For our senior ECE design at Cornell, my partner and I created a portable face recognition system. To our knowledge, it’s the first face recognition system on a microcontroller. You enroll with one button and log in with another. You can build our system for about $30 and then use it to control access to anything: a safe, a door, or the beer fridge. In our demo video, we just output to an LCD for feedback instead of actually controlling access to something. See the website I provided for more detail.
This was a final project for Cornell’s ECE 4760 (Designing with Microcontrollers). This is a senior design course. There are a bunch of other cool hack/gadget projects from other groups, which you can browse here.
One of the best thing about the yearly Cornell projects is they’re all documented, source code is posted, everything – fantastic work!
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
