Real Time Trends Network

Telepresence is one of those futuristic buzzwords that’s popped up a few times over the decades; promising the ability to attend a meeting in New York City and another in Tokyo an hour later, all without having to leave the comfort of your home or office. This is the premise of Double Robotics’ Double 3 , its most recent entry in this market segment, as the commercial counterpoint to more DIY offerings . More than just a glorified tablet screen. Looking like a tablet perched on top of a Segway, the built-in dual 13 megapixel cameras allow the controller to get a good look at their surroundings, while the 6 beamforming microphones should theoretically allow one to pick up any conversation in a meeting or on the work floor. Battery life is limited to 4 hours, and it takes 2 hours to recharge the built-in battery. Fortunately one can just hop over to another, freshly charged Double 3 if the battery runs out. Assuming the $3,999 price tag doesn’t get in the way of building up a fleet of

Racing games have come a long way over the years. From basic 2D sprite-based titles, they’ve evolved to incorporate advanced engines with highly realistic simulated physics that can even be used to help develop real-world automobiles. For [Surrogate.tv], that still wasn’t quite good enough, so they decided to create something more rooted in reality. The game is played in a web browser. Players are assigned a car and view the action from a top-down camera. Their project resulted in a racing game based on controlling real RC cars over the internet, in live races against other human opponents. Starting with a series of Siku 1:43 scale RC cars, the team had to overcome a series of engineering challenges to make this a reality. For one, the original electronics had to be gutted as the team had issues when running many cars at the same time. Instead, the cars were fitted with ESP8266s running custom firmware. An overhead GoPro is used with special low-latency streaming software to allow pl

In a recent article in Nature, you can find the details of a RISC-V CPU built using carbon nanotubes . Of course, Nature is a pricey proposition, but you can probably find the paper by its DOI number if you bother to look for it. The researchers point out that silicon transistors are rapidly reaching a point of diminishing returns. However, Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistors (CNFETs) overcome many of these disadvantages. The disadvantage is that the fabrication of CNFETs has been somewhat elusive. The tubes tend to clump and yields are low. The paper describes a method that allowed the fabrication of a CPU with over 14,000 transistors. A wafer gets nanotubes grown all over it and then some of them are removed. In addition, some design rules mitigate other problems. In particular, a small percentage of the CNFETs will become metallic and have little to no bandgap. However, the DREAM design rules can increase the tolerance of the design to metallic CNFETs with no process changes.

It’s a staple of our community’s work, to make electronic devices do things their manufacturers never intended for them. Analogue synthesisers using CMOS logic chips for example, or microcontrollers that bitbang Ethernet packets without MAC hardware. One of the most fascinating corners of this field comes in the form of software defined radios (SDRs), with few of us not owning an RTL2832-based digital TV receiver repurposed as an SDR receiver. The RTL SDR is not the only such example though, for there is an entire class of cable modem chipsets that contain the essential SDR building blocks. The Hermes-Lite is an HF amateur radio transceiver project that uses an AD9866 cable modem chip as the signal end for its 12-bit SDR transceiver hardware with an FPGA between it and an Ethernet interface. It covers frequencies from 0 to 38.4 MHz, has 384 kHz of bandwidth, and can muster up 5W of output power. It’s a project that’s been on our radar for the past few years, though somewhat surprisi

Python is a versatile, powerful language but sometimes it’s not the best choice, especially if you’re doing work in embedded systems with limited memory. Sometimes you can get away with MicroPython for these cases, but the best language is likely C or assembly. If you’re really stubborn, like [amirgon], and really want C and Python to play well together, you can make use of his new tool which can bring any C library to MicroPython . As an example of how this tool is used, a “Pure MicroPython” display driver for ILI9341 on the ESP32, which means that everything was implemented in MicroPython. [amirgon] wanted to see how the Python driver would compare to one that’s already been written in C, and use it to showcase MicroPython binding. This tool also automatically converts structs, unions, enums and arrays to Python objects, and provides a means to work with pointers which is something that Python doesn’t handle in the same way that C requires. [amirgon] hopes that this tool will encou

