Hardware Podcasts

Ep 207: Modular Furniture, Plastic Prosthetics, and Your Data on YouTube

Hackaday Podcast · 24 Feb 2023 · 1h 07m · Episode 207

AI in practice: 2 real uses of AI described

What this episode covers

Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi discuss a week of hacks, including a pico balloon shot down by the US Air Force, a NASA SLS rocket noise study, and modular furniture systems like Open Structures. They explore data storage on YouTube and VHS, AI-generated Pong on a Raspberry Pi Pico, and a fake CO2 monitor that is actually an alcohol sensor. The episode highlights Precious Plastic's work in Indonesia creating prosthetic limbs from recycled plastic, Linux audio mixing with PipeWire, and the retro Nintendo Robo.

AI in practice

Where this conversation describes AI being used to build or deliver a product. Part of the AI in practice tracker.

Engineering & simulationOpenAI Codex80% of generated games were working

The developer used OpenAI's Codex to generate MicroPython code for Pong games, which was then flashed to a microcontroller to run on a physical LCD display.

“He got open AI codex to complete pong games for him in Micro Python and then flashes it to a Pico and a little LCD display. What's really cool about this is, of course, like all of this AI completed for me stuff is that the hard work is in generating the prompts right.”

Speaker 1 · Hear it at 20:10

Engineering & simulation

A developer used a custom algorithm to shuffle music playlists by using relative prime numbers to step through a song index, avoiding duplicate songs without storing full shuffled lists.

“And his claim is that what you want to do instead is you want to take the whole playlist, shuffle it once and then step through that. And then when you get to the end, you want to shuffle it again and go through that again.”

Speaker 1 · Hear it at 29:07

Most relevant to

makers and hobbyists

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
NASA, Precious Plastic
Products
Open Structures, Gridbeam, SLS, Nintendo Robo, Apple Lightning
Chips
Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Pico
Tools
PipeWire, Open AI Codex
Materials
E-Ink
Also
Big Clive, Dvorak Dwarf, Jose Antonio Garcia Perro

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