[Raphael Baron] needed a better way to control his office’s air conditioning units. Sure, they have remotes, but that’s too easy. [Raphael] came up with a solution that uses an ESP8266, a computer, IR LEDs, and a bot that runs on Slack.
[Raphael] built a prototype of the ESP8266 hardware on protoboard and used it to read and record the IR signals from the remote. Once he’d figured out the issues he was having with the IR library he was using, he could use it to send the IR commands to the AC unit. Since their office has two AC units, [Raphael] built a second prototype which had two IR LEDs but didn’t have the IR receiver. Using this he could turn both AC units on and off and set their temperatures.
For...

Zipline, a California-based robotics company that has made a name for itself delivering blood by drone in Rwanda, has just announced plans to operate its services in Tanzania by early next year.
In an interview with The Verge, Zipline co-founder and chief executive Keller Rinaudo said that the company plans to work with the Tanzania Ministry of Health and the country’s Medical Stores Department to open four distribution centers in Tanzania over the next four years, with the intent to deliver blood via drone to over a thousand public health facilities in the country.
Zipline also wants to expand services in Tanzania to include on-demand delivery of other medical supplies, things such as emergency vaccines,...

Nikon has a new full-frame DSLR: the D850. Announced today, the D850 is a monster of a camera in terms of specs, and it’s one that will cost accordingly — the retail price is $3,299 for just the body when it goes on sale in September. The pro-level D5 may still be the king of Nikon’s current DSLR offerings, but at first glance it’s the D850 that will likely be the Nikon full-frame camera that gets the most use by pros, semi-pros, and amateurs with deep pockets. For all intents and purposes, this is Nikon’s flagship camera going forward. So what does a 2017 flagship camera look like in Nikon’s eyes? Well, this camera has just about everything you could want from a full-frame DSLR these days. It’s...

Yesterday, Samsung unveiled its latest flagship, and now you can officially put in a preorder for the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. In a limited promotional offer, the company is offering bundle deals for preorders that’ll include either its Gear 360 camera or a wireless charging pad and memory card, but you have to put in an order before September 24th. Before you speed off to get the new phone, know that carriers and retailers aren’t all offering up preorders at the same time. Here are the ones that are available as of 12 AM today and otherwise. We’ll update this article as more information comes in.
Direct from Samsung, unlocked
You can get the Note 8 directly from Samsung, unlocked. That’s kind of a big...

A Giant Dog “Fake Plastic Trees”
This isn’t a Radiohead cover. This is an original song that in no way references the famous Radiohead song “Fake Plastic Trees,” or even uses any of those three words in the lyrics. It’s hilarious to me that a band would do this, but hey, it’s not as if Radiohead’s the only band with a song called “Creep,” and Stone Temple Pilots beat them to that title by a year! A Giant Dog’s “Fake Plastic Trees” is glammy garage rock song about being a cool loser. It starts off with Sabrina Ellis and Andrew Cashen asking for a ride somewhere – “it’s on the way, it’s on the way!” – and digresses into verses about being bored and depressed, eating at...

Thought yesterday’s Joker-centric movie news was a huge surprise? Today’s newest development makes that look ho-hum: Warner Bros. is reportedly developing a Joker and Harley Quinn film, with Jared Leto and Margot Robbie coming back as Mr. J and Dr. Quinzel.Read more...

[John Dingley] describes his Electric Beach Luge Project as an exciting mashup between “a downhill luge board, a kite surf buggy, a go-kart, and a Star Wars Land Speeder” and it’s fresh from a successful test run. What’s not to like? The DIY experimental vehicle was made to run on long, flat, firm stretches of sand while keeping the rider as close to the ground as possible. The Beach Luge is mainly intended to be ridden while lying on one’s back, luge-style, but it’s also possible to lay prone in the “Superman” position. The whole unit was built from the ground up, but [John] points out that the design isn’t particularly complicated. There is no fancy self-balancing or suspension involved...

At some point in 2018, we can expect to see a live-action Teen Titans on Warner Bros’ brand-new digital streaming service. Tonight, we learned who’ll be playing the show’s incarnation of Starfire and the news of her casting has an importance that can’t be understated.Read more...

Most people think of rainy days as gray, but in Nicolás P. Villarreal’s animated short Nieta, a little girl has exactly the opposite reaction. For her, gloomy weather brings delightful color—in splashes, sparkles, and fanciful shapes. Watch until the end of this brief, simple, but elegantly-made short to see why.Read more...

For decades, the oil and gas company Exxon Mobil has waged a public-facing disinformation campaign about human-caused climate change — even as the company’s scientific publications and internal communications acknowledged its reality, a new study says. Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes and postdoctoral fellow Geoffrey Supran analyzed internal, scientific, and public-facing communications from Exxon Mobil. They found the vast majority of the company’s peer-reviewed papers and internal documents confirmed that climate change is real and caused by human activity. But Exxon’s communications with the public through paid editorials, or ‘advertorials’, in the New York Times promoted climate...

