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For this Cornell ECE 5760 Hand Tracking Pong project Hanting Lu and Kedari Elety have connected a camera to an FPGA, the image is down sampled so that it is only looking at a 40 X 30 image to determine how the players are moving. “The NTSC video signal from the camera is stored in the SDRAM at the rate of the TV Decoder Line clock (TD_CLK). Data is read from the SDRAM each time the VGA requests data. The data from the SDRAM is in YUV format which needs to be converted to RGB before sending it to the VGA. For skin detection, we added a filter at this converting module level such that in addition to the R,G and B values, the module also outputs a one bit binary 1 if it corresponds to a skin pixel. Else, zero. By doing this, the output on the VGA is now white corresponding to skin pixels and black otherwise.”
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Jiayuan Wang and Sheng Zhang from Cornell University built this Wireless Voice-Controllable Smart Home Project for their ECE 4760 Final Project. “There are two CPU in our project, ATmega328 and ATmega1284. We set up the wireless communication by two Xbee chips. One of them connects with ATmega328 working as the transmitter to transmit the signal, another one is connected with ATmega1284 to be the receiver. We pick up ATmega328 to be our transmitter part because there is a microphone on it which could receive and store the voice signal from people. When people say the voice instruction, microphone gets it first and then ATmega328 receive it. By the program controlling, ATmega328 will send the signal to transmitter Xbee. When the Xbee is enabled, it will send the corresponding signal to the receiver Xbee by the different voice instructions. When the wireless communication set up successfully, it will send instructions for ATmega1284.” |
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Check out this cool 3D Printed Stepper Motor that Christopher Hawkins made. You can see in the video that it can move quite quickly and not loose any steps. This design would be idea to teach how stepper motors work. Via: Hack a Day “This is a programmable stepper motor and driver that I made out of some nails, magnet wire, neodymium magnets, a digispark microcontroller, and a 3D printed piece that I designed around these things. My goal was to make something about the size of a business card that moved. You can’t exactly fit it in your wallet but it does indeed move. It just a first draft- there’s lots of room for improvement. It has a step angle of 15 degrees (although the way I’m driving it, it is 7.5 degrees.)”
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Jon Wise demonstrates his Raspberry Pi 3D Printer, he is using a pen in the demo but it can use an extrude to print items. The mechanical movements leek very complex when compared to a standard XY table that is controlled using 2 stepper motors. The Pi has enough number crunching ability to get the job done though. I can’t wait to see this printing a complex shape, the movements are interesting to watch, it reminds me of the robot hands that use angular joints to move around. |
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These Rave Shade – LED Glasses look like a ton of fun. They are Arduino based and use 74HC595 shift registers to light all the LEDs. At first I though it was a silly design since with a PCB sitting on your face you would not be able to see anything. But later I saw the small circles that are cut into the board which allows you to presumable see most things in front of you. To program new pattern some computer software is used which generates the pattern code to be downloaded to the Arduino. eXtremeSomething is selling kits but he is waiting till 10 people pays for a kit before pulls the trigger on the order. Sort of like a mini Kickstarter (he lives in the UK and Kickstarter doesn’t operate there). Be sure to follow the project Facebook page if this interests you!
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Want to annoy IronJungle? Tweet a bunch of commands to his Twitter Robot Hand! His hand is monitoring the Twitter stream using a Raspberry PI and will act on your commands (seen below). ”A Raspberry PI monitors the tweets to @OurCatDoor. The PI’s GPIO acts as inputs to a PICAXE 18M2 which controls five servos on a robot hand. You can control the “The Hand of PI” by sending a tweet to @OurCatDoor. Ifyour tweet includes any of the text below, the “Hand of PI” obeys your command. |
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It sucks when you have a perfectly good piece of hardware that mechanically functions but the controller dies. This is exactly what happened to Davide Gironi from Milan Italia when his dehumidifier stop working. Instead of placing it next to the curb for garbage pickup he investigated what the issue was. Turns out the humidity switch was no longer working. He installed an AVR Atmega8 microcontroller system that now operates the dehumidifier and all is well. If you would like to see how he wrote the code and wired it up you can see both here. “AVR dehumidifier is an alternative electronic board for your dehumidifier based upon AVR Atmega8 micro.
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