Collaborate Disseminate
Sending teams of tiny drones to explore areas and structures is a staple in sci-fi and research, but the weight and size of sensors and the required processing power have …read more Continue reading Tiny Drones Do Distributed Mapping
If there’s a reason that fancy holographic displays that respond to gestures are a science fiction staple, it’s probably because our current display technology is terrible. Oh sure, Retina displays …read more Continue reading A Little Optical Magic Makes This Floating Display Pop
This ultra-cute tiny LiDAR rangefinder project by [gokux] can be thought of as a love letter to the incredible resources and components hobbyists and hackers of all types have access …read more Continue reading Make a Super Cute LiDAR Measurement Module
Wait a second, read that title again. This isn’t a throwback 3D printing project at all. That’s “RepTrap” as in reptile trap, and it’s a pretty clever way to study …read more Continue reading RepTrap Keeps Watch Over Our Cold-Blooded Friends
In a world where smartphones have commoditized precision MEMS Sensors, the stage is set to reimagine clusters of these sensors as something totally different. That’s exactly what [chronopoulos] did, taking …read more Continue reading Laser Theremin Turns Your Hand Swooshes into Music
[Justin Lam] created a wonderfully-detailed writeup of his Smart Sourdough Lid project, which was created out of a desire to get better data on the progress and health of his sourdough starters, and to do so more efficiently. The result …read more
Continue reading Smart Lid Spies On Sourdough Starter, Sends Data Wirelessly
A lighthouse beams light out to make itself and its shoreline visible. [Daniel’s] lighthouse has the opposite function, using lasers to map out the area around itself. Using an Arduino and a ToF sensor, the concept is relatively simple. However, connecting to something that rotates 360 degrees is always a …read more
Continue reading Automate the Freight: Shipping Containers Sorted by Robot Stevedores
Sometimes the best you can say about a project is, “Nice start.” That’s the case for this as-yet awful DIY 3D scanner, which can serve both as a launching point for further development and a lesson in what not to do.
Don’t get us wrong, we have plenty of respect for [bitluni] and for the fact that he posts his failures as well as his successes, like composite video and AM radio signals from an ESP32. He used an ESP8266 in this project, which actually uses two different sensors: an ultrasonic transducer, and a small time-of-flight laser chip. Each was …read more
Continue reading Fail Of The Week: How Not To Make A 3D Scanner
[JRodrigo]’s xLIDAR project is one of those ideas that seemed so attractively workable that it went directly to a PCB prototype without doing much stopping along the way. The concept was to mount a trio of outward-facing VL53L0X distance sensors to a small PCB disk, and then turn that disk with a motor and belt while taking readings. As the sensors turn, their distance readings can be used to paint a picture of the immediate surroundings (at least within about 1 meter, which is the maximum range of the VL53L0X.)
The hardware is made to be accessible and has a …read more
Continue reading xLIDAR Is A Merry-Go-Round Of Time-Of-Flight Sensors