The inner machinations of the mind of cryptocurrency markets are an enigma. Even traditional stock markets often seem to behave at random, to the point that several economists seriously suggest that various non-human animals might outperform one market or another just by random chance alone. The classic example is a monkey picking stocks at random, but in the modern world the hamster [Mr Goxx] actively trades crypto from inside his hamster cage.

[Mr Goxx]’s home comprises a normal apartment and a separate office where he can make his trades. The office contains an “intention wheel” where he can run in order to select a currency to trade, and two tunnels that [Mr Goxx] can use to declare his intention to buy or sell the currency he selected with the wheel. The wheel is connected to an Arduino Nano with an optical encoder, and the Nano also detects the hamster’s presence in the “buy” or “sell” tunnel and lights up status LEDs when he wants to execute a trade. The Nano also communicates with an intricate Java program which overlays information on the live video feed and also executes the trades in real life with real money.

Live updates are sent directly both on Twitter and Reddit, besides the live Twitch stream of [Mr Goxx] we linked above. The stream only shows his office and not his apartment, and he’s mostly active at night (Berlin time). But we can’t wait for his random walks to yield long-term results which can be analyzed for years to come. In the meantime we’ll see if others have been able to make any profits in crypto with any less-random methods.

[XenonJohn] dabbles in cryptocurrency trading, and when he saw an opportunity to buy an RGB color sensor, his immediate thought — which he admitted to us would probably not be the immediate thought of most normal people — was that he could point it to his laptop screen and have it analyze the ratio of green (buy) orders to red (sell) orders being made for crypto trading. In theory, if at a given moment there are more people looking to buy than there are people looking to sell, the value of a commodity could be expected to go up slightly in the short-term. The reverse is true if a lot of sell orders coming in relative to buy orders. Having this information and possibly acting on it could be useful, but then again it might not. Either way, as far as out-of-left-field project ideas go, promoting an RGB color sensor to Cryptocurrency Trading Advisor is a pretty good one.

Since the RGB sensor only sees what is directly in front of it, [XenonJohn] assembled a sort of simple light guide. By enclosing the area of the screen that contains orders in foil-lined cardboard, the sensor can get a general approximation of the amount of red (sell orders) versus green (buy orders). The data gets read by an Arduino which does a simple analysis and sends alerts when a threshold is crossed. He dubbed it the Crypto-Eye, and a video demo is embedded below.

Could this have been done purely in software? Certainly, but there’s a certain charm to the Crypto-Eye being a standalone device that uses a simple visual input to make buy and sell predictions like a Speak & Spell.

Inventive crypto trading is just a side project for [XenonJohn], he’s better known around these parts for his outstanding contributions to one-wheeled electric vehicles, like this 3000W Electric Unicycle, which also happens to feature an Arduino with 80’s-style voice feedback, just like the Crypto-Eye.

Pokemon is a great game by itself, but when you realize that not all of the ‘mon are available in one game, trading is required for completion, and some pokemon aren’t available without either hacking or going to a Toys ‘R Us in 1997, you start to see how insidious this game can be. Figuring he could finally complete the game with an Arduino, [Pepijn] decided to build a pokemon storage system.

This build was inspired by an earlier post that also spoofed trades. Instead of building this project around a high-power micro, [Pepijn] decided to use an Arduino. The protocol Game Boys use to communicate with each other is extremely well documented, although that’s only half the battle. Each game using the link cable used specialized data structures for transfer, and after grepping through a disassembled Pokemon ROM,  [Pepijn] figured out how everything worked.

The completed hardware keeps one Pokemon in the EEPROM of an Arduino. It’s not very fast if you want to catch all 151 Pokemon in the Gen 1 games, but any way you look at it, you’re going to be catching a lot of Magikarp anyway.