Olive oil at its finest quality is a product that brings alive the Mediterranean cuisine of which it is a staple. Unfortunately for many of us not fortunate enough to possess our own olive grove, commercial olive oils are frequently adulterated, diluted with cheaper oils such as canola. As consumers we have no way of knowing this, other than the taste being a bit less pronounced. Food standards agencies use spectrophotometers to check the purity of oils, and [Daniel James Evans] has created such a device using a Raspberry Pi. A spectrophotometer shines white light through a sample to be tested, splits the light up into a spectrum with a prism or diffraction grating, and measures the light level at each point in the spectrum to gain a spectral profile of the sample. Different samples can then be compared by overlaying their profiles and looking at any differences. This build shines the light from an LED through a sample of oil, splits the result with a diffraction grating, and capture

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Military headphones, at least the older ones, are like few other sound reproducers. They are an expression of function over form, with an emphasis on robustness over operator comfort. Electrically they most often have high-impedance drivers and annoyingly proprietary connectors for whichever obscure radio system they were a part of. [John Floren] has a HS-16A headset , the type used by the US military during the Vietnam war. It’s an antiquated design with a dual spring steel headband and on-the-ear ‘phones with no muff for comfort, and a quick bit of research finds that they can be had brand new in their 1960s packaging for somewhere around $20. Their connector is a pair of odd metal pins, and rather than doing what most of us would do and snipping the wire to fit something more useful, he hunted high and low for a TE Connectivity receptacle that would fit them. A short extension and a jack plug allowed him to use these slightly unusual cans. This isn’t a special hack, but it’s still

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Last Thursday two lowly masters grad students, Aaron Gokaslan and Vanya Cohen managed to replicate the secretive OpenAI model and cheekily named their version OpenGPT-2 . The code can be downloaded from this Google Colab page and apparently no prior experience in language modeling is required to use it. More useful might be the skills required to persuade Google to part with $50,000 worth of free cloud compute time for the training! Research firm OpenAI released a new, ever more powerful, version of their GPT language model with 1.5 billion parameters, trained on a data-set of 8 million web pages and although it’s most entertaining use is to produce gibberish, it will inevitably also be able to produce coherent text sometime very soon. For us mere mortals, there’s a cut down version of the model hosted in the cloud and a webpage that we can visit, type in a short phrase to prompt the system, and print out a few paragraphs of fake news. We tried it with the following: “You can use a

An orgiastic frieze of genitalia, limbs and mouths seems an unlikely subject for a 173-year-old glass maker to hand-cut onto its refined crystal tableware. Yet that is exactly what the Czech company Rückl did when collaborating with Switzerland-based artist Marine Julié for this year’s Handmade . The resulting ‘Constellations of Us’ vases and cups feature what Julié calls ‘a farandole of bisexual beings’, their curvaceous forms melding into, grasping and probing each other. This imagery is a trademark of Julié’s. She often paints it on walls and rock faces – large-scale sites befitting a trained architect. Her forms tend towards the gender fluid, combining male and female traits alongside some traces of the animal. She’s frequently asked, ‘Why women with dicks?’ The answer is multilayered. ‘It’s a kind of representation of myself – it’s much easier to speak about desire by representing myself with a dick. Because as a woman, culturally, I’m not supposed to talk about it, I’m not sup

Located in one of Beijing’s famous hutong neighbourhoods, this new multiuse boutique complex by Chinese architecture practice Archstudio is a contemporary reimagining of a traditional Siheyuan compound – a Chinese building typology of the Beijing region, where a series of smaller structures with a sloped roof are arranged around a central courtyard, turning their back to the street. This type of arrangement applied to many different uses – from government buildings to residential and mixed-use complexes, like this one.  Set within the Chinese capital’s Qianliang Hutong in the Dongcheng District, this particular project however tells a slightly different story than the most typical Siheyuan compounds. Its original structure, composed of two main parts – a couple of brick structures at the front, and a larger U shaped one at the back, in between outside areas – did not feature the traditional sloped roofs. Flat roofs were found instead, which the architects embraced, adding staircases

Radios are, by and large, not powered by steam. One could make the argument that much of our municipal electricity supply does come via steam turbines, but that might be drawing a long bow. Regardless, steampunk remains a popular and attractive aesthetic, and it’s the one that [Christine] selected for her radio build . The build cribs from [Christine’s] earlier work on a VFD alarm clock, using similar tubes and driver chips to run the display. FM radio and amplification are courtesy of convenient modules. Tubes are fitted for aesthetic purposes, artfully lit with a smattering of color-changing LEDs. Perhaps the neatest touch is the use of valve handles to control tuning and volume. A stepper motor turns a series of gears, as is mandatory for any true steampunk build, and there’s even an electromagnetic actuator to make the Morse key move. To run it all, a pair of Arduino Megas are charged with handling the I/O needs of all the various systems. It’s a fancy build that shows how far th

