Tools Hack Daily: December 2019

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Building a ‘papercraft’ LED marquee #LEDs #Charlieplexing

The CrawlingRobotFortress blog posts about building a ‘papercraft’ 5×22 LED marquee.

Long, dark winter nights demand some tinkering and crafts. Arduino LED projects are fun, but custom circuit boards might not always be in the budget. Thankfully, discrete LEDs can be found on Ebay for less than 1¢ apiece, and cardboard circuits are a thing. Can we build a scrolling marquee display with nothing more than some LEDs, cardboard, and paper?

The LED marquee is laid out on cardboard, with dividers to separate pixels. A little screen on top diffuses the light.

And how to handle all the LEDs?

We will use a “Charlieplexing” layout to control many LEDs using only a few pins. This can be a difficult to lay out by hand. Thankfully, there is a trick: if we’re willing to tilt the grid diagonally, we can use a pattern that is easy to layout and assemble. The code to drive the display gets a bit confusing, but one can always manually map the LED locations one-by-one, if push comes to shove.

See the post for the full build details.

Celebrating the Art of Vaughan Oliver #ArtTuesday

From Hi•Fructose:

Vaughan Oliver, the artist behind so many memorable LP covers from 4AD, has died at 62. Bands in his body of work include The Breeders, Pixies, Scott Walker, TV on the Radio, Lush, Cocteau Twins, Modern English, The Mountain Goats, and several others.

Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Dezeen’s Top 10 Conceptual Architecture Projects of 2019 #ArtTueday

via dezeen

This year designers created a huge variety of conceptual architecture from a straw bale school to a bamboo colony on Mars. Semi Han continues our review of 2019 with 10 of the most intriguing concepts.

Platte Basin Timelapse: A Watershed in Motion

Mick's Slide Timelapse

Water is a critical resource for all life on earth, but sometimes it’s easy to take for granted. The Platte Basin Timelapse project seeks to change that:

The Platte Basin Timelapse project tells stories of the Platte River Basin using innovative multimedia content. The long-term documentary project uses more than 60 time-lapse camera systems placed throughout the 90,000 square-mile basin, from its headwaters in the Colorado Rockies to the river’s confluence with the Missouri River on Nebraska’s eastern border.

The site is chock-full of striking images and videos. One that caught my eye is called “A Trout With Feathers“:

In the upper reaches of North America’s watersheds, one will find a charismatic chunky gray bird dipping and diving underwater in clear, fast-flowing streams. This bird is called the American dipper and is North America’s only aquatic songbird. Photographer and conservationist Mike Forsberg fell in love with the American dipper on a college fishing trip. After learning about these birds and their unique behaviors of dipping and diving underwater, he set out on a mission to document their natural history. This included photographing their behavior above water and below. This film follows Mike on his quest to photograph the American dipper diving underwater in the Poudre River in Colorado and will introduce you to lifelong birder, retired school teacher, and ex-Harley rider Steve Den who helps Mike along the way.

See the video below for more:

For more information, visit http://plattebasintimelapse.com/ or check out @PlatteBasin on social media. #plattebasintimelapse #naturalresources #waterconservation

7,000 thanks! Python for Microcontrollers newsletter! @circuitpython @adafruit

Adafruit Daily 7000 Thanks Fb Ig

Thanks to everyone who shares their projects, code, sends in links, and for the joy of coding with Python on hardware, the Python for Microcontrollers newsletter has reached over 7,000 subscribers! The latest newsletter is here (and check them all out here), you can sign up here at adafruitdaily.com – the next one ships out next week, Tuesday at 11am ET!

We started the Python on Microcontrollers newsletter in November of 2016. Since then, we’ve published 152 newsletters. We’re so thankful for all the readers and contributors.

The Psychedelic Beauty of Destroyed CDs #ArtTuesday #Photography

After no longer having a use for physical cds, artist Rus Khasanov uses the discs for his art. Via Wired:

Three frenzied days of destruction followed. Sticking CDs and DVDs in the freezer produced frost and water droplets that magnified the iridescence beneath. Burning the metallic saucers formed bubbles and cracks on the polycarbonate surface—but the fumes were toxic, so he stopped. He illuminated the warped discs with LED panels and photographed them through a macro lens, capturing swirling tie-dye patterns that look like far-out screensavers. Though he blasted them with compressed air beforehand, he still had to spend hours dusting them in Photoshop. “Under a macro lens, the smallest specks look like pimples,” he says.

