You can get some of these (like the smaller TOMY robots) for pretty cheap on eBay. They're usually broken, but the innards of these robots are so interesting, just taking them apart is a learning experience. TOMY was brilliant at making seemingly sophisticated toys that were actually run by a single DC motor; all the movements, sounds, sensing etc. were implemented using gears and cam shafts and other mechanisms. A great way to learn about simple machines, and a bonus if you (or your kid) can repair them and bring a 40-year-old robot back to life.
The original Furby was interesting on this front, I have one controlled by a Pi Zero using a motor controller and LED driver board (you need an LED for the cam position sensor, and this way I could backlight the eyes with RGBs too). Every expression the thing can make is driven by a single motor via a series of gears and cams, so it's pretty straightforward to get up and running. The main issues are that clearance is really tight and the gearbox is pretty noisy.
My eventual plan is to hook it up to an LLM and use it like the world's most uncanny Alexa, but there's an issue with the audio board I've not got around to fixing yet. Got a bit sidetracked by the server software which I'm using as an excuse to learn Cats Effect properly.
Same with some of the older Wowee stuff, Robosapien, Roboraptor, etc. In-box ones are expensive as collectors items, but you can grab ones that are missing the remote for cheap and then it’s a fun project to reverse engineer the IR signals with a Pi or Arduino or something like that.
I recently bought a complete-in-box Radio Shack Armatron for $15, and I was super excited to have such a complete piece of history. I checked eBay out of curiosity, and was surprised by how cheap it was. I could have bought one any time, for not too much more.
And I remember going to Radio Shack at the mall as a kid and wanting that Armatron robot so badly! Being able to get these things now for pretty cheap and fixing them and playing with them with my kids has been such a treat.
I'm a bit surprised at your language; robots that use cams and gears to make complicated motions all run from a single DC motors aren't "seemingly" sophisticated, they are very sophisticated. It's much easier to make something complicated with code than with cams.
I miss Pine too. I could read/file/delete scores of plaintext emails in seconds using single keystrokes.
Every email client I've used since Pine has been better at dealing with all the stuff we've bolted on to email (HTML, attachments, calendar invites...) but none of them have been as efficient at the core tasks of email as Pine was.
A side note: I think there's an unmet need for algorithms that can convert photos of these random patterns into text (or something similar) that can be stored in a database and searched quickly for matching patterns. I've tried image similarity algorithms like the ones used by e.g. Google Reverse Image Search, but they seem poorly suited for this task. I ended up writing my own crude algorithm in the paper above that converts a pattern into a set of strings, and it works OK, but surely there are better ways to do this.
Very cool! This seems almost like physical cryptography. Maybe there is a better term for it, but I’d be very interested in other work along these lines.
> We describe the first MITM-resistant device pairing protocol purely based on a single wireless interface with an extensive adversarial model and protocol analysis. We show that existing wireless devices can be retro-fitted with the VP protocol via software updates, i.e. without changes to the hardware.
I once wondered if the colorful fibers in bank notes — which, like the nonpareil spheres, are distributed at random throughout the paper on which the notes a printed — can also be used to generate a unique number.
Examples (aha, including a teaser to an upcoming product called “Verifibre”!) can be seen here:
Instead of a lookup table, that number could be signed and the signature printed onto the bank note itself. It would be impractical to either deduce the signing key or duplicate the pattern of fibers in a way that the signature was still valid.
I don’t know if there’s a signature algorithm though that is resilient to lossy and unreliable input data and which can also produce short enough output that could be printed on the face of a bank note.
I should think you could do this with fingerprinting the photo similar to how music is fingerprinted for things like Shazam or MusicBrainz. I used to work for MusicIP, which I believe developed the fingerprinting system MusicBrainz is using.
There are image-representation versions of wavelets that would work well in that context, with some tolerance/quantization of the frequency representation to accommodate fuzzy edges, and likewise for nearby hues.
Perceptual color representation gets a bit harder but if you're only looking at gamut differences on cameras/screens/printed media I think it's feasible.
Alternatively, if you know a lot about the source image you can train a NN for the specific application.
It would be pretty hard for the attacker to precisely arrange a hundred tiny sprinkles on the surface of a pill to exactly match a known-good pattern. (At least compared to just throwing a bunch of assorted sprinkles on the pill randomly and taking a photo of the result, which is what legitimate manufacturers would be doing.)
yeah, this is one common claim about sprinkles - that the pattern can't be reproduced. Is that so true? Manually, sure, probably, perhaps. But if sprinkles signing is common enough, or the attacker has enough budget - and they do - then sprinkles matching deserves a machine. A sprinkles printer.
And if you have a standard algorithm which converts a sprinkles picture or three into a hash. Then now you have a precise target for the machine to benchmark against.
I guess this would be easy to spot for the end user. Maybe the app that is used for checking the pills can alert the user if one pattern is scanned multiple times.
https://www.californiacitruspark.com