[Diyguypt] may be an altruist to provide the means for people who can’t manipulate chess pieces to play the game. Or he may just have his hands too busy with food and drink to play. Either way, his voice command chessboard appears to work, although it has a lot of moving parts both figuratively and literally. You can check out the video below to see how it works. The speech part is handled by an Android phone and uses Google’s voice services, so if you don’t want Google listening to your latest opening gambit, you’ll want to pass this one up. The phone uses an app that talks to the Arduino via Bluetooth, which means the Arduino needs a Bluetooth module. The Arduino controls what amounts to an upside-down 3D printer. Instead of a hot end pointing down, the mechanism has an electromagnet pointing up. A small washer in the base of each chess piece makes it susceptible to the magnet’s motion. The electromagnet is required to let go of a piece before a move to a new position. It is possi

This past week the world honored our loyal fur buddies as International Dog Day swept the internet. Meanwhile, thousands of others put social media on pause to venture out into the Nevada desert for the annual Burning Man Festival. Both of these things are actually relevant to this Agency Brief. S4 Capital’s Martin Sorrell denied this week through a spokesman that he planned to hold his board meeting at the Burning Man Festival he so adores (he’s attended the arts festival in the past; interviewed CEO Marian Goodell on stage at this year’s Cannes Lions; and even featured the iconic Burning Man figure on S4’s prospectus at the company’s launch). Yet an unidentified someone close to the situation recently told Ad Age’s George P. Slefo that it was in fact a considered destination. Why those plans blew up in smoke, who knows? It’s hard to imagine how a crew of corporate bigwigs discussing marginal growth would fit into a crowd of freethinkers who denounce their very existence. But perhaps

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Every weekday we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new commercials tracked by iSpot.tv , the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time on Aug. 28. A few highlights: Fitbit shows how its Versa 2 smartwatch works with Alexa and Spotify. Home furnishings/decor retailer Pier 1 says that “the color of the moment” is something called “Energetic Ocher.” And JC Penney wants you to “celebrate the end of summer with massive deals” at its Labor Day Sale. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2LvAVLl via IFTTT

Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are back from Chaos Communication Camp, and obviously had way too much fun. We cover all there was to see and do, and dig into the best hacks from the past week. NASA has a cute little nuclear reactor they want to send to the moon, you’ve never seen a car phone quite like this little robot, and Ardupilot (Ardurover?) is going to be the lawn mowing solution of the future. Plus you need to get serious about debugging embedded projects, and brush up on your knowledge of the data being used to train facial recognition neural networks. Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments! <span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span><span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overf

One of the great things about the Arduino environment is that it covers a wide variety of hardware with a common interface. Importantly, this isn’t just about language, but also about abstracting away the gory details of the underlying silicon. The problem is, of course, that someone has to decode often cryptic datasheets to write that interface layer in the first place. In a recent blog post on omzlo.com , [Alain] explains how they found a bug in the Arduino SAMD21 analogRead() code which causes the output to be offset by between 25 mV and 57 mV. For a 12-bit ADC operating with a reference of 3.3 V, this represents a whopping error of up to 70 least-significant-bits! Excerpt from the SAMD wiring_analog.c file in the Arduino Core repo. While developing a shield that interfaces to 24 V systems, the development team noticed that the ADC readings on a SAMD21-based board were off by a consistent 35 mV; expanding their tests to a number of different analog pins and SAMD21 boards, they saw

We’ll start with more Black Hat/DEFCON news. [Meh Chang] and [Orange Tsai] from Devcore took a look at Fortinet and Pulse Secure devices, and found multiple vulnerabilities. ( PDF Slides ) They are publishing summaries for that research, and the summary of the Fortinet research is now available. It’s… not great. There are multiple pre-authentication vulnerabilities, as well as what appears to be an intentional backdoor. CVE-2018-13379 abuses an snprintf call made when requesting a different language for the device login page. Snprintf is an alternative to sprintf , but intended to prevent buffer overflows by including the maximum string length to write to the target buffer, which sounds like a good idea but can lead to malicious truncation. The code in question looks like snprintf(s, 0x40, "/migadmin/lang/%s.json", lang); . When loading the login page, a request is made for a language file, and the file is sent to the user. At first look, it seems that this would indee

