Adafruit tears down a set of brainwave cat ears. They’re made by Necomimi and use your brain waves to adjust a pair of luxurious cat ears on the headgear.

If your desktop computer is sitting on the floor you may have damaged USB dongles by hitting them with your knees. [Megacier] prevents this from happening again by building a flexible dongle link.

Can anyone help [Brian Benchoff] find a datasheet for this International Rectifier 92-O350 so he can fix up his old VT100 terminal?

Here’s a quick example of how to graph data from a Raspberry Pi on the sen.se cloud service.

Have some extra fun with your oscilloscope by showing any image. This set of conversions starts with a picture and ends with an audio file that will draw it on the scope’s screen.

You’ve probably already heard that the Sikorsky prize for human powered helicopter has been claimed. If you didn’t see any footage of the flight now’s your chance. [Thanks Adam]

There are two radio modulation schemes everyone ought to know. Amplitude modulation changes the amplitude — or ‘volume’, if you will — of a carrier frequency and turns all radio into channels owned and operated by a church. frequency modulation changes the pitch of a carrier frequency and is completely run by clear Channel. Amateur radio operators are familiar with dozens of other modulation schemes, but there’s one hardly anybody touches. phase modulation is strange and practically unheard of, but that doesn’t imply you can’t execute it on an FPGA. [nckm] is transmitting audio using phase modulation on an FPGA (Russian, here’s the Google Translatrix).

This hardware is just an Altera MAX10 board, with a single input used for serial data of the audio to be transmitted, and two outputs, each connected to a few bits of wire for a quarter-wave antenna. No, there’s no output filter or anything else except for a few bits of wire. It’s an experiment, chillax.

The Verilog for this project receives an audio signal as serial data in mono, 22050 BPS, 8-bit unsigned samples. These samples are fed into a dynamic PLL with phase shift in the FPGA. Shifting the phases also changes the frequency, so [nckm] can receive this audio signal with the FM transmitter on his phone.

Is this really phase modulation if it’s being received by an FM radio? Eh, maybe. PM and FM are closely related, but certainly distinguishable as modulation schemes in their own right. You can get [nckm]’s code over on the gits, or check out the video demo below.

So robots kick our butts at tic-tac-toe, chess, Jeopardy, as well as now they’re the dominant types at rock-paper-scissors too. This robot arm will outmatch your at the game every single time. It’s not just quick sufficient to keep up, however it figures out what you’re planning to do as well as reacts according. all of this occurs method to quick for you to catch it in the act.

Researchers at the university of Tokyo came up with the concept of integrating high-speed vision with a high-speed hand. obviously one millisecond is all it takes to examine what step you’ve chosen. the time it takes for the hand to type the conquering setting is only marginally longer than that. As you can see in the clip after the break, it already understands the protocol of 1-2-3 shoot as well as doesn’t requirement any type of operator intervention to begin a new game, or continuously institution you on trying to contend with a machine.

We’ve been beaten at the game by a maker before. This is just very first time that the human player doesn’t requirement to wear special equipment and the maker has moved from a online hand to a physical one.

[via Reddit]

We’ve seen the 3D phone fad come and go, with devices like the Evo 3D, that used a parallax barrier to achieve autostereoscopy (that is, 3D checking out without glasses). These displays aren’t holograms, they are just showing your eyes two different images like a 3D motion picture or a stereopticon. However, researchers from Australia and China are intending to change that. They’ve developed a nano-hologram (their term) that is about 1000 times thinner than a human hair. You can see a video about the invention, below.

Conventional holograms modulate the phase of light to give the illusion of three-dimensional depth. but to generate the required phase shifts, those holograms need to be as thick as the optical wavelengths involved. The researchers claim the holograms are “simple” to make, but that depends on what you compare it to. You need some exotic materials, vacuum deposition gear, and a laser that can do femtosecond-long pulses.

The research team has broken this thickness limit with a 25 nanometer hologram. Their technique counts on a topological insulator material a novel quantum material that holds a low refractive index in the surface layer but a much higher refractive index in the bulk of the material. This forms an intrinsic optical resonant cavity which can enhance the phase shifts and makes holography possible.

The next step is to develop a rigid thin film to overlay an LCD screen. The current version has pixels at least ten times too large to be functional for that application, so that’s another hurdle to overcome.

We’ve seen screens that shoot 3D images on motion pictures like star Wars for years. This isn’t it yet, but it is the next step. think of a phone, a wrist watch, or a contact lens that could generate a holographic image. Or a garbage-can-sized robot.

If your resources don’t stretch to the creation of real holograms, you can always create something that nearly looks like one.

[Frank Howarth] is a extremely competent woodworker understood on the YouTubes for his wonderful stop-motion videos of turned wood bowls. Lately, though, he’s put some effort into building furniture, this time around a gorgeous yard chair made from a gigantic sequoia log.

A few years ago, [Frank] as well as a buddy obtained a gigantic sequoia log as well as milled it themselves with a chainsaw. After two summers, the big boards were lastly dry sufficient to be utilized as well as [Frank] decided a yard chair would be a fine project.

The sides of the chair are a single monolithic piece of wood. Of program [Frank] needed to cut the sides in half as well as join them together once again for the decorative holes, however it’s still an impressively solid piece of woodworking. The back as well as seat of the chair are likewise constructed out of the exact same sequoia board, cut into slats held together with three extremely big dowel rods.

This job most likely wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the incredible devices as well as tools [Frank] has in his shop. He has a fantastic tour of his shop offered for your viewing. We should all be so lucky.