AI Powered Coffee Maker Knows A Bit Too Much About You via Hackaday

People keep warning that Skynet and the great robot uprising is not that far away, what with all this recent AI and machine-learning malarky getting all the attention lately. But we think going straight for a terminator robot army is not a very smart approach, not least due to a lack of subtlety. We think that it’s a much better bet to take over the world one home appliance at a time, and this AI Powered coffee maker might just well be part of that master plan.

PCB stackup with Pi Zero sat atop the driver / PSU PCBs
[Mark Smith] has taken a standard semi-auto espresso maker and jazzed it up a bit, with a sweet bar graph nixie tube the only obvious addition, at least from the front of the unit. Inside, a Raspberry Pi Zero sits atop his own nixie tube hat and associated power supply. The whole assembly is dropped into a 3D printed case and lives snuggled up to the water pump.

Read AI Powered Coffee Maker Knows A Bit Too Much About You via Hackaday

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11 Wonderful Waze Settings Everyone Should Be Using via Lifehacker [Shared]

I was a big user of Waze, at least before the pandemic, and I plan on using it a lot once this is all over. I use it for ETA estimates, routing, route changes due to traffic and closures and more. Here are some tips on tuning it to your preferences.

Google’s got the navigation app market locked down tight, owning two of the most popular navigation apps for Android and iPhone. Google Maps has lots of excellent features and is pre-loaded on Android phones sold in most places around the world, but in spite of that, Waze has a cult following in several countries, including the U.S.

There are lots of people who prefer Waze over Google Maps, and it’s easy to see why—it’s essentially Google Maps with personality. It also has several great features that you should check out. Here are some of the best.

Read 11 Wonderful Waze Settings Everyone Should Be Using via Lifehacker

A $50 CNC via hack a day [Arduino]

In theory, there’s isn’t much to building a CNC machine. Hook a bit to a motor and move the motor around with some lead screws and stepper motors. Easy. But, of course, the devil is in the details. [DAZ] made a nice-looking and inexpensive rig that probably isn’t the most precise CNC in the world, but it looks like it does a good enough job and he claims he spent about $50 on it. The video below shows some of the work it has done, and it doesn’t look bad.

This isn’t a rainy afternoon project. You’ll need to cut some wood and 3D print many parts. The drives use M8 threaded rod. Electronics is just an Arduino running standard software.

Read A $50 CNC via hack a day

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Convert Any Analog Camera to Digital With This DIY Hack via Fstoppers

The additional steps and costs involved with shooting on film often put many photographers off. What if you could have the best of both worlds and use digital in your older film cameras?

Digital and analog cameras have for the most part stayed on opposite sides of the track. There have been several attempts in the past to merge these two worlds but nothing concrete has ever taken off. Enter stage left Befinitiv who recently took it upon himself to build a custom film cartridge for his analog camera so it could act as a digital one.

At the heart of this creation is a Raspberry PI Zero W with a camera module and battery. What I love about this particular incarnation of "digital film" is that all of the electronics fit neatly inside the camera body itself. This crucially means that you don't have to modify your beloved antique cameras in any destructive way which would be a major deal-breaker for many of us.

Read Convert Any Analog Camera to Digital With This DIY Hack via Fstoppers

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How to download everything you've posted on Instagram via Mashable!

Looking for a way to obtain all your Instagram content? There is a quick and easy way to do so. Instagram offers a free "Download Data" function that downloads all the content you've ever posted to Instagram, or any actions you've made on the site such as comments and likes, and sends it all to you via email.

Here's how to make use of this simple process to save all your Instagram content.

Read How to download everything you've posted on Instagram via Mashable!

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Upgrade Your Bike With This Awesome Arduino Project via All3DP [Arduino]

The majority of bikes are boring. They have two wheels, some handles, a brake or two, and a seat about as comfortable as a jagged rock. They do not have turn signals, brake lights, or GPS. But what if they could?

Enter our hero, young Collin Wentzien. Juicy hero backstory now – after suffering an injury that deprived him of the ability to enjoy his passions of cross country and soccer, Collin was restricted to exercising only with a bike. A grim fate indeed. After using an ordinary, boring bike on the road, Collin realized it was, as we all suspected, meh, and got to work using his skills for a project that can turn any mundane, run-of-the-mill bike into something far more interesting.

Referred to as the Smart Bike System by Collin in his build text, his project is designed to solve the problem of communicating with drivers while also indicating the speed and bright lighting for biking about post-sunset.

Read Upgrade Your Bike With This Awesome Arduino Project via All3DP

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Android on Raspberry Pi 4: How to Make It Work via All3DP [Raspi]

The Android Operating System (OS) is currently the most widely used OS in the world. Launched in 2008, few would’ve thought it would have such a massive impact on our lives. Many of our smartphones and TVs, as well as embedded and IoT devices, run on some form of Android.

Android as an OS is primarily aimed at mobile devices. Its free and open-source nature has contributed significantly to its development. Developers have modified the base Android OS and customized it to suit various applications.

Being such an established and highly-developed OS, many have looked to put it on devices not necessarily designed to run it, including the Raspberry Pi.

Read Android on Raspberry Pi 4: How to Make It Work via All3DP

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Google Calendar will let you record where you’re working to help organize office meetings via The Verge

Google is adding an option to its Calendar service to let you show where you’re working on any given day of the week, the company has announced. The feature will start rolling out from August 30th for users on select Google Workspace plans, and will be accessible via Calendar’s settings menu alongside its existing working hours options, as well as on the weekly calendar view below where it shows each day’s dates. Available work locations include “Office,” “Home,” “Unspecified,” or “Somewhere else.”

Read Google Calendar will let you record where you’re working to help organize office meetings via The Verge

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This App Identifies Birds by Their Songs via kottke.org [Apps]

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology recently added the ability to identify birds from hearing their birdsong to their Merlin Bird ID app — a “Shazam for bird songs” as Fast Company says. You just start recording with your phone and the app starts telling you the birds it’s hearing. Here’s how it works:

Automatic song ID has been a dream for decades, but analyzing sound has always been extremely difficult. The breakthrough came when researchers, including Merlin lead researcher Grant Van Horn, began treating the sounds as images and applying new and powerful image classification algorithms like the ones that power Merlin’s Photo ID feature.

“Each sound recording a user makes gets converted from a waveform to a spectrogram-a way to visualize the amplitude [volume], frequency [pitch], and duration of the sound,” Van Horn says. “So just like Merlin can identify a picture of a bird, it can now use this picture of a bird’s sound to make an ID,” Van Horn says.

This pioneering sound-identification technology is integrated into the existing Merlin Bird ID app, meaning Merlin now offers four ways to identify a bird: by a sound, by a photo, by answering five questions about a bird you saw, or by exploring a list of the birds expected where you are.

Read This App Identifies Birds by Their Songs via kottke.org

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It’s easier than ever to add two-way communication to Arduino devices via Arduino Blog [Arduino]

There’s a brand new device-to-device communication feature now available in the Arduino IoT Cloud. It’s something we’ve been working on for a long time. So we’re excited to see how it’ll add a whole new connected dimension to your Arduino projects.

Read It’s easier than ever to add two-way communication to Arduino devices via Arduino Blog

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