Who Will Win The Hackaday Prize? Judging Begins Tonight

October 27, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

It’s been a long road for each of the five finalists; but after tonight they can breathe easy. The last judging round of the 2014 Hackaday Prize begins at 11:50pm PDT.

Each finalist must finish documenting their project by that time as a cached version of each of the project pages will be sent off to our orbital judges. Joining the panel that judged the semifinal round is [Chris Anderson], CEO of 3D Robotics, founder of DIY Drones, former Editor-in-Chief of Wired, and technology visionary. These nine are charged with deciding who has built a project cool enough to go to space.

In case you’ve forgotten, the final five projects selected by our team of launch judges are:

ChipWhisperer, an embedded hardware security research device for hardware penetration testing.
Open Source Science Tricorder, a realization of science fiction technology made possible by today’s electronics hardware advances.
PortableSDR, is a compact Software Defined Radio module that was originally designed for Ham Radio operators.
ramanPi, a 3D printed Raman Spectrometer built around a Raspberry Pi.
SatNOGS, a global network of satellite ground stations.

The ultimate results of the judging will be revealed at The Hackaday Prize party we’re holding in Munich during Electronica 2014. We’re also holding an Embedded Hardware Workshop with Moog synths, robots, hacked routers, computer vision, and a name that’s official-sounding enough to convince your boss to give you the day off work. We hope to see you there!

Simple POV Bike Effects With WS2811 Strips

October 27, 2014 by Ethan Zonca 24 Comments

[Andrew] wrote in with a new take on the classic persistence of vision bike spoke hack. While many of these POV setups use custom PCBs and discrete LEDs, [Andrew]’s design uses readily available off-the-shelf components: WS2811 LED strips, an Arduino, an Invensense IMU breakout board, and some small LiPo batteries.

[Andrew] also implemented a clever method of controlling his lights. His code detects when the rider taps the brakes in certain patterns, which allows changing between different light patterns. He does note that this method isn’t incredibly reliable due to some issues with his IMU, so now he senses when the rider taps on the handlebars as well.

If you want to build your own bike POV setup, you’re in luck. [Andrew] wrote up detailed instructions that outline the entire build process. He also provides links to sources for each part to make building your own setup even easier. His design is pretty affordable too, coming in at just under $50 per wheel. Check out a video of [Andrew]’s setup in action after the break.

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Ask Hackaday: Sequences Of Sequences

October 27, 2014 by Will Sweatman 25 Comments

In a previous article, we talked about the idea of the invariant representation and theorized different ways of implementing such an idea in silicon. The hypothetical example of identifying a song without knowledge of pitch or form was used to help create a foundation to support the end goal – to identify real world objects and events without the need of predefined templates. Such a task is possible if one can separate the parts of real world data that changes from that which does not. By only looking at the parts of the data that doesn’t change, or are invariant, one can identify real world events with superior accuracy compared to a template based system.

Consider a friend’s face. Imagine they were sitting in front of you, and their face took up most of your visual space. Your brain identifies the face as your friend without trouble. Now imagine you were in a crowded nightclub, and you were looking for the same friend. You catch a glimpse of her from several yards away, and your brain ID’s the face without trouble. Almost as easily as it did when she was sitting in front of you.

I want you to think about the raw data coming off the eye and going into the brain during both scenarios. The two sets of data would be completely different. Yet your brain is able to find a commonality between the two events. How? It can do this because the data that makes up the memory of your friend’s face is stored in an invariant form. There is no template of your friend’s face in your brain. It only stores the parts that do not change – such as the distance between the eyes, the distance between the eye and the nose, or the ear and the mouth. The shape her hairline makes on her forehead. These types of data points do not change with distance, lighting conditions or other ‘noise’.

One can argue over the specifics of how the brain does this. True or not true, the idea of the invariant representation is a powerful one, and implementing such an idea in silicon is a worthy goal. Read on as we continue to explore this idea in ever deeper detail.

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The Solution To The 10th Anniversary Code

October 27, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

A few weeks ago, [1o57], a.k.a. [Ryan Clarke] gave a talk about puzzles, DEFCON, and turning crypto puzzles into an art form at our 10th anniversary party. Ever the trickster, [1o57] included a crypto challenge in his talk, and a few days after our little shindig, nobody had yet solved the puzzle. Finally, someone bothered to sit down and figure it out. We don’t know what [tahnok] won, but as [1o57] said, solving it is its own reward.

