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Some thought the first man-made intelligence would come about as an accident, others as a war maker that decides the only way to secure humans is to kill them all. It turns out both these ideas were wrong. The first AI is apparently a teddy bear, available on Kickstarter for $60.

The Supertoy Kickstarter is selling a mechatronic teddy bear with motors, speakers, and enough electronics to connect to a cell phone. After plugging your cell phone and stuffing it in Teddy’s thorax, the bear comes alive with an intelligence all his own and a voice seemingly lifted from [Peter Griffin].

Needless to say, we’re just a bit skeptical that Teddy here can do as demonstrated in the Kickstarter video. While the team behind Teddy has developed a successful talking chatbot before, the video makes this tech seem too good. Even the voice sounds like a real person with a microphone, and not like a clunky GPS personality.

Feel complimentary to speculate in the comments on how good this tech can possibly be.

The desire to innovate and change the world can drive one to take hazardous risks. Sometimes, inventors pay the utmost price. Inventors can be early testers of a device under development, and often pushing the limits of what’s possible has deadly consequences. In this era of alerting labels on coffee cups, it’s maybe worth taking a look back at some inventors of the past who lost their lives in the pursuit of building something new.

First Aviation Fatality

Jean-Francoise Pilatre de Rozier was an early aviation pioneer, as well as a chemistry and physics teacher. He and Marquis d’Arlandes made the first manned complimentary balloon flight in 1783. De Rozier is known for testing the flammability of hydrogen by “gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is undoubtedly explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.” (Bill Bryson, in “A short history of nearly Everything”) He may have had a slightly cavalier technique to on-the-job safety.

But it was ballooning that would get him. After several successful flights, he and his companion Pierre Romain attempted to cross the English channel on June 15th, 1785, but the balloon unexpectedly deflated, and they fell from an estimated altitude of 450 m. Both pioneers were killed in the crash.

The Glider King

The first well-documented and successful heavier-than-air flights were made by German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal. He constructed eighteen types of gliders and took over 2,000 glider flights. He also developed a dozen models of monoplanes, flapping-wing aircraft, and two biplanes. Wilbur Wright called him “easily the most important” of the early airplane pioneers.

His final flight, on August 9th, 1896, was otherwise quite normal. His glider design had a problem with pitching nose-first, because after a certain angle the pilot just couldn’t shift their weight any additionally backwards to counteract it. Lilienthal lost control in a nose dive, falling from a height of about 15 m, and fractured his spine. He was taken to the hospital, but died about 36 hours after the crash. His last words where “Opfer müssen gebracht werden!” (Sacrifices need to be made!).

Dangers of the Atom

It is hard to underestimate the achievements of Marie Curie. She remains the only person to win a Nobel prize in two different sciences: in physics, for her work on radiation phenomena, and in chemistry, for the discovery of the elements radium and polonium. all of this took place during a time when women were discouraged or outright forbidden from doing academic science.

Her work with those radioactive elements was the cause of her death, considering that the dangers of ionizing radiation were not known at the time. She use to carry the test tubes with radioactive material in her pockets, without any safety measures. even today, her papers and even her cookbook are stored in shielded boxes because they are still highly radioactive. much of the money from the Nobel prize, as well as other monetary gifts she received, was given to friends and family and donated for research. Albert Einstein used to say that she was probably the only person who could not be corrupted by fame. Marie died from aplastic anemia caused by the long term radiation exposure on July 4th, 1934.

Submarine Innovator

Painting by Conrad wise Champan. image from Wikimedia Commons.
Horace Lawson Hunley was a lawyer and a member of the Louisiana state legislature who developed early hand-powered submarines. Hunley understood how crucial the shipping trade with Europe was for the Confederacy, so he partnered with James McClintock and Baxter Watson to create an underwater vessel that would help keep the crucial shipping lanes with Europe open. three different models were created and built. Unfortunately, the third submarine sank, killing all eight crew members, including Hunley.

