One thing some people hate about voice control is that you need to have a process always running, listening for the wake word. If your system isn’t totally locally-hosted, that can raise some privacy eyebrows. Perhaps that’s part of what inspired [SpannerSpencer] to create this 24th century solution: a Comm Badge straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation he uses to control his smart home.

This hack is as slick as it is simple. The shiny comm badge is actually metal, purchased from an online vendor that surely pays all appropriate license fees to Paramount. It was designed for magnetic mounting, and you know what else has a magnet to stick it to things? The M5StickC PLUS2, a handy ESP32 dev kit. Since the M5Stick is worn under the shirt, its magnet attached to the comm badge, some features (like the touchscreen) are unused, but that’s okay. You use what you have, and we can’t argue with how easy the hardware side of this hack comes together.

[Spanner] reports that taps to the comm badge are easily detected by the onboard accelerometer, and that the M5Stick’s microphone has no trouble picking up his voice. If the voice recordings are slightly muffled by his shirt, the Groq transcription API being used doesn’t seem to notice. From Groq, those transcriptions are sent to [Spanner]’s Home Assistant as natural language commands. Code for the com-badge portion is available via GitHub; presumably if you’re the kind of person who wants this, you either have HA set up or can figure out how.

It seems worth pointing out that the computer in Star Trek: TNG did have a wake word: “computer”. On the other hand it seemed the badges were used to interface with it just as much as the wake word on screen, so this use case is still show accurate. You can watch it in the demo video below, but alas, at no point does his Home Assistant talk back. We can only hope he’s trained a text-to-speech model to sound like Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. At least it gives the proper “beep” when receiving a command.

This would pair very nicely with the LCARS dashboard we featured in January.

Climbing is a cool sport. With that said, like everything, it’s even better if you integrate lots of glowing colorful LEDs. To that end, [Superbender] worked up this fun climbing wall that features interactive lighting built right in.

Structurally, there’s nothing too wild going on here. It’s a wood-framed climbing structure that stands 10 meters long and 2.5 meters high, and can be covered in lots of climbing holds. It’s the electronic side of things where it gets fun. An Arduino Due is installed to run the show, hooked up with a small TFT display and some buttons for control. It’s then hooked up to control a whole bunch of LEDs and some buttons which are scattered all across the wall. It’s also paired with an Arduino Nano which runs sound feedback, and a 433 MHz remote for controlling the system at a distance.

[Superbender] uses the lighting for fun interactive games. One example is called Hot Lava, where after each climbing pass, more holds are forbidden until you can’t make the run anymore. Chase the Blues is another fun game, where you have to climb towards a given hold, at which point it moves and you have to scamper to the next one.

We’ve featured similar projects before from other inventive climbers. Video after the break.

Over the last few centuries, behavioral psychologists have documented all kinds of ways of modifying our actions and the actions of various animals. From the famous Skinner boxes to many modern video game mechanics, animals and humans alike can learn through the addition or subtraction of various rewards and punishments. And it doesn’t only impact simple actions either; [Everything is Hacked] took this idea to the extreme, using painful electric shocks to teach himself to avoid making blunders while playing chess.

This positive punishment system uses a medical device called transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) to deliver an electric shock to the skin. The electrical jolt is routed through a custom-built, conductive chess board where each square is isolated from the others and controlled by its own relay. The pieces are conductive as well, so if one is placed on a square where it shouldn’t go a relay will switch on to quickly provide the behavioral modification. The control logic is provided by a Raspberry Pi running the Stockfish chess engine, and it keeps track of the locations of the positions of all the pieces by using MX switches in the base of each square on the board.

This project took [Everything is Hacked] over a year to get into a working condition, including having to rebuild the entire project twice after mishaps with baggage handling at an airline. But he was able to demo the board to the Open Sauce tech festival and even took it to his local park to play chess with the local hustlers. Unfortunately, he reports that he spent more time reworking and rewiring his board over that year than he did improving his chess game, so unfortunately he still hasn’t been able to win any of his money back yet. Perhaps combining this project with a chess-playing robot would help.