A library for turning sensor data into useful motion features

Puara Gestures is a lightweight C++ library for turning sensor data into useful motion features. It is designed for embedded systems and real-time projects that need gesture-style signals from accelerometers, IMUs, touch arrays, and buttons.

What this library gives you

• Jab, Jab2D, Jab3D — simple motion burst detectors for 1, 2, or 3 axes.
• Shake, Shake2D, Shake3D — smooth motion energy tracking for vibration and shaking.
• Tilt and Roll — orientation signals from 9DoF IMU data.
• Tilt_Roll — fast roll/tilt computation using accelerometer data only.
• TouchArrayGestureDetector — brush/rub and swipe-style touch features for sensor arrays.
• Button — tap, double-tap, hold and press tracking from digital button input.
• utils/ — reusable helpers for smoothing, thresholds, mapping, timing, and sensor support.

Why it is useful

This library is made for people who want meaningful sensor features, not raw numbers. Instead of reading raw acceleration or touch values, you can get:

• a jab intensity score
• shake energy that grows with movement and decays smoothly
• tilt and roll values ready for gesture use
• touch brush/rub metrics
• button interactions like taps and holds

This MIT licensed project is on GitHub.

from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! https://ift.tt/0WqJZ7l
via IFTTT

Continue Reading

Reverse engineering the TI-84 Plus OS

Ben Siraphob is currently working on a reproducible Ghidra reverse-engineering project for the TI-84 Plus calculator OS (version 2.55MP), a Zilog Z80 system.

A Z80 (64 KiB address space) with hardware paging maps flash page 0 at 0000 (the kernel: RST vectors, the bcall dispatcher, FP/VAT/memory core) and swaps other 16 KiB flash pages into 4000 on demand. Code reaches routines on other pages via bcalls (rst 28h + a 2-byte ID resolved through a jump table on flash page 0x3B).

The OS is a single-tasking context machine: a main event loop runs the active context’s handlers, switching contexts by key. All arithmetic flows through a 9-byte BCD floating-point engine (OP1–OP6); named objects live in the VAT; TI-BASIC is stored as 1/2-byte tokens executed by the parser on page 0x38.

See a detailed outline of the reverse engineering here and the GitHub repo here.

from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! https://ift.tt/rZCyw9a
via IFTTT

Continue Reading

Computer Lessons: A history of using computers in education

Over on the Creatures of Thought blog, is an excellent, detailed essay on how computers have been linked to education from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The belief that computers would revolutionize education took root long before the microcomputer era; it had spread rapidly across American universities in the 1960s. The political and technical moment were both ripe: the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs both catalyzed massive new flows of federal money into education, and into educational research in particular.

Meanwhile, time-sharing, which allowed multiple users to simultaneously access a single large, expensive computer, made it conceivable to teach whole classrooms of students at once by computer (though this was still very expensive, given the price of computers at the time).

However confused the original purpose and function of classroom computers, they became by the mid-1980s an unquestioned necessity. That schools were obligated to expose their charges to the basics of the computer became an accepted fact-of-life of twentieth-century schooling.

This mirrored a broader trend of personal computing: in a handful of years it went from curiosity that large organizations ignored, to an experiment that a few early adopters within large organizations took up, to a requirement that large organizations controlled. Nothing better embodied this transformation than the IBM Personal Computer.

See this excellent piece here.

 

from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! https://ift.tt/d1oNB64
via IFTTT

Continue Reading

NEW LEARN GUIDE: Use Blinka in Ubuntu Core on Raspberry Pi #Sensors #AdafruitLearningSystem @Adafruit

Ubuntu Core is an OS intended for use on devices embedded within commercial products or industrial equipment. It’s very locked down by default. It runs on lots of different hardware, this new guide focuses on Raspberry Pi 3, 4, and 5 devices. It is a very different kind of OS than the traditional Raspberry Pi OS, which is aimed at students, hobbyists, and tinkerers. The locked down nature can make the development iteration cycle slower and more tedious than traditional Pi OS. Ubuntu Cores strengths really shine most after you’ve already got a project functioning how you want under a more traditional OS like Pi OS or Ubuntu Server/Desktop and you are ready to deploy somewhere remote.

The Ubuntu Core documentation describes the OS like this:

Ubuntu Core is an immutable and transaction-based version of Ubuntu that’s engineered for cloud, embedded, and IoT systems.

It provides an image-based deployment infrastructure with automatic updates for sandboxed applications, enabling the creation of production-ready systems with minimal attack surface and automatic rollback capabilities.

Ubuntu Core reduces the time to production by eliminating manual provisioning, ensuring systems remain secure throughout their lifecycle, and enabling rapid updates across fleets of devices at scale.

It is designed for embedded Linux developers, IoT device manufacturers, cloud-based applications, and organizations deploying embedded systems in robotics, automotive, signage, industrial automation, and IoT applications – from single devices to thousands in the field.

This new guide features pages covering installation, a sensor dashboard demo, and building custom snaps and images.

Read more at Use Blinka in Ubuntu Core on Raspberry Pi

from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! https://ift.tt/lA2LWvs
via IFTTT

Continue Reading

SD Card Performance in CircuitPython #CircuitPython #AdafruitLearningSystem @Adafruit

This guide benchmarks SD card performance in CircuitPython across a range of boards, card tiers, and filesystems. The findings are straightforward: SDIO for bulk transfers, SPI for fast small writes. For max performance, pair a card over 32 GB (A2/U3 rated) with an exFAT filesystem.

Read more at SD Card Performance in CircuitPython

from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! https://ift.tt/H65u1aB
via IFTTT

Continue Reading

Becky Stern and Wood by Wright How to Teamed up to Make a Glowing Burl Slab Chandelier

Have y’all seen this incredible collaboration between Becky Stern and James Wright?! Don’t miss their videos on YouTube or Becky’s electronics write up on Instructables.

from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! https://ift.tt/Sv6EKVM
via IFTTT

Continue Reading

The Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: subscribe for free

The Python for Microcontrollers Newsletter is the place for the latest news involving Python on hardware (microcontrollers AND single board computers like Raspberry Pi).

This ad-free, spam-free weekly email is filled with CircuitPython, MicroPython, and Python information that you may have missed, all in one place!

You get a summary of all the software, events, projects, and the latest hardware worldwide once a week, no ads! You can cancel anytime.

It arrives about 11 am Monday (US Eastern time) with all the week’s happenings.

And please tell your friends, colleagues, students, etc.

Please sign up > > >

from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! https://ift.tt/bw9PB3L
via IFTTT

Continue Reading