Some of the slides in the presentation had a few characters sitting off to the side for no apparent reason. [tahnok] put these together and came up with:

DOXIYLDCYVDKIKNKUMKRYDNBYGONYMNXOC

In cases like this, you might try a Caesar cipher, or just shifting characters to the left or right a certain number of places. Since [1o57] noted this was the tenth anniversary of Hackaday, [tahnok] tried that first:

TENYOBTSOLTAYADAKCAHOTDROWEDOCDNES

It doesn’t look like much, but that’s only because the string is backwards. Tricky, tricky. tricky. With instructions to send a codeword to an email address, [tahnok] now needed to find a code word. There was one picture [1o57] put up on twitter that was still an unsolved part of the puzzle:

With no idea what these little stickmen are, he scoured google with variants of ‘stickmen code’ and ‘semaphore’ until he hit upon the Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Dancing Men. It’s a simple substitution cypher, translated to, “codeword psychobilly ciphers”

And that’s the entire puzzle. As far as we know, this took about a month to solve, and compared to the DEFCON challenges, was fairly simple. [1o57] will probably chime in down in the comments to tell everyone how many people have picked up on the clues and sent an email.

Proto Build Bar Combines a Pub with a Makerspace

The Proto BuildBar Is Exactly What It Sounds Like, And It Sounds Awesome

October 27, 2014 by James Hobson 16 Comments

People of Dayton, Ohio have a new reason to get excited with the opening of what is perhaps the world’s first Bar/Makerspace.

Called the Proto BuildBar, it’s kind of a cross between a 3D printing lab, a makerspace, and a cafe. Hang out, drink, eat, 3D print — sounds like most hacker spaces we’ve been to, but this might just be the first one with a cafe being it’s main business model!

It’s even home to the World’s Largest Claw game, or so they claim.

It has just opened, with a recent press event on Thursday, which was covered by a local news blog. While Dayton has long since been called a technology hub (what with Boeing and other high tech companies in the area), opening the Proto Buildbar is hoped to bring new life to the surrounding area!

For more information on Proto BuildBar (including hours of operation), you can check it out on Facebook.

[Thanks Load.Nikon!]

Self Replicating Skateboard…. What?!?!?

October 26, 2014 by Rich Bremer 19 Comments

[Bart] and company over at Pumping Station One make a lot of skateboard decks. They wanted to build a CNC Router that was not only portable but had a size that was optimized for cutting skateboard decks. The project got a little out of hand and the CNC Router ended up also being a skateboard! As crazy as that sounds, the craziest part may be that they built it in just one night.

The project started off with some stock Shapeoko 2 parts. Achieving the deck-cutting size required shortening the X Axis and tripling the length of the Y Axis resulting in a 250 x 1200mm work envelope. The DC spindle used accepts ER16 collets and has a fully variable speed control. The stand alone selectable 24/48 volt power supply has a neat DIY handle to ease transportation. Even though the router itself has skateboard trucks, it also has a handle at the front so it’s easy to grab and drag behind you.

The guys that built this admit that, as a skateboard, it is kind of crappy. They do go on to mention that a 230lb dude was able to ride it without incident. As a project, however, they hit their goals on the head, ending up with an easily-transportable dedicated skateboard-deck-making CNC Router.

Star Gate LED Clock Has Plenty Of Pizazz

October 26, 2014 by James Hobson 8 Comments

[David Hopkins] has finally finished off his Star Gate LED clock over on Hackaday.io and it looks fantastic.

We originally featured his progress with the project in Hacklet 18 – Tick Tock, it’s Time for Clocks, and we’re happy to say it’s finally complete. The clock features 60 WS2812 LEDs to simulate the Star Gate’s chevrons — and to tell the time. Under the hood is an RTC, an Arduino Nano, an LDR and even an hourly ‘chime’. Did we mention it also automatically dims at night?

What we’re almost more impressed with is the build quality, which [David] doesn’t actually mention how he did it — regardless, it looks great! Stick around after the break to see a video of it in action, so you can really appreciate the clock’s capabilities.

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