CPU Made From 74HC Chips Is A Glorious Mess

Did you ever start a project that you felt gained a life of its own? This project by [Paulo Constantino] is an entire CPU named dreamcatcher on breadboards, and is a beautiful jungle of digital. On top of that, it works to connect to an analog VGA display. How cool …read more

Continue reading CPU Made From 74HC Chips Is A Glorious Mess

Wandel Weaponizes Waste with Lego and a Raspberry Pi

Before 3D printers, there was LEGO. And the little bricks are still useful for putting something together on the quick. Proof is YouTuber [Matthias Wandel]’s awesome bottle cap shooter build that uses rudimentary DIY computer vision to track you and then launch a barrage of plastic pieces at you.

This …read more

Continue reading Wandel Weaponizes Waste with Lego and a Raspberry Pi

Color-Tunable LEDs Open Up Possibilities Of Configurable Semiconductors

The invention of the blue LED was groundbreaking enough to warrant a Nobel prize. For the last decade, researchers have been trying to take the technology to the next level by controlling the color of emission while the device is in operation. In a new research paper, by the guys …read more

Continue reading Color-Tunable LEDs Open Up Possibilities Of Configurable Semiconductors

The cloak of invisibility against image recognition

Adversarial attacks are not something new to the world of Deep Networks used for image recognition. However, as the research with Deep Learning grows, more flaws are uncovered. The team at the University of KU Leuven in Belgium have demonstrated how, by simple using a colored photo held near the …read more

Continue reading The cloak of invisibility against image recognition

Howto: Docker, Databases, and Dashboards to Deal with Your Data

So you just got something like and Arduino or Raspberry Pi kit with a few sensors. Setting up temperature or motion sensors is easy enough. But what are you going to do with all that data? It’s going to need storage, analysis, and summarization before it’s actually useful to anyone. You need a dashboard!

But even before displaying the data, you’re going to need to store it somewhere, and that means a database. You could just send all of your data off into the cloud and hope that the company that provides you the service has a good business model …read more

Continue reading Howto: Docker, Databases, and Dashboards to Deal with Your Data

Gesture Sensing With A Temperature Sensor

Good science fiction has sound scientific fact behind it and when Tony Stark first made his debut on the big screen with design tools that worked at the wave of a hand, makers and hackers were not far behind with DIY solutions. Over the years the ideas have become much more polished, as we can see with this Gesture Recognition with PIR sensors project.

The project uses the TPA81 8-pixel thermopile array which detects the change in heat levels from 8 adjacent points. An Arduino reads these temperature points over I2C and then a simple thresholding function is used to …read more

Continue reading Gesture Sensing With A Temperature Sensor

Cheating AI Caught Hiding Data Using Steganography

AI today is like a super fast kid going through school whose teachers need to be smarter than if not as quick. In an astonishing turn of events, a (satelite)image-to-(map)image conversion algorithm was found hiding a cheat-sheet of sorts while generating maps to appear as it if had ‘learned’ do the opposite effectively[PDF].

The CycleGAN is a network that excels at learning how to map image transformations such as converting any old photo into one that looks like a Van Gogh or Picasso. Another example would be to be able to take the image of a horse and add stripes …read more

Continue reading Cheating AI Caught Hiding Data Using Steganography