The vessel was recovered by the Confederacy, and on February 17th, 1864 it became the first successful combat submarine, sinking the USS Housatonic. The HL Hunley, as it was named, mysteriously disappeared after that mission, to be found over a century later in 1995. The crew received a proper burial only in 2004.

Walking on unknown Ground

Pushing out boundaries is the essence of science and invention. We don’t know enough about de Rozier’s death to say whether his devil-may-care attitude was responsible for his death — ballooning was in its infancy and is quite dependant on the wind — but it could have been. Lilienthal made over 2,000 similar flights before bad luck fatally caught up with him. Marie Curie, and the rest of science at the time, just didn’t know that radioactivity was dangerous. Hunley had no choice but to test out his submarine himself. all of them paid for their inventions with their lives.

We’re not saying that you shouldn’t wear glasses and hearing protection when operating an angle grinder. You must absolutely take every affordable safety precaution that you can. a lot of of us will never get near enough to the boundaries of the unknown that we’d need to take a leap like Lilienthal, much less do so thousands of times. Still, there’s a certain tragic nobility to these stories that underscores the strength of the desire to innovate, to be first, or to find something new.

If you’re going to discover digital logic, why not goal high? That’s what [Easton] as well as his good friend did when they built a clock utilizing only 4000-series logic chips. On a breadboard, no less.

For a 1 Hz clock, [Easton] as well as his good friend utilized a 4060 counter paired with a flip flop. This counts off 59 seconds until, with the assist of an as well as gate, the seconds counter rolls over to zero. After repeating that once again for the minutes as well as building a similar circuit for the hour, as well as [Easton] had a working 4000-series 24-hour clock.

The breadboard clock may not be the prettiest thing, or a textbook example of exactly how to prototype circuits,  but that was fixed with [Easton]’s friend’s PCB design of a 12-hour clock. We couldn’t discover any type of pics of this, however we’re sure it’s awesome as well as a excellent method to discover about logic as well as design.

This Predator suit was premiered at this year’s Monsterpalooza conference. It’s nothing short of incredible. however the shoulder cannon is truly what caught our attention. The thing is completely motorized as well as includes noise as well as light firing effects.

We saw a glimpse of what [Jerome Kelty] is capable of about two years ago. He was showing off an Arduino-based animatronics platform he put together for a Predator shoulder cannon that tracked based on where the predator’s helmet was pointing. however other than a video presentation there wasn’t much information on the that actual build. This publish makes up for that as well as then some.

A replica of this high quality is seldom the work of just one person. A team of fans joined in to make it happen. After getting the molded parts for the backpack as well as canon from one more team member [Jerome] set out to in shape the support structure, motors, as well as manage electronics into the area available. That meant a ton of milling, cutting, as well as shaping parts like the support arm seen above which integrates a servo motor into its rectangular outline. all of the controls in shape in the backpack, with cable televisions running to the helmet, in addition to the cannon.

Bitrot is setting in, and our digital legacy is slowly turning to dust. efforts preserve our history are currently being embarked on many people around the Internet, and [Jason Scott] just got an automated CD ripper, so everything is kinda okay.

However, there is one medium that’s being overlooked. ROMs, and I don’t indicate video game cartridges. In the 80s, mask ROMs were everywhere, found in everything from talking cars to synthesizers.

[Ali] gotten a Korg i5m workstation from eBay a few years ago, but this unit had a problem. Luckily, he had a similar synth with the same samples stored on board. There was only one way to find out if bitrot was the cause: desoldering the chips and discarding all the information.

After fiddling around with his broken synth, [Ali] still had a problem with the sound output. deciding the ROM chips had to be the issue, [Ali] desoldered the chips and bought a breadboard SOP44 adapter after deciding soldering wires to each lead of the chip was a bad idea. This adapter was connected to an Arduino Mega — still the best tool for odd tasks like this — and the contents of the ROM were discarded to a PC with the help of a helpful Arduino sketch.

