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Remember the game Breakout? These days with game controls like the Kinect who wants to use the old style joysticks anymore? ECE 5760 students Meng-Ling (Maxwell) Liu, Thu-Thao Nguyen and Yang Yang designed a game that they call HAND BREAKING BRICKS. They are using an FPGA to display the game on the monitor while it is also monitoring a Terasic CCD module which allows the game to “see” the location of the players hand. The players hand location directly reflects to the location of the ball bouncing bar. Read more about HAND BREAKING BRICKS here. “In order control the game using hand motions, we need a device to track hand movement. We chose the Terasic CCD kit, which consists of a 1.3 megapixel CMOS image sensor and an IDE cable to connect to the GPIO port of the DE2 board. We followed the provided code to learn how to use the camera in the kit.
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If you have taken some CS courses you have no doubt seen Conway’s Game of Life, if you are a kit builder you have probably seen some nice Conway’s Game of Life kits also. Where the basic kit version has 16 elements Cornell University student Cooper Bills wanted to design a system that had 307,200 elements. What this boils down to is an incredible looking visual effect that requires a massive amount of calculations. Luckily this project was undertaken in the Cornell University Advanced Microcontrollers course (ECE5760) where students had the choice of Altera/Terasic DE2 or DE2-115 FPGA educational boards to work with. Read more about this FPGA Conway’s Game of Life project. “The main goal of this project was to implement Conway’s game of life on a grid of 640×480 cells, running at 60Hz. Updating that resolution at that rate requires over 18 million updates per second! This leaves just a few clock cycles per cell for updating. Given that each cell requires 9 values to calculate it’s next value, even with extreme pipelining serial updating would not be possible (without over-clocking).”
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Collin Cunningham from Make gives a good introduction to what an electronic schematic is and how to properly read them. You can read more about schematics here, to see lots of practical examples this is a good start. “Schematics are the functional diagram of electronic circuits. With so many designs available on the web, understanding how to read schematics can unlock a world of possibilities for the electronics maker” |
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In the latest Solid State Technology magazine there is a great article about the Nobel Prize in chemistry being awarded being awarded to Dan Shechtman. Subscribing to the Solid State Technology magazine is free as long as you are in USA, if you are outside the USA you can subscribe to the digital version. Hacked Gadgets does receive a small payment for each subscription to any of our Free Magazine Subscriptions so we appreciate the support from all who subscribe to the free magazines that we offer. “The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Dan Shechtman, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, for the discovery of quasicrystals. Shechtman discovered the solid-matter arrangement in April 1982, using an electron microscope. Until his research, all solid-matter atoms were believed to be packed inside crystals in symmetrical patterns that were repeated periodically. Scientists considered this repetition required in order to obtain a crystal. Shechtman showed that the atoms in his crystal were packed in a pattern that followed mathematical rules but could not be repeated. The controversial findings led to Shechtman being asked to leave his research group. However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter. Shechtman’s quasicrystals are now described by “the golden ratio;” the ratio of various distances between quasicrystal atoms is related to the golden mean.” |
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Solar Pop Can Heating Systems are getting quite popular these days. As heating costs rise everyone is looking for ways to save on their energy bill. Most people are aware of insulating and using good weatherstripping to keep the heat in and the cold out but many don’t know about the alternate heating methods that are available. One of the alternative heating methods that is gaining some traction is capturing the heat energy from the sun and using it to heat the inside of your house. These systems use black aluminum tubes to capture the heat from the sun, as the heat rises in the tubes it is collected in an upper plenum which is then ducted into the house. These systems can be built quite inexpensively since the main component of the system are the aluminum tubes which can be constructed from recycled pop cans. These pop cans get the top and bottom cut out, then they are stacked together to form an air tight tube, after a flat black paint job they are ready to soak up the heat from the sun. Wyatt West Ranch Solar Pop Can Heater Zsnowshredder has built one of these Pop Can Solar Heaters which has 17 aluminum tubes made from 204 aluminum pop cans. He has cut a circular hole in one end of the can and used tin snips to cut a fin shaped design in the other end. This is used to make the air swirl as it rises in the tube. Four inch dryer venting is used to move the air in and out of the heater. A solar atic fan is used to blow the cold room air into the bottom of the heater. This will allow the hot air to be forced out of the top. The fan is a 200 CFM unit and allows for temperatures of around 133 degrees to be blown into the room with an outdoor temperature of 47 degrees. He was able to get 155 degrees during initial testing but this was when it was angled at a better angle to the sun. The installed position of the heater is flat against the building which caused the angle to the sun to not be optimal and caused the loss in heating. A simple mirror on the ground is allowing him to boost some of the light energy that is hitting the pop can heater.
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Luis Cruz just graduated from high school but don’t let his young age fool you, he is already developing some very serious systems. His low cost eye tracking system uses Electrooculography to detect the movements of a person’s eyes. This then allows a person to control an electronic or computer system just by looking around. He has also received some CNN coverage, see the CNN video below. “The eyeboard is an open source project that I built in order to help people with disabilities. My circuit detects the eye movements using the technology called “Electrooculography”. Which consists in detecting the resting potential that exists between the retina and the cornea by using skin electrodes around the eyes. Using analogue and digital electronics, and applying the correct interface to this concept, I can control anything I wish just with the eyes!”
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Henrique Ribeiro de Oliveira from Brazil and two others have built this great Delta Robot with Vision. Best of all it is running a cool program to show off what it is capable of. You can toss some tokens randomly on the board, the robot will locate the tokens and place them on some colored dots in the middle of the working surface. Via: Hacked Gadgets Forum “We used Labview to make the main program, it has all the configuration of the robot. On normal cycle it will scan the image from a webcam located under the big base that hold the motors and if there is something that looks like the template that we are looking for it will calculate the inverse kinematics to start the movement (yes it has few problems on locating something under the robot arms). With the kinematics calculated it will send a value in steps to the microcontrollers so they can calculate a acceleration ramp and send it to the driver. The end effector is a vacuum cup that have a small pump to feed it. After the first cycle of movements to get the object it will repeat the process of scanning the webcam streaming to find a location to deposit the object.“
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