and useful. Celebrating that and getting the message out to the general public is certainly something worth doing.

Michael Weinberg is a board member at OSHWA, and he’ll be joining the Hack Chat on October 23 (National Boston Cream Pie Day) to discuss Open Hardware Month and open-source hardware in general. We’ll learn about some of the events planned for Open Hardware Month, how open hardware is perceived beyond the hacker community, and what’s on tap for the 10th anniversary Open Hardware Summit in 2020.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 23 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

What Better Than A Hexapod?

October 14, 2019 by Sharon Lin 10 Comments

What’s more awesome than a normal hexapod robot? What about a MEGA hexapod?

Max the Megapod, a six-legged 3D-printed walking robot, is an open source, Arduino-based, Bluetooth controlled, Scratch programmable creation made possible by [Steven Pendergrast]. The design for Max was based on a previous hexapod project, Vorpal the Hexapod, which has since been built at hundreds of schools worldwide.

Max clocks in at two feet in diameter, expanding to three when sprawled out on the ground. In addition, the hexapod is able to dance, walk, and run as fast as the smaller version, covering ground at twice the speed due to its size.

The scaling for the project – about 200% from the original hexapod – required some creativity, as the goal was for the components to be printed on a modest-sized printer with an 8 inch cube bed. In addition, since Max weighs 9 pounds on average, real bearings (608 Skate bearings) needed to be used for the servo mounts.

The electrical system had to be changed to account for the larger currents drawn by the larger servos (MG958s). and the power distribution harness needed to be redesigned. The current harness take about two hours to build for the larger hexapod, compared to 15 minutes for the original design.

The results are both hilarious and adorable, especially given the endless modifications made to give Max a unique flair. Perhaps a GIGApod could be coming up next?

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Hacking Diabetes Hack Chat

October 14, 2019 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, October 16 at noon Pacific for the Hacking Diabetes Hack Chat with Dana Lewis!

When your child is newly diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes (T1D), everyone is quick to point out, “It’s a great time to be a diabetic.” To some degree, that’s true; thanks to genetically engineered insulin, more frequent or even continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), and insulin infusion pumps, diabetics can now avoid many of the truly terrifying complications of a life lived with chronically elevated blood glucose, like heart disease, kidney failure, blindness, and amputations.

Despite these advances, managing T1D can be an overwhelming task. Every bite of food, every minute of exercise, and every metabolic challenge has to be factored into the calculations for how much insulin to take. Diabetics learn to “think like a pancreas,” but it’s never good enough, and the long-promised day of a true artificial pancreas always seems to remain five years in the future.

Dana Lewis is one diabetic who decided not to wait. After realizing that she could get data from her CGM, she built a system to allow friends and family to monitor her blood glucose readings remotely. With the addition of a Raspberry Pi and some predictive algorithms, she later built an open-source artificial pancreas, which she uses every day. And now she’s helping others take control of their diabetes and build their own devices through OpenAPS.org.

Join us on the Hack Chat as Dana drops by to discuss OpenAPS and her artificial pancreas. We’ll find out what her background is – spoiler alert: she wasn’t a hacker when she started this – what challenges she faced, the state of the OpenAPS project, and where she sees the artificial pancreas going.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 16 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

[Dana Lewis image source: GeekWire]

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Professional Audio On An ESP32

October 6, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 53 Comments

Audiophiles have worked diligently to alert the rest of the world to products with superior sound quality, and to warn us away from expensive gimmicks that have middling features at best. Unfortunately, the downside of most high quality audio equipment is the sticker price. But with some soldering skills and a bit of hardware, you can build your own professional-level audio equipment around an ESP32 and impress almost any dedicated audiophile.

The list of features the tiny picoAUDIO board packs is impressive, starting with a 3.7 watt stereo amplifier and a second dedicated headphone amplifier. It also has all of the I/O you would expect something based on an ESP32 to have, such as I2S stereo DAC, an I2S microphone input, I2C GPIO extenders and, of course, a built-in MicroSD card reader. The audio quality is impressive too, and the project page has some MP3 files of audio recorded using this device that are worth listening to.

Whether you want the highest sound quality for your headphones while you listen to music, or you need a pocket-sized audio recording device, this might be the way to go. The project files are all available so you can build this from the ground up as well. Once you have that knocked out, you can move on to building your own speakers.

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Tracking The Satellites That Keep Us On Track; Monitoring GPS, Galileo, BeiDou, And GLONASS

September 24, 2019 by Danie Conradie 3 Comments

We may not always be aware of it, but the daily function of the technological world around us is extremely dependent on satellite navigations systems. It helps the DHL guy deliver those parts you were waiting for, and keeps the global financial and communication systems running with precision timing. So, when these systems have a bad day, they can spread misery across the globe. To keep an eye on these critical constellations, [Bert Hubert] and friends set up a global open source monitoring network that aims to track every satellite in the GPS, Galileo, BeiDou and GLONASS constellations.

Local azimuth and local elevation of GPS, Galileo, and BeiDou satellites passing overhead [via @GalileoSats]

Off-the-shelf GNSS receivers are used to feed navigation messages to a machine running Linux/OSX/OpenBSD. The messages are processed to calculate the position (ephemeris), extract atomic clock timings and status codes of each satellite. Publicly available orbital data is then used to make an informed guess regarding the identity of the satellite in question.

All this data enables [Bert] to determine ephemeris discontinuities, time offsets, and atomic clock jumps. The project’s twitter feed, @GalileoSats, is very active with interesting updates. Go check it out! All the collected data is available for research purposes and the software is up on Github.

GPS hacks are never in short supply around here and another open source satellite network, SatNOGS has been featured a number of times on Hackaday after it won the 2014 Hackaday Prize.

Thanks for the tip [DarkSideDave]!