Few trends have upended the retail landscape as much as the rise in direct-to-consumer brands. Many of these digitally native brands did not exist a decade ago, yet they’re challenging the old ways of doing business and winning over consumers with their witty marketing, streamlined business models and value-driven products. Large marketers are paying close attention. They’re acquiring up-and-coming d-to-c brands or creating their own. TV networks, too, are hoping to cash in on the trend as d-to-c brands direct more dollars—as much as $3.8 billion last year, according to VAB —to the TV ad marketplace. On Sept. 9,  Ad Age Next: D-to-C will bring together the leaders in the brands challenging retail today to discuss their evolving marketing, how they use data, and why “traditional” isn’t always the best strategy when it comes to retail in 2019. Some highlights to look forward to: Five years ago, a hot new brand challenging the traditional retail landscape was a disruptor. Now, cons

On the same day Apple Inc. revealed the date for its latest iPhone event, Google’s privacy team said it had discovered a two-year long vulnerability in the phone-maker’s software. The bug targeted a small number of websites. Simply visiting those pages could have left iPhone users susceptible to the breach and possibly affected thousands of users per week, Google Zero wrote in a number of blog posts on Thursday. Visiting the unnamed sites allowed hackers to gain access to a plethora of information, including the ability to track movements via the phone’s GPS system, to obtaining passwords and being privy to sensitive conversations through iMessage and WhatsApp. The report from Google came at the same time Apple announced the date for unveiling its next iPhones, and potentially a slew of other products. Earlier in August Apple’s top security engineer said the company would begin distributing special iPhones to researchers to help them discover flaws before malicious hackers do. The

Picture this: You put in hours of work or have outsourced to experts who know emails. The messages, coupons and special codes are there. You scheduled the emails and hit send, but they didn't arrive in your test inbox. Customers haven't redeemed their coupons or visited the designated landing pages. Worse, spam filters hate you.  What went wrong? The messages never arrived. Marketing failed the email deliverability test.  What is email deliverability? Email deliverability is the quality by which an email arrives at an inbox as it should. You have no deliverability if your email bounces back from a faulty address or if a spam filter tracks it.  Believe it or not, you can measure when or if an email will reach a target market’s inbox. Some online services include proactive steps to increase the odds. Even so, you and your team should also plan out viable strategies. Email marketing should always factor in deliverability to engage users with valuable content.  How do you maxi

Sometimes it seems like Arduino is everywhere. However, with a new glut of IoT processors, it must be quite a task to keep the Arduino core on all of them. Writing on the Arduino blog, [Martino Facchin], Arduino’s chief of firmware development, talks about the problem they faced supporting two new boards from Nordic . The boards, the Nano 33 BLE and Nano 33 BLE Sense are based on an ARM Cortex M4 CPU from Nordic. The obvious answer, of course, is to port the Arduino core over from scratch. However, the team didn’t want to spend the time for just a couple of boards. They considered using the Nordic libraries to interact with the hardware, but since that is closed source, it didn’t really fit with Arduino’s sensitivities. However, in the end, they took a third approach which could be a very interesting development: they ported the Arduino core to the Mbed OS . There’s even an example of loading a sketch on top of Mbed available from [Jan Jongboom]. On the one hand, this has two big ad

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Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. You can sign up to get an audio version of this briefing on your Alexa device. Cadbury’s Unity Bar proves rather … divisive Cadbury’s new chocolate for the Indian market was well-intentioned. It used four different chocolates, from dark to white, in the same bar, promoting a pro-diversity message for the country’s Independence Day this month. The limited-edition Unity Bar, created out of Ogilvy Mumbai, encouraged solidarity between India's castes, religions, languages and regions, "because sweet things happen when we unite,” as the promotional film says. But the product has exasperated some international viewers who spotted it online and found it simplistic and cloying. As Ad Age’s Ann-Christine Diaz writes , this isn’t the first time people have “scoffed at brand efforts to celebrate diversity through a more wide-ranging color palette ( see Crayola's multicultural cr

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Making an outdoor rover is easy stuff, with lots of folk having them doing their roving activities on beaches and alien worlds. Clearly the new frontier is indoor environments, a frontier which is helpfully being conquered by [Andreas Hoelldorfer]’s Mantis Rover . OK, we’re kidding. This project started out life as a base for [Andreas]’s exquisite 3D printable robotic arm , but it’s even capable of carrying people around, as the embedded video after the break makes abundantly clear. The most eye-catching feature of the Mantis Rover are its Mecanum wheels , which allow it to move in any direction, and is perfect for those tight spots where getting stuck would be really awkward. The Mecanum wheels are 3D printed, making the motors and the associated controllers the more complicated part of this package. Plans for the wheels involve casting some kind of rubber, to make the wheels more gentle on the floors it has to drive on. The electronics include TMC 5160 motor drivers and an STM32F40

