Electronics

Attack of the Flying 18650s

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When somebody builds a quadcopter with the express purpose of flying it as fast and aggressively as possible, it’s not exactly a surprise when they eventually run it into an immovable object hard enough to break something. In fact, it’s more like a rite of passage. Which is why many serious fliers will have a 3D printer at home to rapidly run off replacement parts.

Avid first person view (FPV) flier [David Cledon] has taken this concept to its ultimate extreme by designing a 3D printable quadcopter that’s little more than an 18650 cell with some motors attached. Since the two-piece frame can be produced on a standard desktop 3D printer in a little over two hours with less than $1 USD of filament, crashes promise to be far less stressful. Spend a few hours during the week printing out frames, and you’ll have plenty to destroy for the weekend.

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Creating Autonomous Flying Robots with the CogniFly Project

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The CogniFly project is a foray into combining autonomous drones with AI vision, allowing for novel solutions when tackling tough problems.

How It Started

Smart agriculture is vital for making farming more efficient and thus more sustainable. This includes tracking crop yields, water usage, and weather over time, all of which requires ample amounts of data and powerful processing to make it useful. Some data scientists use satellite imaging to gather information, but it can tough in certain locations. The alternative is to use UAVs to get images, which is what the MISTLab postdoctoral researcher Ricardo de Azambuja set out to do in his project called “High Fidelity Data Collection for Precision Agriculture with Drone Swarms”. He originally wanted to use off-the-shelf DJI Tello drones and customize their control software, but since they had to be connected to laptops the entire time and with new Canadian UAV restrictions, a new solution was needed. The next idea was to combine an open source design with AI capabilities and a customized battery holder for an ultra-versatile platform.

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Boosting Headphone Volume with a Tiny Smartphone Amplifier

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This video guide from GreatScott! explains how to build a tiny Class A amplifier for your smartphone to boost headphone volume.

As the name suggests, an amplifier is a device that increases the amplitude (the power) of an electrical signal. Amplifiers can be used for any kind of electrical signal, but audio amplifiers are the most well-known. As an example, the audio output from an electric guitar is very faint, because that signal is produced entirely passively by the electromagnetic pickups. To push that up to a respectable volume, an audio amplifier is necessary. If your headphone volume coming from your smartphone is too quiet, GreatScott! explains how you do the same thing by building a tiny amplifier for headphones.

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M5Timer Camera X ESP32 Camera (Best ESP32 Camera)

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Timer Camera X is a camera module based on ESP32, integrated with ESP32 chip and 8M-PSRAM. The camera (ov3660) with 3 million pixels , DFOV 66.5 ° and shoot 2048×1536 resolution photo, built-in 140mAh battery and LED status indicator, featuring ultra-low power consumption design. There is a reset button under the LED. Through RTC (BM8563), timing sleep and wake-up can be realized

These Electric Ice Skates Finally Make the Sport Effortless

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You probably haven’t noticed this, but athletes tend to be in very good physical condition. That is because most sports require a high level of fitness. You’re going to have a hard time winning a 100-meter dash if you collapse from exhaustion after 20 meters of sprinting. If you’re out of shape like I am, then you’ll probably agree that it isn’t fair that we don’t get to join in the fun. Apparently Simon Sörensen, of the RCLifeOn YouTube channel, felt the same way, which is why he designed these electric ice skates to make the sport effortless.

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Nano Piano – An Ardiuno Based Nano Piano

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A simple, small piano that is not only small as the name implies, but it runs off of the Arduino Nano Every.

Nano Piano is a four key piano that runs off of an Arduino Nano Every. This project is beginner friendly, and it is great if you are looking to get into Arduino or electronics as a whole. I will be going over everything you need to know to create this project. You get to decide how its assembled but I will be showing you all the electronics and things you need to make it work.

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Ping Pong Scoreboard with animation and sound

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We play a lot of ping pong, but lose track of the score and who is supposed to serve. This scoreboard introduces the game, keeps track of whose serve it is, keeps score and congratulates the winner at the end. Uses an rgb matrix and a soundboard.

The scoreboard uses an Arduino Mega (for the RGB matrix and soundboard pins, mostly) and several LED and LCD panels.   The games are configurable to be either 11 points or 21 and the service can be switched at either 2 points or 5 points.  The warmup begins with a virtual ping pong match on the matrix and then several vocal announcements including “Lets Play Ping Pong” and “Shall We Play a Game”.  Each point is entered using a big lighted button on the top (one for each player).   Service is announced with “Switch Serve” and the arrows pointing towards player 1 or  2.   The announcement of player can be switched from two specific people by name or generic “Player 1” and “Player 2”.   At the end of a game, the winner is announced and there’s applause, etc.  The soundboard is loaded with all these sounds, etc.

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MicroNova’s AmpliPi Is a RaspberryPi Powered Open Source Audio System for Your Entire Home

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Driven by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+, this Python-powered audio system supports up to six stereos zones — expandable to 36.

MicroNova has launched a crowdfunding campaign for AmpliPi — an open source, whole-home audio system powered by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ and running a Python REST API and mobile-first web application.

“AmpliPi is a multi room/zone home audio controller and amplifier made for whole house audio systems with many zones,” explains MicroNova co-founder Jason Gorski of the device. “It can play up to 4 simultaneous audio streams (Pandora, Spotify, AirPlay, etc) or sources (RCA inputs), each routed to one or many zones, all of which are configurable in real-time using the self-hosted AmpliPi Web App or its underlying REST API.”

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