See more!

Hyperallergic on Michel Pastoureau’s Yellow: The History of a Color #ArtTuesday

Michel Pastoureau’s Yellow: The History of a Color sounds like the text book for that one class you decided to take last minute that turned out to be the best decision you ever made! Via Hyperallergic:

Over three broad chapters that take us from the ochres of prehistory to the neon of the gilet jaunes (yellow vest protesters) in France, we are reminded that color is mostly a cultural construction. We “make” colors when we group similar tones under one name and imbue those tones with symbolic meanings stemming from and exhibited in scientific, artistic, and other cultural sources. A professor of medieval history and symbology expert, Pastoureau is an adept and lucid guide to yellow’s mutable connotations.

Mostly 3D Printed Binary Encoder

What a really neat project.

via megardi on instructables

An encoder converts information from one format or code to another. The device presented in this Instructable will convert the decimal numbers 0 through 9 into their binary equivalents. However, the concepts presented here can be used to create encoders for any reasonable number of items and codes (say 20 or less). Aside from a few easily obtained microswitches and screws, all of the parts for this mostly mechanical machine can be 3D printed.

Why Does Cold Weather Kill Your Phone?

Handy video from SciShow.

If you live in a cold climate, you might know the agony of trying to get your car started on a chilly winter morning, or standing helplessly by as your phone’s battery level plummets. So why do cold weather and batteries seem to just not get along?

Brightly coloured apartment blocks in Moscow! #ArtTuesday

Via Dezeen

Italian architecture studio Iosa Ghini Associati has worked with Russian firm Mosproekt-3 to complete 47 high-rise buildings clad with colourful panels on the outskirts of Moscow.

Situated in the Dmitrovskoe Shosse district, the development consists of numerous 16-story high-rise blocks arranged around two vast communal courtyards with a strip of green space and low-rise buildings in between.

See more!

Syd Mead, Designer for Blade Runner, Alien, TRON, and More, Leaves an Amazing Legacy #ArtTuesday

via Hi-Fructose

[Syd] Mead was hired to design vehicles for Blade Runner, but he did what he has always done: he immersed his transportation ideas within a story, and, essentially, painted his way into the movie. By the end, his hand could be felt on everything, from the objects Harrison Ford held to the dripping city streets he walked.

“The movie industry has really changed since then, moving toward one-stop shopping,” says Mead. “As an independent, I might get hired to design one thing, like when they asked me to do the Mask-Maker for Mission: Impossible III, because they wanted something that would look like it could actually work. But usually the same shop does the sets and the props. Blade Runner was different.”

See more!

Balance the Forces within a Mobile #MakerEducation

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Another fun activity from Scientific American.

Have you ever seen a mobile? Not a mobile phone—but a hanging art sculpture? You might have had such a mobile in your room when you were little. These mobiles hang in the air and are usually made up of layers of hanging balanced rods, which, in turn, have objects hanging from them. When you look at a mobile sculpture you might wonder how it stays balanced—even when it is in motion. In this activity you will make your own mobile sculpture and find out.

Monday, December 30, 2019

Anatomy and Broidery in the Art of Lia Pas #ArtTuesday

From Lia Pas via Art the Science

I’m very inspired by older anatomical artists. It fascinates me how they depicted the body without the aid of photography or the imaging techniques we have now. I’ve already mentioned Andreas Vesalius, as well as Henry Vandyke Carter, the illustrator of Gray’s Anatomy. I’m fascinated by the waxwork anatomical venuses created by Clemente Susini as well as by Ramón y Cajal’s neurology drawings and Ernst Haeckel’s biology drawings and groupings. Björk has done some fascinating SciArt work with her music and videos and Meredith Monk’s music theatre pieces that combine spirituality, ecology, and incredible vocal explorations have definitely influenced my work both sonically and visually. I absolutely adore Greg Dunn’s neurology pieces and Rogan Brown‘s exquisite paper-cut work. Fibre artist Vanessa Barragão‘s huge rugs of coral reefs and Louise Bourgeois’ interdisciplinarity are also absolutely inspiring.

