Tux Machines
Open Hardware/Modding and Devices With Linux
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 18, 2023
DIY EMF detector scans for ghosts and appliances
Electromagnetic Field (EMF) detectors are popular pieces of ghost hunting equipment. The idea is that paranormal apparitions emit a noticeable EMF that proves their existence. But in reality, those EMFs come from electric and electronic devices. And an EMF from you microwave may, for example, interfere with your Wi-Fi network and cause performance problems.
Hackaday Prize 2023: PAROL6 – A GPL Desktop Robotic Arm
Parol 6 is a 3D-printed six-axis robot arm created by [Petar Crnjak] as a combination of the principles from a few previous projects. Aside from a pneumatic gripper, each axis is driven by a stepper motor, with at least a few of these axes being driven through a metal planetary gearbox for extra precision and torque.
Raspberry Pi Camera Instantly Develops Pictures into Digital Frame
The Pi has turned the old analog camera into a digital camera that works with the Internet of Things. It communicates with the digital picture frame — which is also fitted with a Pi using Wi-Fi. As long as the two devices are connected to the internet, the camera is able to send pictures instantly to the remote frame as soon as they’re taken.
Moon-Pi: an e-paper lunar cycle display
The PiJuice powers up the Raspberry Pi Zero W daily at 1.30am and it only needs to run briefly to update the display for the day ahead. All the lunar cycle data and quotations are stored on the SD card, avoiding the need for an internet connection. A Python script runs automatically at boot and looks up the date. Then it finds out today’s moon phase and grabs the image file titled with today’s date. Next, a moon-related quotation is selected at random, and this text, along with the image of the moon in its current phase, is thrown up onto the e-paper display. Once it has done its job for the day, it shuts itself down, leaving everything on screen for Billy’s wife to find when she gets to her desk. How efficient.
Z-Wave gets a boost with new chip provider
If you need any more indication that Matter is not going to kill all of the pre-existing standards in the smart home anytime soon, check out the launch this week of Trident IoT, a new company devoted to building Z-wave chips. Trident was founded in April to design and support Z-wave devices, and launched this week with news that it is a month out from taping out its chips and plans to sample them to customers before the end of this year.
Americas Puts on Updated ROS 2 Training with Revamped Motion Panning Special Topic
To start the workshop, beginner students worked through the basics of ROS 2, while those already familiar with ROS were walked through our freshly updated exercise on performing motion planning with Tesseract. All students then came together to learn about setting up their robot URDF, do motion planning with MoveIt, and process pointclouds using PCL. Notably, these students were the first to experience the ROS-I training fully in ROS 2 Humble. No more spending time during training wrapping your mind around ROSbouncing between ROS 1 and ROS 2 1 just to get MoveIt up and running.