Dot-Matrix Printer Brings Old School Feel To Today’s Headlines

October 9, 2024 by Dan Maloney 20 Comments

If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re old. Now, most of us get our news piped directly into our phones, selected by algorithms perfectly tuned to rile us up on whatever the hot-button issue du jour happens to be. Welcome to the future.

If like us you long for a simpler way to get your news, [Andrew Schmelyun] has a partial solution with this dot-matrix news feeder. It’s part of his effort to detox a bit from the whole algorithm thing and make the news a little more concrete. He managed to chase down a very old Star Micronics printer with a serial interface, which he got on the cheap thanks to the previous owner not being sure if it worked. It did, at least after some cleaning, and thanks to a USB-to-serial and the efforts of Linux kernel hackers through the ages, was able to echo output to the printer from a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

From there, getting a daily news feed was as simple as writing some PHP code to mine the APIs of a few selected services. We’re perplexed and alarmed to report that Hackaday is not among the selected sources, but we’re sure this was just a small oversight that will be corrected in version 2. The program runs as a cron job so that a dead-tree version of the day’s top stories is ready for [Andrew]’s morning coffee.

We’ve seen similar news printers before; we particularly like this roll-feed paper version. But for a seriously retro feel, we’d love to see this done on a real teletype.

Reverse Engineering A Soundsystem’s API

July 31, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 11 Comments

We’ve all been stymied by a smart thermostat, coffee maker, or other device which would work fine on its own but ultimately seems to be worse off for having an Internet connection — so when something actually pulls off this feat it’s quite noteworthy. [James] has a powerful set of connected speakers and while they don’t have all of the functionality he needed built-in, an included web API at least allowed him to build in the features he wanted.

The major problem with these speakers isn’t that they’re incredibly loud (although they are), but rather that the wide range of available volumes for such a loud soundsystem doesn’t leave a lot of fine adjustment in the range where [James] typically uses these speakers. To tackle the problem, he first found the web interface the speakers present and then discovered a somewhat hidden application programming interface (API) within that allows for some manual control. He built a second website which serves as a volume slider within the range he wants, and the web server sends this volume to the speakers via this API which allows much finer control than the built-in user interface.

Having a usable API included with Internet-connected devices is not always the case, although it’s a great model for any company wanting to allow their customers better control of the products they buy. If you need to roll out your own API for connected devices that don’t have one already, take a look at [Sean Boyce]’s guide from 2019.

Torment Poor Milton With Your Best Pixel Art

June 25, 2024 by Donald Papp 7 Comments

One of the great things about new tech tools is just having fun with them, like embracing your inner trickster god to mess with ‘Milton’, an AI trapped in an empty room.

Milton is trapped in a room is a pixel-art game with a simple premise: use a basic paint interface to add objects to the room, then watch and listen to Milton respond to them. That’s it? That’s it. The code is available on the GitHub repository, but there’s also a link to play it live without any kind of signup or anything. Give it a try if you have a few spare minutes.

Under the hood, the basic loop is to let the user add something to the room, send the picture of the room (with its new contents) off for image recognition, then get Milton’s reaction to it. Milton is equal parts annoyed and jumpy, and his speech and reactions reflect this.

The game is a bit of a concept demo for Open Souls whose “thing” is providing AIs with far more personality and relatable behaviors than one typically expects from large language models. Maybe this is just what’s needed for AI opponents in things like the putting game of Connect Fore! to level up their trash talking.

Hackaday Links: May 19, 2024

May 19, 2024 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

If there was one question we heard most often this week, it was “Did you see it?” With “it” referring to the stunning display of aurora borealis — and australis, we assume — on and off for several days. The major outburst here in North America was actually late last week, with aurora extending as far south as Puerto Rico on the night of the tenth. We here in North Idaho were well-situated for prime viewing, but alas, light pollution made things a bit tame without a short drive from the city lights. Totally worth it:

Hat tip to Tom Maloney for the pics. That last one is very reminiscent of what we saw back in 1989 with the geomagnetic storm that knocked Québec’s grid offline, except then the colors were shifted much more toward the red end of the spectrum back then.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: May 19, 2024” →

AI Helps Make Web Scraping Faster And Easier

May 8, 2024 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

Web scraping is usually only a first step towards extracting meaningful data. Once you’ve got everything pulled down, you’ve still got to process it into something useful. Here to assist with that is Scrapegraph-ai, a Python tool that promises to automate the process using a selection of large language models (LLMs).

