Controlling A Quadcopter With Gestures

October 16, 2014 by Rick Osgood 16 Comments

[grassjelly] has been hard at work building a wearable device that uses gestures to control quadcopter motion. The goal of the project is to design a controller that allows the user to intuitively control the motion of a quadcopter. Based on the demonstration video below, we’d say they hit the nail on the head. The controller runs off an Arduino Pro Mini-5v powered by two small coin cell batteries. It contains an accelerometer and an ultrasonic distance sensor.

The controller allows the quadcopter to mimic the orientation of the user’s hand. The user holds their hand out in front of them, parallel to the floor. When the hand is tilted in any direction, the quadcopter copies the motion and will tilt the same way. The amount of pitch and roll is limited by software, likely preventing the user from over-correcting and crashing the machine. The user can also raise or lower their hand to control the altitude of the copter.

[grassjelly] has made all of the code and schematics available via github.

The Hovering, Holographic, Star Wars Display

June 6, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 36 Comments

Tweetergif

While we’re still a long way off from the Star Wars telepresence holographic displays, this build over on the Projects site is the closest we’ve seen yet. Even better, it can be built in a garage for not much money.

Inside the Hoverlay are a few fans and a pair of ultrasonic atomizers that turn water into an extremely fine mist. The fans pull this vapor up through the base of the display and through simple drinking straws to create a laminar sheet of water vapor. Put a projector behind this thin sheet of vapor, and you have a display, seemingly floating in mid-air.

The base of the display can be scaled up, simply by putting several units together in a line. It’s still just a prototype – future versions will improve the stability and reduce the thickness of the fog layer – but it’s still a very cool build for a custom holographic display.

Continue reading “The Hovering, Holographic, Star Wars Display” →

Good Vibrations: Giving The HC-SR04 A Brain Transplant

March 17, 2014 by Adam Fabio 23 Comments

[Emil] got his hands on a dozen HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors, but wasn’t too happy with their performance. Rather than give up, he reverse engineered the sensor and built an improved version. Hackers, Makers, and robotics enthusiasts have had easy access to standard sonar platforms since the early 1980’s, when Polaroid began selling their 6500 sonar modules. A number of companies have released sonar boards since then, notably The Parallax Ping))) module. The HC-SR04 appeared on the market a few years back as a low-cost alternative of the Ping.

[Emil] found that the HC-SR04 would work reliably on hard surfaces as far as 4 meters away from the sensor. However, he got a lot of bad data back when using soft sided targets, or when no target was present at all. [Emil] reverse engineered the schematic of the HC-SR04 and found some interesting design decisions. A Max232 RS-232 converter chip is used for its ~~+-12V~~ +-10V charge pumps. The charge pumps are connected to create ~~24V~~ 20V at the ultrasonic transmitter. A mask programmed microcontroller manages the entire unit, commanding the ultrasonic transmitter to send 40Khz pulses, and listening for returns on the receive side of the system. [Emil] believes the micro is running in polled mode, due to the fact that it sometimes misses pulses. Even worse, the micro runs on an unmarked 27MHz crystal which had quite a bit of drift.

[Emil] solved these problems by creating his own PCB with an ATtiny24 and a 12MHz crystal. He increased the pin count from 4 to 6, allowing the ATtiny to be programmed in circuit, as well as opening the door to I2C and SPI operation. To build the boards up, [Emil] first solders his micro and crystal. He then uses a hot air gun to move all the components from the HC-SR04 board to his own. The new boards are still being tested, but [Emil] has posted his PCB and BOM data. He’s also promised to post his AVR code when it is available.

Audio Networking With GNU Radio

February 19, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 31 Comments

fsk

Thought GNU Radio was just for radio? Think again. [Chris] has been hard at work turning the signal generation and analysis of the best tool for software defined radio into a networking device for speakers and a microphone.

The setup uses GNU Radio to generate a carrier signal whose frequency is modulated with a data stream. With this modulated signal piped over a laptop’s speakers, [Chris] is able to send UDP packets across his desk using nothing but sound.

[Chris] had recently used a similar technique to transmit data via audio with GNU Radio, but this latest build is a vast improvement; this is now a duplex networking, meaning two computers can transmit and receive at the same time.

In the end, [Chris] created a strange, obsolete device called a “modem”. It’s not exactly fast; sending ‘Hello World’ takes quite a bit of time, as you can see in the video below.

Continue reading “Audio Networking With GNU Radio” →

A Simple Posture Sensor

February 18, 2014 by Nick Conn 18 Comments

ChairPosture

If you are on the computer for a large part of the day, posture becomes a serious issue that can negatively impact your health. [Wingman] saw this problem, and created a hack to help solve it. His simple posture sensor will monitor the position of your head relative to the chair, and reminds you to sit up straight.

The posture sensor is built around the HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor, an Attiny85, and a piezo speaker. We’ve seen this distance sensor used in the past for a few projects. Rather than going down the wearable route, which has its own drawbacks, [Wingman] decided to attach his sensor on the back of his chair. The best part is that the sensor is not mounted directly on the chair, but rather on a piece of fabric allowing it to be easily moved when needed.

Given how low-cost and small the sensor is, the project can be easily expanded by adding multiple sensors in different locations. This would allow the angle of the back and possibly the neck to be determined, giving a more accurate indicator of poor posture. There are very few hacks out there that address bad posture. Do you have a project that helps address bad posture? Have you used video processing or a wearable device to monitor your posture? Let us know in the comments an don’t forget to send post links about them to our tips line.

Ultrasonic Data Transmission With GNU Radio

December 10, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

When we hear GNU Radio was used in a build, the first thing we think of is, obviously, radio. Whether it’s a using extremely expensive gear or just a USB TV tuner dongle, GNU Radio is the perfect tool for just about everything in the tail end of the electromagnetic spectrum.

There’s no reason GNU Radio can’t be used with other mediums, though, as [Chris] shows us with his ultrasound data transmission between two laptops. He’s transmitting audio from the speakers of one laptop at 23 kHz. It’s outside the range of human hearing, but surprisingly able to be picked up by a cheap desktop mic connected to another laptop. His GNU Radio setup first converts a string of text to a 5-bit packet, modulates it with FSK, and bumps up the signal to 23 kHz. On the other end, the data is decoded by doing the same thing in reverse.

The setup is easily able to reject all audio that isn’t in the specified frequency range; in the video after the break, [Chris] successfully transmits a ‘hello world’ while narrating what he’s doing.

Continue reading “Ultrasonic Data Transmission With GNU Radio” →

A Speaking Ultrasonic Distance Sensor

December 3, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

speak

[Klaus] wanted some sort of aid for parking his car, and after running across a $4 ultrasonic sensor, decided to build his own speaking distance sensor (.de, Google Translation).

Inside [Klaus]’ device is an Arduino Uno, an HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor, and an Adafruit Wave Shield. Originally, this parking/distance sensor used a small TFT to display the distance to an object, but after a few revisions, [Klaus] redesigned the device to speak the current distance, courtesy of an SD card and a soothing female voice.

Right now, the voice is set up to speak the distance from an object to the sensor from 10 cm to 1 m in 5cm increments. This isn’t the limit of the sensor, though, and the device can be easily reconfigured to sense a distance up to four meters.

The board doesn’t have an amplifier or speaker, but with the addition of a small amplifier, [Klaus]’ device is loud enough to be heard in even the noisiest environments.

Video demo below.

Continue reading “A Speaking Ultrasonic Distance Sensor” →