Cooking Hacks Blog

 

The Mood Lamp project by Vittorio Cuculo, is a system using interactions to communicate an emotional state to a physical object and receive back a coherent response. In particular, through your facial expression you communicate your emotional state to an RGB color lamp . The lamp, at this point, will respond to the interaction by changing the color of the light emitted in accordance with the emotional state inferred.

The aim of the systems is to remove the mediation between human and machine typical of classic interfaces. Among the modes of natural interaction we usually have gestures, gaze tracking and facial expressions. The latter are particularly relevant because they play a fundamental role in nonverbal communication between human beings.
Regarding the man-machine interaction, the ability to recognize and synthesize facial expressions allows the machine to gain more communication skills, on the one hand by interpreting the emotions on the face of a subject, and on the other by translating their communicative intent through an output, such as movement, sound response or color change.

An IKEA lamp becomes a Natural Interaction system which senses human emotional states through facial expression. It uses OpenCV for image processing and analysis to identify emotional state through the movements of face’s fiducial points. The lamp, made with an Arduino Duemilanove, changes its color to represent the user’s current emotion.
In particular, it receives via serial communication, the values of pleasure, arousal and dominance, following the PAD emotional state model, as inferred from the facial expression and changes accordingly the color of the RGB LEDs.

Via: Arduino Blog, Source: Vittorio Cuculo

 

IR Remote is a small shield that allows you to record any infrared command sent by a remote control and resend it from the Internet. It works connected to Arduino and Raspberry Pi, and let us to control any HVAC system including heating,ventilation, air-conditioning and thermostats from the Cloud.

We offer 6 different wireless interfaces to connect Arduino and Raspberry Pi to the Internet: WiFi, 3G, GPRS, Bluetooth and 802.15.4 / ZigBee.

With IR Remote you can easily control our home HVAC system from a laptop, a webserver or even from your smartphone. The shield is compatible with both Arduino and Raspberry Pi so you can choose your favourite platform to automate your home.

You can find a detailed Tutorial to know how to use IR Remote Module with your favourite HVAC devices, as well as a demonstration video to show a basic example of what it can do.

Note: If you are interested in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), M2M and the Internet of Things (IoT) projects check our new open source sensor platform: Waspmote which counts with more than 60 sensors available to use and a low consumption mode of just 0.07uA to ensure years of battery life. Know more at:

• Waspmote Main Page (Libelium)
• Waspmote Brief Description (Cooking Hacks)

After several months under development, Cooking Hacks Team has been able to offer a new Blood Pressure Sensor (Sphygmomanometer) ready to ship. 

This Sphygmomanometer allows to measure the blood pressure and read it with Arduino. Blood pressure is the pressure of the blood in the arteries as it is pumped around the body by the heart. When your heart beats, it contracts and pushes blood through the arteries to the rest of your body. This force creates pressure on the arteries. Blood pressure is recorded as two numbers—the systolic pressure (as the heart beats) over the diastolic pressure (as the heart relaxes between beats).

It has a screen to see the values directly, but you can also use it with our e-Health Sensor Platform to share the results through the Cloud, entering in the Internet of Things. From the release of the e-Health Sensor Platform, we have received several awards and we have been in the media like Wired or Postscapes. This sensor is also included in the e-Health Sensor Platform Complete Kit.

Don't forget to read our full guide if you need more information about e-Health Sensor Platform. Learn how to use all sensors and our apps for iPhone and Android to monitor the patient easily.

 

This month is being a success in DIY events. Due to the workshops we are giving in TechShop in San Francisco these days, we have been able to attend Maker Faire Bay Area 2013 too.

We have no words to describe our sensations: meeting old friends, new ones, awesome projects from Makers... Maker Faire Bay Area brings the opportunity to any people to show what they do, from makers or HackerSpaces to big companies like Atmel, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments or Autodesk. Artists, inventors, engineers and creators came together to share their toys, hobbies, inventions, and their passions. People of all ages came to be inspired and just have fun.

There were several pavilions (Expo Hall, Fiesta Hall, Hands-on homegrown...) where makers had the opportunity to show everything they make. The Expo Hall was full of booths with 3D Printers, taking a high part on this Maker Faire Edition: from proprietary ones to RepRap ones (Mendel or even Prusa IT3-based like the one we released last week). CNC Machines, 3D Scanners or even Open Source Pick & Place Machine were in this pavilion. Most of people was using Arduino or Raspberry Pi in their projects so we had the opportunity of meeting some interesting attendants, talking about the improvement of their projects and showing our Open Source Sensor Platform: Waspmote. There were several outdoor stages like Coke Zero & Mentos Stage, where Stephen & Fritz from EepyBird show us what they do with the bottles.

Fiesta Hall was a pavilion for Digital Art. It was awesome to watch performances by ArcAttack using Tesla Coils, or playing Tetris in a big screen made by LEDs. Music, Lights, 3D...

And... What about kids? There were many places for them: workshops for "How to solder?" or "Electronic Camps" where kids were making their first electronic projects with basic circuits. Maker philosophy is very high here and we were able to see future "makers". Don't forget: Children are the future!

We met in person people from DFRobot, SeeedStudio or Arduino, taking the opportunity of talk about OpenHardware and our role in this and the staff from Neurosky, remembering the winner of AT&T Hackathon in last CES (January) who won the prize using Mindwave with our 3G Shield for Arduino/Raspberry Pi.