Talk about job perks. Disneyland is in the middle of building Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, and to celebrate the construction of the area’s tallest peak, all Disney cast members got a chance to autograph the steel beams. Meaning they get to tell their grandkids they’re forever cemented in Star Wars canon, and I’m just…Read more...

It is sometimes a surprise in our community of tinkerers, builders, hackers, and makers, to find that there are other communities doing very similar things to us within their own confines, but in isolation to ours. A good example are the modified vehicle crowd. In their world there are some epic build stories and the skills and tools they take for granted would not in any way be unfamiliar to most Hackaday readers.
As part of a discussion about electric vehicles near where this is being written, someone tossed an interesting link from that quarter into the mix; a two-part treatise on building ultra-light-weight tubular frame vehicles. Or space frames, as you might know them.
You might think that making a...

A new report from Business Insider confirms rumored details about Facebook’s efforts to create consumer hardware, and also says that longtime Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth has been tapped to lead those efforts.
Earlier this month, sources told Bloomberg that Facebook’s Building 8 division was working on both a video chat device akin to the Amazon Echo Show, and a standalone smart speaker to compete with devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Business Insider’s new report confirms both projects are well underway.
The video chat device, apparently code-named Aloha, will have a large touchscreen (supposedly bigger than in competitor products), a wide-angle camera, microphones, speakers, and will...

Apple TV is continuing to lose ground to Roku and Amazon in the living room, a survey by Parks Associates has found. The consumer research company sampled 10,000 US homes and based its results on those which had at least one streaming player, according to AppleInsider. Roku jumped year-over-year from 32 percent to 37 percent, which is a foothold that none of its competitors can quite match. But Amazon is also gaining momentum and moved up from 16 percent to 24 percent. Apple, by contrast, fell YOY from 19 percent to 15 percent marketshare. Consumers seem to be favoring the aggressively priced streaming sticks and boxes from Roku and Amazon over the comparatively expensive Apple TV, which sells for either $150...

Terminator 2 isn’t just a film, it’s an achievement. James Cameron managed to create a movie that was not only tense and action-packed, but also revolutionary. It was the harbinger for what visual effects could do, and changed the industry forever. And it turns out, a lot of it was made possible by a small group…Read more...

Cliquer sur l’image pour l’agrandir
Tenue de cérémonie
2014 – tickets de métro des transports en commun lyonnais, agrafes.

Billet invité. Ouvert aux commentaires.
Décidément l’été porte dangereusement à la paresse intellectuelle dans les rédactions de la presse écrite ! L’an dernier déjà, à la même époque, nous avions fait ici-même une petite récolte de ces quelques articulets à la limite de la désinformation qui croissent comme ivraie dans les pages de nos magazines au temps venu de l’ambre solaire et des doigts de pied en éventail ! Nous reprenons cette année une mini-collecte du même type, certes moins pour fustiger les auteurs concernés (ce n’est pas drôle de travailler quand tout le monde est à la plage !) que pour y trouver l’occasion de menues explications de texte à l’usage des lecteurs...

3D printers are now cheaper than ever and Monoprice is at the absolute forefront of that trend. However, some of their printers struggle with flexible filaments, which is no fun if you’ve discovered you have a taste for the material properties of Ninjaflex and its ilk. Fear not, however — the community once again has a solution, in the form of a hot end adapter for the Monoprice Mini Delta.
The Mini Delta is a fantastic low-cost entry into 3D printing but its hot end has a break in the Bowden between the extruder and nozzle. This can lead to flexible filaments not being properly guided through the hot end and a general failure to print. This adapter allows the fitting of the popular E3D V6 hot end, and is...

No Man’s Sky’s vast universe was part of its initial appeal. You would go from planet to planet, completely alone, discovering and naming things along the way. For some players, that was too desolate, so they banded together to make the Galactic Hub, a portion of No Man’s Sky that acted as a home base. After the most…Read more...

[Sebastian Goscik]’s entry in the 2017 Hackaday Prize is a line following robot. Well, not really; the end result is a line following robot, but the actual project is about a simple, cheap robot chassis to be used in schools, clubs, and other educational, STEAM education events. Along with the chassis design comes a lesson plan allowing teachers to have a head start when presenting the kit to their students.
The lesson plan is for a line-following robot, but in design is a second lesson – traffic lights which connect to a main base through a bus and work in sync. The idea of these lessons is to be fairly simple and straightforward for both the teachers and the students in order to get them more interested...

I have storage on the mind, and it comes from two facts in my life:
First, I have tons of stuff in my workshop, far too much for the amount of space I have. A lot of this material is much easier to use if it’s well-organized. Think electronics, robotics, building sets. Modular parts that need to go together a certain way for them to be useful. It is imperative, therefore, that I come up with some sort of organization system to keep the chaos in check.
Second, my favorite tool is the laser cutter, born from my love for building vector designs. I can do art on the computer and have it manufactured in front of my eyes, and share my designs with someone else who can remix it into something even cooler.
So with...