Dumping the ROMs took about 15 minutes, and that’s if he was able to maintain a good connection between the chip and Arduino for that long. [Ali] wrote an improved ROM reader after much trial and error, and was eventually able to get the same data out of the same chip eventually.

While the broken synth hasn’t been repaired yet, at least [Ali] has the crucial bits off of this antique instrument. That’s good enough for now, but [Ali] intends to take this project to completion and get those vintage samples playing out of this great old synth.

The worldwide Obfuscated C contest – the contest to produce the most useful, useless, or distinct program in absolutely unreadable C code – has just published the winners of the 2013 contest.

Of the entrances of note, a few truly stand out. The picture at the top of this post, for instance, comes courtesy of this submission. It’s an iterative ray tracer stuck inside an unlimited loop that, when left running overnight, is able to create fantastic renders.

An IOCCC contest wouldn’t be total without some ASCII art C code, as well as this entry fits the bill. It’s a Tetris painting tool that produces pictures constructed out of tetronomoes. Each picture is developed up one line each time from the bottom up, utilizing Tetris’ lack of physics to produce a photo out of un-cleared lines.

One of the most outstanding entrances for this (last?) year’s contest is a small 8086 PC emulator/virtual device written in only 4043 bytes of code. It’s a completely practical 80s-era PC emulator that can run vintage copies of AutoCAD, Windows, Lotus 1-2-3, as well as SimCity.

All the submissions are awesome, however like any type of IOCCC contest, there aren’t really any type of winners. Or they’re all winners. The Obfuscated guidelines aren’t extremely remove in that regard.

Chips as furniture is now a thing. It started off with a 555 footstool from Evil mad Scientist and moved on to an EPROM coffee table. now [msvm] over on the war Thunder forums has built a Nixie tube chauffeur table. It’s based on the K155, as well as as a neat bit addition, he’s included a genuine vintage chip under glass in the table.

Have some tongs, an anvil, as well as a blowtorch? Make some bottle openers out of framing nails. There’s a great deal of range right here in the shapes of the bottle openers.

[Stephen] utilized a solid specify relay he discovered on eBay to drive some Christmas lights. The SSR failed. That implied it was time to see inside of this relay looked like. The short response is, ‘a great deal of goop as well as epoxy’, however the traces look huge sufficient to support the present it’s rated for.

Imagine a part of your 3D printer breaks. That’s alright, just print another…. oh, yeah. Well, I assumption it’s time to make a bearing bracket out of wood.

The Electronica MK-54 as well as MK-61 (actually the Электроника МК-54) were extremely prominent Soviet programmable calculators. now there’s an emulator for them.

[Rue Mohr] discovered a extremely inexpensive TFT screen on an Arduino shield. The chip for the screen was an SPF5408, a chip that isn’t supported by the most typical libraries. He ultimately got it to work after emailing the seller, getting some libraries, as well as renaming as well as moving a lot of stuff. If you have one of these displays, [Rue] just saved you a lot of time.

The final random drawing for Hackaday’s Trinket daily bring contest was held tonight, as well as the champion is [flaming_goat] with Trinket Pocket IR Analyser/Transmitter!

In addition to having an incredible username, [flaming_goat] likes IR protocols. Trinket Pocket IR Analyser/Transmitter is a standalone gadget to read, examine as well as transmit Infrared (IR) signals. The IR part of the job is handled by a Vishay TSOP38238 (PDF link) The 382 series is a 3 pin module. It is available in a number of variants, each tuned to a certain provider frequency. The 38238 will decode IR signals at 38 kHz.

The demodulated IR signals are fed into the Pro Trinket, where they can be analyzed. data is either sent with the serial terminal or displayed on the on-board 1.44″ TFT LCD. source code for the whole job is up on [flaming_goat’s] GitHub repo.

