Arduino Powered Garage Parking Sensor

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We live in a house with a very tight garage, and our relatively big car leaves a tiny space in front. I designed and built this simple project to visually guide the driver into the optimal parking distance, using real-time feedback about how close the car is to the wall in front. In short, it tells you when to stop.

The project uses an ultrasonic sensor and Arduino to measure distance and then displays it on a full-color LED strip as a progress bar. The sensor is mounted on the wall; as the distance between the car and wall shrinks, the light strip shows an increasing number of illuminated LEDs, which also change color from green to amber to red, and then finally, flashing red.

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Machine Learning Inference on Raspberry Pico 2040

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This is another article in know-how series, which focuses solely on a specific feature or technique and today I’ll tell you how to use neural network trained with Edge Impulse with new Raspberry Pico 2040. Also make sure to watch the tutorial video with step-by-step instructions.

Edge Impulse is a platform that enables developers to easily train and deploy deep learning models on embedded devices. You can read the full introduction in my first article of the series about TinyML. Now, let’s jump straight to action.

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Bird classification in remote areas with Lacuna Space and The Things Network

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Over the past years, The Things Networks has worked around the democratization of the Internet of Things, building a global and crowdsourced LoraWAN network carried by the thousands of users operating their own gateways worldwide. Thanks to Lacuna Space’ satellites constellation, the network coverage goes one step further. Lacuna Space uses LEO (Low-Earth Orbit) satellites to provide LoRaWAN coverage at any point around the globe. Messages received by satellites are then routed to ground stations and forwarded to LoRaWAN service providers such as TTN. This technology can benefit several industries and applications: tracking a vessel not only in harbors but across the oceans, monitoring endangered species in remote areas. All that with only 25mW power (ISM band limit) to send a message to the satellite. This is truly amazing!

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This pen plotter draws detailed maps the size of walls

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Christopher Getschmann wanted a wall-sized map of the world. He soon realized, however, that it’s tough to actually buy such a map that’s both beautiful and detailed enough to satisfy his cartographic tastes. While many would simply move on to the next “thing,” Getschmann instead took things into his own hands, and built a pen plotter specifically to draw a massive 2×3 meter map for his wall.

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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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