Pi-Based Spectrometer Puts the Complexity in the Software

Play around with optics long enough and sooner or later you’re probably going to want a spectrometer. Optical instruments are famously expensive, though, at least for high-quality units. But a …read more Continue reading Pi-Based Spectrometer Puts the Complexity in the Software

TMD-2: A Bigger, Better, More Collaborative Turing Machine

One of the things we love best about the articles we publish on Hackaday is the dynamic that can develop between the hacker and the readers. At its best, the comment section of an article can be a model of collaborative effort, with readers’ ideas and suggestions making their way …read more

Continue reading TMD-2: A Bigger, Better, More Collaborative Turing Machine

“Hey, You Left the Peanut Out of My Peanut M&Ms!”

Candy-sorting robots are in plentiful supplies on these pages, and with good reason — they’re a great test of the complete suite of hacker tools, from electronics to machine vision to mechatronics. So we see lots of sorters for Skittles, jelly beans, and occasionally even Reese’s Pieces, but it always …read more

Continue reading “Hey, You Left the Peanut Out of My Peanut M&Ms!”

Old Polaroid Gets a Pi and a Printer

There’s nothing like a little diversion project to clear the cobwebs — something to carry one through the summer doldrums and charge you up for the rest of the hacking year. At least that’s what we think was up with [Sam Zeloof]’s printing Polaroid retro-conversion project.

Normally occupied with the …read more

Continue reading Old Polaroid Gets a Pi and a Printer

Pi Cam Replaces Pinhole and Film for Digital Solargraphy

Have you ever heard of solargraphy? The name tells you much of what you need to know, but the images created with a homemade pinhole camera and a piece of photographic film can be visually arresting, showing as they do the cumulative tracks of the sun’s daily journey across the …read more

Continue reading Pi Cam Replaces Pinhole and Film for Digital Solargraphy

Machine Vision Keeps Track of Grubby Hands

Can you remember everything you’ve touched in a given day? If you’re being honest, the answer is, “Probably not.” We humans are a tactile species, with an outsized proportion of both our motor and sensory nerves sent directly to our hands. We interact with the world through our hands, and …read more

Continue reading Machine Vision Keeps Track of Grubby Hands

3D-Printed Film Scanner Brings Family Memories Back to Life

There is a treasure trove of history locked away in closets and attics, where old shoeboxes hold reels of movie film shot by amateur cinematographers. They captured children’s first steps, family vacations, and parties where [Uncle Bill] was getting up to his usual antics. Little of what was captured on …read more

Continue reading 3D-Printed Film Scanner Brings Family Memories Back to Life

Raspberry Pi Tracks Humans, Blasts Them With Heat Rays

Given how long humans have been warming themselves up, you’d think we would have worked out all the kinks by now. But even with central heating, and indeed sometimes because of it, some places we frequent just aren’t that cozy. In such cases, it often pays to heat the person, …read more

Continue reading Raspberry Pi Tracks Humans, Blasts Them With Heat Rays

Neural Network Electrocutes You to Take Better Photographs

It’s ridiculously easy to take a bad photograph. Your brain is a far better Photoshop than Photoshop, and the amount of editing it does on the scenes your eyes capture often results in marked and disappointing differences between what you saw and what you shot.

Taking your brain out of the photography loop is the goal of [Peter Buczkowski]’s “prosthetic photographer.” The idea is to use a neural network to constantly analyze a scene until maximal aesthetic value is achieved, at which point the user unconsciously takes the photograph.

But the human-computer interface is the interesting bit — the device …read more

Continue reading Neural Network Electrocutes You to Take Better Photographs