Soccer robot scores on humans

Did you lot know there'due south a rather large community dedicated to making robots that can play soccer? Did you lot know they're getting pretty expert?

RoboCup is an international robotics competition held annually, first founded in 1997. The goal beginning and foremost is to promote robotics and AI inquiry — and to do so, they decided to brand the contest something that is publicly appealing — Why not one of the most pop sports around? The official goal of the project is to have a team of autonomous humanoid based robot players vanquish the about recent winning team of the World Cup, complying with the official rules of FIFA. This yr, the RoboCup coincided with the real World Cup, and was hosted in Brazil.

There are several categories in RoboCup with diverse types of robots, and the mid-size team did pretty well this year.

Arguably, this is the most exciting game of all, because it gives a sense of what the current state-of-the-art in robotic soccer is, and how it stacks upwards to a squad of moderately talented squishy bipeds.

We guess that'southward a nice fashion of saying "not-professional soccer players". Regardless though, they SCORED!

Continue reading "Soccer Playing Robots Score On Human Goalie!" →

astronaut-or-not-round3-results

Round 3 of Customs Voting has fatigued to a close. This time around we had nearly 60,000 votes for 420 projects! The starting time voter lottery cartoon didn't turn up a winner, just on Friday we ended up giving away the bench supply. We'll comprehend the projects with the top votes in just a moment, just starting time let's take a look at the voter lottery prize for the new round.

You must vote at least once in this new round to be eligible for the voter lottery on Fri!

voter-lottery-4-prizes

Nosotros've got and so many prizes in the package for the fourth round of Astronaut or Not that we're just showing you a few in this image.

On Friday morning time nosotros'll be drawing a random number and checking it against the Hacker profiles on Hackaday.io. If that person has voted in this current round, they win. If not, they'll be boot themselves (emptyhandedly) for non taking part in the festivities.

This week'south prize package includes:

  • Terasic Technologies DE0 Development Board for Cyclone III FPGA
  • Raspberry Pi Model B+ Board
  • Element14 BeagleBone Black
  • MSP430F5529 USB LaunchPad Evaluation Kit
  • SimpleLink Wi-Fi CC3200 LaunchPad
  • AVRISP mkII Atmel Programmer
  • PICkit iii Microchip In-Circuit Debugger
  • ST-LINK/V2 ST Microelectronics In-Circuit Debugger/Programmer
  • B&K Precision 1550 Switching DC Bench Power Supply
  • Fluke 115 Digital Multimeter

Now onto the results:

Keep reading "New Round Of Astronaut Or Not: Too Cool For Kickstarter" →

cock

Nosotros have some of the Net's hacking elite judging The Hackaday Prize, and that means they can't enter any projects into the prize. All the better for everyone else, we suppose. 1 of the judges, [Sprite_tm], is a resourceful guy and when it comes to judging the entries for The Hackaday Prize, he'south going to do what comes naturally to him: build a auto to automate the chore.

[Sprite]'south plan for the JudgeTron 9001 is to employ neural networks embedded in biological specimens to do the judging for him. Honestly, we actually appreciate the effort he put in to this; biohacking is really in vogue correct now, and we practice love the classic throwback to the AI renaissance here. It certainly doesn't hurt that he'south using a Raspberry Piand an Arduino for this project, either.

Grabbing a touchscreen LCD and a few other parts out of his junk drawer, [Sprite] quickly whipped upwardly a project that would display entries to The Hackaday Prize to the biologically embedded neural nets. These nets needed a little scrap of encouragement to select winning entries, and so a 'feed' dorsum mechanism was laser cut out of acrylic, mounted to a servo, and filled with positive reinforcement.

The software running on the Pi crawls through the list of entries to The Hackaday Prize, extracting images from each one. The programme was for the biological neural nets to select winning entries and be rewarded via the feedback machinery. These neural nets proved to be very sensitive to the sound of the servo gears of the feedback mechanism, and [Sprite]'south effort at finding a winning entry with his creation has then far proved unsuccessful. Yet, there's a video of it in action, you can check that out below.

Keep reading "Automated Judging Of Hackaday Prize Entries" →

The news for RadioShack is not good. The retail chain that we hackers hold nearly and beloved to our hearts is in financial trouble, and could go under side by side twelvemonth.  With just 64 million in cash on mitt, it literally does not have plenty capital to close the 1,100 stores information technology planned to in March of this year.

On May 27th, 2011, we asked y'all what RadioShack could practice to cater to our community. They listened. Most of their retail stores now acquit an assortment of Arduino shields, the under appreciated Parallax (why?), and fifty-fifty El Wire. Thanks to you. You fabricated this happen.

