“I’ve programmed my custom Alexa Skill to recognize three seasonal phrases and then send a message over MQTT to the Pi. These are defined in speechAssets – part of the Alexa Skill SDK. Alexa tell Christmas Tree [to] change to red/green/blue
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Debuglive takes a look how Dr Abrasive’s cracked the Sega Saturn CD system. The original copy protection of the system uses a physical wobble in the outer edge of the official game CDs. This makes copying the disks impossible since blank disks have this portion pressed into it when you get it. After a lot of reverse engineering and some custom hacking the system is now able to do lots of things that it was never intended to do.
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If you want to jazz up your tv with an Ambilight system now might be the time. We have seen other systems in the past that were impressive but not as good as this system. This new system is still a bit kludgy but seems to work very well and is nice and flexible to work with most systems. The Raspberry Pi Zero running Hyperion is the heart of the system and allows for lots of customization. The basics of this system takes in your TV HDMI signal into a splitter, one feed goes directly to your TV and the other goes into the an HDMI to AV converter. This AV signal is then fed into an AV to USB converter. The converter is plugged into a USB port of the Pi. This is not an ideal chain but since HDMI is a secure transport of video data there is no simple way for the Pi to read in the HDMI data. Now that the Hyperion software running on the Pi can see the live video signal that the TV is displaying it can calculate and output the appropriate codes that are fired down the serial LED string. Using the serial LED tape allows for a very simple LED layout.
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In the near future when autonomous vehicles are buzzing around they will need to have some method of charging themselves. ARMdevices.net interviewed Kevin Leary from Power Hydrant who has a solution to this issue. With this system an electric vehicle will be able to have this system detect the vehicle type and have the robot charging arm connect power automatically. This is done by having the various types of electric vehicles modeled in the system and with the aid of a vision system the arm knows exactly what to do. “PowerHydrant is an early stage startup focused on applying the “smart phone dividend” to deliver 3D sensor based conductive autonomous fast-charging for Autonomous Vehicles and eMobility. Based in Boston’s Innovation District, PowerHydrant is a member of the MIT Startup Exchange and part of Autodesk’s inaugural Startups in Residence (STIR) group. PowerHydrant® has important advantages over other hands-free charging technologies: |
Adarsh Jayakumar, Timon Amirani and Cameron Boroumand developed a Super Secure 4 Factor Lock Box Project for their Cornell University ECE 4760 final project. It uses a typed code, 3 pots set to a specific value, a knock sensor and a finger printer sensor. All they need now is a iris scan! Of course this box is built out of something that can be smashed into with ease and the electronics take up almost all the space in the box but just imagine this built into your steel and concrete reinforced safe room in your home.
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Ever wonder how data recovery is done when an micro SD card fails? HDD Recovery Services shows us how he recovered the data. He uses 800 grit sand paper and wet sands the card till the card PCB pads are showing. He then micro solders wires from a memory reader directly to the SD card PCB. He is then able to pull the NAND flash data and save it locally. Not sure what he charges but based on the work that goes into getting it done it won’t be cheap.
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