The United States Justice Department has unveiled charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17 new counts on the alleged violation of the Espionage Act by publishing classified information through WikiLeaks website. If convicted for all counts, Assange could face a maximum sentence of 175 years in U.S. prison for his “alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified Source: Hackernews Continue reading U.S. Charges WikiLeaks' Julian Assange With Violating Espionage Act

Even when you ignore the greenhouse effect related to the release of HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), the impact of residential climate control on the environment is substantial. HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) systems account for 6% of all residential energy use in the United States, and that results in 100 million tons of carbon dioxide being released in the atmosphere each year. That’s hardly a trivial amount, and is a big cost just to stay comfortable. That’s why engineers from the University of California San Diego have developed a wearable heating and cooling patch that can act as a personal thermostat.Prototype … Continue reading This Wearable Heating and Cooling Patch Can Keep You Comfortable and Help the Environment

Hourglasses are very impressive devices, especially when you consider how mechanically-simple they are. It isn’t known when the first hourglass was produced, but the first recorded example was constructed in the 8th century CE. That was an era when most people couldn’t measure time anymore accurately than by the general position of the sun. It was quite the feat to be able to calibrate an hourglass to measure the passage time by the trickle of sand. Simulating that digitally is also difficult, but that’s exactly what Mike Szczys, editor-in-chief of Hackaday, has done with Sand-ular Automata.Szczys built this digital hourglass … Continue reading This Handheld Digital Hourglass Works on Cellular Automata Principles

Engineers from the University of Auckland’s Augmented Human Lab have designed a chewable device that lets users wirelessly interact with mobile devices and PCs by using ‘oral gestures,’ such as biting, tongue manipulation, and location changes. ChewIt is an intraoral input interface that resembles an edible object and allows for hands-free input operations in a discreet manner.The ChewIt device features an MPU-9250 IMU, a Digital Motion Processor (DMP), and a Nordic nRF51822 SoC, housed inside a 3D-printed flexible casing. (📷: Augmented Human Lab)The engineers explain, “Our design is informed by a series of studies investigating the implications of shape, size, locations for … Continue reading Go Hands Free with Mobile Devices Using ChewIt Intraoral Input Interface

Drones are the most agile aircraft around, just look at some of the racing quadcopters, and you get a pretty good idea of just how fast they can take a turn or avoid obstacles. That said, they are terrible at avoiding moving objects, and can be knocked out of the sky with the slightest of hits. That may no longer be the case; however, as researchers from the University of Zurich have developed an autonomous drone that’s capable of dodging thrown objects, even at close range.The drone uses an Insightness SEEM1 sensor, a Lumenier F4 AIO Flight controller, and an Intel … Continue reading Autonomous Drone Can Dodge Thrown Objects Using an Event Camera

Engineers from the University of Southern California have designed a tiny four-winged robot that has almost the same agility and flight characteristics of flying insects. USC’s Bee+ project builds off previous robotic insect designs, including Harvard’s RoboBee autonomous flying microbot, which uses a pair of wings driven by small piezoelectric actuators.The University of Southern California’s Bee+ robotic insect uses Twinned Unimorph Actuators to achieve smooth flight. (📷: University of Southern California)Those wings were designed using cantilevers made with two layers of piezoelectric material with a passive material sandwiched between them. While the RoboBee could roll, pitch, and thrust, it was … Continue reading Engineers Design Tiny Robot That Flies Using Wings Similar to Insects

MagicBox describes their REFLO Air machine as “a stylish, portable reflow machine that lets creators and makers easily, quickly, and professionally prototype circuits.” It’s a small reflow oven that can be used for rapid prototyping, IoT projects, wearables, robotics, and a host of other applications.The REFLO Air features a compact, enclosed heating system, simplified settings for preheating and reflow, temperature and air adjustments, and much more. (📷: MagicBox)The heater system is housed in a compact enclosure and situated in a way that allows you to solder without needing to operate the heater manually. The soldering process has been simplified as … Continue reading Solder PCBs Anywhere with MagicBox’s Portable REFLO Air Machine

In the months leading up the original Segway’s release in 2001, it was hyped as the future of personal transportation. If you’re too young to remember the news, it was roughly on par with a royal wedding or a new Marvel movie — people were excited, despite not having any idea what a Segway would actually look like. The reality is that Segway has only ever achieved marginal commercial success. But the self-balancing system was still impressive, and has been replicated many times since. Over on the Gear Down For What? YouTube channel, they’ve utilized a similar system to build a speedy … Continue reading This Self-Balancing RC Car Is Impressively Quick and Sophisticated

I recently sat down to benchmark the new accelerator hardware that is now appearing on the market intended to speed up machine learning inferencing on the edge. But, so I’d have a rough yardstick for comparison, I also ran the same benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi. Afterwards a lot of people complained that I should have been using TensorFlow Lite on the Raspberry Pi rather than full blown TensorFlow. They were right, it ran a lot faster.Yet, there were still some other options still to explore. I’d heard a few rumours about the sort of performance gains people were seeing using … Continue reading Benchmarking the Xnor AI2GO Platform on the Raspberry Pi