This robotic hand will swipe left or right on Tinder for you

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The True Love Tinder Robot will “find you love, guaranteed.”

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Are you an active user of popular social media dating apps? Have you made some poor decisions lately? Well, fear no more. Nicole He, a graduate student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has developed a robot that reads your body’s reaction as you browse through Tinder profiles, and then swipes right or left based on your skin’s response. In fact, she promises the bot will “find you love, guaranteed” merely by reading the change in your galvanic skin response over a period of time. (Meaning, how sweaty your palms get.)

As simple as today’s sites make finding a potential suitor, if contemplating between age, location and looks still requires too much thought, the True Love Tinder Robot can be your perfect wingman. The system itself is powered by an Arduino, and includes a pair of servos to move the hand, some LEDs, a text-to-speech module, a bunch of wires, a speaker and a couple of sheets of metal that act as a skin sensor. There is also an indentation for your palms.

With Tinder open, you put your smartphone down in from of the rubber hand. Once you’ve placed your hands down on the sensors, a robotic voice (inspired by the villain GlaDOS from Portal 2) guides you through the process and questions your feelings. As you are looking at each profile, the True Love Tinder Robot will read your true heart’s desire through the sensors and decide whether or not you are a good match with that person based on how your body reacts.

For instance, it’ll ask things such as “Do you see yourself spending the rest of your life with this person?” If it determines that you’re attracted to that person, it will swipe right. If not, it will swipe left. Throughout the process, it will make commentary on your involuntary decisions. Although galvanic skin response may not be the most precise measurement, it is often used by Scientologists for spiritual auditing and by law enforcement as part of polygraph tests.

The first prototype of the bot actually attempted to incorporate facial recognition, but was later swapped out for galvanic skin response. The idea behind GSR is pretty straightforward: when you see or experience something stimulating, your skin reacts appropriately by creating an electrodermal response. As your skin gets a little wetter, it becomes more conductive to electricity. GSR then measures that physiological feedback through skin conduction.

“In a time when it’s very normal for couples to meet online, we trust that algorithms on dating sites can find us suitable partners. Simultaneously, we use consumer biometric devices to tell us what’s going on with our bodies and what we should do to be healthy and happy. Maybe it’s not a stretch to consider what happens when we combine these things,” He explains.

The premise is that a computer may actually know you better than you know yourself, so why not let it pick you a date? While chances are the installation may not choose your future hubby or wifey, it’s still a pretty nifty project nevertheless.

“I want this project to be sort of amusing, kind of creepy and slightly embarrassing. I want the user to feel a tension between the robot assuring you that it knows best and not being sure whether or not to trust it. I want the user to question whether or not we should let a computer make intimate decisions for us,” He writes.

He has provided a detailed overview of the project and has made it entirely open source with all of its code available on GitHub.

 

Tell time on this Arduino Nano-driven Berlin Clock

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And you thought reading an analog watch was tough…

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The Mengenlehreuhr, which in German means “Set Theory Clock,” is also known simply as the Berlin Clock. It is the first clock in the world to tell time via illuminated colored sections, and was initially installed in 1975. It keeps time in a 24-hour format, with four rows of LEDs, representing hours on the top two rows, and minutes on the two rows below that, and a blinking second “hand” on top. 40 years later, and we have the technology to replicate this clock at home using readily available and inexpensive technology.

Maker “mr_fid” decided to do just that using an Arduino Nano (ATmega328), a real-time clock (RTC) unit and three eight-bit shift registers. These shift registers combined give 24 individual outputs, equalling the number of lighting sections in the original clock.

As the hours, minutes, and seconds don’t really match up with our base 10 numbering system, or even a computer’s binary system, programming isn’t as straightforward as some projects featured here. He includes an explanation, as well as the code he used, in his linked Instructables article.

‘Fid doesn’t go into all of the mechanical details of his build, preferring to let his drawings and photos do most of the talking. One interesting feature to note is his use of frosted acrylic material on top of the LEDs. Using a material like this can help soften LED or other lights to make illumination more even. This diffusion effect that can be used for artistic purposes as seen here, or for more practical reasons like lighting in a computer vision system.

Intrigued? You can head over to the project’s page here.

Yes, you can play Super Hexagon in an Arduino

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This game is FANtastic!

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The game Super Hexagon was released on iOS in September of 2012, and later ported to Windows, OS X, Android, BlackBerry and Linux. It was not, however, ported for play on a… fan until 2015.

Alejandro J. Cura, with help from friends Jorge Crowe and Cristian Martinez, decided to use an Arduino Nano (ATmega328), literally attached to a fan blade, to display a version of this game in a more “circular” format.

