Open Hardware: Scratch and Arduino
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Scratching Out Business Intelligence
At Hackaday, we love things both from scratch and in Scratch, Scratch being the blocks building helpful language for teaching kids and the like how to program. However, when you have a large amount of data that needs to be processed, queried, and collated to get meaningful insights, it is a pain to rewrite a SQL query every time a new question arises that needs an answer. So perhaps a more elegant approach would be to give the people asking the questions the tools to answer them, but rather than teach them SQL, Mongo, GraphQL, or any other database, give them the tools to scratch out the answers themselves.
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A wearable, waterproof, wireless human-machine interface
“Human-machine interface” (HMI) is a general term that describes any physical input or output hardware that people can use to interface with systems (like computers) and vice versa. That very broad definition usually applies to computer input devices like keyboards or output devices like monitors. The move towards touchscreens represented a fundamental shift in HMI preferences and we might see another shift soon towards wearable HMIs. To provide the building blocks of that potential future, a team of UCLA engineers developed this wearable, waterproof, wireless HMI.
This prototype HMI is a patch that users can wear on their skin and that resembles a thick Band-Aid. It flexes and stretches along with the user’s skin, making it comfortable to wear for extended periods of time. The prototype has four buttons that can wirelessly control remote devices. In the team’s demonstration, for example, the buttons control a music player’s functions. It is also waterproof, so users don’t have to worry about damage from sweat or other moisture.