Hasta La Gadget!

The Kinect hacks keep rollin’, and we just keep on lovin’ every one of ’em — despite most being decidedly non-practical. This one actually is, created by Sebastian Pirch at 3rD-EYE, a media production company. He’s made a free-space 3D modeling tool using a Kinect camera to track his hands, which he uses to create points in space and draft a model. To provide greater control he then made two Arduino-powered gloves that detect finger touches — basically DIY Peregrines. Using different connections of finger-presses he can move the entire model, move single points, create new points, create new polygons, and basically do everything he needs to do to create a mesh, which can then be imported into 3ds Max for further refinement. He even manages to make it all look fun, thus besting Lockheed Martin’s similar system that’s powered by zombies.

Continue reading Kinect + homemade Power Gloves = 3D modeling in free-space (video)

Kinect + homemade Power Gloves = 3D modeling in free-space (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 11:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Candy crane, teddy picker, claw machine, whatever you call it, this arcade mainstay was robbing children of their golden tokens long before we slid into our first pair of Hammer pants, but despite the changing face of the plush offerings within, the crane game’s remained mostly the same. Now a team of students at the Bartlett School of Architecture have produced a Kinect hack that could change the way you drop that claw. The rather temperamental delta robot enlists the ever-hackable peripheral in combination with Processing and Arduino to mimic the movements of a user’s arm. As you can tell by the video below, the delta hasn’t quite figured out the subtleties of human gestures, but the robot’s creators say they intend to implement “several autonomous behaviors” once all the kinks are worked out. Frankly, we’d pay our weight in tokens to see the crane game bite back at an unsuspecting whippersnapper. Video after the break.

Continue reading Kinect hack turns Arduino-controlled delta robot into aggressive claw crane (video)

Kinect hack turns Arduino-controlled delta robot into aggressive claw crane (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Mar 2011 23:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Make  |  Enrique Ramos  | Email this | Comments

Vincent Riemersma’s beautiful time-freezing photographs are a mixture of skill and old fashioned geekery. The pictures show splashes of colored water frozen in time as they jump simultaneously from a row of wine glasses. The results are clearly impressive. But how were the photos taken?

First, the splashes. To ensure repeatability, time after time, Vincent built a simple rig. Two inline skate-frames and a piece of wood made a rolling trolley which was mounted on a slope. A marker at the top meant the start-point was consistent, and a plank of wood at the bottom stopped the trolley suddenly. Momentum takes care of the rest, flinging the colored water into the air. Capturing these repeatable spills was the tricky part.

Timing is everything. To capture the splashes, you need to have perfect timing. Vincent decided to let a computer take care of this, and used an Arduino to fire a flash gun. The trigger was a piezo-element which would detect the noise of the crash and fire the strobe. Into the Arduino Vincent programmed several delays. The first was to give the water enough time to jump from the glass (around 100ms). The flash would then fire, and be cut immediately. A final delay, of 4,000ms, is there to make sure nothing tricks the circuit into firing again.

What about the camera? Well, that’s the easiest part. The tripod-mounted Nikon D300s was manually focussed and had its shutter speed set to three seconds. Turn out the room lights and trip the shutter, and the sensor waits patiently for some light. Roll the skateboard and wait. The water spills, the flash flashes, the sensor records the image, and the shutter clicks safely shut. Easy!

The results show just how well Vincent set things up. More photos can be seen over at his Flickr page, and you can read his write-up, complete with all the nerdy details, at the DIY Photography blog.

Creating “The Splash” [DIY Photography]

Photo: Vincent Riemersma / Flickr

See Also:

• Laser-Firing Physicists Take High-Speed Photography to the …
• April 6, 1903: Edgerton Born, Father of High-Speed Photography …
• Hacking NASCAR: The Ultimate High-Speed Photography Kit
• Cheap DIY Camera Systems Perform Amazing Photographic Feats …

If you’re looking to make yourself somewhat more productive on this lazy weekend, and you’ve got an Arduino or two collecting dust, we’ve got just the thing to add line after line to your dwindling to-do list. Tronixstuff has a borderline insane tutorial series going, and as of now, 27 chapters have been published. It’s essentially the Arduino Bible, but the two most recent additions in particular have piqued our interest. With the explosion in mobile broadband, even hackers are looking to get their creations online. If you’ve mastered the art of Arduino, but haven’t yet been brave enough to toss in a bit of GSM communication, the how-to guides linked below definitely deserve your attention. Just be careful how you write that code — one wrong line with a SIM card installed could lead to text overages that’ll take two lifetimes to pay off.

Elaborate Arduino tutorial explains the nuts and bolts of communicating over GSM originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 06 Feb 2011 11:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Hack A Day  |  Tronixstuff (1), (2)  | Email this | Comments

Continue reading DIY ArduSpider robot battles household pets, beats other homemade gifts

DIY ArduSpider robot battles household pets, beats other homemade gifts originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Jan 2011 02:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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