Tools Hack Daily

Friday, October 18, 2024

Raspberry Pi Pico Spider Robot

Tom’s Hardware shares the details of robot wiz Kevin McAleer’s new Pico-powered spider robot.

This spider is still technically a work in progress but he shared lots of juicy info about its design in a recent video — plenty to indulge in. The design schematics show it’s built around a Raspberry Pi Pico but McAleer assures you could use an Arduino Nano in its place. It works by detecting people with ultrasonic sensor eyes (HC-SR04). When someone gets close, its arms wiggle open and closed. It also has LED strips inside its body that can be programmed to change colors.

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!

This Spooky Raspberry Pi Halloween eye uses AI to stalk you around the room #piday #raspberrypi #electronichalloween

Nice Pi find from Tom’s Hardware just in time for Halloween:

Poke080 shared a demo video of the Halloween eye in action. In it, we get a good look at the eye’s movement and ability to track targets. It’s illuminated from the inside with RGB LEDs to glow red, occasionally flashing green. It could theoretically be programmed to say anything but in the video, we hear a nice welcoming “Happy Halloween!”

See more! and check out the project from Poke08 on reddit and demo on YouTube

It’s Saving time! Subscribers to the Newsletter get 15% off The Halloween Gift Guide with the Code HALLOWEEN15

Working on a project for Halloween this year? Share it with us in the comments below, the Adafruit forums, Facebook, Discord, Instagram or Twitter [aka X]– (tag your posts #ElectronicHalloween). You can also send us a blog tip!

Air Quality Monitor Project @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Here’s a project that brings a matteter sensor together with a Raspnerry Pi to create a DIY filtration system. Here’s more from Joyce Lin via hackster.io:

Connect a particulate matter sensor to a Raspberry Pi to trigger a DIY air filtration system. The PMS7003 particulate sensor measures the air quality and transmits data in a serial stream from the transmitter pin (TX) to the receiver pin (RX pin) on the Raspberry Pi.

See project!

Tandy 1000 keyboard to USB with CircuitPython #ShackToberFest

A new Adafruit Playground Note shows how to adapt a Tandy 1000 keyboard for use on modern computers using CircuitPython and an Adafruit QT Py RP2040 microcontroller board.

Check it out here > > >

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

“The Starry Night” Follows Laws of Physics That Weren’t Discovered Yet #ArtTuesday

Science and art have always been inextricably linked. Before ‘art’ and ‘science’ were subjects in a text book scientist and artists were one and the same.

Fascinating discovery in Physics of Fluids. Van Gogh, knowingly or not, accurately depicted fluid mechanics. Laws of physics that wouldn’t be proven for decades. This depiction isn’t only on the broad strokes either: “On a microscopic scale, the scientists found that the brushstrokes and the visual effects of the paints’ viscosity also align with Batchelor’s law”

Did he know? Was it keen observation, intuition or coinidence?

Via Hyperallergic:

The research team examined the length of, space between, and varying luminance of van Gogh’s brushstrokes from each of the 14 whirling eddies in “The Starry Night,” and found that the composition intrinsically observes Richardson–Kolmogorov’s cascade picture of turbulence, specifically Kolmogorov’s −5/3 Power Law. Put simply, this predicts that turbulent flows experience energy cascades during which larger eddies transfer some of their energy into smaller ones, and that those, in turn, transfer their energy into even smaller eddies, and so on.

Add some real motion to Starry Night, and lights! With the Circuit Playground Express and Adafruit CRICKIT for Circuit Playground Express using Living Starry Night Painting on Learn.Adafruit

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!

Early Home Computers in the work of Lola Dupre #ArtTuesday

Onc day Americans woke up to discover that home computers sat on their desks. These home computers soon brought with them the world wide web, smuggling the entire world into suburban homes from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. Home computers transformed our families, our relationships, our the way we make our decisions. Nowadays we walk around with proof of that complete transformation in the form of smart phones. The work of painter Lola Dupre helps us remember just how strange home computers really are. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:

[Lola Dupre] continues her disorienting manipulations with a pair of early Apple desktops, ships with enough stories to rival a high-rise, and a cow so bloated she needs eight legs to stand. Each work pushes the limits of legibility as limbs and common objects undergo exaggerated distortions.

See Dupre’s work here!

Engineezy’s Marble Machine Makes Pixel Art

Engineezy uses a color sensor and stepper motor to detect and sort different color marbles in their pixel art marble machine

Learn how to make glowy pixel based art in the Adafruit Learning System: