Tools Hack Daily: October 2018

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Lego Skeleton Head #3DThursday #3DPrinting

This is a scaled head to fit on the following body: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2552442

download the files on: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3142167

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

Halloween eyes #3DThursday #3DPrinting

wizzle111 shares:

I made a 3d printed version of the toilet paper roll glowstick eyes.

download the files on: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3133148

ASK AN ENGINEER 10/31/18 LIVE! @adafruit #adafruit #AskAnEngineer

ASK AN ENGINEER 10/31/18 LIVE! (video). What is “Ask an engineer”? From the electronics enthusiast to the professional community – “Ask an Engineer” has a little bit of everything for everyone. If you’re a beginner, or a seasoned engineer – stop in and see what we’re up to! We have demos of projects and products we’re working on, we answer your engineering and electronics questions and we have a trivia question + give away each week.

http://www.adafruit.com/ask

Live text chat in discord in the #livebroadcast channel, and we’ll have live video on Youtube, Twitch, Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook.

NEW PRODUCTS – Conductive Nylon Fabric Tape – 5mm + 8mm Wide

With our fun assortment of conductive materials, cosplay and wearables have never been easier to craft!

This Conductive Nylon tape goes great with our other interesting materials, such as copper tape, ITO glass or plastic, conductive inks, etc. We found that the metallic nylon fabric has some great improvements over plain copper tape.

First of all it doesn’t crack when bent or twisted! So you can make all sorts of odd shapes and paths without worrying about broken traces. It’s also more flexible so you can put it on a flexible material.
It comes with conductive glue on the opposite side, so you can tape it directly to capacitive pads.
It’s high conductivity, only a few ohms per foot. It’s not quite as conductive as pure copper tape, but you can definitely power small components.
But, you cannot solder to it like you can with pure copper tape. You can sew it though, since it’s fabric.

Each order comes with a strip of 5mm wide x 10 meter long tape. It’s long enough you can use it for a bunch of projects. Just cut out the size you need and save the rest.

First up, the 5mm!

Each order comes with a strip of 5mm wide x 10 meter long tape. It’s long enough you can use it for a bunch of projects. Just cut out the size you need and save the rest.

If this tape isn’t wide enough, we also carry it in 8mm!

And now, the 8mm!

In stock and shipping now! Conductive Nylon Fabric Tape – 5mm + 8mm Wide

NEW GUIDE Great Seal Spooky Eye Mask #CircuitPython #Hallowing #Halloween

This guide shows you how to make an creepy Halloween mask! This quick and easy project uses the Adafruit HalloWing to create a creepy Halloween mask from the seal found on the back of the one dollar bill.

The Great Seal was first designed in 1782, and has been printed on the back of the one-dollar bill since 1935.
This hand is designed to pull itself along the floor slowly, waiting until it finds a cold, dark spot, at which point it will stop and wait until temperature and light increase.

An old pair of sunglasses (with lenses removed) or a headband can be used to hold this mask to the face.

Check out the Halloween mask on Adafruit Learn System to learn more!

DIY ESP8266 Smart Watch #WearableWednesday

Via Hackaday:

Not content with a watch that simply tells the time, [Shyam] added in a weather function that pulls the current conditions for his corner of the globe from the Yahoo weather API and displays it above the time and date on the watch’s multi-color OLED display when the center button is pressed. Frankly, given the state of DIY watches, that would already have been impressive enough; but he didn’t stop there.

The left and right buttons control Internet-connected relays which [Shyam] uses to turn his lights and air conditioner on and off. When he presses the corresponding button, the watch will even display the status of the devices wherever his travels might take him.

Learn more!

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

From the Forums: Terminator Skull with #CircuitPlaygroundExpress #Halloween

terminator skull adafruit forums

From the Adafruit Forums: James Kato 3D printed an awesome Terminator skull and made it come to life with an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express. See the Youtube video below.

Also see their 3D printed skull case for the Adafruit HalloWing. Nice work!

Magic Light Bag of Holding

Create a bag that magically collects and holds lights! Pull up to ten colored lights from nowhere, and drop each one into your bag and watch them light up. Turn the bag upside down and all the lights will spill out and vanish.

Delight and amaze your friends, UPS guy, kids, or pets with this simple trick. It's really easy to customize in MakeCode, with endless possibilities for colors, triggers, and magic effects.

