I knew this part would be a doozy.  First of all, I am a skeptic in terms of the viable use-cases of blockchain technology.  Having gotten stuck in, researched ways to build on and integrate with it, I remain so, although I concede there may be good things to come. It’s safe in 90% of…

It’s been a few months, and things have slowed down just a little. That said, things have been happening, and now I think we’re entering the final push for the demo. Cubes – all but done First of all, the Flasher cube, including dodecahedron-based (NOT an icosahedron) LED core, I think is at a point…

Deploying AI is the hardest part I spent three days at the O’Reilly AI Conference in London a couple of weeks back. It was incredibly informative in terms of applying AI, understanding some very new techniques and in particular, deploying and running models. Kubeflow came up time and again as a way to build pipelines…

I got up and running with Keras quite quickly – a pipenv install of tensorflow==2.0.0rc2, keras, numpy==1.16.4 was the right combination. Fairly quickly I threw together something to use small half-second snippets of samples across 26 classes (“people”!), some LSTM neural net layers and managed to my astonishment to build a brain with almost 80…

MOSFET and LEDs with discrete resistors are all hooked up. After adding some beefy capacitors to allow for a chunky flash, I was able to test it out, albeit it with the solid white prototype (the next ones will be transparent / translucent – much flashier, I hope!) – Everything went pretty well with this…

The Pointer is effectively finished – version 1, at least. I’ll outline the process from freshly-printed to what you see below: First, Polyfilla, believe it or not. The banding that seems to be part and parcel of 3d printing (at least at the amateur level) consists of both peaks and valleys. The valleys will stubbornly…

Pointer The Pointer part of the project is nearly done! It’s the hits-per-minute meter. Thanks to the simplicity of the Beat Saber mod, it’s possible to drop an Arudino on the local Wifi, have it listen and respond to a multicast UDP packet, and it’ll automatically get a packet sent to it when a block…

In order to drive the LEDs without drawing so much, much more than the Arudino I/O pins can handle, I ordered from handy, pre-made driver boards from Amazon (here). Today I hooked everything up to build one of the “brain” units (battery, board, switches): The MOS Module seen there allows switching of a larger power…

The Vuforia API – the one that lets you generate unique VuMarks – is quite painful to understand. They use a HMAC-SHA1 signature, which is fine, with an MD5 digest of some request fields, which is fine, but somewhere along the line it’s not adding up, and there’s just a generic “authentication failed” message. On…