TechWorld

High-speed cameras taking 100,000 pictures in one second are enough to fascinate us. But what about a camera that can film at a rate of 5 trillion images per second. It’s created by the researchers Elias Kristensson and Andreas Ehn at the Lund University in Sweden. The camera can make light slow enough that it could be analyzed by humans. In other words, it can be used to record events happening in the 0.2 trillionths of a second. In 2011, a similar camera device was created by the MIT Media Lab. But it was slower and capable of capturing 1 trillion images per second. The researchers demonstrated the camera by filming photons of light traveling a distance equivalent to the thickness of a paper. The trillion camera works in a different way in comparison to the normal high-speed cameras. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fjP02EpJac?feature=oembed&w=669&h=502] In the method, laser light pulses with a unique code are slashed on the subject. The reflected pulses captured by ...

We’ve known for a while that Microsoft doesn’t care too much about Windows phones these days, but this time it’s official. Not as in Microsoft provided us with a statement official, but as in 10Q SEC filing official, which Microsoft needs to file every quarter after its earnings report. Documents published by Microsoft for Q3 come with a little change from the previous quarter, and as spotted by DrWindowsPhone, the mobile platform isn’t getting any new improvements. As you can see in the screenshot included in this article, in Q2 Microsoft planned “significant improvements in research, development, and marketing for existing products, services, and technologies, including the Windows operating system, […] and Windows Phone.” For the next quarter, Windows Phone is no longer listed as a platform getting investments, and this is just another sign that Microsoft is giving up on this platform. As we’ve told you last week, Microsoft also confirmed in the call with financial analysts after th...

It is not easy being a spy or a soldier: you have to be completely foucsed in dangerous situations, assess information in the field, speak many foreign languages, and also handle all kinds of technical weaponry and equipment. Learning how to do all of this needs a lot of training, which is why the US Department of Defence research wing wants to figure out other ways to make their workers learn the vital skills faster – even if they have to zap them to get the job done. To explore all the possibilities, Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA has awarded more than US$50 million in their funding to eight teams which are researching on how electrical stimulation of the nervous system can help them facilitate learning. The four-year program is called TNT(Targeted Neuroplasticity Training), aims to be the identity safe and also optimal neurostimulation methods which can activate what is called synaptic plasticity, the ability of synapses to weaken or strengthen, and by doing so, ...

Just two weeks ago our favorite supplier of cheap ESP8266 boards, WeMos, released the long-awaited LOLIN32 ESP-32 board , and it’s almost a killer. Hackaday regular [deshipu] tipped us off, and we placed an order within minutes; if WeMos is making a dirt-cheap ESP32 development board, we’re on board! It came in the mail yesterday. (They’re out of stock now , more expected soon.) If you’ve been following the chip’s development, you’ll know that the first spin of ESP-32s had some silicon bugs (PDF) that might matter to you if you’re working with deep sleep modes, switching between particular clock frequencies, or using the brown-out-reset function. Do the snazzy new, $8, development boards include silicon version 0 or 1? Read on to find out! The Good News The board design is basically perfect. It takes more than a little inspiration from Adafruit’s Feather series . Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It has 4 MiB flash memory onboard, a USB-serial adapter (cp210x), and a LiPo b...

For the millions of people suffering from Parkinson’s and other causes of hand tremor, there is new hope in the form of [mohammedzeeshan77]’s entry into the Hackaday Prize: a glove that analyzes and controls the tremors . The glove uses an accelerometer and a pair of flex sensors to determine the position of the hand as it oscillates. A Particle Photon crunches the raw data to come up with the frequency and amplitude of the tremors and uploads it to the cloud for retrieval and analysis by medical staff. Hand tremors can vary in frequency and severity depending on the cause. Some are barely perceptible movements, and others are life-disrupting shakes. By analyzing the frequency and amplitude of these tremors, doctors can better understand a patient’s condition. The best part of this glove is that it also provides immediate relief to the wearer by stabilizing the hand. A rapidly spinning super precision gyroscope counteracts the tremor oscillations as it tries to maintain its position. T...

One of the smash hits of the 1970s arcade was Atari’s  Lunar Lander . A landing craft in orbit around a moon would descend slowly towards the surface, and through attitude and thrust controls the player had the aim of bringing it safely in to land. Many a quarter would have been poured into the slot by eager gamers wanting to demonstrate their suitability for astronaut service. It was to this game that [Chris Fenton] turned when he was looking for inspiration for the 2016 NYCResistor Interactive show, and the result was a  Lunar Lander game with a difference, one in which the gameplay was enacted through a physical lander and lunar surface . In this case the moon in question is a papier-mâché-covered inflatable ball, and the lander is a 3D-printed model on the end of a lead screw. Control is provided by an Arduino, with a rough facsimile of the original control panel and a set of microswitches on the model to detect a crash or a safe landing. The result is a surprisingly playable game...

Festo has released a video showing the workings of their BionicCobot , a pneumatic robot arm developed for lending a helping hand to humans at a workstation. Since it works intimately with humans, it has to be safe, producing no harmful movements, and reacting when encountering an obstacle such as an arm containing delicate human bone. This it does using pneumatics and rotary vanes. Rotary vane in action The arm has seven degrees of freedom, three in the shoulder, one in the elbow, another in the lower arm, and two in the wrist. But you won’t find any electric motor or gears. Instead each contains a rotary vane. Compressed air pushes on both sides of the vane. If the air pressure is the same on both sides of the vane then it doesn’t rotate. But with more pressure on one side than the other, the vane rotates. This is much like in a human arm, where two muscles work together to bend the arm, one muscle contracts while the other relaxes. Together they’re referred to as an antagonistic pai...

