Author Archives: Brian McEvoy

Winch Bot Records Hacks and Cats

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Some people are better than others when it comes to documenting their hacks. Some people, like [Micah Elizabeth Scott], aka [scanlime], set the gold standard with their recordings. Hacking sessions with the Winch Bot have been streamed regularly throughout the build and this is going to lead to a stacking effect in her next projects because the Winch Bot was designed to record hacking sessions. Hacking video inception anyone? Her Winch Bot summary video is after the break.

The first part of this build, which she calls the Tuco Flyer, was [Micah Elizabeth Scott]’s camera gimbal hack which we already …read more

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Magnet Implants, Your Cyborg Primer

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What would you do to gain a sixth sense? Some of us would submit to a minor surgical procedure where a magnet is implanted under the skin. While this isn’t the first time magnet implants have been mentioned here on Hackaday, [The Thought Emporium] did a phenomenal job of gathering the scattered data from blogs, forum posts, and personal experimentation into a short video which can be seen after the break.

As [The Thought Emporium] explains in more eloquent detail, a magnet under the skin allows the implantee to gain a permanent sense of strong magnetic fields. Implantation in a …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: SNAP Is Almost Geordi La Forge’s Visor

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Echolocation projects typically rely on inexpensive distance sensors and the human brain to do most of the processing. The team creating SNAP: Augmented Echolocation are using much stronger computational power to translate robotic vision into a 3D soundscape.

The SNAP team starts with an Intel RealSense R200. The first part of the processing happens here because it outputs a depth map which takes the heavy lifting out of robotic vision. From here, an AAEON Up board, packaged with the RealSense, takes the depth map and associates sound with the objects in the field of view.

Binaural sound generation is a …read more

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Tough Pi-ano can Take a Punch

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There will be no delicate solos for [24 Hour Engineer’s] Tough Pi-ano. It was built to soak punishment from aggressive youngsters in musical therapy, specifically those on the autism spectrum and those with Down’s syndrome. The Tough Pi-ano will be bolted to a wall with heavy-duty shelf brackets so it can’t fall on anyone. The keyboard is covered in plastic and it doesn’t have any exposed metal so there will be no splinters.

[24 Hour Engineer] made a short video demonstration and if you listen closely, he has a pun in all but one sentence. We love that kind of …read more

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Follow the Bouncing Ball of Entropy

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When [::vtol::] wants to generate random numbers he doesn’t simply type rand() into his Arduino IDE, no, he builds a piece of art. It all starts with a knob, presumably connected to a potentiometer, which sets a frequency. An Arduino UNO takes the reading and generates a tone for an upward-facing speaker. A tiny ball bounces on that speaker where it occasionally collides with a piezoelectric element. The intervals between collisions become our sufficiently random number.

The generated number travels up the Rube Goldberg-esque machine to an LCD mounted at the top where a word, corresponding to our generated number, …read more

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