Today, we are asking y'all once more. Only not for what RadioShack tin do better. Nosotros're asking what they tin can do to survive. To live. Information technology makes no sense for RadioShack to compete in the roughshod cell phone/tablet market, and makes every chip of sense for them take advantage of the chop-chop growing hacker/builder/maker what-ever-you-want-to-call-us community. Let'south face it. We're everywhere and our numbers are growing. From 3D printers to drones, the evidence is undeniable.

With v,000 retail stores across the USA, they are in a perfect position to change their business model to a hacker friendly one. Imagine a RadioShack downward the road  that stocked PICs, Artillery, Atmels, stepper motors, drivers, sensors, filament….like a Sparkfun retail store. Imagine the ability to only drive a few miles and buy whatsoever you needed. Would you pay a premium? Would you pay a little extra to have information technology now? I bet you would.

At present it's time to speak up. Permit your voices be heard. Allow'south go the attention of the RadioShack board. Yous've done it before. It's time to exercise it again. Hackers unite!

poke Early on this year, Twitch Plays Pokemon, a webstream of tens of thousands of people playing the same game of Pokemon via spider web chat. It was certainly an interesting sociological miracle, but as in any organization where thousands of people try to practise a single matter, progress was exceedingly slow at points. This was compounded by the fact the Twitch stream delayed the chat past about 30 seconds.

At the time, there was some talk nearly setting upwardly an alternative to the emulator-based Twitch stream. Ideas were floated, but until at present, no one has yet come up upwardly with a workable solution. At present we accept Pokáde: real Pokemon games (Blood-redand Blue) running on existent hardware (two Super Game Boys, two super Nintendos, and two Game Genies), streamed live to the Net with an IRC-like chat role.

Simply for the ease of capturing the video of the stream, [Johannes], the guy behind all of this, is using a pair of Super Nintendos and Super Game Boys connected to USB video capture dongles. The Super Game Boys are modded to enable trading between the Blood-red and Blue versions of the game, and controls are handled with a USB connection to the PC running the server.

Anyone can play the game, simply by going to the Pokáde Chat, entering the conversation, and clicking on random buttons on the brick Game Boy GUI. The game ROMs have been slightly modified to disable the option of starting a new game, just this is nevertheless the classic Twitch Plays Pokemon experience: people all around the globe mashing buttons and creating a faith effectually a fossil pokemon.

F8X0VISHV3Q1HLI.LARGE

Ever feel like someone is watching you? Similar, somewhere in the back of your mind, you tin feel the peering eyes of something glancing at you? Borer into that paranoia, is this Information science graduate project that was created during a "Tangible Interactive Computing" class at the University of Maryland by two vivid young students named [Josh

Their Professor [Dr. Jon Froehlich] wanted the students to 'seamlessly couple the dual worlds of bits and atoms' and create something that would 'explore the materiality of interactive calculating.' And this relatively simple idea does merely that, guaranteeing some expert reactions.

As y'all've probably gathered from the title, this project uses a Microsoft Kinect to track the motility of nearby people. The output is then translated into actionable controls of the mounted eyeballs producing a creepy vibe radiating out from the feline, robot poster.

Continue reading "Creepy Cat Eyes With A Microsoft Kinect" →

brewpi-fridge-conversion-51

The team behind BrewPi are at information technology again! This time they have created an online guide showing how to convert a min-refrigerator into a Raspberry Pi & Arduino controlled fermentation bedroom. In it, they describe three possible options:

  • Pick i: Make a simple switched ability cord, without hacking into the fridge electronics.
  • Option 2: Brand a switched ability cord, only too override or remove the thermostat.
  • Option 3: Rip out the thermostat and fully integrate the SSRs into your fridge (which is what [Koen] and [Elco] did).

First things first though. They had to clean the fridge. And depending on where they got information technology or how long it has been unplugged for, the within might take been pretty rank and disgusting from mold growing out of every corner. This took a expert hour or then to clean properly lest the brewing process get infected with external grossness. This is all worth it considering a well-controlled fermentation chamber results in a superior batch of beer.

They put their laser cut example on elevation of the fridge, holding an LCD, Raspberry Pi, Arduino and the BrewPi Arduino shield. The Arduino reads the temperature sensors within the refrigerator, the beer and the ambient temperature. And so it controls the SSRs they added to switch the compressor and a heater. And so, the cables were routed through the fridge and take control of the compressor.

Continue reading "The Refrigerator Hacking Guide By BrewPi" →