• Idea: Answering Tricky questions with Amazon Mechanical Turk

    I know that the Echo gets the bulk of its responses from Alexa, but I think amazon is missing an opportunity with their own mturk service. Each time Echo responds with “sorry”, the transcript of that command is already flagged for staff review. If enough people ask for anything, the appropriate response will eventually be available for Echo. However, what if Amazon could create new responses to tricky questions in less than a day? Using Amazon’s own Mechanical Turk service, Amazon can reduce the threshold for human review. Overall decreasing the turnaround for creating better responses from weeks down to hours or even minutes! For the uninitiated, Mechanical Turk is…

  • Functional Pip-Boy

    Getting around to finishing my Pip-Boy project, this is my plans and research so far. Last fall, I purchased a Pip-Boy cast from Skruffy of theRPF.  The cast I received from him needed very little sanding to get it to fit together and look right. I was inspired to go beyond this by another member named pudding of theRPF who posted a video of a functional Pip-Boy he made with an android app and an arduino for the serial interface to the phone. I think I can go beyond this. Smaller, more functions, and more accuracy.  I asked a my buddy to code up a universal pipboy webapp that will…

  • DIY Recoil Action

    Goal here to add the sensation of recoil to a prop rifle gun.  I have seen it done with compressed air and motor pistons, but neither are easily synchronized with electronics and capable of rapid firings for full auto fire.  Leaves me with the third option of using a solenoid.  To fire a solenoid with enough furiosity to kick the gun into your shoulder involves some serious power requirements. I did a dry run yesterday and came up with this circuit.  The solenoid is rated 12-24V and 3 lbs force.  Using the circuit below it was weak at 18V, fully actuated at 27V, and actually had some kick at 36V. …

  • Star Trek Communicator

    Got the idea in my head after I finished watching all seven seasons of Star Trek Voyager for the second time that it may be possible to create a functional comm badge. It would function as a bluetooth headset of sorts for a cellphone. Their are plenty of micro sized bluetooth headsets, but they only work when close to your ear. I see three different ways to implement this idea: * First, take an existing micro headset pcb and add an amplifier. * Second, there could be a wire from an ear phone to the comm badge, the mic and controls would be in the comm badge. * Third, ditch…