Video

Infotainment Gesture-Control

Lately we worked at EDAG on testing gesture control. We, that’s Adrian my trainee and me. Yeah and the hand you can see there is mine. 😉

Beitrag von EDAG.
Video

Silent Meditation Timer for a Singing Bowl

In 2014 I had another idea about a meditation timer for singing bowl (Klangschale). A clapper which automatically hammers after a specified amount of time.

I had some features in mind:

  • It needs to fit on a wide range of bowls.
  • The mechanics needs to be silent.
  • The timer needs to be adjustable
  • Maybe it can also bell in adjustable time intervals, like Tich Nhat Hanh’s mindfullness bell

Motors, servos and solenoids are all too noisy. So I made some research and found electric muscles. I ordered two from sparkfun. And I made some scribbles how it can look like.

I think it would be nice that the time can set by a rotary encoder, combined with a little display, maybe 7-segment led or a small oled, like in the MicroView

The latest thing I made is a paper prototype with a simple button. I was amazed, the mechanics works perfect. And it’s really silent.

 

The click in the video is just the button press. The NanoMuscle itself is very silent.

Galerie

New Enclosure for my Knob

In 2013 I started designing a nice enclosure for my knob. But unfortunately I never finished it. I designed it by layering laser cutted acrylic glas.

It has the followong features:

  • Li-Po battery power
  • Wireless charger
  • Stand for iPad and iPad mini
  • Bluetooth Audio connection
 

Here are the vector files which i have used for cutting.

TheKnobCutFiles.zip

 

mysqldump windows command line only databases with prefix

Here’s a little snippet which mysqldumps only the databases with a specific prefix or another wildcard expression under windows command line or windows batch.

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
set myvar=
for /f %%i in ('c:xamppmysqlbinmysql -uroot -pmysql -e "SHOW DATABASES LIKE 'prefix_%%'"') do set myvar=!myvar! %%i
echo %myvar:~10%
@echo on
c:xamppmysqlbinmysqldump.exe -u root --password=mysql --databases %myvar:~10% | "c:Program Files (x86)gzipgzip.exe" > "C:WHEREEVERYOUWANTmysqlbackup-%date:~6,4%-%date:~3,2%-%date:~0,2%-%time:~0,2%-%time:~3,2%-%time:~6,2%.gz"
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THE KNOB III – BlueTooth 4.0 aka BLE

4 Comments

Here is a new Version of my rotating Knob. It now uses Bluetooth Low Energy aka BT 4.0 to communicate to the iOS device. I’m using the BLE Shield by RedBear Labs. I also coded a native App to have access to the iOS music library. So now it kan be used as a replacement for that cool, but expensive, infotainment systems integrated in cars. Mine doesn’t have one. On the other side Toyota’s infotainment systems aren’t cool. Hey guys take a look at Audi or BMW. And last but not least it has a new case with an aluminium knob. It looks very nice now. In addition it is enough space to put in a 9V battery to use it completely wireless.

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THE KNOB II – Wifi-Hardware

You know, I’m addicted to rotating knobs. And this is my new version. This one works over Wifi. So it works for desktop and mobile, native and Adobe Air. It is build with an Arduino Leonardo, a RedFly Wifi Shield and a ProtoShield with 10 buttons, 1 rotary encoder and 3 LEDs.

On the software side I’m using the OSC protocol over UDP which is very fast and responsive.

AS3 Simple UnTAR

The challenge: How to distribute additional content-packages for an Adobe Air App for iOS and Desktop.

The Answer: Inspired by this article I started coding my own ActionsScript tar version to unpack gnu-tar files. This format has some benefits. First it is one file, easy downloadable and shareble. Because it’s uncompressed, it is faster than any compressed format like zip. This doesn’t really matter because all files in my packages are compressed files like jpeg. I unpacked a 350 MB file on an iPad 2 in 18 seconds. Additionally it is very fast to extract only one file or data out of it, maybe for some metainformation. Possibly there is some potential to optimize the speed. It’s a common used format, so packing tools are available on all plattforms (Windows, Mac OSX and Linux). Because of this there is no need to code a special packing tool.

And last, I want to share this with you:

AS3 Simple Untar on Google Code

Have fun with it.

Adobe AIR Gyroscope Native Extension with Euler Angles (roll, pitch, yaw) for iOS

24 Comments

UPDATE: I have released the extension including source on google code with some changes.
Euler Gyroscope ANE on Google Code

I baked my very first AIR iOS Native Extension. It’s just an adapted version of this version from Adobe. Because in my opinion the data of radians per second aren’t really good to handle. So I looked into Apples API documentation and found out that there are Euler Angles in the CMMotionManager CMDeviceMotion classes. So I just changed a few lines in the Objective-C Code. I learned much from this tutorial Native Extionsion for Adobe AIR and iOS 101 by Liquid Photo

NSString *myStr = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%f&%f&%f&%f&%f&%f", 
rotate.x, 
rotate.y, 
rotate.z, 
motionManager.deviceMotion.attitude.roll, 
motionManager.deviceMotion.attitude.pitch, 
motionManager.deviceMotion.attitude.yaw];

[motionManager startDeviceMotionUpdates];

motionManager.deviceMotionUpdateInterval = 0;

And added these three parameters roll, pitch and yaw to the Actionscript Gyroscope Event.

new GyroscopeEvent(GyroscopeEvent.UPDATE, _x, _y, _z, _roll, _pitch, _yaw)

You can download source and final iOS .ane Native Extension file here:
iOS Air Native Extension Gyroscope – with Euler Angles