"arduino" entries

Four short links: 17 July 2015

Four short links: 17 July 2015

Smalltalky Web, Arduino Speech, Testing Distributed Systems, and Dataflow for FP

  1. Project Journal: Objects (Ian Bicking) — a view askew at the Web, inspired by Alan Kay’s History of Smalltalk.
  2. Speech Recognition for Arduino (Kickstarter) — for all your creepy toy hacking needs!
  3. Conductor (github) — a framework for testing distributed systems.
  4. Dataflow Syntax for Functional Programming? — two great tastes that will make your head hurt together!
Four short links: 21 April 2015

Four short links: 21 April 2015

Chromebooks and Arduinos, 3rd Person Driving, Software Development, and Go Debugging

  1. Chromebooks and Arduino — two great edtech tastes that taste great together.
  2. 3rd Person Driving (IEEE) — A Taiwan company called SPTek has figured out a way to use an array of cameras to generate a 3-D “Around View Monitor” that can show you multiple different views of the outside of your car. Use a top-down view for tight parking spaces, a front view looking backward for highway lane changes, or a see-through rear view for pulling out into traffic. It’s not a video game; it’s the next step in safety.
  3. Lessons Learned in Software Development — omg every word of this.
  4. Cross-Platform Debugger for Gotake the source code of a target program, insert debugging code between every line, then compile and run that instead. The result is a fully-functional debugger that is extremely portable. In fact, thanks to gopherjs, you can run it right here in your browser!
Four short links: 26 March 2014

Four short links: 26 March 2014

Better Fonts, Speaking Javascript, Arduinos & Phones, and Averaging Streams in Go

  1. brick — uncompressed versions of popular web fonts. The difference between compressed and uncompressed is noticeable.
  2. Speaking Javascript — free online version of the new O’Reilly book by Axel Rauschmayer.
  3. micio.js — clever hack to communicate between Arduino and mobile phones via the microphone jack.
  4. Exponentially Weighted Moving Averages for Go — Go implementation of algorithm useful for dealing with streams of data.
Four short links: 17 January 2014

Four short links: 17 January 2014

Remote Working, Google Visualizations, Sensing Gamma Rays, and Cheap GPS For Your Arduino

  1. Making Remote WorkThe real­ity of a remote work­place is that the con­nec­tions are largely arti­fi­cial con­structs. Peo­ple can be very, very iso­lated. A person’s default behav­ior when they go into a funk is to avoid seek­ing out inter­ac­tions, which is effec­tively the same as actively with­draw­ing in a remote work envi­ron­ment. It takes a tremen­dous effort to get on video chats, use our text based com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools, or even call some­one dur­ing a dark time. Very good to see this addressed in a post about remote work.
  2. Google Big Picture Group — public output from the visualization research group at Google.
  3. Using CMOS Sensors in a Cellphone for Gamma Detection and Classification (Arxiv) — another sense in your pocket. The CMOS camera found in many cellphones is sensitive to ionized electrons. Gamma rays penetrate into the phone and produce ionized electrons that are then detected by the camera. Thermal noise and other noise needs to be removed on the phone, which requires an algorithm that has relatively low memory and computational requirements. The continuous high-delta algorithm described fits those requirements. (via Medium)
  4. Affordable Arduino-Compatible Centimeter-Level GPS Accuracy (IndieGogo) — for less than $20. (via DIY Drones)
Four short links: 2 January 2014

Four short links: 2 January 2014

3D Model-to-Printer, GCode Visualizer, AC Power Control, and Public Domain Sadness

  1. slic3rconverts a digital 3D model into printing instructions for your 3D printer. It cuts the model into horizontal slices (layers), generates toolpaths to fill them and calculates the amount of material to be extruded.
  2. gCodeViewer — GCode is the “numerical control language” for telling extruders, mills, polishers, etc. where to move to and when. This open source package is a visual GCode visualizer, viewer and analyzer in your own browser! It works on any OS in almost any modern browser (chrome, ff, safari 6, opera, ie10 should work too). All you need to do – is drag your *.gcode file to the designated zone.
  3. AC Power Control with Arduinoin the video video and the code, we take an in depth look at the hardware for using Arduino interrupts to control AC power through a triac. Using a zero-crossing detector Arduino will detect the pulse then calculate a delay to control the power output to a load.
  4. What Didn’t Enter the Public Domain Today — a reminder of what the public domain lost because of the Sonny Bono/Disney copyright term extension, timely given there are bad times ahead.
Four short links: 24 December 2013

