Collaborate Disseminate
Controlling a single drone takes up a considerable amount of concentration and normally involves wearing silly goggles. It only gets harder if you want to control a swarm. Researchers at Skolkovo Institute of Technology decided Jedi mind tricks were the best way, and set up swarm control using hand gestures. …read more
Continue reading Use Jedi Mind Tricks To Control Your Next Drone Swarm
Picture this: You’re in your bed in the middle of the night, and you want to know what time it is. Bedside alarm clocks are a thing of the past and now you rely on your smartphone to tell the time. Only, if you turned the screen on, you’d find …read more
Continue reading Haptic Clock Lets You Keep Your Eyes Shut At Night
A question: if you’re controlling the classic video game Street Fighter with gestures, aren’t you just, you know, street fighting?
That’s a question [Charlie Gerard] is going to have to tackle should her AI gesture-recognition controller experiments take off. [Charlie] put together the game controller to learn more about the …read more
Continue reading Arduino, Accelerometer, and TensorFlow Make You a Real-World Street Fighter
If you’re a member of a rowing team, it’s not just your stroke that’s important, but also how well you coordinate that stroke with those of your team-mates. With that in mind, Idaho-based rowers Mike Schaefer and John Balint invented the conn… Continue reading Connected rowing machine makes users part of a team
The first LED digital wristwatches hit the market in the 1970s. They required a button push to turn the display on, prompting one comedian to quip that giving one to a one-armed man would be in poor taste. While the UIs of watches and other wearables have improved since then, …read more
Head-mounted displays range from cumbersome to glass-hole-ish. Smart watches have their niche, but they still take your eyes away from whatever you are doing, like driving. Voice assistants can read to you, but they require a speaker that everyone else in the car has to listen to, or a headset that blocks out important sound. Ignoring incoming messages is out of the question so the answer may be to use a different sense than vision. A joint project between Facebook Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have a solution which uses the somatosensory reception of your forearm.
A similar …read more
When it comes to training robots, you could grab a joystick or carefully program movements in code. The better way, though, is to move the robot yourself, and have the robot play back all those movements ad infinitum. This is training robots by touch, and it’s the subject of this week’s Hack Chat over on hackaday.io.
Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Kent Gilson], inventor, serial entrepreneur, and pioneer in reconfigurable computing. [Kent] is the creator of Viva, an object-oriented programming language and operating environment that harnesses the power of FPGAs into general-purpose computing He’s launched eight …read more
For their final project in embedded microcontroller class, [Aaheli, Jun, and Naomi] turned their focus toward assistive technology and created an Electronic Travel Aid (ETA) for the visually impaired that uses haptic feedback to report the presence of obstacles.
We have seen a few of these types of devices in the past, and they almost always use ultrasonic sensors to gauge distance. Not so with this ETA; it uses six VL53L0X time-of-flight (ToF) sensors mounted at slightly different angles from each other, which provides a wide sensing map. It is capable of detecting objects in a one-meter-wide swath at a …read more
HaptiVision is a haptic feedback system for the blind that builds on a wide array of vibration belts and haptic vests. It’s a smart concept, giving the wearer a warning when an obstruction comes into sensor view.
The earliest research into haptic feedback wearables used ultrasonic sensors, and more recent developments used a Kinect. The project team for HaptiVision chose the Intel RealSense camera because of its svelte form factor. Part of the goal was to make the HaptiVision as discreet as possible, so fitting the whole rig under a shirt was part of the plan.
In addition to a …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: HaptiVision Creates a Net of Vibration Motors
While medical facilities continue to improve worldwide, access to expensive treatments still eludes a vast amount of people. Especially when it comes to prosthetics, a lot of people won’t be able to afford something so personalized even though the need for assistive devices is extremely high. With that in mind, [Guillermo Herrera-Arcos] started working on ALICE, a robotic exoskeleton that is low-cost, easy to build, and as an added bonus, 100% Open Source.
ALICE’s creators envision that the exoskeleton will have applications in rehabilitation, human augmentation, and even gaming. Also, since it’s Open Source, it could also be used as …read more
Continue reading The Hackaday Prize: Exoskeletons for the Masses
