The Nvidianator

Skynet fights back.

In January 2018 I finished a project I had been working on for quite some time – The Raspbinator; I was very happy with it and it got some good attention. But there were some bugs and limitations to it and I already ideas for the next one.

Early in 2019 the Nvidia Jetson Nano was released and it had great capability for running machine learning; I thought this would be perfect for the next version of my project and a great opportunity to get into ML/Neural Nets.

Also, with Terminator: Dark Fate coming out this year – what better time!

So I pre-ordered the Jetson Nano, it was delivered on release and after many months of working and learning; The Nvidianator is finally ready.

Lets dive in to the build and code…

Mission Parameters:

1. Improve upon The Raspbinator and fix bugs.
2. Use more advanced technology for image recognition and learning.
3. Improve the aesthetics.

Freezing a Raspberry Pi 4

Why??

First off do not try this at home – it may damage your Pi or cause things in your freezer to thaw if the door is left ajar in anyway. This is a joke experiment, do not replicate! I take no responsibility for damaged Pi’s.

Anyway – it’s summer time at the moment and I just got my new Raspberry Pi through with a case from Pimoroni – and it looks so nice:

 

 

Soooo nice.

So nice.

But even with the big new heat sink on it still gets pretty toasty – especially around summertime.

Last year I did an experiment with using cooking oil to cool a Pi – while not exactly practical it certainly did the job in cooling the Pi down a good 22 degrees or so compared to passive air while running Quake 3.

So this year I thought about how I could one up myself with an even more ridiculous experiment – putting the Pi in a freezer!

RGB Potion

Why.

First up thanks to DFRobot for sending me the parts for this!

So I was thinking about potions and stuff in games and the varied colours of them, red for health, blue for magic and green for stamina usually.

I thought it would be awesome to make a light up one – with fully customisable 255/255/255 RGB colour customisation with a rotary encoder – so I suggested the idea to DFRobot and they kindly agreed to send me some parts.

I also had a maple syrup jar laying around that I thought would look great lit up.

Key Goals:

1. Make an LED ‘potion’ that lights up.
2. Make it fully adjustable throughout 3 channels of colour.

Infinity Gauntlet

Fun isn’t something one considers when balancing the universe.

First up I’d suggest that if you haven’t seen Infinity War or Endgame yet then stop reading here and go watch them; there are no real spoilers but there are definitely references to the movies in this article.

Anyway – I saw Endgame the other day and just, oh wow.

I thought I should definitely do an Infinity Gauntlet project – and then it came to me, I can combine it with my Artificial Life Project and have it light up and stuff but also wipe out 50% of the life in the project, perfect synchronicity – is that a word? Google says it is.

So I got on with planning…

Key Goals:

1. Have a wearable Infinity Gauntlet that lights up as in the film.
2. Interface it with my Artificial Life project.

The Hackster Badge

Beware flashing images in the video below:

The Idea

First up thanks to Elegoo for sending me one of their Diffused and Clear Assorted LED packs!

I’ve been using the site Hackster for just over 2 years now, my first project uploaded to there was my Windows 98 Wrist Watch, I’ve also had some help from Elegoo recently with my Scorpion Robot Project.

I asked Elegoo for the above LED kit to make something with and review and I thought I could make a Hackster Badge with their logo on, as a thank you to them for spreading word about my projects as well as give Elegoo more attention to their awesome products!

For reference, the Hackster logo looks like this:

Key Goals:

1. Make a wearable with the Hackster logo.
2. Make it flash cool patterns.

ASMD Shock Rifle

Liandri

First off thanks to DFRobot for the parts for this project!

I love Unreal Tournament (UT) and I definitely love the ASMD Shock Rifle in the games weapon roster – so I thought why not make one?

Also because the new UT is now no longer in development (EPIC, please please please resume this), I needed something to sate my need for UT.

From the above link – it’s basically a plasma rifle that fires purple beams, with a secondary fire of a purple orb that can also be shot with a beam to make a tertiary attack.

After some experience with SimplePlastics in my Arduino Lightsaber project I was sold on the idea of them – although I realised that instead of a tube I should have used a solid rod for the project in order to propagate the light more – I realised this plastic would also be perfect for creating a real life Shock Rifle!

So I pitched the idea to DFRobot and they agreed and then I ordered the plastics from SimplyPlastics and got to work.

Key Goals:

1. Make a real life ASMD Shock Rifle.
2. Make sure it lights up and makes noise from the game (both firing modes) as well as a screen telling the user what mode is currently on.

Terminator Glasses

Tech Noir.

I’ve been thinking of making a pair of Terminator Glasses for a while now; basically I was thinking of having the red eye behind the glasses that would move around as the wearer looks about.

I was looking around for a good LED platform to use when I came across Pimoroni’s very handy looking 5×5 RGB LED matrix, so I got it purchased and got to work.

Key goals:

1. Have a pair of glasses with the iconic terminator red eye.
2. Have the eye move when the glasses are moved in a direction.

Tinned Heisenberg Principle | Arduino

Update

So it turns out I may have been wrong about much of the below (as I thought) The user ‘eivind’ on Hackster left me a comment pointing me to This video which probably explains things better than I did.

I’m still trying to get my head around it all.

Experimental

This is a bit of a weird one and I’m almost definitely going to get some concepts wrong here so bear with me.

I was reading up about Quantum Physics the other day, trying to make any sense of it at all and I got to The Uncertainty principle – which is essentially (from my limited understanding) where any quantum particle (wave?) measured is affected by the equipment used to measure it.

I think.

So basically whatever you try and measure you affect and so cannot get an accurate measurement of.

I don’t understand it fully, so what better time to try and make a project about it, right?

You can also catch this on my Hackster.

Key Goals:

1. Make an device that when closed has a certain output that can’t be seen, based on a value from an environmental sensor
2. Ensure that when opened and attempted to be measured the sensor input is changed and thus the output is changed

Nerf Scope Module | Arduino Project

The Scope

So first off thanks to DFRobot for the parts in this project! They have been great to work with over the past year.

For a while now I’ve been eying up the Nerf Raptorstrike but there was one issue – no scope or top rails for attaching a scope – only an underside rail. Which made me think – can I just make my own movable and attachable scope with an Arduino and a servo or two?

Lets find out.

You can also catch this project on my Hackster.

Main goals for this are:

• Make a movable scope
• Make it attachable to underside Nerf rails

The Scorpion ~ Star Trek Inspired Robotics

Ideas.

First off thanks to Elegoo for sending me the robot car that I’ve used for this project!

When Elegoo first contacted me I said it would be cool to add some extra stuff to their already cool Robot Car V3.0 – they agreed and I got thinking about what could be done.

So I was watching the Star Trek TNG episode ‘The Quality of Life’ and thought it would be cool to add on a Raspberry Pi to the bot and see if I can make something similar.

As an overview; in the episode the Exocomps are designed to be used for doing work in dangerous/unreachable areas, until a character suspects that they may have sentience and questions how they should be treated.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to start using Tensorflow to get the bot to take pictures and analyse them, sending the results to the user.

You can also catch this on my Hackster profile.