Since becoming ill with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) in 2015, my more recent work has been primarily in fibre arts. ME/CFS is a neuroimmune disease, and I have many neurological symptoms to deal with because of it. In 2016, I started embroidering my neurological sensations of pain and paresthesia as a way of both better understanding them and as a practice of “exquisite attention,” which made them feel less disruptive and less painful in my day to day….

See more!

Elementary School Teachers Try Out An Interesting White Bread Experiment And It Goes Viral | #MakerEducation

5dfb37333790e school dirty hands moldy bread experiment 6 5df9e5e390e7c 700

An especially effective reminder to your students to wash their hands, especially during peak germ season, from DeMilked.

It always baffles me how some people think not washing your hands after leaving the restroom is completely okay. You’d think it’s common sense, especially with so many nasty bacteria already living on our hands, but apparently not everyone thinks that way. Recently, two teachers – Jaralee Metcalf and Dayna Robertson – found an interesting experiment called “How clean are your hands?” online that shows just how much bacteria lives on our hands, and decided to try it out with their students.

Elementary School Teachers Try Out An Interesting White Bread Experiment And It Goes Viral | #MakerEducation

5dfb37333790e school dirty hands moldy bread experiment 6 5df9e5e390e7c 700

An especially effective reminder to your students to wash their hands, especially during peak germ season, from DeMilked.

It always baffles me how some people think not washing your hands after leaving the restroom is completely okay. You’d think it’s common sense, especially with so many nasty bacteria already living on our hands, but apparently not everyone thinks that way. Recently, two teachers – Jaralee Metcalf and Dayna Robertson – found an interesting experiment called “How clean are your hands?” online that shows just how much bacteria lives on our hands, and decided to try it out with their students.

Design a Laser Cut Gift Box in Fusion 360

Desktop Makes shared this video on Youtube!

In this video we create a pattern for a laser cut gift box using @Autodesk Fusion 360 . After creating the design I show how to export it as either a dxf file or an svg file.

Arduino 2020: features, ideas, and more … post yours! @arduino @adafruit #arduino

Arduino Featured

Adafruit has been part of the Arduino community from the start, making and sharing open-source libraries, code, and hardware. We’ve put together a list of updates and suggested features based on community feedback, things we are re working on, and requests we have received. Here’s the list we came up with!

Post up in the comments with what you want to make, share, build, or see in Arduino in 2020. We’ll also post this to the Arduino developer list.

DOWNLOAD STATS FROM ARDUINO FOR COMMUNITY AND DEVELOPERS

Currently, there is no way (unless you work at Arduino) to get the download stats for libraries. The way the Arduino Library manager works is that once a copy is moved to Arduino, stats for developers are not available and are not published. The site: arduinolibraries.info is an attempt at that, but it can only get data from GitHub and public sources.

Having the download stats of the library you have contributed to Arduino would help software developers and community to know what’s popular, what development resources are needed, and encourage developers to contribute their libraries to Arduino. Download stats were mentioned in April of 2019. We got a top 10 from the presentation and have a post about it here.

TINYUSB SUPPORT IN ARDUINO-CORE

The Arduino low level hardware support was recently “chainsaw”-ed to make adding new hardware cores easy and keep them all compatible. TinyUSB is an open-source cross-platform USB Host/Device stack for embedded systems, and it is a perfect fit as a default USB stack (when none is provided by the hardware port). It allows developers to add USB support to their hardware quickly and easily. The supported boards include: MicroChip SAMD, Nordic nRF5x, NXP iMX RT, NXP LPC, Sony, ST STM32, Tomu and more.

If Arduino replaced the current USB stack with TinyUSB, more hardware makers and software developers would be able to contribute to the Arduino ecosystem. This would make it easier to add new chipsets, and open up the peripherals available. (For example, mass storage which is an oft-requested but unavailable class for Arduino). Best of all, the same USB interfaces would work across all ports!

UF2 BOOTLOADER SUPPORT FROM ARDUINO

UF2 is an open-source file format and bootloading specification, developed by Microsoft for PXT (also known as Microsoft MakeCode) that makes it super-easy to flash microcontrollers. It shows up as a USB drive and new/updated software can be flashed to the device eliminating much of the frustration for users. Even better you can drag existing firmware OFF the device, for backup and distribution. It solves many problems with serial port drivers/identification, tricky command line tools like bossa, and project setup.There are bootloaders for Microchip ATSAMD21 and ATSAMD51, Arduino UNO, STM32F103, STM32F4, Nordic NRF52840, Linux (RPi Zero), Cypress FX2 and more!