VU Meter Costume #WearableWednesday #ElectronicHalloween

From Team partyanimals: Salma Mayorquin, Terry Rodriguez on Hackster.io:

This is a very simple project you can wire together and make you the life of the party.

Components

For this project, we need a small board that is portable, requires minimal power, and can handle powering all the fairy light LED strings. We found that a Light Blue Bean is a great board for this use case. It has a small rechargeable lithium ion battery already soldered on to keep the board powered and plenty of analog/digital pins to control each section. If you need to power it for a long time, it is easy to carry a battery pack like this one to plug in and charge.

As mentioned, you’ll need plenty of string LEDs, enough to cover your entire body. We got three of the string LEDs listed in the components list above in green, yellow, and red.

You’ll also need plenty of thread and wire to attach the lights to fabric and connect all the sections together.

How to practice effectively…for just about anything

TED-Ed shared this video on Youtube!

Mastering any physical skill takes practice. Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement, and it helps us perform with more ease, speed, and confidence. But what does practice actually do to make us better at things? Annie Bosler and Don Greene explain how practice affects the inner workings of our brains.

See more and check out the full lesson here!

@BarnabyJDixon recreates the OOGIE BOOGIE song #ElectronicHalloween

Barnaby J Dixon recreates the oogie boogie song from the cult classic, A Nightmare Before Christmas.

Subscribe on YouTube

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! And big thanks to my Patrons over at https://ift.tt/2bArM4c for this fun suggestion!

The CIA’s Former Chief of Disguise Show How Spies Use Costumes in Undercover Operations #Wearables

Via Open Culture!

Think on this as you ready your Halloween finery. Sometimes it’s not a case of winning a costume contest, or impressing your friends with your witty take on current events or pop culture.

Sometimes, masquerade is a thin line between life and death.

The CIA’s former Chief of Disguise, Jonna Mendez, rose up through the ranks, having signed on as receptionist shortly after her fiancé revealed—three days before the wedding—that he was actually an undercover agent.

As Chief of Disguise, her mission was to protect case officers in dangerous situations, as well as foreign sources who routinely put their lives at risk by meeting with American operatives.

Transforming their appearance was an additive proposition—while it’s difficult to make someone shorter, slimmer, or younger, it’s not difficult to render them taller, heavier, older…

In her experience, women are easily disguised as men. (She shared with The New York Times’ Matthew Rosenberg how she herself passed undetected in male mufti, thanks primarily to a lit cigar.)

Men have a tougher time passing as women. Fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race might take exception to this position, were it not for the assertion that blending in is key.

The goal is to be forgettable, not fabulous.

For Americans abroad, this poses certain cultural challenges.

Mendez stresses that disguise is much more than a simple facial transformation, involving makeup, false hair, and prosthetics.

It’s dress, carriage, gait, jewelry, scent…

The biggest American giveaway is our shoes. An Italian civilian can peg ‘em with one swift glance.

Passing requires further behavioral modifications in the realms of table manners, gait, and even hanging out. (Europeans distribute their weight evenly, whereas Americans lean.)

To fly beneath the radar, the disguised operative must shoot to transform every aspect of their appearance. Imagine a survey wherein the participant recalls every physical aspect of someone they’ve just encountered. The goal is to nudge that participant into answering every question incorrectly.

See more!

DIY Linear Servo Actuator #3DPrinted via @PotentPrintable

Ali shared on Thingiverse:

Linear Servo Actuators

This video shows how to assemble and then run these DIY linear servo actuators (pusher style). Two sizes have been designed and made available for any project you have that needs a pusher style linear actuator.

An off the shelf version can cost around $70, while these 3D printed versions are much lower cost. Links to the STL files, part lists and affiliate links can be found below.

GIFAANISQATSI: GIFs Out of Balance

via The Verge

Koyaanisqatsi is a film that is impossible to forget, despite having absolutely no plot.

The 1982 film is an hour-long montage of scenes from around the world that was directed by Godfrey Reggio, but is perhaps best known for its soundtrack, which was scored by the composer Philip Glass. Koyaanisqatsi derives its title from a Hopi word meaning “life out of balance” and its shot selection ranges over everything from nature time lapses to the inner workings of a hotdog factory.

