How can it be that telling someone something they already know with no consequences if they ignore it can improve how people drive?
And yet it does. Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops, from Wired.
It would be nice to add in some open source figures to this chart. I wonder how many Arduino’s are programmed? Feeds are connected to Pachube? How many sensors are added to the internet?
SWITL has been around for several months, but I still find it mesmerizing to watch how it can pick up gels and semi-liquids.
The Cornell ECE course always presents a very cool batch of projects which push technology to the max. This year is no exception with a webcam vision car, consonant recognition and many others. If you are interested in looking at some cool student videos and amazing projects, go no further.
Final Projects ECE 4760
This looks pretty neat – a parallel programmable, small, cheap swarm research bot.
From here
I think there are probably a lot of Arduino users out there who either (a) don’t know about interrupts, or (b) don’t know you can use them in the Arduino environment. I will almost certainly be using the Timer Interrupt capability of the ‘duino in an upcoming project that uses Charliplexing (get excited!). I found the following to be an excellent overview and reference in that respect: http://www.uchobby.com/index.php/2007/11/24/arduino-interrupts/
For more “advanced” Arduino users, it helps to keep in mind that at the end of the day, all your source code gets compiled using avr-gcc, so in principle you can do anything with an Arduino that you could do by targetting an ATMega328 (or ATMega168) using vanilla avr-gcc (i.e. use any of the chip’s hardware). For some things it’s harder than for others because the core Arduino libraries implement some of the interrupt handlers (ISRs), but for some things, like Timer2, it’s open season! Other than that you just have to make sure you are not trampling over some other (Arduino) function of the hardware resource you want to hijack :). Have fun!
Thinking of aleeping late? That’ll be $100. A money shredding alarm clock gets you out of bed. Increase the denomination of the notes until you care.
From Mashable:
From the looks of these pics, that shredder does a thorough job of destroying currency or whatever else
you’d like to place in it. And look at that — the designer has placed not one, but what looks
like a stack of $100 bills into the clock’s hungry maw.
3 pins controlling 6 LEDs… pretty neat
In my recent exploration into the realm of Charlieplexed Networks of LEDs, I whipped up a fancy-pants spreadsheet that tells you how many LEDs can be controlled by N pins, which is somewhat unexciting as the answer is just N * (N – 1), which is the simplified form of (N Permute 2). I can only imagine how impressed you are by my mastery of middle school mathematics… I also, in Excel brute force tradition, had the spreadsheet calculate an accompanying table enumerating all the complimentary pairs of HIGH/LOW pin-mapped addresses in the LED network. Is this particularly useful to anyone? Maybe, maybe not, but for me it helped me to see the software side of things a little more clearly. So I figured I’d share this toy spreadsheet with the world via this blog entry.
Basically you wire up a complimentary pair (i.e. facing in opposite directions)Â of LEDs between each pair of pins that you have available, hook up one carefully sized resistor between each pin and the charlieplex network, then use software to turn all but two pins into inputs, and set one of those two HIGH and the other LOW, and that turns on exactly one LED in the network if you set it up right. Using this technique, and exploiting a fundamental weakness of human visual system called Persistance of Vision, you can sequentially illuminate (i.e. scan)Â the LEDs in the network to illuminate (as far as the eye can tell anway) many more LEDs than you have pins. It’s actually remarkably clever once you get your head around it.
OK, so it’s not like I cured cancer or anything, but, inspired by my pilgrimage to the Maker Faire in San Mateo this past weekend, I saw coming home to a broken Roomba robotic vacuum a welcome challenge. In a nutshell, the symptom being exhibited was the brushes not turning and the brush cage rising and falling at about 1Hz, resulting in a distinctive clicking sound. After a few minutes of this, the robot eventually gave up and announced that I should clean the brushes or something useless like that.
So I asked the almighty Google if it knew anything about this mysterious phenomenon, and, lo and behold, I arrived at this amazingly clear and eminently useful video on the You Tube.
Roomba Clicking Brushes Repair
I thought to myself, hm… that’s a lot of small moving parts, but yea sure I can follow that…Â Â so I commenced with the disassembly, diving head first into the belly of the beast. Now I don’t know life is like in @dfraser’s household, but I’ve got two shedding cats and a shedding dog, and a generally dusty house. Having watched the video, I was completely unprepared for what I found when I finally cracked open the gearbox for the brushes. I was, to say the least amazed at the scale of the infiltration. I took some photos as I went, and thought I’d share them here. Hopefully they don’t gross anyone out too much!
Anyway, I cleaned it all up, resorting to a toothpick to clean between the teeth of every gear, applied a fresh coating of synthetic grease to the plastic gears, put it all back together, and…. IT WORKS just like new! I’m not gonna lie, I felt like a legend of robotic vacuum repair for about 15 minutes. The moral of this story is that you’d be surprised what you can fix and do yourself. I frequently hear people express a fear of programming, but for me it’s kind of a fear of the mechanical – screws, washers, and gears are mysterious… but once you dive in and take it apart, it’s really not so scary after all! Now for those gross pictures :).
Like it or not, it seems that Uncle Sam will soon mandate that cars must have black boxes, just like aircraft. From Autopia:
That snapshot could be viewed by law enforcement, insurance companies and automakers. The device cannot be turned off, and you’ll probably know little more about it than the legal disclosure you’ll find in the owner’s manual.
…
How much it affects you depends upon where you live and what data points it records. How much it will affect you in the future may depend on a new set of standards that spell out exactly what data is collected and who can access it.
Questions that have already come up are things like “who owns the data?” and “Must I disclose it?”