The Nano controls a series of LED lights mounted to a custom printed circuit board, so when they are spun in a circle, they appear to draw bent solid lines around the middle of the fan. This type of display is known as persistence of vision (POV), and tricks the eye into seeing a quickly moving point as a solid line. For the game gaps in these lines are made by carefully timing when the lights go on and off, using a hall effect sensor to measure rotational speed (similar to how a bike speedometer works).

Cura’s device made its successful world premeire in Buenos Aires, Argentina at Casa Abasto, the home of his local hackersapce. If you’d like to build your own, the source code and schematics are posted here. What’s more, the Maker has plans for future improvements on the design itself, as well as plans to expand the documentation. Until then, see it in action below!

This tool lets you create 3D printer filament at home

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The Multistruder will turn plastic into filament for your 3D printer.

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For most Makers, having to continually purchase 3D printing filament can be quite the expense. But what if, instead of having to purchase spools of PLA and ABS and wait for them to arrive, you could turn raw materials into 3D-printable filament right at home? This is the idea behind one San Jose-based startup’s open source and expandable fabrication tool called the Multistruder. 

Developed by The Green Engineers, Multistruder is a plastic extruder that transforms either virgin resin pellets or recycled scrap plastic into different shapes that can be used in your 3D printer.

With a little research, creator Steven Mosbrucker discovered that making your own 3D-printable materials from pellets is around 2.2 to 4.3 times less expensive than buying readymade filament. The greater quantities of pellets you buy, the cheaper it gets as well. Not to mention, using scrap plastic such as plastic bottles is totally free!

The Multistruder itself is made entirely out of rigid pipe, and sits upright to optimize space. It comes with a stand that can be mounted to a desk or hung from a wall, depending on a Maker’s preference.

In terms of hardware, the device is based on Arduino Uno (ATmega328) that provides its accuracy and expandability. With an Arduino for its brain, the unit is incredibly user-friendly and can be easily controlled via a TFT color touchscreen. Beyond that, the Multistruder’s drive motor control precisely handles the extrusion speed, capable of achieving speeds up to three feet per minute. Meaning, the tool can extrude a 1kg spool in less than eight hours.

Looking ahead, Mosbrucker and his team are developing an automated spooler expansion module for the Multistruder. This will automatically roll up the filament as it’s extruded onto a standard spool.

“The module will use motors controlled by the Multistruder Arduino board. The speed will be (manually) set to hold constant tension onto the filament to get more consistent filament diameter thus better performance,” Mosbrucker adds.

An additional dimension control module will enable the Multistruder to even detect the diameter of the filament and automatically set the speed of the spooler motor to hold the tension for optimal results.

As its creators explain, “Instead of having a PID controller (which the prototype uses and a lot of other filament makers use) and buying a microcontroller for everything else, why not just have a Arduino do all of it?”

Are you looking to save money and cut out the middleman in the filament supply chain? Then head over to Multistruder’s Kickstarter campaign, where The Green Engineers team is currently seeking $6,000.

 

 

Maker turns an old Star Wars toy into a walking AT-AT

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This Star Wars fan transformed an old toy from the ‘80s into a remote-controlled AT-AT Walker with Arduino.

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What do you get when you combine an Arduino, an Adafruit Servo Shield, an Xbox 360 controller and a 1981 AT-AT Walker? A toy that Star Wars fans like Dave Stein have always dreamed about as kids.

“If you played with this toy growing up you will probably remember how clumsy it was and difficult to move around,” the software engineer by day, tinkerer by night writes.

With hopes of changing this, Stein decided to take his beat-up AT-AT, embed it with an Arduino Uno (ATmega328), and allow it to clumsily walk and perform other functions similar to those seen in the film.

Admittedly, there were some obstacles that the Maker had to first overcome, such as quadrupedal movement, learning how to program an Arduino, and not damaging the Kenner toy’s plastic components.

For control, Stein configured an Xbox 360 gamepad that interfaces with a computer and relays a signal to the Uno. This enables the modded AT-AT Walker to wander left and right, forwards and backwards, and even move its head horizontally. 

Did this awaken your Maker forces? If so, you can check out Stein’s entire project here, and see it in action below.

Hacking a 3D printer to play air hockey

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This DIY project is puckin’ awesome!

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As a kid, there was always that one game — besides Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam and Street Fighter, of course — that seemed to captivate everyone’s attention while inside an arcade. Air hockey! Originally invented by a group of Brunswick Billiards engineers back in 1969, the two-player game features a puck, two goals and a frictionless surface.

However, there was always those times when you couldn’t find anyone else around to compete against. Fortunately, Maker Jose Julio recently decided to take it upon himself to alleviate that problem by creating an air hockey-playing robot using some readily available RepRap 3D printer parts, including an Arduino Mega (ATmega2560) and RAMPS 1.4 board.