In a 21st century twist on this classic work of experimental cinema, the artist Rico Monkeon has created a Koyaanisqatsi generator that sources its imagery from randomly selected GIFs. The premise of Monkeon’s “GIFAANISQATSI” is simple enough: GIFs tagged with “slow motion” or “time-lapse” are pulled from Giphy’s repository and looped over a two-minute selection from Koyaanisqatsi’s soundtrack that is used in the film’s trailer.

GIFAANISQATSI

Halloween Eyes with ItsyBity via @sudomod_wermy

Wermy shared on YouTube:

Spooky Arduino Halloween Eyes

Links to everything you need: https://www.sudomod.com/spooky-arduino-halloween-eyes/
Follow me on Instagram to see what I’m up to between videos: https://www.instagram.com/sudomod_wermy/
Discord server: https://discord.gg/8BDrDjQ

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Thousands Of Swedes Are Inserting Microchips Under Their Skin #WearableWednesday

Interesting piece from NPR about the growing use of chip implants. Will this be a growing trend or passing fad?

In Sweden, a country rich with technological advancement, thousands have had microchips inserted into their hands.

The chips are designed to speed up users’ daily routines and make their lives more convenient — accessing their homes, offices and gyms is as easy as swiping their hands against digital readers.

They also can be used to store emergency contact details, social media profiles or e-tickets for events and rail journeys within Sweden.

Proponents of the tiny chips say they’re safe and largely protected from hacking, but one scientist is raising privacy concerns around the kind of personal health data that might be stored on the devices.

Around the size of a grain of rice, the chips typically are inserted into the skin just above each user’s thumb, using a syringe similar to that used for giving vaccinations. The procedure costs about $180.

So many Swedes are lining up to get the microchips that the country’s main chipping company says it can’t keep up with the number of requests.

Despite these concerns, there seems to be no letup in the trend. One coworking space and innovation hub in Stockholm is holding a large implant party this month where a tech startup, DSruptive, is promising to reveal “the next generation consumer-level implant.” The device will include 2KB of memory — double that of earlier implants — a range of new functions and an LED light designed to improve privacy by blinking if someone tries to read or access an implant.

Learn more!

NEW GUIDE: Magic Light Bag of Holding

Delight and amaze your friends, UPS guy, kids, or pets with this simple trick. It’s really easy to customize in MakeCode, with endless possibilities for colors, triggers, and magic effects.

Full build tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System: https://learn.adafruit.com/magic-light-bag-of-holding/overview

NEW GUIDE: Magic Light Bag of Holding

Delight and amaze your friends, UPS guy, kids, or pets with this simple trick. It’s really easy to customize in MakeCode, with endless possibilities for colors, triggers, and magic effects.

Full build tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System: https://learn.adafruit.com/magic-light-bag-of-holding/overview

NEW GUIDE: Magic Light Bag of Holding

Delight and amaze your friends, UPS guy, kids, or pets with this simple trick. It’s really easy to customize in MakeCode, with endless possibilities for colors, triggers, and magic effects.

Full build tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System: https://learn.adafruit.com/magic-light-bag-of-holding/overview

NEW GUIDE: Magic Light Bag of Holding

Delight and amaze your friends, UPS guy, kids, or pets with this simple trick. It’s really easy to customize in MakeCode, with endless possibilities for colors, triggers, and magic effects.

Full build tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System: https://learn.adafruit.com/magic-light-bag-of-holding/overview

Double Helixes Streak Across the Sky in Multi-Shot Images of Birds by Xavi Bou #ArtTuesday

Via Thisiscolossal

Spanish photographer Xavi Bou (previously) tracks and records the flight patterns of birds, combining their repetitive movements into elongated shapes that twist through the sky for his series Ornitographies. The images are inspired by chronophotography, a Victorian era photography method that combined multiple images to create movement, and edited digitally in Photoshop. The layered images appear like floating double helixes or fringed ribbon depending on the size and wingspan of each bird, and create elegant gestures as they criss-cross against the blue sky.

Recently Bou traveled to Iceland where he captured new species of birds set against a dramatically different landscape than his previous images. “Iceland was especially interesting because I was looking for the contrast between the size and heaviness of the volcanic rocks, in contrast between the tiny patterns that marine birds create in the sky,” he tells Colossal. Bou has also recently visited Barcelona to watch pigeons race across the city, and Tarifa, Spain to experience thousands of birds from all over Europe cross the sea towards Africa. You can see more of his multi-shot avian images on his website and Instagram.