Scrapegraph-ai is able to accept a URL as well as a prompt, which is a plain-English instruction on what to do with the data. Examples include summarizing, describing images, and more. In other words, gathering the data and analyzing or formatting it can now be done as one.

The project is actually pretty flexible in terms of the AI back-end. It’s able to work with locally-installed AI tools (via ollama) or with API keys for services like OpenAI and more. If you have an OpenAI API key, there’s an online demo that will show you the capabilities pretty effectively. Otherwise, local installation is only a few operations away.

This isn’t the first time we have seen the flexibility of AI tools like large language models leveraged to ease the notoriously-fiddly task of web scraping, and it’s great to see the results have only gotten better.

Taking A Public Transit Display From Project To Product

November 17, 2023 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

We’ve noticed an uptick in “project to product” stories lately, which seems like a fantastic trend to us. It means that hackers are turning out projects that really resonate with people, to the degree that taking the leap and scaling up from a one-off to a marketable product is worth the inherent risk. And luckily enough for the rest of us, we get to learn from their experiences.

The latest example of this comes to us from [Stefan Schüller], who from the sound of things only reluctantly undertook the conversion of his LED matrix public transit sign into an actual product. The original project had a lot going for it; it looked fantastic, it was technologically simple, and it provided a valuable service. But as a project, it made certain assumptions and concessions that would cause problems when in the hands of a customer. Chief among these was the physical protection of the fragile LEDs, which could easily shear off the display modules if bumped or dropped. There were also firmware issues, such as access to the backend API that serves the transit data; requiring each customer to sign up for and configure their own API key is a non-starter for a product.

In the article, [Stefan] enumerates a long list of problems that going from project to product raises, as well as how he addressed them. The API issue was solved by implementing his own service, which acts as a middleman between the official API and his customers. A nice plexiglass and sheet-metal frame serves to protect the display, too. Design changes were made as well, not only to provide better functionality but to make manufacturing easier. [Stefan] also relates a tale of woe with regard to getting the display’s app into the app stores, something that few of us have to deal with when we’re just fiddling around with something on the bench.

All in all, [Stefan] does a great job walking us through the trials and tribulations of bringing a product to market. There are similar lessons in this production run scale-up, too, but with an entirely different level of project complexity.

Does Getting Into Your Garage Really Need To Be Difficult?

November 9, 2023 by Dan Maloney 78 Comments

Probably the last thing anyone wants when coming home from a long day at work or a trip is to be hassled at the last possible moment — gaining entrance to your house. But for some home automation enthusiasts, that’s just what happened when they suddenly learned that their own garage doors had betrayed them.

The story basically boils down to this: Chamberlain, a US company that commands 60% of the garage door market, recently decided to prevent “unauthorized usage” of their MyQ ecosystem through third-party apps. Once Chamberlain rolled out the change, users of Home Assistant and other unauthorized apps found themselves unable to open or close their doors with the apps they were accustomed to.

Those of us with custom smart home setups can relate to how frustrating it is when something disturbs the systems you’ve spent a lot of time tweaking and optimizing. It’s especially upsetting for users who both Chamberlain hardware specifically because it was supported by Home Assistant, only to have the company decide to drop support. This feels like false advertising, but we strongly suspect that buried in the EULA users must have agreed to at some point is a clause that essentially says, “We can do anything we want and tough noogies to you.” And if you read through the article linked above, you’ll get an idea why Chamberlain did this — they probably didn’t like the idea that users were avoiding their ad-spangled MyQ app for third-party interfaces, depriving them of ad revenue and the opportunity for up-selling.

We feel the frustration of these users, but rather than curse the darkness, perhaps this will light a candle of righteous rage that leads to a clever workaround. The Home Assistant blog article mentions a dongle called ratgdo, which should allow any door with plain old dry contacts to work via MQTT or ESPHome. It’s extra work that users shouldn’t have to put in, but maybe getting one over on The Man would be worth the effort.

Thanks to [KC] for the tip; please keep us posted on your workaround.