Microsoft has a great post about it, and check it out on GitHub.

Being able to flash devices immediately without special cables or software, and being able to run Arduino (or Python, tinyGo, uLisp, etc) on your hardware gives users the maximum choice for what they want to do. It’s the easiest way to send updates to users if they are developers or hardware makers. Arduino supporting UF2 would allow more people to contribute to the Arduino ecosystem and participate with their hardware innovations.

ARDUINO LIBRARY STANDARDS & AUTOMATION

Writing software is like gardening – the flowers are beautiful but you’re going to spend a lot of time weeding! Except instead of weeding, it’s keeping up to date with new frameworks, operating systems and dependencies. It’s a ton of work! Automation makes this easy – there are free continuous integration services like Travis and GitHub actions. It would be really great if there was an Arduino CI system check/prerequisite for inclusion into the Arduino library manager. Stuff like dependencies, clean formatting, documentation, and other ‘linting’ that could be done to promote good quality libraries and coding styles. There’s been more work on this recently, in compilation-testing, which is a great start. It would be great to have the CI script do even more common-error checking like -Wall, or clang-format.

UNIFORM TRANSFER OF STRUCTURED DATA OF UART, SPI, ETC. IN ARDUINO

Related to library standards checking with automation – it would be a great help when creating better libraries and examples if there were some lightly-structured helpers for the common bus interfaces like UART/SPI/I2C, so folks don’t have to copy-and-paste the same code over and over for transmitting data. This would be a big boon for library writers who can have small bugs slip in and also will keep code updated as the interfaces improve – for example when the I2C buffer size changes, SMBus-style register reading, bitmask twiddling, or when transactions are improved/added. Adafruit created – Adafruit_BusIO. Having a universally-available toolset would also keep hardware forks from adding or changing the bus interfaces.

SUPPORT FOR GROVE / QWIIC / STEMMA ON ARDUINO HARDWARE

On the Arduino MKR there is a 5-pin JST SH connector, with +5V, ground, and SDA/SCL. This is great because we’re definitely seeing a big shift over to I2C as its the one and only ‘universal’ interface for sensors and mainboards, it’s even supported in Linux and there’s USB to I2C adapters that cost $1.50. However, given it’s a 5V power supply not 3V, it risks having I2C pullups to 5V on the ‘client’ device if its plugged into something like a Grove sensor – or possibly trying to connect it to a non-regulated sensor and frazzling it. It’s not a big issue but it would be great if the power supply was 3V so it would work with SparkFun QWIIC, Seeed Grove, DF Robot Gravity, or Adafruit STEMMA / STEMMA QT. If everyone making breakouts would be interested in committing to a standard, it would make customers very happy!

Post up in the comments with what you want to make, share, build, or see in Arduino in 2020.

ino-hardware-package-list: A list of all known Arduino hardware packages @arduino

ino-hardware-package-list: A list of all known Arduino hardware packages. Handy …

A list of all known Arduino hardware packages.

Hardware packages (AKA “cores”) contain the hardware definitions used by the Arduino IDE and arduino-cli. They may add support for new boards and/or programmers.

Full list here.

Crushable robot insect sneers at fly swatters and shoes #Robotics #Robots #Insects

Deansect1

The team must be taking notes from NYC cockroaches. Via Cnet:

The DEAnsect, a fly-swatter-defying soft robot, could inspire all sorts of sci-fi fun, but its creators foresee a helpful future where the tiny bots work together for inspections, repairs or as remote emissaries sent to study real insect colonies.

A team at Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland developed the fast, agile robot. “DEAnsect is propelled by soft artificial muscles: It can be twisted, bent, squeezed, while retaining its functionality,” EPFL said.

Learn more!

Crushable robot insect sneers at fly swatters and shoes #Robotics #Robots #Insects

Deansect1

The team must be taking notes from NYC cockroaches. Via Cnet:

The DEAnsect, a fly-swatter-defying soft robot, could inspire all sorts of sci-fi fun, but its creators foresee a helpful future where the tiny bots work together for inspections, repairs or as remote emissaries sent to study real insect colonies.

A team at Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland developed the fast, agile robot. “DEAnsect is propelled by soft artificial muscles: It can be twisted, bent, squeezed, while retaining its functionality,” EPFL said.