[flaming_goat] will be getting a Teensy 3.1 and an Audio+SD adapter from The Hackaday Store. If the pro Trinket is a gateway drug, then Teensy 3.1 is the hardcore stuff. Powered by a Freescale Kinetis ARM Cortex M4 processor in a small package, the Teensy 3.1 packs rather a punch. You may believe all that power would indicate complex tools, however Teensy 3.1 is still simple to program utilizing the Arduino IDE. The Audio+SD adapter board provides Teensy 3.1 the capability to produce some quite respectable audio, thanks to the Teensy Audio Library.

This was the last regular drawing for the Trinket daily bring Contest, however there is still time to go into as well as win the huge prizes! The deadline is January 3 at 12am PDT. That’s just about 3 days to go into – so procrastinators, get in the game!

Hackaday is all about the neat hacks and the repurposing of old components into new projects, but numerous people then try to take those projects and turn them into businesses. We’ve seen lots of people offer their stuff as kits and sell them on Tindie, with the rare few going on to develop a consumer electronic product at scale.

The Hackaday prize 2017 best product highlights this journey. “Scale” itself is a vague term, but essentially it implies to be able to produce enough to meet market demand. We hope that market demand is roughly 7 billion units, purchasing yearly, but the reality is that it is somewhere between 1 and a few hundred thousand, with very big differences in manufacturing at each purchase of magnitude. So how do you start with a proof of concept and design your product from the very beginning to be optimized to scale to meet whatever demand you can handle?

The Chasm

The hardware startup world calls it the retail chasm, and it’s the huge gap between making your first few units in your home, and mass producing tens or hundreds of thousands of units. This is where many startups fail, because they can’t get the benefit of large volume discounts on components, they can’t afford the injection molds, and assembly is expensive if they can find someone to take on the work at all.

But they can’t charge any much more than they would be able to sell it for in volume, so the margins are non-existent and it is really hard to grow. The trick to crossing this chasm is to design the product FOR the chasm. To use components that are easily acquired in low volume, and assembly methods that are still available without expensive tools.

Get comfortable with SMT

Surface mount components on circuit boards save cost, space, assembly time, and are much more readily available than through-hole counterparts. If you want to manufacture a product in volume, use SMT whenever possible. I’ve had enough connectors ripped off the board that I’m pleased to make an exception for components where mechanical stability is essential, but SMT makes everything better. There is a lot of worry about making the transition and the skills required, but the landscape for making circuit boards at home has gotten much better, with much more resources like OSH stencil and experimentation into reflow controllers like the Controleo.

When looking through the best product list of submissions, it is clear that products that are much more refined and scalable are all using SMT where possible. It’s common to start with breakout boards for various components and wire them together through a breadboard for the proof of concept, but then rapidly relocation to SMT for the first revision of the customized PCB. heartyPatch started with a development board wired through a breadboard and has refined to a small PCB with practically entirely surface mount components, and practically entirely on one side (the temperature sensor is on the back side and needs to be, but that will complicate assembly).

The heartyPatch can be put together on a hot plate.
Assembling PCBs at home is easy, and mostly just requires a pair of tweezers and a hot plate or toaster oven. Of course producers are set up to do SMT really well, so scaling is simple.

Use Existing Parts

It’s tempting to design a customized enclosure that is slick and tiny, or to source a transformer with limited suppliers, but that will only get you in trouble. In the short run it implies you’ll pay a lot for the parts and may have to purchase a minimum number that’s beyond your initial demand. start with an enclosure from Polycase or Hammond, then modify it as needed. numerous of the enclosure companies offer modification and printing in house, too, implying you can purchase your parts completely ready with very little up front cost.

Extruded aluminum cases are another popular option, because you can customize the length as well. The City Air quality project chose this route and ended up with a robust and good enclosure without needing to pay for tooling costs. They have built in scalability. The part cost may be higher, but the initial investment required is much lower, making it simpler to cross the chasm of manufacturing in small volumes until your demand grows enough to afford to invest in your own mold.

Another example is the USB TinyTracker, where [Paul] started with the enclosure and developed his USB TinyTracker to fit inside. If he scales up he can eventually design his own enclosure, but for the beginning he has all he needs.

