Arduino Software Update Introduces Command-Line Tool, Serial Data Plotter
Arduino releases version 1.6.6 of their IDE software, adding new tools and features for programming Arduino-compatible microcontrollers.
Software
Get to Know Onion Omega, a Tiny New Dev Board
The Onion Omega, a promising open hardware development platform, blew through its Kickstarter goal this week, where its promise to make hardware development easy for software developers seemed to resonate with backers. “We are strong believers of open source and we strive to give back to the open source community,” wrote the Onion Omega team. “All hardware schematics, […]
Glove Based Sign-to-Speech System
The EnableTalk system uses a glove-mounted microcontroller to collate information from a passel of onboard sensors—11 flex sensors, 8 touch sensors, 2 accelerometers, a compass, and a gyroscope—and transmit it wirelessly to a nearby computer or smartphone for translation into machine generated speech.
Hacking Skype for Better Teleconferencing
David Schneider of IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article up about a system he set up to improve his Skype-mediated telepresence at their editorial meetings. Physically, the system consists of four oblong wooden boxes, distributed along their conference table, mounting ten USB devices between them (two webcams and eight microphones) and some custom software that uses the Skype API to allow him to switch between them remotely in real time.
Vim Clutch
In an effort to shave off precious microseconds from the tedium of having to manually switch modes in his favorite multi-modal text editor, Aleksandr Levchuk fashioned a USB clutch pedal to do the job. Now, instead of typing an “i” to insert text or hitting to edit it, Aleksandr need only tap the pedal to enter the corresponding mode.
Visible Physible Family Trees
Last September, I wrote about the Thingiverse “Cube Gears” phenomenon, briefly tracing the origin of user emmett’s Screwless Cube Gears through its evolution from Haruki Nakamura’s papercraft geared heart sculpture via user GregFrost’s printable Broken Heart thing. At the time, I really wanted to exhaust the graph of the cube gears / heart gears phenomenon, but didn’t have the available free time. Well, I finally got around to doing it.
New Method for Vectorizing Pixel Art
I especially like the new streamlined Space Invader shapes. I always wondered what they really looked like.