Learn more!

Sourcing Lithium from the Chile’s Salt Flats

via Engadget

Using Landsat data from the US Geological survey, NASA’s Laren Dauphin recently imaged the Salar de Atacama in Chile. The enclosed basin is the world’s largest source of lithium, producing 29 percent of the world’s reserves. Much of it will wind up in rechargeable batteries used by EVs, laptops and smartphones, but how it gets there is surprising — think salt production, not pit mines.

Salar de Atacama is a salt flat from an ancient sea bed that contains massive reserves of lithium brine beneath its surface (“salar” means “salt flat”). It’s cut off in the east by the Andes mountains, and to the west by another range called Cordillera de Domeyko. It’s the driest desert in the world and with the high altitude (1.4 miles above sea level) the relentless sun would damage your skin in just minutes.

See more!

Better 3D graphics on the Arduino: avoiding flickering and tearing #Arduino #Graphics

The crawlingrobotfortress blog posts about creating better 3D graphics on the Arduino Uno. With the speed and memory of Arduino 328 boards, flickering and image tearing may be common:

A while ago I purchased a cheap $4 Chinese LCD Arduino shield from Ebay. The board arrived with no documentation. … The vendor provided an archive containing a few amusingly translated datasheets, as well as a copy of Adafruit’s Arduino LCD drivers. Evidently the product is a clone of the Adafruit LCD shields, and uses the ILI9341 LCD driver. I had hoped to use the display to show short animated GIF loops. This is not, in practice, possible. Test animations loaded slowly, with noticeable flicker and vertical tearing. The Arduino does not have enough speed or bandwidth to render full-screen animation frames, but what about 3D vector graphics?

Both optimizing ILI9341 LCD drivers and rendering basic wireframe meshes have been done before. XarkLabs provides an optimized fork of Adafruit’s library. Youtube user electrodacus has also implemented an optimize driver for the ILI9341 communicating over SPI. Existing 3D wireframe demonstrations, even ones using optimized drivers, display a noticeable flicker when the animation updates. This flicker is caused by the delay between when the previous frame is erased and when the new frame is drawn.

There simply isn’t enough processing power on the Arduino to render anything significant within one frame length, and isn’t enough memory to perform off-screen rendering. The ILI9341 supports a 16-bit RGB color interface with 320×240 pixels, and buffering even a single frame would take 150 kilobytes of memory, compared to the AtMega328’s two kilobytes of RAM.

The solution is to render animation frames in such a way that the intermediate rendering stages are not noticeable to the human eye. This can be achieved by rendering subsequent frames on top of previous frames without erasing, and then erasing only those pixels that have changed.

See the techniques in the article here and in the video below.

Better 3D graphics on the Arduino: avoiding flickering and tearing #Arduino #Graphics

The crawlingrobotfortress blog posts about creating better 3D graphics on the Arduino Uno. With the speed and memory of Arduino 328 boards, flickering and image tearing may be common:

A while ago I purchased a cheap $4 Chinese LCD Arduino shield from Ebay. The board arrived with no documentation. … The vendor provided an archive containing a few amusingly translated datasheets, as well as a copy of Adafruit’s Arduino LCD drivers. Evidently the product is a clone of the Adafruit LCD shields, and uses the ILI9341 LCD driver. I had hoped to use the display to show short animated GIF loops. This is not, in practice, possible. Test animations loaded slowly, with noticeable flicker and vertical tearing. The Arduino does not have enough speed or bandwidth to render full-screen animation frames, but what about 3D vector graphics?

There simply isn’t enough processing power on the Arduino to render anything significant within one frame length, and isn’t enough memory to perform off-screen rendering. The ILI9341 supports a 16-bit RGB color interface with 320×240 pixels, and buffering even a single frame would take 150 kilobytes of memory, compared to the AtMega328’s two kilobytes of RAM.

The solution is to render animation frames in such a way that the intermediate rendering stages are not noticeable to the human eye. This can be achieved by rendering subsequent frames on top of previous frames without erasing, and then erasing only those pixels that have changed.

See the techniques in the article here and in the video below.

Sounds Of The Rare PAiA 2720 Modular Synthesizer #MusicMonday

via Synthopia

This video, via Tinfoil Cat, explores the sounds of the rare PAiA 2720 Modular Synthesizer.

