Electronics

PiWatcher TB Is a Raspberry Pi Watchdog

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A well-worth-the-buy Raspberry Pi peripheral device is now available on Tindie, Omzlo’s PiWatcher TB, a small board made to automatically shut down or reboot your Pi when needed. Useful in case of incident or just for power saving purposes, the board can even be programmed to shut an Pi down and automatically reboot it a set amount of time later, whether that means a few minutes or a few hours.

Simply put, the PiWatcher TB is a watchdog circuit for the Raspberry Pi. It is a variation on Omzlo’s classic PiWatcher also available on Tindie. It is designed to solve two problems with regard to power management on Pis: wasteful power usage due to incomplete shutdown following a shutdown or halt command and recovery from situations in which the Pi has become stuck in an unrecoverable state. For the first, the watchdog circuit can be configured to fully cut power following a shutdown command. For the second, it can be programmed to power cycle should it not read a heartbeat from the device after a set period of time.

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Andy Geppert’s Core 64 Interactive Core Memory Boards Get a Final Design and 3D-Printed Weaving Jig

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Designed to bring back a classic from the early days of computing in interactive form, the new Core 64 boards will form a stack eight deep.

Andy Geppert has unveiled the latest entry in the Core 64 family, a range of badge boards designed to bring back a classic of early computing: hand-woven magnetic core memory.

While modern computers and microcontrollers run from dynamic RAM, static RAM, flash RAM, or most commonly a combination thereof, that technology wasn’t always available. Early computers had to rely on other forms of random access memory, with one of the most widespread being magnetic core — toroidal magnets suspending in a hand-woven grid of copper wire.

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Playing the “Dinosaur Run Game” on an ATtiny10 Without Batteries

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Jump and dodge obstacles on this keychain-sized PCB game console!

It has happened to almost all of us: suddenly going offline while using Chrome and having that dinosaur run game pop up. This is what inspired this project’s creator, ridoluc, to develop a much smaller implementation of the game. What he was able to come up with can fit in a 34 x 25mm area and run indefinitely without the need for a battery.

These DIY Smart Glasses Provide Turn-By-Turn GPS Navigation Instructions

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If you’ve ever walked into a telephone pole while staring at your phone’s map app, then Sam March’s DIY smart glasses are for you.

I think it’s fair to say that none of us know where we’re going anymore. Thanks to the proliferation of GPS technology, we no longer have to memorize the streets and layout of our city. That’s not necessarily a bad thing when you’re just driving around, but it is less than ideal when you’re walking. Aside from the potential danger of strolling into a light post, oncoming traffic, or an open manhole, staring at your phone while you walk prevents you from enjoying the sights your city has to offer. That’s why Sam March designed DIY smart glasses that unobtrusively provide turn-by-turn GPS navigation instructions.

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TinyML on Arduino and STM32: CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) example

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Painless TinyML Convolutional Neural Network on your Arduino and STM32 boards: the MNIST dataset example!
Are you fascinated by TinyML and Tensorflow for microcontrollers?
Do you want to run a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) on your Arduino and STM32 boards?
Do you want to do it without pain?

EloquentTinyML is the library for you!

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Google Releases Objectron Dataset to Help Improve 3D Object Understanding in Computer Vision

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Google’s AI division has announced the release of the Objectron dataset, a corpus of short video clips designed to capture common objects from various angles — and each coming with augmented reality session data with sparse point-clouds and manually-annotated 3D bounding boxes.

“Understanding objects in 3D remains a challenging task due to the lack of large real-world datasets compared to 2D tasks (e.g., ImageNet, COCO, and Open Images),” explain Google Research software engineers Adel Ahmadyan and Liangkai Zhang. “To empower the research community for continued advancement in 3D object understanding, there is a strong need for the release of object-centric video datasets, which capture more of the 3D structure of an object, while matching the data format used for many vision tasks (i.e., video or camera streams), to aid in the training and benchmarking of machine learning models.”

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DIY Stream Deck (3D Printing, Arduino, Electronics!)

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An Elgato Stream Deck is a vital tool for anyone looking to live-stream online, but the ongoing pandemic has made these devices hard to find or very expensive! To solve this problem, I built a DIY version using Arduino, 3D printing, and some custom PCBs, which you can also build yourself! All of the design files are free and open source so that you can create the Stream Deck that best suits your needs!