Science Projects

If you are tied to your cell phone to monitor weather, calendar events and stocks, the Alert Tube could be the next gadget you need. Michael Watson built is around a Raspberry Pi, it monitors the net for events that you choose and alerts you by light patterns, text to speech or sounds. You can see the entire project build details here. “The Alert Tube is an open source information appliance that connects wirelessly to the Internet of Things in the cloud. The user interface is dead simple, it communicates data via customized colored light sequences, sounds and text to speech. The idea for the Alert Tube came from something simple, a clock. You don’t have to turn it on, or boot it up and request information, it simply tells you the time, all the time, without you having to ask. That’s the idea behind the Alert Tube. You tell it what you want and then it continuously displays and/or emits audible information, without you having to ask. Simply walk by and take a glance at it or listen for any important alerts. Set it and forget it!”

Yesterday Microsoft announced their new cable box, the Xbox One. Included in the announcement is a vastly improved Kinect sensor. It won’t be available until next Christmas, but now the question is what are we going to do with it? From what initial specs that can be found, the new version of the Kinect will output RGB 1080p video over a USB 3.0 connection to the new Xbox. The IR depth camera of the original Kinect has been replaced with a time of flight camera – a camera that is able to send out a pulse of light and time how long it takes for photons to be reflected back to the camera. While there have been some inroads into making low-cost ToF cameras – namely Intel and Creative’s Interactive Gesture Camera Development Kit and the $250 DepthSense 325 from SoftKinetic - the Kinect 2.0 will be the first time of flight camera you’ll be able to buy for a few hundred bucks at any Walmart. We’ve seen a ton of awesome Kinect hacks over the years. Everything from a ‘holographic display’ that turns any TV into a 3D display, computer vision for robots, and a 3D scanner among others. A new Kinect sensor with better 3D resolution can only improve existing projects and the time of flight sensor – like the one found in Google’s driverless car – opens up the door for a whole bunch of new projects. So, readers of Hackaday, assuming someone can write a driver in a few days like the Kinect 1.0, what are we going to do with it? While we’re at it, keep in mind we made a call for Wii U controller hacks. If somebody can crack that nut, it’ll be an awesome remote for robots and FPV airplanes and drones. Filed under: Ask Hackaday, Kinect hacks

The game of Anti-Tetris is played by standing in front of a monitor and watch falling Tetris pieces overlaid on a video image of your body. Each hand is used to make pieces disappear so that they don’t stack up to the top of the screen. We don’t see this as the next big indie game. What we do see are some very interesting techniques for hand tracking. An FPGA drives the game, using a camera as input. To track your hands the Cornell students figured out that YUV images show a specific range of skin tones which can be coded as a filter to direct cursor placement. But they needed a bit of a hack to get at those values. They patched into the camera circuit before the YUV is converted to RGB for the NTSC output. Registering hand movement perpendicular to the screen is also a challenge that they faced. Because the hand location has already been established they were able to measure distance between the upper and lower boundaries. If that distance changes fast enough it is treated as an input, making the current block disappear. Filed under: FPGA, video hacks

Fabrican’s long road to commercialization on Core77: Don’t get us wrong, Fabrican is amazing. But it is not new, and serves as a reminder of just how long it can take to bring a good idea to market, and how dogged inventors need to be. Manel Torres first conceived of Fabrican way back in 1995, when he was an RCA student studying fashion design, after watching a friend get sprayed with Silly String. Torres began to collaborate with chemical engineers, and by 2000 he’d filed a patent and set up R&D facilities at Imperial College London. Three years later Torres formed Fabrican Ltd., and another three years went by before the blogosphere picked up on the stuff. Here in 2013, seven years later, there are still no announcements for commercialization; the “News” section of Fabrican’s website saw its last update in 2010. Has Torres given up? Doesn’t look like it, as he’s delivered several Fabrican-based TED Talks as recently as last year. We can only speculate as to what’s preventing the appearance of Fabrican on store shelves, which is what we’d really like to see; while Torres is proposing industrial solutions targeted at the medical, automotive and fashion design industries, we think selling the stuff in cans and letting you guys figure out what to do with it would be a good way to go.

Mika @ Kobakant writes: You can design, print and etch your own PCBs from a flexible sheet of Kapton coated with a thin layer of copper. To do this yourself you need some special materials and equipment, and if you are not planning on etching circuits more regularly then it can be nice to start by looking for a local space that has an etching setup you can use. Photo of a flex circuit etched using the exact same process as described below in step-by-step detail.

NEW PRODUCT – Right Angle USB cable – A/MicroB – This here is your standard A to micro-B USB cable, for USB 1.1 or 2.0, but with a twist! Literally! Instead of the cable coming straight out from the connector, there’s a right angle bend. We thought this might make a good pair for a Raspberry Pi as the cable doesn’t stick out as far. We got cables with extra-beefy 24 AWG power wires, and 28 AWG data lines, so it’s particularly good for power-hungry devices like micro-computers and phones. Approximately 5 feet / 1.5 meter long In stock and shipping now!

iHeart Locket for kids to unlock their digital diaries via Fashioning Technology

Tatsu Iida, a member of oxoxo [zero by zero] wrote in to tell us about the interactive LED installation entitled Senko [Flash] which they showed at the Tokushima LED Art Festival in April. They used a Peggy 2 to drive a field full of LED illuminated spheres, along with IR sensors to detect visitors entering the array. Each new person would trigger a new sphere to light up and move through the field. This is the largest installation we’ve ever seen based on the Peggy 2. Thanks for sharing your incredible project with us! Links to many more Peggy 2 projects are on the wiki.

A while back we toyed with the idea of doing a look back on hackaday history. We weren’t sure how often to publish it, or what exactly to publish. Now, we’ve decided that this will be the main part of the Hackaday news letter. You can sign up here if you haven’t already, but hurry I’m sending out today’s newsletter in a couple hours! Each email (1-2 a week) will have that day’s history going all the way back to roughly the beginning. It will also have a quick blurb about what video I’m working on or any other little hackaday news bits. Filed under: news

Besties sweater lights up when you are hugged: Next we cut out a little circle of conductive fabric and split it in two and sewed them onto the left shoulder blade. We took conductive thread, sewed it into the VBATT hole, and connected it to one of the conductive fabric circle halves. We then sewed a new piece of conductive thread from the unused half circle, and connected it through all of the positive ends of the LED lights. By interrupting the circuit using the conductive fabric half circles, when someone wearing conductive thread on their right wrist, the circuit will complete when they put their arm around the person wearing the sweater. This project would be a great candidate for capacitive touch sensing with conductive fabric! Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!