WOW Cube Diagnostic mode – possibly the coolest screensaver.

This was a pre-order that I paid $249 for on 6/6/2022 [For the WowCube System Starter Pack].

In the two years since, they had shipped some cubes, had some issues, got some feedback, and went to a lot of trade shows.

Now it looks like they have taken delivery of a big batch of cubes and are starting to deliver. They “upgraded” me to the Space Invaders Cubed edition (I suspect this is the only edition they are currently producing, or have stock in.) and I paid my $19.75 shipping fee on March 3rd 2024 and it was delivered on March 8th 2024. (Yep, 21 months later….hey, at least I got it…I’m looking at you Peachy Printer, CST, and Yomee yogurt Kickstarters….)

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KUSAYYLA 12v 7 5Ah LiFePO4 replacement battery (Possible fire hazard)

This “drop in” replacement for a 12v AGM battery has 12x 18650 cells in a 3 series 4 parallel configuration. The cells only had a company logo on them, and no other markings, so they *could* be LiFePO4 chemistry, but I can’t verify that one way or the other.

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I tried the Anycubic “ABS-Like” Pro2 UV cured 3D printing resin in my Phrozen Sonic Mini printer.  Because Anycubic doesn’t provide resin settings for other brands of printers, I had to dial in the settings myself, and it took me several tries to get it to stop sticking to my FEP film (I had to turn up the exposure time, and also replace my FEP film, as well as stop using “thin” supports).

This resin wants to stick to the FEP film more than what I was using previously (The Phrozen Aqua Ivory 4K resin, which has settings specifically tuned by Phrozen for their line of printers), and appears to be a little more flexible when printing so that you need to use slightly larger supports to keep fine parts from starting to stick to the FEP film when the built plate lifts.

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The Ravemen PR1400 bike light ($70 as reviewed) is VERY bright in the HI / EMERGENCY mountain biking mode. Plenty of light. Blinding light. More than you should have on a road bike.

HIGH / Mountain Biking / EMERGENCY full power mode with both “high” and “low” beams at full power

Although it claims a 1.5 hour runtime in the highest setting, it actually goes for 1 hour 45 minutes in my testing, because it was producing so much heat the light would thermally throttle the light output and occasionally drop down to the “medium” setting until the light cooled down. [I was testing statically on a garage floor, so it may get more cooling airflow if you are actually riding it on a bike…]

High light setting in road biking (low beam) mode

The “road biking” modes deliver a more reasonable amount of light and it is aimed lower (think, low beam vs high beam). You get a High/Medium/Low/Eco mode in the road bike mode.

The eco mode claims to deliver 22 hours of battery life (I didn’t test this, but I believe it, as it is much dimmer than the high powered modes). I think this mode provides enough light to walk, or bike along at a walking pace, but I’d want to use the “low” mode at a minimum for most biking at night. There is also a “pulse” mode which appears to cycle between the medium and eco modes, and makes you more noticeable to drivers. Continue reading →

I recently tried out the DIYMalls DHT11 temperature and humidity (DHT11) sensors with an Arduino Uno. With simple 3 wire set up (+5 volts, ground, and data) and the Adafruit DHT library, it was super simple to get readings streaming over the serial monitor.

Example code is as follows:

// Must install Adafruit DHT library and unified sensor library.
// Code below borrows heavily from their example code, but distills it down to the bare minimum.
#include <DHT.h>

// Connect the yellow/Signal/data line to pin 4
// Connect the GND/black line to GND
// Connect the Red/VCC line to 5V

#define DHTPIN 4
#define DHTTYPE DHT11


DHT dht(DHTPIN, DHTTYPE);

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial.println("DHT11 test!");
  dht.begin();
}

void loop()
{

// Reading temperature or humidity takes about 250 milliseconds!
// Sensor readings may also be up to 2 seconds 'old' (its a very slow sensor)
float h = dht.readHumidity();
// Read temperature as Fahrenheit (isFahrenheit = true)
float f = dht.readTemperature(true);

Serial.print(F("Humidity: "));
Serial.print(h);

Serial.print(F("% Temperature: "));
Serial.print(f);
Serial.println();

delay(2000);
}

This is the ELP-USB960P2CAM-V90, a dual camera with synchronized shutters on a single board. It streams side-by-side stereo pair images at maximum resolution of 2560 x 960 pixels [1280×960 for each image].  It is amazing what you can get for $80 on Amazon.   This module and a few hours of calibration and programming with OpenCV will get you a reasonable depth math / 3D vision setup.

It enumerated on my Linux system as a UVC 1.0 camera as follows:

usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=32e4, idProduct=9750, bcdDevice=21.03
usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
usb 1-2: Product: 3D USB Camera
usb 1-2: Manufacturer: 3D USB Camera
usb 1-2: Found UVC 1.00 device 3D USB Camera (32e4:9750)

Albert Armea walks you through the basics, including calibration using an older version of this module that was basically two different cameras on a USB hub (so they were not well synchronized and you had to open each camera independently) here:
https://albertarmea.com/post/opencv-stereo-camera/

For testing purposes, I didn’t even bother to calibrate the cameras, I just opened the stream, chopped it down the middle to get a left and right image, and passed that right into the SterioBM object.  sterio_camera_demo_code.zip