PAiA Electronics, founded by John Simonton in 1967, pioneered synth DIY in an era where commercial modular synthesizers were as expensive as cars. The PAiA 2720 system was advertised in electronics magazines, and available as a collection of kits.

See more!

Antarctic Explorers’ Brains Shrunk During a 14-Month Polar Expedition

via Gizmodo

Spending over a year in the bleak desolation that is Antarctica might change your brain for the worse, according to new research out this month. It seems to show that polar explorers who lived for 14 months at an Antarctica research station experienced brain shrinkage, likely as a result of their isolation and boredom. But the effects on their actual health and cognition were mild and probably temporary.

Fallon Sherrock first female darts player to beat man at world championship

Screen Shot 2019 12 24 at 10 43 04 AM

With a name like Fallon Sherrock, you’re sort of destined to do something awesome, right?

Cool news from ESPN.

Fallon Sherrock became the first female darts player to beat a man at the PDC World Championship on Tuesday.

Sherrock, a former runner-up at the women’s world championship, recovered from losing the opening set to beat Ted Evetts 3-2 in front of a raucous crowd at Alexandra Palace in London. The Englishwoman made six 180s — a perfect score over three darts — and had a match average of 91.12 in their first-round match.

New Star Wars Planet Kijimi Named After Synthesizer #MusicMonday

via CDM

J.J. Abrams, mega-nerd – not only is the Star Wars writer/director a scifi fan, but synth fan, too. No spoilers here, but his love of a certain synthesizer comes out in Rise of Skywalker‘s script.

Kijimi is the lush polysynth from Black Corporation, also makers of Deckard’s Dream (the Yamaha CS-80 homage) and assorted modules. The Star Wars boss is a known Black Corporation customer himself – you can spot him in a photo posing on the balcony of Black’s Shibuya, Tokyo offices with his new Kimiji – and it seems both the name and synth inspired him.

See more!

Kākāpō Recovery Technology

From New Zealand’s Department of Conservation via Analytics India Mag:

So in 2019 we’re trialling 3D-printed smart eggs that can emit life-like sounds. We’re hoping they’ll trigger a preparation response in mum at just the right time.

Bionic cat Vito becomes ‘superstar’ with his prosthetic legs

110198706 capture

Definition of a heartwarming story from BBC News. Make sure to check out his account on instagram.

Vito, or Vituzzo, had both rear legs amputated after they were crushed by a vehicle in Milan while his owners were away on their honeymoon.
The couple, former basketball player Silvia Gottardi and her wife Linda Ronzoni, returned home immediately.
Vito’s story has been widely shared with the hashtag #vituzzosuperstar.
His surgery to attach two prostheses by inserting them directly into his remaining upper leg bones has reportedly never before been achieved successfully in Italy.

AI Bingo: Developed at MIT, Tested by 9 – 14 Year Olds

Learning by playing ftw. From MIT Technology Review:

This game challenges you and your kid(s) to notice. Designed by Blakeley H. Payne, a researcher at MIT, AI bingo builds on pedagogical research that shows how exposing kids to the way technology works helps develop their interest in STEM and improve their job prospects later on in life.

But How Old is He in Yoda Years? #SciFiSunday

via Gizmodo

There’s a big, if unintentional, consequence of Baby Yoda’s existence. Because we were told how old the little guy is (50) and we think we have a decent understanding of how old Baby Yoda is developmentally (approximately 18 months) considering what we’ve seen of his actions so far in The Mandalorian, we can infer how old Master Yoda was when he pulled his disappearing act on Luke in Return of the Jedi. If our theory is correct, Jedi Master was so young he probably didn’t even have a 401k.

When Yoda passes in Return of the Jedi we know he’s around 900 years old. He’s aged visibly from Revenge of the Sith set over 18 years before that. Because we see that he ages over the course of nearly 20 years, we can make one major assumption about his species (which is not named in Star Wars canon and will be referred to simply as Yoda for the purposes of this blog)—they continue to age over time and do so in clear visible ways. This means it has senescence—a term referring to creatures (including humans) that mature and age after reaching maturity. This also means Yodas likely do not possess negligible senescence—a trait shared by many turtles and lobsters. Those species age so slowly it is difficult to perceive biologically speaking.

See more!