Four short links: 24 December 2013

Arduino Robot, LIDAR for Phones, Climbing Bots, and OS X Emulators

  1. Arduino Robot — for all your hacking needs.
  2. LIDAR for Smartphones (DIYdrones) — The device attaches to the back of a smartphone and combines a built-in laser range finder, 3D compass and Bluetooth chip with the phone’s camera and GPS.
  3. Bridge Inspection Robot Equipping Magnets — 7.8 inches/second, magnets, can scuttle up walls and along ceilings.
  4. OpenEmu — nice-looking emulator framework for OS X. Make your Christmas present a trip back in time.

Supercomputing on the cheap with Parallella

Blowing open the doors to low-power, on-demand supercomputing

Parallella topview

Packing impressive supercomputing power inside a small credit card-sized board running Ubuntu, Adapteva‘s $99 ARM-based Parallella system includes the unique Ephiphany numerical accelerator that promises to unleash industrial strength parallel processing on the desktop at a rock-bottom price. The Massachusetts-based startup recently ran a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign and gained widespread attention only to run into a few roadblocks along the way. Now, with their setbacks behind them, Adapteva is slated to deliver its first units mid-December 2013, with volume shipping in the following months.

What makes the Parallella board so exciting is that it breaks new ground: imagine an Open Source Hardware board, powered by just a few Watts of juice, delivering 90 GFLOPS of number crunching. Combine this with the possibility of clustering multiple boards, and suddenly the picture of an exceedingly affordable desktop supercomputer emerges.

This review looks in-depth at a pre-release prototype board (so-called Generation Zero, a development run of 50 units), giving you a pretty complete overview of what the finished board will look like.

Read more…

Upward Mobility: The Forgotten Mobile Platforms

They may not be as pretty, but low cost embedded computing is a big thing

When thinking about the mobile development space, it’s easy to make the mistake of restricting it to smartphones. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the stragglers dominate the news, and seeing someone typing away at a handset has become ubiquitous. But below the surface, there’s another set of mobile platforms that tend to get ignored, outside the DIY community, but are revolutionizing the world in their own way.

Traditionally, embedded computing was restricted to high-volume commercial applications (e.g., smart refrigerators and automobile control systems.) The intrepid hackers dabbled, but the amount of hardware knowledge required to get a CPU, memory and I/O logic onto a breadboard prevented any but the most experienced from implementing their own low-power embedded creations.

Read more…

Four short links: 28 November 2013

Four short links: 28 November 2013

Data Tool, Arduino-like Board, Learn to Code via Videogames, and Creative Commons 4.0 Out

  1. OpenRefine — (edited: 7 Dec 2013) Google abandoned Google bought Freebase’s GridWorks, turned it into the excellent Refine tool for working with data sets, now picked up and developed by open source community.
  2. Intel’s Arduino-Compatible Board — launched at MakerFaire Rome. (via Wired UK)
  3. Game Maven — learn to code by writing casual videogames. (via Greg Linden)
  4. CC 4.0 OutThe 4.0 licenses are extremely well-suited for use by governments and publishers of public sector information and other data, especially for those in the European Union. This is due to the expansion in license scope, which now covers sui generis database rights that exist there and in a handful of other countries.
Four short links: 24 October 2013

Four short links: 24 October 2013

Visual Arduino Coding, Hardware Iteration, Segmenting Images, and Client-Side Adjustable Data View

  1. Visually Programming Arduino — good for little minds.
  2. Rapid Hardware Iteration at Scale (Forbes) — It’s part of the unique way that Xiaomi operates, closely analyzing the user feedback it gets on its smartphones and following the suggestions it likes for the next batch of 100,000 phones. It releases them every Tuesday at noon Beijing time.
  3. Machine Learning of Hierarchical Clustering to Segment 2D and 3D Images (PLoS One) — We propose an active learning approach for performing hierarchical agglomerative segmentation from superpixels. Our method combines multiple features at all scales of the agglomerative process, works for data with an arbitrary number of dimensions, and scales to very large datasets.
  4. Kratuan Open Source client-side analysis framework to create simple yet powerful renditions of data. It allows you to dynamically adjust your view of the data to highlight issues, opportunities and correlations in the data.