Electronics, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, 3D Printers, Hackerspaces, Digital Art, Craft, workshops, children, outdoor events... You must not miss it next time... Turn your dreams into reality.

We are collecting all pictures of this event and they will be available soon in our Facebook channel. Take a look!!

Let's Make!

From May 13, we are awarding your support with free samples in all the orders. Cables, PCBs, small sensors... When you place the order, we will include an assorted gift.

Currently, we are offering:

- Electrolytic Decoupling Capacitors - 100uF/25V: These capacitors are great transient/surge suppressors. Attach one between the power and ground of your project to ensure smooth power delivery. High quality radial electrolytic capacitors.

- DIP Sockets Solder Tail - 18-Pin 0.3". If you've ever had to de-solder a dip part from a circuit board, you know how valuable these are! Number of pins include: 8, 14, 16, 18, 28, and 40.

- Jumper Wire - 0.1", 6-pin, 4": Great for jumping from board to board or just about anything else. There is a 6-pin JST RE connector on both ends. These are simple jumper wires used on standard 0.1" breakaway headers.

- EB - Fully buckled 3 wire cable: The cable is designed for Arduino sensor shield V4 and Sensor Chassis 1.1. Compatible with V4 digital port, basic digital module connections.

We will add more assorted gifts soon. Come on! Get your free sample in your next order!

If you are also looking for specials, don't forget to visit our Sales Section. More than 100 products are waiting for you.

 

Hanting Lu and Kedari Elety, students in Cornell University’s Electrical and Computer Engineering, have written a detailed explanation of their Hand tracking pong project, a pong game which was controlled by tracking the player’s hand:

"The NTSC video signal from the camera is stored in the SDRAM at the rate of the TV Decoder Line clock (TD_CLK). Data is read from the SDRAM each time the VGA requests data. The data from the SDRAM is in YUV format which needs to be converted to RGB before sending it to the VGA. For skin detection, we added a filter at this converting module level such that in addition to the R,G and B values, the module also outputs a one bit binary 1 if it corresponds to a skin pixel. Else, zero. By doing this, the output on the VGA is now white corresponding to skin pixels and black otherwise"

Via: Dangerous Prototypes, Source: Cornell University

 

 

Dimitri, Frank, Kevin and Robin from Eectronique have sent in some details of a project that they have been working on. They had an old early 90′s LED matrix sign and wanted to make it work with a Raspberry Pi. The circuit layout is what you would expect from that era.

They retreived an old (1992 !) bus display (the thing that says the next stops on the buses). It was old: unknown protocol, unknown wiring, not fast at all...

Via: Dangerous Prototypes, Source: Electronique

 

Our friends from ICTP, including Marco Zennaro (from WSNBlog), have launched an Open Book: "Low-cost 3D Printing for Science, Education and Sustainable Development"

The Science Dissemination Unit (SDU) of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) has organized the 1^st International Workshop, to be held at the ICTP (Trieste, Italy) from May 6 to 8, 2013.

They introduce this Open Book, downloadable in low and high-resolution, as follows:

"Low-cost, three-dimensional (3D) desktop printing, although still in its infancy, is rapidly maturing, with seemingly unlimited potential. The hope is that this cutting-edge 3D technology will open new dimensions to science and education, and will make a marked impact in developing countries. This book gives a reasonable, first overview of current research on 3D printing. It aims to inspire curiosity and understanding in young scholars and new generations of scientists to motivate them to start building up their own 3D printing experiences and to explore the huge potential this technology provides –with the final goal of putting learning literally in their hands."

If you are looking for a 3D Printer, take a look on our Step-by-Step Guide.

Via and Source: ICTP

 

This wooden box is a wireless pinball controller and tablet stand. The idea is to set it on a workbench to give you some of the thrill of standing and playing the real thing. [Jeff] has been rather addicted to playing a pinball app on Android lately, and started the journey because he needed a way to give his thumbs some relief.

An Arduino monitors buttons on either side of this wooden controller. [Jeff] is new to working with hardware (he’s a Linux Kernel developer by trade) and was immediately struck with button debouncing issues. Rather than handle this in software (we’ve got a super-messy thread on that issue with our favorite at the bottom) he chose a hardware solution by building an SR latch out of two NAND gates.

With the inputs sorted out he added a BlueSMiRF board to the project which allowed him to connect a Nexus 7 tablet via Bluetooth. At this point he ran into some problems getting the device to respond to his control as if it were an external keyboard. His stop-gap solution was to switch to a Galaxy Tab 10.1 which wasn’t throwing cryptic errors. Hopefully he’ll fix this in the next iteration which will also include adding a plunger to launch the pinball, a part which just arrived in the mail as he was writing up this success.

Via: Hack a Day, Source: Fun with DC Circuits

 

 

Knock Knock is a clever Arduino-controlled calculator toy, designed for small children. The user knocks out a calculation on the surface — addition, multiplication, subtraction, or division — and Knock Knock will spit back the solution, in the form of knocks, of course. Created by Switzerland designer Khalil Klouche, Knock Knock is brought to life with an Arduino, contact microphones, and solenoids. It’s a fun idea for a toy, but good luck trying to use this in secret during a “no calculators” test at school!

Via: Make, Source: Makeshift