See more!

Running Zork and Z Machine Games on an Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Express @cogliano #RetroGaming #ItsyBitsy

Running Zork on an Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Express

Dan Cogliano aka Dan the Man has done some remarkable work porting the classic PDP-10 game Zork and other Infocom Z Machine games to the Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Express.

Zork was originally developed in the late 1970’s on a DEC PDP-10 computer at MIT using a descendant of the LISP language. There was also a FORTRAN version that was translated to the C language. When the development moved to a commercial endeavor through the startup company Infocom, Zork was rewritten in two parts: An interpreter and a story file read by the interpreter.

This allowed Zork to run on many different computers, where there were quite a few in the 80’s. The same story file could be used on any computer, only the story interpreter had to be created for that computer. This also allowed new stories and sequels to be created that could run using the same interpreter. The name for the interpreter was called the Z Machine. There are several open source Z Machine implementations available. My goal was to implement a Z Machine on an [microcontroller] that allows playing Zork and other compatible interactive fiction games.

From PDP-10 to Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4

The original Zork story file is about 90KB in size, which leaves plenty of room in the M4’s 192 KB of RAM for the Z Machine. The 2MB SPI FLASH provides enough storage for plenty of Z Machine games and save files.

The A2Z Machine supports Z Machine files version 3 and version 5 (usually “.z3” and “.z5” extensions). You can find other compatible games and resources on the internet including these sites:

The Interactive Fiction Database
Z-Machine Matter

From mainframe to a board smaller than your thumb. Lots of fun and great work Dan! See Dan’s whole article here along with the related tweet.

See our previous article on Zork on the PDP-10 and translations.

Do you like Retro Gaming? Remember Infocom games? Post in the comments below!

Wearable Heart Rate Badge Uses Bitalino ECG Sensor, Flora, NeoPixels | #WearableWednesday #wearables #Electrocardiography @BITalinoWorld #BadgeLife

ECG SENSOR:
https://ift.tt/2Q7EZCu

WAITING ON REPLY TO MY COMMENT TO RE-UPLOAD MOVIE:
https://ift.tt/2qieYVN

I’BLE:
https://ift.tt/2qieYVN

I’ve seen the Bitalino boards before at an Engadget Expand event – they were smart, break-offable modules and their ECG & EMG blocks always seemed really intriguing. This very cool project from Instructables user LyndsyS uses the ECG module

that uses a Flora, Flora NeoPixels,

Pedalino: A smart, open source wireless MIDI foot controller for guitarists and more

Pedalino

With the Pedalino, you can change the presets of your guitar rig, turn old MIDI equipment into something that’s USB-compatible, give you hands-free or foot-occupied ways to control your rig during a live performance, and it can be expanded with WiFi or Bluetooth. This is a full-featured MIDI controller, with three user profiles, and it can control a maximum of 48 foot switches. That’s an impressive amount of kit for such a small device; usually you’d have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a simple MIDI controller, and the Pedalino does everything with very cheap hardware.

See the GitHub for the project, the Hackaday article, and the video below.

Pedalino: A smart, open source wireless MIDI foot controller for guitarists and more

Pedalino

See the GitHub for the project, the Hackaday article, and the video below.

New Book: Capturing Telemetry with #Python, Flask and @Raspberry_Pi #MicroPython @Adafruit #Feather

PYTHON, RASPBERRY PI AND FLASK - CAPTURE TELEMETRY DATA AND WEB DASHBOARDS (ESP8266 & MICROPYTHON)

A new book in French from MC Hobby details capturing telemetry and making web dashboards in MicroPython and Flask with Adafruit Feather HUZZAH ESP8266 and Raspberry Pi.

The book develops projects explaining how to capture telemetry data from a house (temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, brightness) and present them in a web interface in the form of dashboards … not to mention the persistent storage of data.

The book makes heavy use of Adafruit products in their examples. The book will be available in early November 2018, see this site.

A History of Halloween Advertising #ArtTuesday

via Firewood

If you’ve entered a chain superstore recently, you may have followed signs toward a bootastic explosion of costumes, candies, and plastic pumpkin heads. Wallets are loosened, credit cards swiped. It’s so very hard to resist. And there’s a reason for that.
Halloween first achieved “merchandising necromancy” in the roaring twenties. The headline below spells it out: “Making business where none was before.”

