TechnologyIQ

For the price of a toothbrush and a small motor with an offset weight, a bristlebot is essentially the cheapest robot that can be built. The motor shakes the toothbrush and the bristle pattern allows the robot to move, albeit in a completely random pattern. While this might not seem like a true robot that can interact with its environment in any meaningful way, [scanlime] shows just how versatile this robot – which appears to only move randomly – can actually be used to make art in non-random ways. Instead of using a single bristlebot for the project, three of them are built into one 3D printed flexible case where each are offset by 120°, and which can hold a pen in the opening in the center. This allows them to have some control on the robot’s direction of movement. From there, custom software attempts to wrangle the randomness of the bristlebot to produce a given image. Of course, as a bristlebot it is easily subjected to the whims of its external environment such as the levelin...

The doorbell. The intercom. The elevator. Once upon a time, beginning in the late nineteenth century, pushing the button that activated such devices was a strange new experience. The electric push button, the now mundane-seeming interface between human and machine, was originally a spark for wonder, anxiety, and social transformation. Read When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked via JSTOR Daily An interesting link found among my daily reading

According to Michael Gardi, although you can find numerous stunning Turing machine implementations on the Internet, their complexity tends to detract from the simplicity of what a Turing machine actually does. In order to easily show how they work, he decided to create a demonstrator with the actual calculations handled by an Arduino Mega. The console, dubbed TMD-1, displays a “tape” state on the top of the device using eight servo-controlled flip tiles that write 1s or 0s, while a series of lighted arrows indicate the program’s position. On the bottom surface, users can program instructions with magnetic tiles, and read the current machine state via LEDs. Read The TMD-1 is a Turing machine demonstrator via Arduino Blog * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library An interesting link found among my daily reading

In a thread on Reddit over the weekend, some Amazon Echo owners complained about unwanted commercial messages from Alexa. Sometimes if you ask Alexa a question, like the time, it’ll follow up with asking if you want recommendations for things to buy. Here’s how to stop Alexa from doing that. Read How to stop Amazon Echo from asking you to buy stuff via CNBC An interesting link found among my daily reading

If you are of a certain age, your first exposure to computer programming was probably BASIC. For a few years, there were few cheaper ways to program in BASIC than the Sinclair ZX series of computers. If you long for those days, you might find the 1980-something variant of BASIC a little limiting. Or you could use SpecBasic from [Paul Dunn]. SpecBasic is apparently reasonably compatible with the Spectrum, but lets you use your better hardware. For example, instead of a 256×192 8-color screen, SpecBas accommodates larger screens and up to 256 colors. However, that does lead to certain incompatibilities that you can read about in the project’s README file. Read Sinclair BASIC For Today via Hackaday An interesting link found among my daily reading

A new article published to the official Raspberry Pi blog this week reveals more details about SeedGerm, a Raspberry Pi powered platform designed for automated seed imaging. The new platform has been created by researchers at the John Innes Centre for plant and microbial science. Offering a machine learning driven image analysis platform to acquire a range of seed germination image collections for different crop species . Read SeedGerm Raspberry Pi-based platform for automated seed imaging via Geeky Gadgets * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library An interesting link found among my daily reading

This website has 17,000 3D scans of famous sculptures and cultural artifacts -- Scan The World, The Open Source Museum via Boing Boing Scan the World has thousands of high-resolution scans of statues, sculptures, and other 3D museum pieces saved in the STL format. You can upload them to 3D modeling apps or print them on a 3D printer. Read This website has 17,000 3D scans of famous sculptures and cultural artifacts -- Scan The World, The Open Source Museum via Boing Boing * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library

The toys of the past may have been cheesy, but you can’t deny the creativity needed to build something engaging without any electronics. One stalwart toy from this category is View-Master, the little stereoscopic slide viewer that brought the world to life in seven vibrant scenes. And digitizing these miniature works of art is the purpose of this neat View-Master reel scanner project. Read Scanner Captures View-Master Discs as Glorious 3D Videos via hack a day An interesting link found among my daily reading

The Bosch BME680 is a super-capable environmental sensor, and [Random Nerd Tutorials] has married it to the ESP32 to create an air quality meter that serves as a great tutorial on not just getting the sensor up and running, but also in setting up a simple (and optional) web server to deliver the readings. It’s a great project that steps through everything from beginning to end, including how to install the necessary libraries and how to program the ESP32, so it’s the perfect weekend project for anyone who wants to learn. Read Two-Part, Four-Wire Air Quality Meter Shows How It’s Done via hack a day * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library An interesting link found among my daily reading

Read Clubhouse is no longer an iOS exclusive via Input An interesting link found among my daily reading

Read Clubhouse comes to Android after more than a year of iOS exclusivity via The Verge An interesting link found among my daily reading

In this tutorial I’ll be demonstrating how to trace and image to vector with Illustrator, both in color and in monotone. For this lesson I’ll be using the Image Trace feature in Adobe Illustrator, which allows us to make auto tracings of images as opposed to manually tracing them with something like the Pen Tool. Read How To Trace An Image To Vector with Illustrator | Color and Monotone via Design Made Simple on YouTube * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library An interesting link found among my daily reading

Hedy is a new programming language with some new features: The nice thing about Hedy is that Hedy is gradual. That means that you do not have to learn all rules at once. The first few levels do not have that many rules, so you can get used to programming comfortably. In every level they add new rules, increasing the number of commands that you know. Commands are instructions for a computer. Hedy is meant for all kids that want to learn programming! You do need to be able to read English with ease. Programming experience is not needed. However, if you have programmed with Scratch or Python, some commands will look familiar to you. Hedy is free. Hedy is also ‘Open source’, which means that everyone who can program can help us make Hedy better. You can find the code on GitHub. No need to install anything, Hedy works in the browser, which is the program you are using to look at this page. Probably Chrome or Edge or FireFox. Hedy also works on a phone or tablet. Read Hedy: A progra...

@douglaswelch Lewisham Chessmen 3D Print - prints can help make history come alive ##history ##3dprinting ##chessmen ##chess ##artifact ♬ Medival - StreamVibes

Raspberry Pi has been an exceptional platform to enjoy retro gaming, and 2021 has a lot to offer on the best emulators that can help in upgrading the experience to something enjoyable and worthwhile. Enjoying retro games is best fitted with a rightful emulator that bears a variety of tools that complement the feels of the good ole days. When people say retro, the first thing coming to mind is old, and that is exactly what the function of emulators is for, as it relieves the games loved in the past to the modern world. The addition of the Raspberry Pi Pico device has been excellent in supporting this feature of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, as it promotes the use of Linux native language for its functions.  Read Raspberry Pi Emulator for Retro Gaming in Linux: Round-Up of 2021's Best via Tech Times * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Publi...

CSSConf Australia For so many of us, myself included, the art world is the entry point into the coding world. Here we will explore ins and outs of generative art, and experience the joy of creating art with code. Generative art can be as simple or complex as you like, at the end of the day, everyone will have the mindset and processes down to create their own unique pieces of joy. This talk begins with the basics of generative art, a small history, including some of the earliest "code art", proceeding into examples through history leading us here. The goal of the "speed run" is to give the audience as much knowledge about generative art as possible in the given time, while also showing the tooling, and surprisingly few steps it takes to get creating unique and original art. Generally speaking, there is no limitation to the audience of this talk, it really sits on the borderlines of people who enjoy art, code and science, and everyone will take home a different p...