Saturday, December 28, 2019

How One Tree Grows 40 Different Kinds of Fruit @TEDTalks

via TED

Artist Sam Van Aken shares the breathtaking work behind the “Tree of 40 Fruit,” an ongoing series of hybridized fruit trees that grow 40 different varieties of peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines and cherries — all on the same tree. What began as an art project to showcase beautiful, multi-hued blossoms has become a living archive of rare heirloom specimens and their histories, a hands-on (and delicious!) way to teach people about cultivation and a vivid symbol of the need for biodiversity to ensure food security. “More than just food, embedded in these fruit is our culture … In many ways, these fruit are our story,” Van Aken says.

Read and see more.

How do PCBs Work? #PCB #Howitworks #Educators #STEM

In one way or another you work with PCBs everyday. Branch Educaton on YouTube made this thorough and graphic filled video.

What is inside of PCBs? Smartphones have dozens of components, and they are all connected thru a vast labyrinth of wires inside the PCB! So how exactly do PCBs work?

See more!

Friday, December 27, 2019

Setting Up the MotionEye OS on the Raspberry Pi Zero W #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Shared by BnBe_Club on Hackster.io:

Using the motionEye OS with the Raspberry Pi board is the next popular thing around. In this post, we learn how to set it up, go over the features and options and I also end things by giving you my thoughts on the system and why I don’t think it’s a good enough solution.

Learn more!

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

Dumping the x88c64 multiplexed rom #8051 #ROM @abzman2000

Evan notes the 8051 microcontroller is in many different devices. It’s a very old architecture, which means there are lots of tools and the parts are rather inexpensive.

The 8051 is in everything. I’ve won pitchers of alcohol by betting that a given device contained an 8051. It’s in USB hubs, bluetooth microprocessors, UPSes, and even SOIC16 packages and smaller. That’s not to say it’s a sane architecture, but it’s ubiquitous. The problem I have is pin multiplexing. The 8051 has internal rom, that’s all fine if you’re only using that internal space but the 8031 is the rom-less version. The 8031 has all of it’s program memory offboard which is very nice for the purpose of accessing it to dump the data for analysis and modification, except in this case.

To save pins on the 8051 series the data pins are multiplexed with the lower 8 bits of the address bus. In most circuits that just means that a latch is used and the processor interfaces with a standard parallel rom. This architecture became so ubiquitous though, that special multiplexed roms were created to deal with this exact scheme and allow for smaller boards and less circuit design work. The x88c64 is one of those chips.

See how Evan used an Arduino Mega 2560 to read out the ROM contents in the blog post here. The code is on GitHub here.

SimpleClean Psycho Pass Dominator Prop #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

via instructables

This is my first attempt in prop making. I managed to rush this out in a week of school holiday, through building on the spot.

This dominator prop to be able to transform from a Non-Lethal Paralyser into the Lethal Eliminator Mode, play the appropriate sounds. It can also detect people’s faces to give a crime coefficient, though not very fast. There are NeoPixel LEDs too!

This could be a good holiday project to not only improve prop-making skills but also have electronics & programming skills. It even has a camera which you can try some computer vision.

A business card which runs Linux #Linux #MicroPython

George Hilliard is an embedded systems engineer who spends a lot of time looking for things for use in future designs, or things that tickle a fancy:

One of those things is cheap Linux-capable computers, the cheaper the better. So I started diving into the very deep rabbit hole of obscure processors.

I thought to myself, “These processors are nearly cheap enough to give away.” After a while I hit upon the idea of making a barebones Linux board in a business card form factor.

As soon as I had the idea I thought it would be pretty cool to do. I have seen electronic business cards before, with various fun features including emulating USB flash drives, blinkenlights, or even wireless transceivers. I have never seen one running Linux, however. So I built one.

You can run all these from the emulated serial console after you log in (as root, the only user):

rogue: the classic Unix dungeon crawler.
2048: a simple console mode 2048 game.
fortune: various pithy sayings. I decided not to include the entire database of quotes here to save space for other functionality.
micropython: a very small Python interpreter.

It has a USB port in the corner. If you plug it into a computer, it boots in about 6 seconds and shows up over USB as a flash drive and a virtual serial port that you can use to log into the card’s shell. The flash drive has a README file, a copy of George’s résumé and photography. The shell has several games and Unix classics such as fortune and rogue, a small 2048, and a small MicroPython interpreter.