Additional key specs included a PS3 camera, NEMA17 stepper motors, motor drivers, belts, bearings and rods, along with some 3D-printed brackets, paddles and pucks, obviously. Meanwhile, the table itself was built from scratch with off-the-shelf wood and two standard 90mm PC fans to produce the necessary air pressure to lift the puck.

Julio used a three-motor design (two for the Y-axis, one for the X), and replaced the X-axis rods on the RepRap with carbon tubes, which seemed to work quite well on PLA-printed bushings and made the system lighter.

“I started studying the code of Marlin (typical RepRap firmware) software but I decided to start from scratch, first because I don’t need a G-code interpreter, and second, because the software of a 3D printer have a motion planning algorithm and this is not the way the Air Hockey robot must work,” the Maker explains. “3D printers plan movements for smooth paths through all the points. The Air Hockey Robot should move inmediately with every new command canceling the previous one, because what we need is that the robot moves as quickly as possible to the new position.”

How the robot works is fairly straightforward. fThe system employs a PS3 camera mounted above the table to monitor the puck, determine its trajectory and stop shots from an opponent. The PS3 Eye is also adjustable, which allows a user to determine the robot’s speed, acceleration and strategy algorithms. (That’s good news for sore losers, you can rig the game to guarantee the win…) This was made possible by connecting the camera to a PC running a vision system that he wrote using OpenCV libraries. This way, once the puck is detected, the location is sent to the Arduino by serial port.

Beyond that, Julio devised a trajectory prediction system and the robot’s air hockey strategy with the Arduino.

“Once we have detected the puck in two consecutive frames we can calculate the trajectory. The trajectory prediction takes into account that the puck can rebound against a side wall. All these calculations are accesible to the strategy subsystem that decides what the robot will do: defense, defense+attack, and preparing for a new attack,” he writes.

Ready to get your game on against your own Air Hockey Robot? You can head over to the Maker’s official page here, while its code, 3D designs and additional documentation can all be found on Github here.

JöLLY Tracker is a shockingly awesome way to spread holiday spirit

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This Santa-like beard uses sensors to gently zap your face as a reminder to turn that frown upside down.

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You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, the JöLLY Tracker is why. Truth be told, the holiday season can be a stressful one. Between deciding what to get loved ones to navigating your way through crowded malls, sometimes all that happiness can get lost in the hustle and bustle.

Developed by creative ad agency McKinney, the JöLLY Tracker is a wearable of a different kind. It’s not a fitness tracker. It’s not a smartwatch. It’s not even a hat. It’s an embedded Santa Claus beard that has one job, and one job only: to monitor how much you smile. Should you frown, it’ll emit a friendly little reminder in the form of an electric shock to your face. Ho, ho, how about that?

A team of creatives and hackers wanted to devise a wearable concept that would skip the normal metric tracking and go straight to helping spread some cheer.

“We wear devices on our wrists, pin them to our clothes, carry them in our pockets, each one sending us data about our well-being in hope of improving our lives,” McKinney’s ECD Peter Nicholson explains. “JöLLY is a spoof on our obsession with wearables and data. It is, simply, a joyful reminder that the holidays are the happiest time of the year.”

The setup is fairly simple, and resembles that of a recent project from our good pal Simone Giertz. A set of five electrodes are attached to the wearer’s face: two to monitor muscle movement, two to give off the shock, and most importantly, one for ground.

Hidden behind the white facial hair lies an Arduino, a Muscle SpikerShield, a battery pack and a TENS unit that gently jolts the nerves in your face. The JöLLY Tracker is controlled by an accompanying Android app that communicates with the beard over Bluetooth. It counts how many times a minute your smiling, measures the intensity of your smile and displays real-time changes in jolliness over preset intervals. If you’re too grumpy, JöLLY will send electric pulses to your cheeks and jaw. Safe to say, you’ll turn that frown upside down in no time — albeit nervously.

So in the words of Clark Griswold, just “press on and have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny ****** Kaye.”

[Images: Engadget]

The Arduino MKR1000 rolls the Zero and Wi-Fi Shield all into one

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The World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge will award 1,000 finalists with the newly-announced MKR1000 boards.

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Well, the Arduino/Genuino family has just gained another member. Everyone, meet the MKR1000. MKR1000, meet the ever-growing Maker community.

This MKR1000 is a powerful board that combines the functionality of the Zero (Atmel | SMART SAM D21) and the connectivity of the Wi-Fi Shield. It is based on the ATSAMW25 — an Atmel SmartConnect edge node module specifically geared towards IoT — and offers the ideal solution for Makers seeking Wi-Fi connectivity with minimal previous experience in networking.