The City Air quality project uses an aluminum extrusion for the enclosure.
Remove Parts

If you don’t need it, you don’t have to source or assemble it. It’s not unusual in some factories for an unobserved producer to try to save money by removing a component and if it still works they ship it. naturally you want to be in control of this, but the idea has merit.

At every opportunity, ask yourself if you need this component (or if you can remove it from the product and offer two different versions, like WiFi enabled or not). just as essential is trying to find opportunities for doubling up usefulness so you can eliminate a part or an assembly step or jig. For example, design your enclosure so that it snaps together, with bosses to hold the PCB in place. This eliminates a screwing step, sourcing screws, and possibly a gluing step as well. It is tempting to add parts and features to make your product much more appealing to much more people, but each one of those additions adds time and cost and failure points and complexity for the users.

Refine Assembly Time

Every minute of assembly time is multiplied by the number of units to manufacture, and it adds up quickly. In addition, setting up and taking down an assembly process can account for even much more than the process time, making batching of processes essential. It’s much better to assemble 100 PCBs and then program 100 PCBs than to assemble 1, program it, assemble another, program it, and repeat 100 times. Make your stations as easy to set up and take down as possible so that when it’s time to make another batch of units you don’t lose a lot of time on overhead.

Spend some time taking a look at what is slowing things down during the process, or what is causing inconsistency in production and thus quality controls. A few hours repairing that problem can easily save time and improve yield.

More importantly, though, is refining the design with assembly time in mind. eliminate parts where possible, use snaps instead of screws, and build in sanity checks and alignment pins so that parts can only go together one way. Make it easy to program the microcontroller, and don’t position parts so that they block other parts.

Conclusion

Crossing the chasm is really hard, but developing your project to scale from the beginning will save lots of pain. You can always swap out parts and make improvements in the future when you scale, but you ought to prepare in the beginning for lower volumes and much more time-consuming assembly using less expensive tools.

Are you working on your own product journey best now? enter it in the Hackaday prize best product category. It’s a chance for you to connect with the early adopters that make up the Hackaday community and generate early buzz for your product release. There are cash prizes (twenty finalists each awarded $1000 with one best product prize of $30,000) and there’s a substantial multiplier that comes from being a beloved hardware producer within our community.

The HackadayPrize2017 is Sponsored by:

Every Friday, we gather ’round the hot air gun over on Hackaday.io, invite some cool people over, and get them to talk about what they do. This is the Hack Chat. It’s become a tradition, and already we’ve had a ton of awesome people walk through our doors.

This Friday, we’re going to sit down with the purveyors of best purple PCBs. Over the last decade or so, a lot has changed in the space of small-run PCB production. ten years ago, PCBs were expensive, and it wouldn’t be abnormal to spend hundreds of dollars on a small run of tiny boards. Now, The DEF con 24 badge, in a panel are more affordable than ever, giving industrious hardware creators access to professional quality manufacturing at a fraction of the price seen just a few years ago.

For the last few years, OSH Park has been a mainstay of low-volume PCB fabrication. Their web site is as basic as it gets: publish some Gerbers, an Eagle board file, or a KiCad PCB, press a few buttons, and in a week or so you’ll have a best purple PCB in your mailbox.

This week, we’re inviting [Drew Fustini] and [Dan Sheadel] to talk about what OSH Park does, how they became the first place that pertains to mind when you need a PCB. They’ll describe why the boards are purple, environmental guidelines for PCB manufacturing in the US, shared projects and ideas and tricks for creating the best board.

What would you like to see from a PCB supplier? would you like to see OSH Park expand additionally into their burgeoning Pog business? how about a sticker club? who would win in a fight, a blue robot pet dog or a purple robot shark? All these questions and a lot more will be answered; if you have a question for the OSH Park team, drop it in this spreadsheet.

Here’s how To Take Part:

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack chat group messaging. This hack chat will take place at twelve noon Pacific time on Friday, June 23rd. Confused about where and when ‘noon’ is? Here’s a time and date converter!

Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about