BotGadget

Saturday, October 31

Raspberry Pi Halloween Voice Changer

[Dave Shevett] has spent a lot of time (more than a year) expanding his Technomancer costume along with the companion (Arduino-driven) magic staff. He found, however, he needed a way to get his voice out from behind the mask. If you are going to go through that much trouble, you might as well augment your voice at the same time, right?

[Dave’s] voice changer uses a Raspberry Pi which isn’t all that complicated. The Pi uses Linux, and Unix–the predecessor to Linux–has a long history of having little tools you can string together to do big jobs. So once you have a Pi and a sound card, the rest is just some Linux command line wizardry.

There’s a battery and a small portable amplifier to get that booming voice. Since you don’t want to lug a keyboard and monitor around to handle every reboot, [Dave] set the Pi up to run his voice-changing scripts on each reboot.

This is a great example of why old Unix programmers make small tools and use the shell to join them together. [Dave’s] voice changer is pretty much just some off the shelf parts and a script so simple it hardly qualifies as programming in any real sense. In fact, it is essentially one line of “code”:

play "|rec --buffer 2048 -d pitch -300 echos 0.8 0.88 100 0.6 150 .5 band 1.2k 1.5k"

Sure, there is some street cred in embedded development to doing everything the hard way, but with the advent of cheap embedded Linux systems, why not take advantage of the tools where you can?

If you want a more roll-your-own approach, you can pick up your Arduino or break out an audio mixer (but good luck getting it in your costume).

Filed under: Holiday Hacks, Raspberry Pi

Friday, October 30

Developed on Hackaday – HaDge is back to the drawing board

A couple of days back, we wrote about the HACK – a prototyping platform designed by [Michele Perla] based on the Atmel SAM R21 MCU. It’s one of the new breed of devices consisting of an ARM Cortex-M0 MCU + IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless radio bundled together. This was exciting since we could pack a lot of punch in the HaDge hardware. We planned to use the same design later to power the HaDge. Building HACK would have allowed us to get it in the hands of the software team, while the hardware folks worked on the real HaDge layout.

The HACK design was ready for review and we asked around to verify the antenna layout, which was the part we were not too sure about. We asked Atmel for help with verifying the layout. That’s when we had the facepalm moment. They asked us – “What about FCC certification?” Since we plan to build the badges in quantities of a few hundred at the very least, it’s obvious we cannot escape from FCC certification. A design based around the R21 is ruled out – the cost of obtaining approval is pretty high. This means we need to punt the R21 and instead use an off-the-shelf radio module which is already FCC certified. Sigh.

Now the good news. This is a setback in terms of time, and effort put in by [Michele]. But beyond that, we’re good to go back to the drawing board and start afresh. First off, we decided to revert back to the Atmel D21 as the main controller. It’s a fairly decent MCU, and there’s a fairly robust tool chain available that a lot of people are familiar with. For the Radio, we are looking at some of these available options :

The last one from Microchip looks quite promising. But we’re open for better and cheaper suggestions, so please chime in with your comments.

Filed under: Hackaday Columns, hardware, radio hacks

Exclusive Interview: Meet Dr. Dava Newman, Deputy Administrator of NASA

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Newman before the Tested Live Show last week in San Francisco to talk about the Maker Movement, The Martian, and the importance of olive oil.

Feds: Apple must still unlock iPhone 5S, even after defendant pled guilty

(credit: Paul)

In a strange twist, federal prosecutors have said that they are moving forward in their attempt to compel Apple to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7, even after the defendant in a felony drug case has now pleaded guilty.

The judge in the case, United States Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, said in a Friday court filing that he is understandably confused.

The defendant, Jun Feng, whose trial was scheduled for next month, was originally charged with three counts of possessing and distributing methamphetamine.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

How To Target the Right Customers

Guest author Stephen Moyers is an online marketer, designer, avid tech-savvy blogger. Associated with Los Angeles-based SPINX Digital Agency, he writes about online marketing, web design, development, social media marketing and more.Many companies have trouble matching fantastic campaign content ...

Stuffy offices can halve cognitive scores

(credit: Asa Wilson/Wikimedia Commons)

The best way to tackle a tough task at work may be to crack a window and breath deep.

Compared with inhaling fresh air, gulping down the stale air found in conventional office buildings can stifle cognitive function by half, researchers report in Environmental Health Perspectives. The finding suggests that improving the performance, productivity, and health of many office workers could be done with just a fresh breeze, the authors conclude.

“The results are striking,” lead researcher Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard, told Ars. Researchers knew that air quality would likely effect cognitive function and work performance. But, earlier studies included few people and reported subjective data. We didn’t expect to see that high quality air could double cognitive scores, Allen said.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

No More Isolation: Why Apps Cooperate More

Guest author Andreas Weder is the head of user experience at Magnolia.Apps are powerful, easy to learn and, thanks to the spread of mobile devices, wildly popular. But they come with downsides: to solve a complex task, users often have to switch between apps, even multiple times. See also: ...