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Twin Guitar-Playing Robots Will Work for Tab

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Remember Animusic? They were these incredible animated music videos with original tunes being played by computer-generated robots. Well, the MegCell Pulse might be the coolest robots-playing-music thing we’ve seen since Animusic . Built by [Bruce] over six years’ time, this futuristic wonder features two robots working in concert to play acoustic guitar, just like a pair of human hands would. You just feed them digital tablature, and off go the fraternal twins, with one doing the fretting, and the other doing the plucking via six individual plectrum. It’s digital music producing analog sound from a physical instrument. How does MegCell Pulse work? It’s essentially a system of gears, magnetic actuators, and arms, contained in a 3D-printed structure. The only real limitations are that it can’t traverse the entire fretboard, nor can it slide between frets. That said, you can absolutely buy one for your own guitar via [Bruce]’s modestly-goaled Kickstar...

Large-Scale Pokémon Eviction Looms with Pokémon Bank Server Shutdown

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After the Nintendo 3DS handheld console saw most its online services including the online store (eShop) taken offline not too long ago, it was only a matter of time before the demise of even the remaining paid services, such as the Pokémon Bank which Nintendo has now announced will be shutting down on February 25 of 2027. The ability to transfer the digital pocket monsters, or Pokémon, between physical systems has been a staple of the series since the early Gameboy days when a link cable would be all you needed to trade and catch’em’all, as they say in the trade. Naturally over time this Cloud-based aspect wormed its way into this series as well, starting with the 3DS and this continuing on the Nintendo Switch in the form of the Pokémon HOME app. With this paid service an avid Pokémon fan could collect up to 3,000 of these digital critters, move them between various Pokémon games and generally allow players to keep the same Pokémon with them across games. As noted by [K...

Submersible drone analyzes ice

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Doing anything on a frozen lake can carries some amount of risk. Nevertheless, every year events ranging from car racing to ice skating are held on them. As such, proper safety precautions are needed, the most important of which is ensuring the ice is thick enough to withstand the weight of whatever may be on it. This is done by cutting holes into the ice and measuring its depth in several locations. But this is a dangerous and imperfect process only giving a rough picture of actual thickness. So to solves these problems, a team of students at ETH Zurich made an ice measuring submersible drone.  The concept of ice measurement employed is, on paper, reasonably simple. When a sonar pulse is sent out, some of the energy will return off the bottom of the ice sheet, but some of it will pass through creating a second return. By measuring the difference in these two returns, the thickness can be calculate with a high degree of precision. Attach the sonar to a submersible and give it a positi...

Automatic Naptime with BabyBjorn Bouncing Servo

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Any parent with a baby and deep pockets– or friends with deep pockets– will probably sing the praises of the BabyBjorn rocking sling chair. A simple spring-loaded sling seat allows you to rock a child to sleep like magic– but you do have to rock the child. In the tradition of fathers everywhere since the stone age, [Ceyhun Karataş] saw that as something to tinker around, creating his Automatic BabyBjorn Bouncer/Rocker with a servo , an Arduino, and some 3D printed parts. You still can’t leave your child unattended with this hack, [Ceyhun] takes pains to point out, but it will free a hand so you can keep junior happy while tinkering up other toys for him or her. Music players are a popular staple , for example. You should have plenty of time for such projects, because it won’t take long for you to replicate [Ceyhun]’s invention– it’s only as complicated as it needs to be, which is not very. The servo, a Futaba S3003 which is mounted to t...

Removing Microplastics from Soil with Tumbling Magnetic Flakes

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While in aquatic environments microplastics can be filtered out relatively easily, in soil it’s much harder to get to these microscopic particles. While you can certainly strip mine an entire area to process its soil, a less invasive method would involve something like the magnetic flakes proposed and demonstrated by [Jeonghyo Kim] et al. in a recent article in npg asia materials . The Ti 3 C 2 T x flakes, referred to as MXene microparticles, were designed to attract target microplastics. These were then combined with ferromagnetic nickel nanoparticles to make structures that can be propelled through soil using an external magnetic field. During tests under laboratory conditions the researchers managed to remove about 81% of polystyrene and 72% of PET particles this way from soil, with a correspondingly higher percentage in water. After having the flakes rummage about for a while through the target material, they are removed with a strong magnetic field, which should recover m...

Troubleshooting Video Delay On The Raspberry Pi

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The Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers are great little devices, and they can do great things with cameras and video. However, there can be a fair bit of latency involved in these tasks depending on the board you’re using and just what you’re doing. You need to have things set up just so to get peak performance. [MattKC] has tangled with this issue in a personal project, and recently had somewhat of a breakthrough. The issue came up during [MattKC’s] work on cloning the WiiU gamepad . The idea was to receive the video stream from the WiiU console and display it using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. He had some problems with latency, wherein there was a strange 3 frames of latency in the video pipeline that just wouldn’t go away. Even substituting in some dummy frames into the pipeline and ignoring them at output time didn’t work—the latency stuck around. Eventually, [MattKC] realized the delay wasn’t about a certain number of frames—it was about ti...

Tearing Down A Cheap Digital Caliper

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Most hackers and makers end up with a cheap pair of calipers in the toolbox at some point or another. [DiodeGoneWild] decided to take a particularly cheap plastic pair and tear them down to see what makes them tick measure. The electronics is, unsurprisingly, all contained inside the carriage which slides along the ruler. The ruler itself has an etched copper strip inside, underneath the scale sticker, with repetitive T-shaped sections. Meanwhile, the PCB in the carriage has a series of plates for capactive sensing. As the carriage slides along the copper strip inside the ruler, the capacitive sensing plates pick up varying capacitances which are directly proportional to how far the carriage has moved, allowing for precise measurement of  relative position. Zeroing is a job for the user, via the ZERO button. We get to see how this works on the bare hardware level, and [DiodeGoneWild] even breaks out the oscilloscope to help show us what’s going on. [DiodeGoneWild] also notes t...