You’ve probably heard that Rust is a systems programming language that has quite the following growing. It purports to be fast like C, but has features like guaranteed memory and thread safety, generics, and it prevents segmentation faults. Sounds like just the thing for an embedded system, right? [Jorge Aparicio] was frustrated because his CPU of choice, an STM32 ARM Cortex-M didn’t have native support for Rust. Apparently, you can easily bind C functions into a Rust program but that wasn’t what he was after. So he set out to build pure Rust programs that could access the device’s hardware and he documented the effort . Not only does the post show you the tools you need and the software versions, but using OpenOCD, [Jorge] even managed to do some debugging. The technique seems to pretty generally applicable, too, as he says he’s done the same trick on six different controllers from three different vendors with no problem. You do have to configure the project by changing some values in...

Transmission lines are the kind of thing that seems to confuse beginners. After all, the fact that short-circuits can have infinite impedance and open-circuits can behave like a short is not intuitive at all!. That’s why we like [Tinselkoala]’s latest video that shows a nice model of a transmission line. It helps to understand the line as inductors and capacitors in series-parallel connection. Any pair of wires used to transmit electrical power have tiny amounts of inductance and capacitance. This is not a problem with DC or low-frequency AC, but when the frequency is sufficiently high, weird things start to happen. The energy tends to escape as radio waves, and current reflects from discontinuities such as connectors and cable joints.  For this reason, transmission lines for high frequency signals use specialized construction to minimize those effects and reduce power losses. [Tinselkoala] has built a model of a transmission line using coils and capacitors to simulate the inductance...

Here’s a classic “one thing led to another” car hack. [Alexandre Blin] wanted a reversing camera for his old Peugeot 207 and went down a rabbit hole which led him to do some extreme CAN bus reverse-engineering with Arduino and iOS . Buying an expensive bezel, a cheap HDMI display, an Arduino, a CAN bus shield, an iPod touch with a ghetto serial interface cable that didn’t work out, a HM-10 BLE module, an iPad 4S, the camera itself, and about a year and a half of working on it intermittently, he finally emerged poorer by about 275€, but victorious in a job well done. A company retrofit would not only have cost him a lot more, but would have deprived him of everything that he learned along the way. Adding the camera was the easiest part of the exercise when he found an after-market version specifically meant for his 207 model. The original non-graphical display had to make room for a new HDMI display and a fresh bezel, which cost him much more than the display. Besides displaying the cam...

A few weeks ago we published an article on the newly released Keysight 1000 X series . A scope that marks Keysight’s late but welcome entry into the hacker-centric entry-level market. Understandably, this scope is causing a lot of excitement as it promises to bring some of the high-end pedigree of the well-known 2000 X and 3000 X series down to a much affordable price. Now couple that with the possibility of hacking its bandwidth lock and all this fuss is well justified. [Dave Jones] from the EEVblog got his hands on one, and while conducting a UART dump saw the scope report 200 MHz bandwidth despite being labelled as a 100 MHz model. He then proceeded to actually hack the main board to unlock an undocumented 200 MHz bandwidth mode. This created a lot of confusion: some said [Dave] got a “pre-hacked” version, others assumed all 100 MHz versions actually have a stock bandwidth of 200 MHz. Alongside the question of bandwidth, many wondered how this would fare against the present entry-le...

For those that suffer them, seizures are a dangerous thing. Outside the neurological effects, there is always the possibility of injury from the surrounding environment as well – consider the dangers of having a seizure near a busy road, or even simply a glass table. Some detection methods exist for seizure sufferers, but they are primarily based on detecting the jerking motion of the patient. [akhil2001us] thinks it’s possible to do better – by measuring brainwaves to detect the onset of seizures . The build is centered around the Neurosky Mindwave headset . This is an off-the-shelf product designed specifically for capturing EEG data. It outputs raw brainwave data which is key for doing proper analysis. The project then uses an Arduino Mega to tie everything together, along with some Sparkfun Bluetooth modules to talk to a cell phone to send an SMS for help in the event of a seizure. The real difficulty in a project like this comes from developing an algorithm that can reliably detec...

[bd594] likes to make strange objects. This time it’s a  robotic glockenspiel and hacked HDD ‘s. [bd594] is no stranger to Hackaday either, as we have featured many of his past projects before including the useless candle  or recreating the song Funky town from Old Junk . His latest project is quite exciting. He has incorporated his  robotic glockenspiel  with a hacked hard drive rhythm section to play audio controlled via a PIC 16F84A microcontroller. The song choice is Axel-F. If you had a cell phone around the early 2000’s you were almost guaranteed to have used this song as a ringtone at some point or another. This is where music is headed these days anyway; the sooner we can replace the likes of Justin Bieber with a robot the better. Or maybe we already have ?   Filed under: digital audio hacks , robots hacks

Inspiration can strike from the strangest places. Unearthing a forgotten Melexis MLX90614 thermopile from his  ‘inbox,’ [Saulius Lukse] used it to build a panoramic thermal camera . [Lukse] made use of an ATmega328 to control the thermal sensor, and used the project to test a pair of two rotary stage motors he designed for tilt and pan, with some slip rings to keep it in motion as it captures a scene. That said, taking a 720 x 360 panoramic image one pixel at a time takes over an hour, and compiling all that information into an intelligible picture is no small feat either. An occasional hiccup are dead pixels in the image, but those are quickly filled in by averaging the temperature of adjoining pixels. The camera  rig works — and it does turn out a nice picture — but [Lukse]  says an upgraded infrared camera to captured larger images at a time and higher resolution would not be unwelcome.   Another clever use of a thermopile might take you the route of this thermal flashlight . if you...