Electronics

NeoPill is the NeoPixel Emulator You’ve Always Wanted.

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NeoPixels and other addressable LED strings are a technology that have made vibrant, glowing LED projects accessible to all. Of course, it’s nice to be able to simulate your new glowy project in software before you actually set up your LED strings in practice. [Randy Elwin]’s NeoPill simulator can help with that!

The NeoPill consists of an STM32F103 development board, into which one simply hooks up a NeoPixel data line. The microcontroller then decodes the data using a combination of its onboard timers and SPI hardware. This data is then passed to a PC over the onboard USB serial connection, where it’s decoded by a custom Python app. The app takes the data and displays the pixels on screen, so you can verify they operate as expected before you hook up a single real LED.

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Researchers Develop Foldable Haptic Actuator for Mixed Reality Applications

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Touch&Fold is worn on a user’s fingernail and renders touch in MR without preventing them from also touching real objects.

Researchers from the University of Chicago have developed a foldable haptic feedback device that allows users to touch objects in mixed reality environments, then gets folded back onto the user’s nail when touching objects in the real world. Known as Touch&Fold, the end-effector also features a linear resonant actuator that lets the unit touch virtual objects and their textures. Sure, many haptic devices on the market enable users to interact with objects in the virtual world, such as controllers and gloves, but none provides the ability to interact with objects in both worlds and “feel” them at the same time.

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High Voltage Gives Metal Balls a Mind of Their Own

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Have you ever seen something that’s so fascinating you’re sure there has to be some kind of practical application for it, but you just can’t figure out what? That’s how we feel when watching tiny ball bearings assemble themselves into alien-like structures under the influence of high voltage in the latest Plasma Channel video from [Jay Bowles].

Now to be clear, [Jay] isn’t trying to take credit for the idea. He explains that researchers at Stanford University first documented the phenomenon back in 2015, and that his goal was to recreate their initial results as a baseline and go from there. The process is pretty simple: put small metal ball bearings into a tray of oil, apply high voltage, and watch them self-assemble into “wires” that branch out in search of the ground terminal like a plant’s roots looking for water. With the encouragement of his 500,000 volt Van de Graaff generator, the ball bearings leaped into action and created structures just like in the Stanford study.

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This low-cost motion control rig helps capture high-quality shots

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Being a camera operator is tough. Having to move the camera and maintain a smooth motion can be tricky, and the speed at which it’s done is never consistent. That’s what prompted Andy to create his own motorized robotic camera rig that can move in up to four different axes simultaneously. The camera gets attached to a standard mounting plate and then placed into the gimbal. The gimbal is able to both pitch the camera up (rotate around the X axis) and rotate it side to side (called ‘yaw’ or Z-axis rotation). In order to prevent a bunch of wires from tangling around each other while spinning, each rotational axis uses a slipring to transfer electrical power and signals continuously. 

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Cool Way to Count the Euro Coins!

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This is a cool way to count coins. It’s a scale that, with the help of Arduino, a display and a push button, can count the amount of Euros coins on the plate. At the beginning, you need to calibrate the scale by pressing the button with the empty plate, and then with four coins of two Euros. You just need to follow the instructions on the display, and, at the end of the process, you will have the value in Euros of the coins. This was possible because each coin has a specific weight. Such weight never changes, and as long as you follow the instructions, all will be very accurate.

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Researchers Reveal Optimizations to Boost Battery Life in Arduino Uno, ATmega328P-Based Data Loggers

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With the addition of a MOSFET and some tweaks to the program code an Arduino Uno can log every two seconds for a year on a 2,400mAh battery.

A pair of researchers from Newcastle University have published a paper investigating optimizations to boost battery life in Microchip ATmega328P-based, Arduino-compatible data loggers — by tweaking SD card save operations.

“As part of a university project, I needed to look into how to make the Arduino/ATmega328P last on a couple of AA batteries for over a year,” first author Luke J. Bradley explains. “After doing a lot of digging through the datasheet and reading multiple online forums, I discovered that there are lots of tips and tricks out there but no one has made a standard method for creating a low power data logger. As such, I decided to write and publish a paper based on this. The paper shows exactly how to create a data logger using an SD card and an RTC as well as little tips and tricks within the code to help minimize power consumption. I hope it helps other people in their projects!”

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David Huang’s Ultra-Low-Cost Wearable Tension Sensor Is Built From String and Pencil Graphite

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Just rub some string against a pencil lead and you too can have your own low-cost, wearable tension sensor.

Maker David Huang has shared a trick for creating a surprisingly capable tension sensor at practically zero cost — by rubbing some string over a pencil.

“Our goal is use the cheapest and the easiest way to make your own sensor for your project,” Huang explains by way of introduction. “The sensor we are making today is a tension sensor. A tension sensor will react to a pulling motion. The most common material we use for the tension sensor is conductive rubber, or weaved conductive rubber wire – but the problem is the conductive rubbers are very expensive, and they are also hard to get.”

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InfiniLED Illuminates for Years

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This tiny LED magnet runs for five years on a single coin cell battery.


LEDs are extremely efficient sources of light. They can even be used with a coin cell battery, draining these cells after a few days or weeks. After finding an experiment that explored optimization of perceived brightness versus power consumption, BelgianEngineer came up with the InfiniLED, and now the InfiniLED v2, which can function for much longer.

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