Multi-purposes spaces are all the rage these days, so we suppose it was only a matter of time before the savvy administrators at Hatch Student Living’s The Hatch Rooms in Cork decided to turn over their empty dorm rooms to the public during the June-August term holidays. Certainly, the idea of returning to school, much less spend the night in the dorm, may strike some as something of a retrograde life move, but we’ll make an exception here. Set on the grounds of the former University College Cork school of architecture, the 265-room residence is the work of Kingston Lafferty Design. The Dublin-based studio worked hard to demarcate distinct living zones in a futuristic mix of acrylic and Perspex, modular furniture and oversized globe lamps. Meanwhile, the brightly lit, spacious and high-ceilinged rooms are a treat – here furnished in handsome grey tones, roomy sectional sofas, bright geometric patterned rugs, and modern prints on the walls; and each featuring an en-suite bathroom. A b

Doom was a breakthrough game for its time, and became so popular that now it’s essentially the “Banana For Scale” of hardware hacking. Doom has been ported to countless devices, most of which have enough processing ability to run the game natively. Recently, this lineup of Doom-compatible devices expanded to include the NES even though the system definitely doesn’t have enough capability to run it without special help. And if you want your own Doom NES cartridge, this video will show you how to build it . We featured the original build from [TheRasteri] a while back which goes into details about how it’s possible to run such a resource-intensive game on a comparatively weak system. You just have to enter the cheat code “RASPI”. After all the heavy lifting is done, it’s time to put it into a realistic-looking cartridge. To get everything to fit in the donor cartridge, first the ICs in the cartridge were removed (except the lockout IC) and replaced with custom ROM chips. Some modifica

Athletes have a long history of using whatever they can find to enhance their performance or improve their training. While fitness tracker watches are nothing new, swimmers have used them to track their split times, distance, and other parameters. The problem with fitness trackers though is that you have to look at a watch. FORM has swim goggles that promise to address this, their smart goggles present the swimmer with a heads-up display of metrics. You can see a slick video about them below. The screen is only on one eye, although you can switch it from left to right. The device has an inertial navigation system and is — of course — waterproof. It supposedly can withstand depths up to 32 feet and lasts 16 hours on a charge. It can use Bluetooth to send your data to your phone in addition to the display. All this comes at a price, the goggles cost about $200. These aren’t the goggles from the dollar store, but even a nice pair of Speedo goggles might run $30 tops. The device report

The New York Yankees are joining forces with Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. to buy the team’s cable network in a deal valued at $3.47 billion. Yankee Global Enterprises announced the widely expected purchase Thursday, saying the group bought the 80 percent stake from Walt Disney Co. The investors also included RedBird Capital, Blackstone’s Tactical Opportunities business and Mubadala Capital. Disney acquired majority ownership of the YES Network as part of its $71 billion takeover of 21st Century Fox film and TV assets earlier this year. But the Yankees’ owners had an option to buy out that stake and held lengthy talks leading up to Thursday’s announcement. Sinclair, a Baltimore-area broadcaster, has been scooping up regional sports networks and recently purchased 21 channels from Disney as part of the Fox deal. It will own 20 percent of YES, according to a separate statement. The team will have the largest piece, with 26 percent, Yankees President Randy Levine

College football season is just getting started, but Nissan is already thinking about hoops. The brand today announced it is now an official sponsor NCAA men’s basketball, including the Final Four, giving it the rights to use trademarked phrases like March Madness. It is not exactly a new deal. Parent company Nissan Motor Co. has had a deal with the NCAA since 2011. But the automaker has been using its Infiniti brand for the sponsorship. Nissan will now take over as the deal enters its final two years. Nissan, which has poured major money into college football since inking a sponsorship of the Heisman Trophy 14 years ago, is leaning into college sports even more with the NCAA deal, which is jointly managed by CBS Sports and Turner Sports. Nissan wants to tap into “people's passion points and basketball, especially in the United States, is huge,” says Allyson Witherspoon, VP of marketing communications and media for Nissan North America. According to a press release on the deal,