MAKE » Tag: Software

Glove Based Sign-to-Speech System

Sean Michael Ragan — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:06:59 +0000

The EnableTalk system uses a glove-mounted microcontroller to collate information from a passel of onboard sensors—11 flex sensors, 8 touch sensors, 2 accelerometers, a compass, and a gyroscope—and transmit it wirelessly to a nearby computer or smartphone for translation into machine generated speech.

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Hacking Skype for Better Teleconferencing

Sean Michael Ragan — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 16:00:35 +0000

David Schneider of IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article up about a system he set up to improve his Skype-mediated telepresence at their editorial meetings. Physically, the system consists of four oblong wooden boxes, distributed along their conference table, mounting ten USB devices between them (two webcams and eight microphones) and some custom software that uses the Skype API to allow him to switch between them remotely in real time.

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Vim Clutch

Adam Flaherty — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 09:00:33 +0000

In an effort to shave off precious microseconds from the tedium of having to manually switch modes in his favorite multi-modal text editor, Aleksandr Levchuk fashioned a USB clutch pedal to do the job. Now, instead of typing an "i" to insert text or hitting to edit it, Aleksandr need only tap the pedal to enter the corresponding mode.

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Visible Physible Family Trees

Sean Michael Ragan — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 16:00:06 +0000

Last September, I wrote about the Thingiverse “Cube Gears” phenomenon, briefly tracing the origin of user emmett’s Screwless Cube Gears through its evolution from Haruki Nakamura’s papercraft geared heart sculpture via user GregFrost’s printable Broken Heart thing. At the time, I really wanted to exhaust the graph of the cube gears / heart gears phenomenon, but didn’t have the available free time. Well, I finally got around to doing it.

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New Method for Vectorizing Pixel Art

Sean Michael Ragan — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 20:00:58 +0000

I especially like the new streamlined Space Invader shapes. I always wondered what they really looked like.

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SketchUp Plugin Auto-Generates 3D PCB Models from Eagle Files

Sean Michael Ragan — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:00:19 +0000

EagleUp is the work of Swiss design engineer Jerome Lamy. It runs inside SketchUp and requires co-installation of ImageMagick. The script will automatically generate a 3D model of a printed circuit board from an image exported by Cadsoft Eagle, then populate it with preexisting component models.

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Play Percussion on any Surface with Mogees

Michael Colombo — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:00:34 +0000

Using contact mics that detect hand gestures through the aid of software, the Mogee is an electronic musical instrument that can be appended to virtually any rigid object.

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Free Web Accessible Visual Regular Expression Generator

Sean Michael Ragan — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:54:28 +0000

Mark is a programmer who hates writing regular expressions. So he wrote a kind of visual regular expression generator that starts with the string to be searched, identifies recognizable patterns in it, and lets you select those you want. Then it outputs a working (albeit probably inelegant) regular expression to get the job done. The commentariat over at txt2re.com is somewhat predictably divided between grateful regex amateurs and annoyed experts. [via Boing Boing]

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distellamap: Modern Visualizations of Atari 2600 code

John Maushammer — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 12:44:55 +0000

Software is a mix of computer instructions and data, but rarely do you get to see how the two interact in memory. Ben Fry visualized the code of several classic video games, giving insight in to the complexity of the code and how the programmer arranged the graphical elements. It’s […]

OpenSCAD: Constructive solid geometry CAD at long last

Sean Michael Ragan — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:00:47 +0000

So I was really stoked this morning to read this post over on the Thingiverse Blog about the advent of OpenSCAD, which does for 3D CAD what POV-Ray did for raytracing. At long last, you can program your 3D CAD models instead of sculpting them. And it's free! I can hardly wait to try it out.