Wearable Heart Rate Badge Uses Bitalino ECG Sensor, Flora, NeoPixels | #WearableWednesday #wearables #Electrocardiography @BITalinoWorld #BadgeLife

ECG SENSOR:
https://ift.tt/2Q7EZCu

WAITING ON REPLY TO MY COMMENT TO RE-UPLOAD MOVIE:
https://ift.tt/2qieYVN

I’BLE:
https://ift.tt/2qieYVN

that uses a Flora, Flora NeoPixels,

A Video Game Shows the True Colors of Ancient Greece #ArtTuesday

The landscapes of modern video games are sights to see in their own right. From breathtaking sunsets to shadowy alleyways devs are packing in more detail than ever before. Assassin’s Creed Oddyssy beautifully recreates Ancient Greece. Via Hyperallergic:

For a video game that includes bloody mercenaries, extraterrestrial beings, and time travel, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is shockingly faithful to our contemporary historical understanding of what Ancient Greece looked like during its golden age. The Ubisoft development team behind the game even hired a historical advisor to help them recreate a meticulous version of the Ancient World, one that includes hundreds of polychromatic statues, temples, and tombs.

Upon the game’s release, a handful of classics scholars debated the merits of Odyssey on Twitter using the hashtag #ACademicOdyssey, created by Professor Hannah Čulík-Baird, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with researchers noting how a game focused on world-building had to incorporate multiple fields of study (i.e., art, history, epigraphy, architecture, archaeology, ancient languages) to create a believable setting for gamers. Such immersion also allows academics to contextualize their own specializations vis-à-vis the expertise of others.

Learn more!

Uncanny Eyes Halloween Costume @HacksterIO #Halloween #UncannyEyes #ESP32

Halloween Skull Costume with Uncanny Eyes on ESP32

LaurentR on Hackster.io shows us FIVE pairs of uncanny eyes, all controllable via a Wii Nunchuck!

This was my 2018 Halloween project. I was very impressed by Adafruit’s Uncanny Eyes and decided to use them as a basis for my Halloween contribution this year.

The original Uncanny Eyes do a great job at looking realistic in the the rendering and the movement of the eyes, eyelids and pupils. This projects extends this in several directions:

Integrate the eyes into a realistic skull.

Integrate multiple of the skulls on a costume, at eye-level for best effect. The random movement of multiple pairs of eyes creates a nice disturbing effect.

Allow the wearer of the costume to seamlessly transition from random motion to coordinated movements under the control of a handheld input device with an analog joystick and buttons.

Allow the wearer to switch between different types of eyes. The human eyes are great. This adds the option to easily switch to the scary looking newt eyes.

Parts include a ESP32 DEVKITV1, generic displays, a nunchuck from Adafruit and some custom code modified from the Adafruit tutorials.

See the full details here and the video below! Great build!

Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917 to 1931) #ArtTuesday

Via open culture

Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way cool maiden/robot hybrids, but it often shows a level of daring, complexity and creativity not typically found in American mainstream animation. And the form has spawned some clear masterpieces from Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira to Mamoru Oishii’s Ghost in the Shell to pretty much everything that Hayao Miyazaki has ever done.

Anime has a far longer history than you might think; in fact, it was at the vanguard of Japan’s furious attempts to modernize in the early 20th century. The oldest surviving example of Japanese animation, Namakura Gatana (Blunt Sword), dates back to 1917, though much of the earliest animated movies were lost following a massive earthquake in Tokyo in 1923. As with much of Japan’s cultural output in the first decades of the 20th Century, animation from this time shows artists trying to incorporate traditional stories and motifs in a new modern form.

Above is Oira no Yaku (Our Baseball Game) from 1931, which shows rabbits squaring off against tanukis (raccoon dogs) in a game of baseball. The short is a basic slapstick comedy elegantly told with clean, simple lines. Rabbits and tanukis are mainstays of Japanese folklore, though they are seen here playing a sport that was introduced to the country in the 1870s. Like most silent Japanese movies, this film made use of a benshi – a performer who would stand by the movie screen and narrate the movie. In the old days, audiences were drawn to the benshi, not the movie. Akira Kurosawa’s elder brother was a popular benshi who, like a number of despondent benshis, committed suicide when the popularity of sound cinema rendered his job obsolete.

See more!