The combination of 32-bit computational power like the Zero, the usual rich set of I/O interfaces, low-power Wi-Fi with a CryptoAuthentication chip for secure communication, and the ease of use of the Arduino IDE make this board the perfect choice for emerging IoT battery-powered projects in a compact form factor. It should be noted, however, that unlike most Arduino and Genuinos, the MKR1000 runs at 3.3V.

Other key specs include:

• MCU: Atmel | SMART SAMD21 Cortex-M0+
• Power Supply: 5V
• Flash: 256KB
• SRAM: 32KB
• Clock Speed: 32KHz, 32.768KHz, 8MHz and 48Mhz
• Supported Battery: Li-Po single-cell, 3.7V, 700mAh minimum
• Digital I/O Pins: 8
• PWM Pins: 4 (D2-D5)
• UART: 1
• SPI: 1
• I2C: 1
• Analog Input Pins: 7 (ADC 8/10/12-bit)
• Analog Output Pins: 1 (DAC 10-bit)
• External Interrupts: 8
• DC Current Per I/O Pin: 7mA

The newly-revealed board will be available for purchase beginning in February 2016; however, you can be one of the first 1,000 people to lay their hands on the MKR1000 by participating in the World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge, a collaboration between Hackster.IO, Microsoft, Adafruit and Atmel.

This contest is designed to celebrate the burgeoning Maker community with exclusive prizes. Inventors, artists, hobbyists, professionals and developers alike are encouraged to create an innovative and original IoT application, ranging from environmental sensors to gaming, to augmented reality, to robotics or drones using the power of Arduino.cc boards and Windows 10.

The 1,000 Makers who submit the best project ideas will receive the brand-spanking new Arduino MKR1000 (U.S. only) and Genuino MKR1000 (outside the U.S.) boards. Earn bonus points by tapping into the power of the Microsoft Azure cloud to capture, analyze and visualize your data with Azure IoT Suite, Azure IoT Hub, Stream Analytics and Machine Learning.

From there, three finalists submitting the best completed projects will be awarded with a fully-funded trip to either Maker Faire Shenzhen, New York or Rome, a chance to present their creation at the Microsoft and the Arduino and Genuino booths, a professional video production of the project, as well as a whopping $500 gift certificate to Adafruit.

The World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge is now live, and those wishing to partake in the contest can sign up/log into Hackster and enter to win the new MKR1000 board by pitching their idea.

Adding more range and LEDs to an electric longboard

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This Maker added more battery, more range and LED underlighting to his electric longboard. 

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Boosted boards are electric skateboards that when used by Andrew Rossignol got about seven miles of range out of the box. This worked great when he lived in New York City, but after moving to Silicon Valley, Rossignol needed more range to reach his office, now 10 miles away.

Naturally, the Maker didn’t accept this limitation and added 288Wh of high-discharge lithium-ion batteries to the 99Wh of batteries that came with the board. With this extra power, he was able to travel over 13 miles on his first ride, ending with a “fuel gauge” that still read 20%.

This would have been impressive enough, especially given his great explanation of his battery choice and wiring scheme, but he didn’t stop there. Instead, he decided to add LED lighting controlled by an Arduino Pro Mini (ATmega328) in the form of programmable strips. These were attached to the sides and front of his board.

For the color, he came up with what he calls “Boosted Orange” to match his board, also known “#FF1900” in more specific terms. For now he only has one animation programmed for the strips, but has plans to make more, and is even considering adding an inertial measurement unit. This would allow the board to sense motion and sync the lighting accordingly. That certainly sounds like an amazing effect, so hopefully he’ll be able to make that modification!

Intrigued? You can check out Rossignol’s project here.

Protect your things with this picture-taking alarm

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This Maker built a simple, Wi-Fi-enabled alarm system with Arduino. 

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For those of you tired of your roommate using your things, colleagues taking snacks from your cubicle or classmates stealing stuff from your locker, Stefano Guglielmetti has come up with the perfect solution. That’s because the Maker has developed an Arduino-based alarm system, aptly dubbed You Can’t Touch This! 

With an Arduino Yún (ATmega32U4) at its core, the system is comprised of a PIR sensor, a camera, speakers, a microSD card and an optional USB hub. The idea is pretty straightforward: You discreetly place the device around whatever it is that you’d like to monitor. When movement is detected, the alarm will emit a siren and then proceed to take a picture and email it to you. What’s more, you can shame the thief by automatically posting their photo to friends on Facebook or Twitter via a simple IFTTT recipe.

Even better, the entire project is made up of only a handful of steps. These include configuring the Arduino, installing the camera and sound card, snapping a test pic, running an email script, building the circuit and finally uploading the Sketch to the Yún. Lucky for you, Guglielmetti has shared the entire process on MAKE:, including its code and schematics.

Let’s just say, install this alarm in your room, apartment or cubicle, and no one will take your belongings again.