Electronics

UC Riverside Roboticists Create Airhead, a Piano-Playing Robot Driven by “Air-Powered” Memory Chips

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Inspired by player pianos and thermostats from the early 1900s, Airhead ditches electronics in favor of pneumatic RAM modules.

University of California at Riverside (UC Riverside) engineers have created what they describe as “air-powered computer memory,” which drives a robot — dubbed, amusingly, “Airhead” — to play the piano.

“Pneumatically-actuated soft robots have advantages over traditional rigid robots in many applications,” the researchers write in the abstract to their paper. “In particular, their flexible bodies and gentle air-powered movements make them more suitable for use around humans and other objects that could be injured or damaged by traditional robots.”

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Meet Pomodachi, the Productivity “Tamagotchi”

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This virtual pet sits on your desktop and is fed by your Pomodoro technique work sessions.

Like many, dropopuli started working remotely during the recent pandemic, and – also like many – had difficulty staying focused. One popular method for managing workflow and distractions is known as the Pomodoro technique, which breaks the workday up into manageable ~25 minute increments of focused work. Of course, to pull this off correctly means you need some sort of timepiece.

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A Cheap Dipole Antenna From an Extension Cord

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Dipoles are a classic builder’s antenna, after all they are usually little more than two pieces of wire and a feedline. But as [Rob] shows us in the video below, there are a few things to consider.

The first thing is where to get the wire. A damaged extension cord donated the wire. That’s actually an interesting idea because you get multiple wires the same length inside the extension cord. Of course, it is easy to just pull the conductors out of the extension cord, but how do you feed it? A small balun converts the unbalanced feed line into a balanced connection for the antenna. Although the title says “free dipole” this balun is commercial and probably cost something unless you happen to already have one. However, building a balun isn’t all that tricky, either if you happen to have a ferrite toroid.

Modified 3D-Printer Solders Through-Hole Components.

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Surface-mount technology has been a fantastic force multiplier for electronics in general and for hobbyists in particular. But sometimes you’ve got no choice but to use through-hole components, meaning that even if you can take advantage of SMDs for most of the design, you still might need to spend a little time with soldering iron in hand. Or not, if you’ve got a spare 3D printer lying around.

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Minicomputer Part 5: Building an Arduino ROM Reader

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In this episode we take our first step towards ensuring that we have a backup plan if all the magic smoke comes out on first power up – we rip the data off the ROMs! It’s not as easy as it sounds though as these ROMs are pretty old and weird chips that aren’t supported by a lot of ROM programmers out there, so in the end, we end up building our own ROM reader from scratch using an Arduino and some 74LS161s!

DIY Si47xx All Band DSP Radio with 2.8 Inch Touch Display

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This time I will show you how to make a relatively simple All band Radio Receiver which is based on the Si47xx series chip of Silicon Labs. This wonderful radio is is primarily a result of the hard work of Ricardo Caratti who creates the detailed library for the Si47xx chip, Gert Baak for the initial TFT code, and Thiago Lima which creates the Kit with a TFT touch display.

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This Unique Seven-Segment Display Uses a Single Motor to Change Its Digits

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By integrating a pair of special wheels internally, the segments can be raised and lowered at will to produce certain digits.

The idea

For many years now, hobbyists have been trying to come up with increasingly unique and novel ways to display information. These have ranged from giant LED matrices to fun machines that rotate plastic panels in order to create various shapes. In this project created by Instructables user gzumwalt, he was able to build a large seven-segment panel that utilizes seven plastic panels which raise up or down to show a digit. However, unlike many other designs, this one only requires a single stepper motor instead of seven, making it much more easily scaled and cheaper overall.

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DIY Fume Extractor Clears the Air as You Solder

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Open Green Energy’s device consists of a 120mm PC cooling fan and a 3D-printed enclosure.

If you’ve done any amount of soldering, you’ve likely been annoyed by fumes from solder and flux that seem to be automatically attracted to your face. Smelly and potentially toxic, it’s best to route these fumes elsewhere, preferably through a filter of some sort to keep them from simply annoying someone else.

You can, of course, purchase a fume extractor; however, good units can cost upwards of $70, so why not build one yourself? In the video below, Open Green Energy demonstrates how to do just that, using 3D-printed components made with blue and yellow filament to match up with his Hakko soldering station.

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Component Shortages Continue to Bite, Leading to Delays and Redesigns at Adafruit, Arduino, SparkFun

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Company representatives offer a look at the ongoing component shortages and their impact on the maker market.

Stephen Cass, editor of the Hands On DIY section of IEEE Spectrum, has warned of delays in the maker market caused by the ongoing industry-wide component shortages.

“Over the last few months it seemed that manufacturers catering to makers were offering fewer and fewer new products in addition to posting a lot of ‘out of stock’ notices on existing ones, with a knock-on effect on the maker scene as a whole,” Cass explains. “As the editor responsible for IEEE Spectrum’s Hands On DIY section, it’s taken longer and longer each month to find projects incorporating interesting new capabilities.”

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This Open Source Robotic Leg Performs Jumps and Walks All on Its Own

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Although it might look a bit weird on its own, the Overleap robotic leg is capable of some incredible things.

Aaron de los Santos has created an extremely weird backyard decoration: a single robotic leg that hops around in a circle. But do not let this simple premise fool you, as the device called Overleap has some serious engineering put into it. The leg is able to make quick jumps in rapid succession while remaining very accurate. It can also make small adjustments whilst it hops that causes it to almost run in a circular pattern.

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