TechnologyIQ

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 A...

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 An interesting link found among my daily reading

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 An interesting link found among my daily reading

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-identific...

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 An interesting link found among my daily reading

Kelsey Derringer and Matt Chilbert are co-founders of CodeJoy, producing live, interactive, online shows that give kids live control of their cardboard robots, all from a studio in Pittsburgh. In doing so, they are creating a new, fresh fusion of education and entertainment through an interactive medium.  Make: Tell us about yourself, and why you launched CodeJoy. Kelsey Derringer: I’m an educator who started out as a middle and high school English teacher, not a STEM teacher at all. And I’ve taught all kinds of things: ballet, summer camp programs — I even taught at a zoo! But when I moved here to Pittsburgh 7 years ago, I started teaching for an afterschool STEM education program for fourth through eighth grade girls with the Carnegie Science Center and the YWCA. I got introduced to coding and robotics because I was asked to teach it as part of this program. My initial reaction was, “I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do robots.” And I didn’t really receive much training with ...

When the soldering iron gets hot, makers have been known to cook up some sweet music on the Raspberry Pi. In some cases, we mean that literally, like today with Keith Bloemer's NeuralPi project. NeuralPi is a Raspberry Pi-based guitar pedal that uses machine learning to create custom effects. We've always insisted the best Raspberry Pi projects are the ones you can personalize—in this case, you can train the system with existing models or a new one of your own to get the sound you want. Read This Raspberry Pi Guitar Pedal Uses Machine Learning for Effects via Tom's Hardware An interesting link found among my daily reading

Now that midsummer is synonymous with out-of-control wildfires, researchers and government agencies are putting out impressive online mapping systems to help people understand their peril. As California, Oregon, Washington, and other states brace for another devastating wildfire season, fire mapping has improved substantially since last year. Here’s where to bookmark... Read These wildfire tracker maps show smoke, hot spots, and air quality by zip code via Fast Company An interesting link found among my daily reading

Arranging dominoes in such a way that they knock each other down in sequence can be a fun pastime, but what if you would like a machine to take care of lining them up for you? As seen in the video below, Lewis of DIY Machines has come up with just such a device featuring 3D-printable parts and an Arduino Uno for control. The project uses a single gearmotor to both move the robot over the floor and actuate the stacking mechanism, creating consistent spacing without the need for additional sensors. A steering servo points it in the right direction, and its motion can be pre-programmed via the Arduino IDE. Read This machine stacks dominoes automatically via ブログドットテレビ An interesting link found among my daily reading