Have you ever wondered what would happen if Nintendo released Gameboy Glasses for retro gamers? No, me neither, but the geeks over at Mutrics, have invented just that and we love it.
No they can’t play your best Gameboy Color games, but they can reduce eye strain, and connect to your smartphone to play audio through the built-in speakers at the back.
Often you might see a recycling bin next to a trash can, and notice that someone else has thrown their waste into the wrong container. To help with this conundrum, the team of Shalin Jain, Viraj Singh, Edward Chen, and Joshua Kim created a double-sided container that sorts things automatically.
Their device, dubbed “Splash,” takes a webcam image of the item presented to it, analyzes this with a Python script and the Azure Custom Vision API, and reports back to an Arduino Uno controller with its findings. Depending on the results, the Arduino then uses a driver board and motor to properly position a flap, directing refuse into in the correct bin.
Often when working with Arduino projects, you’ll need to generate a random number. There’s a random() function built into the IDE that works acceptably in many cases, but maker_ATOM wanted to take things to the next level, creating an “over engineered true random value generator.”
This device sits on top of an Arduino Uno as a shield, and features input from a floating pin seed value. It adds light input as a second seed value with an LDR, and ambient noise via a microphone as a third value. These are used to choose from an array of Pi digit values, which are also random, revealing outputs on its OLED display at the push of a button that would be exceedingly difficult to predict!
More details on the project can be found in maker_ATOM’s Instructables post.
Drones are fun to fly, and it’s possible to do limited flying using brainwaves. The headset senses my brainwaves and transmits them to a small computer. When I increase my attention level, the computer converts the signals and passes them to the drone’s controller, which I have connected to the computer. When I relax my mind, the drone lands.
To label used bottles that would otherwise go to waste, “tuenhidiy” created a CNC plotter that itself consists mostly of scraps!
The machine’s X and Z axes are formed out of a pair of old CD/DVD players, but instead of a traditional Y axis, it actuates two printer rollers to turn a bottle forwards or backwards. This allows the marking pen to be placed in just the right axial position, while still being very similar to a fully Cartesian (XYZ) plotter controls-wise.
Impressive overclock boosts the RP2040’s Arm cores to more than three times their official upper limit of 133MHz.
Engineer Robin Grosset has pushed a Raspberry Pi Pico and its RP2040 microcontroller to its limits, successfully overclocking the chip from its stock 133MHz to an impressive 420MHz.
Launched earlier this year the Raspberry Pi Pico development board plays host to Raspberry Pi’s first in-house silicon, the RP2040 microcontroller. Officially, the chip can be clocked at speeds of up to 133MHz — but unofficially the part can run considerably quicker, as is often required to get the best performance out of hacks like turning one into a fully-functional BBC Micro emulator.
In this video we look at reverse engineering a basic firmware format of a commonly found IoT camera – and then creating a backdoored firmware that calls back to our command & control server and allows us to remotely control it!
Using colors to predict whether this is Pikachu or Bulbasaur…
The deployment environments of a machine learning (ML) model are changing. In recent years, we went from locally training models and running them on standalone scripts to deploying them in massive and specialized setups. However, the industry hasn’t been focusing only on large-scaled-productionized ML, but also its small, portable, and accessible counterpart—for machine learning has found a place in embedded systems.
Here is an easy project using a Echo Dot (Alexa) to control my ESP8266. I give it simple commands (Alexa, lights, off) and the command shows on the LCD screen attached to the ESP8266. Actual relays will be the next step to attach.
The project is based on the Adafruit tutorial at https://learn.adafruit.com/easy-alexa-or-echo-control-of-your-esp8266-huzzah/overview
with LCD and other modifications made by me. My code is found at https://pastebin.com/NjMcsTRh
PC gaming was only lacking one thing in my eyes… analogue movement. There are a few projects which tackle this, but they are a little incomplete, or require an Arduino micro to be seen as a game controller. My take on this uses an Arduino Uno, and should basically be good to go straight away!