Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

String Art Robot Is An Autorouter In Reverse

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In the depths of Etsy and Pinterest is a fascinating, if tedious, artform. String art, the process of nailing pins in a board and wrapping thread around the perimeter to create shapes and shading, The most popular project in this vein is something like putting the outline of a heart, in string, in the shape of your home state. Something like that, at least.

While this artform involves about as much effort as pallet wood furniture, there is an interesting computational aspect of it: you can create images with string art, and doing this is a very, very hard problem …read more

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Speech Recognition Without A Voice

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The biggest change in Human Computer Interaction over the past few years is the rise of voice assistants. The Siris and Alexas are our HAL 9000s, and soon we’ll be using these assistants to open the garage door. They might just do it this time.

What would happen if you could talk to these voice assistants without saying a word? Would that be telepathy? That’s exactly what [Annie Ho] is doing with Cerebro Voice, a project in this year’s Hackaday Prize.

At its core, the idea behind Cerebro Voice is based on subvocal recognition, a technique that detects electrical signals …read more

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Turning A Tiny FLIR Into An Action Cam With FPGAs

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FLIR are making some really great miniature thermal cameras these days, designed for applications such as self-driving cars, and tools that help keep firefighters safe. That’s great and all, but these thermal cameras are so cool, you really just want to play with one. That’s what [greg] was thinking when he designed a PCB backpack that captures thermal images from a FLIR Boson and stores it on an SD card. It’s a thermal action cam, and an impressive bit of FPGA development, too.

The FLIR product in question is a Boson 640, an impressive little camera that records in 640×512 …read more

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Using Motors As Encoders

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If you have a brushless motor, you have some magnets, a bunch of coils arranged in a circle, and theoretically, all the parts you need to build a rotary encoder. A lot of people have used brushless or stepper motors as rotary encoders, but they all seem to do it by using the motor as a generator and looking at the phases and voltages. For their Hackaday Prize project, [besenyeim] is doing it differently: they’re using motors as coupled inductors, and it looks like this is a viable way to turn a motor into an encoder.

The experimental setup for …read more

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Video Quick Bit: The Best In Human Computer Interfaces

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We’re neck deep in the Hackaday Prize, and we just wrapped up the Human Computer Interface Challenge. This is an incredible contest to go beyond traditional mice and keyboards to find new ways to transfer your desires directly into a computer. Majenta Strongheart is back at it again, giving us a look at some of the coolest Human Computer Interface builds in this year’s Hackaday Prize

The Hackaday Prize is all about hacking, really, and there’s no better project that demonstrates this than [Curt White]’s hacked fitness tracker. This is a tiny, $35 fitness tracker that’s loaded up with …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: Playing With Fire

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We’re pretty sure all the hackers and tinkerers and makers out there were a tiny bit of a pyromaniac in their youth. That’s what makes this week’s Hack Chat so exciting: we’re talking about Hacking With Fire.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Brice Farrell], who, like most of us, has been interested in fire his entire life. He’s taken this interest and turned his amateur passion into something semi-professional. He’s a PGI certified pyrotechnician, an electrical engineer, and an ice carver. This year, he appeared on BattleBots where he built the flame system for Battle Royale …read more

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Disassembling Mouse Sensors For Tracking Tongues

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We just wrapped up the Human Computer Interface challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize, and with that comes a bevy of interesting new designs for mice and keyboards that push the envelope of what you think should be possible, using components that seem improbable. One of the best examples of this is The Bit, a project from [oneohm]. It’s a computer mouse, that uses a tiny little trackpad in ways you never thought possible. It’s a mouse that fits on your tongue.

The idea behind The Bit was to create an input device for people with limited use of their …read more

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Do Space Probes Fail Because Of Space Weather?

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Over the past few decades, numerous space probes sent to the far-flung reaches of the Solar System have fallen silent. These failures weren’t due to communications problems, probes flying into scientifically implausible anomalies, or little green men snatching up the robotic scouts we’ve sent out into the Solar System. No, these space probes have failed simply because engineers on Earth can’t point them. If you lose attitude control, you lose the ability to point a transmitter at Earth. If you’re managing a space telescope, losing the ability to point a spacecraft turns a valuable piece of scientific equipment into a …read more

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Hackaday Links: September 9, 2018

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Octoprint is one of those must-have apps for 3D printers. All you need is a Raspberry Pi, an SD card, and a USB cable, and you can control your 3D printer from anywhere in the house. Of course, some people take it too far and open up their Octoprint to the greater Internet. Gizmodo reports thousands of people are doing so, with possible dire consequences. Choice quotes: “Imagine waking up in the morning to find that your 3D printer was used to produce a gun” and “Once again, 3D guns come to mind”. Yes, they referenced 3D printed guns twice …read more

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Now, Finally, We Can Play With Power

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In case you’re not a ’90s kid, the Nintendo Power Glove is the greatest device for human-computer interaction ever created. It’s so good, they called it bad, and then they made a movie about it. At its heart, the Power Glove is just some force sensors in the fingers of a glove, but that hasn’t stopped hackers from cracking these gloves open for years. We’ve seen the Power Glove used in Hackaday Prize entries before, we’ve seen it control quadcopters, we’ve seen it used as a Vive controller, and the Ultimate Power Glove comes loaded up with Bluetooth, motion …read more

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