Bill of Materials & Cost

I kept costs low. It’s cheap enough that I don’t feel bad giving it away, as designed! I’m not going to give one to absolutely everyone because it does take time to assemble each card, and assembly cost is not factored in here (my time is “free”).

Component Price

F1C100s $1.42

PCB $0.80

8MB flash $0.17

All other components $0.49

Total $2.88

Component	Price
F1C100s	$1.42
PCB	$0.80
8MB flash	$0.17
All other components	$0.49
Total	$2.88

See the entire project on the blog post here.

How to start a script at start-up on a Raspberry Pi #Learnsomething #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi #CatsofEngineering

Quick informative video from Estefannie Explains it All on YouTube:

Do you want your Raspberry Pi to automatically run your code when it is connected to power? Then you are in the right place. In this new #LEARNSOMETHING video I show you how to make you Raspberry Pi run your script automatically when it is connected to a power source. I also show a small hack for the lazy ones out there who never want to touch the terminal again.

Learn more!

An MP3 player for small children #MP3 #Making

Stoerbert - MP3 Player for small children

Michael Thessel posts on Imgur about building an MP3 player for small children.

Final product first. This is an easy to use MP3 player for small children. I made this for my 2 year old for Christmas. Each of the top 9 buttons will play an album. The black buttons on the bottom are prev – play/pause – next. The player also supports an alternative playback mode that can be activated using a special key combination. That combination will turn the buttons into a 10 digit input matrix allowing playback of up to 99 albums. That way the player can be used by parents as well.

The project was heavily inspired by Hoerbert: https://en.hoerbert.com Michael first saw the Hoerbert at a friends place. With a $400 price tag, why not spend 50 hrs and $100 to build ones own?

The core components are the Adafruit Music Maker Shield and an Arduino Uno.

The Uno doesn’t have enough GPIO to handle 12 buttons, the volume pot, the Music Maker shield and UART as well. Because of that I added 2 shift registers that can handle 16 inputs and only need 3 GPIO pins to communicate with the Uno. In the picture you only see 2 buttons because at this point I didn’t have more buttons at hand.

The code is on GitHub.

See the entire project with lots of pictures here.

An MP3 player for small children #MP3 #Making

Stoerbert - MP3 Player for small children

Michael Thessel posts on Imgur about building an MP3 player for small children.

Final product first. This is an easy to use MP3 player for small children. I made this for my 2 year old for Christmas. Each of the top 9 buttons will play an album. The black buttons on the bottom are prev – play/pause – next. The player also supports an alternative playback mode that can be activated using a special key combination. That combination will turn the buttons into a 10 digit input matrix allowing playback of up to 99 albums. That way the player can be used by parents as well.

The project was heavily inspired by Hoerbert: https://en.hoerbert.com Michael first saw the Hoerbert at a friends place. With a $400 price tag, why not spend 50 hrs and $100 to build ones own?

The core components are the Adafruit Music Maker Shield and an Arduino Uno.

The Uno doesn’t have enough GPIO to handle 12 buttons, the volume pot, the Music Maker shield and UART as well. Because of that I added 2 shift registers that can handle 16 inputs and only need 3 GPIO pins to communicate with the Uno. In the picture you only see 2 buttons because at this point I didn’t have more buttons at hand.

The code is on GitHub.

See the entire project with lots of pictures here.

An Internet of Things Clock #RaspberryPi #Adafruit #OLED #ShowAndTell @Raspberry_Pi @Adafruit

Christopher Cantrell was on the Adafruit Show and Tell last Wednesday and demo’ed a wonderful internet connected clock project. The video is below.

Details and code are on GitHub.

The clock can be configured through a web interface. Great work!

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

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Monday, December 30, 2019

DOWNLOAD STATS FROM ARDUINO FOR COMMUNITY AND DEVELOPERS

TINYUSB SUPPORT IN ARDUINO-CORE

UF2 BOOTLOADER SUPPORT FROM ARDUINO

ARDUINO LIBRARY STANDARDS & AUTOMATION

UNIFORM TRANSFER OF STRUCTURED DATA OF UART, SPI, ETC. IN ARDUINO

SUPPORT FOR GROVE / QWIIC / STEMMA ON ARDUINO HARDWARE

Sunday, December 29, 2019

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Friday, December 27, 2019