Hackaday Prize Entry: Project Dekoboko 凸凹 Maps Bumpy Roads On A Bike

August 17, 2015 by Richard Baguley 14 Comments

If you live in New England (like me) you know that the roads take a pounding in the winter. Combine this with haphazard maintenance and you get a recipe for biking disaster: bumpy, potholed roads that can send you flying over the handlebars. Project Dekoboko 凸凹 aims to help a little with this, by helping you map and avoid the bumpiest roads and could be a godsend in this area.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize entry from [Benjamin Shih], [Daniel Rojas], and [Maxim Lapis] is a device that clips onto your bike and maps how bumpy the ride is as you pedal around. It does this by measuring the vibration of the bike frame with an accelerometer. Combine this with a GPS log and you get a map of the quality of the roads that helps you plan a smooth ride, or which could help the city figure out which roads need fixing the most.

The project is currently on its third version, built around an Arduino, Adafruit Ultimate GPS Logger shield, and a protoboard that holds the accelerometer (an Analog ADXL345). The team has also set up a first version of their web site, which contains live data from a few trips around Berlin. This does show one of the issues they will need to figure out, though: the GPS data has them widely veering off the road, which means that the data was slightly off, or they were cycling through buildings on the Prinzenstrasse, including a house music club. I’ll assume that it was the GPS being inaccurate and not them stopping for a rave, but they will need to figure out ways to tie this data down to a specific street before they can start really analyzing it. Google Maps does offer a way to do this, but it is not always accurate, especially on city streets. Still, the project has made good progress and could be useful for those who are looking for a smooth ride around town.

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Bed Lights Keeps You From Stubbing Your Toe When Nature Calls

August 17, 2015 by Kevin Dady 30 Comments

While out shopping for bed’s with his better half, [Shane] tried out one of the more expensive, all “bells and whistles” included models. While the aforementioned featurees were impressive, one stood out: motion controlled underlighting for when you had to get up in the middle of the night.

Knowing that this feature would be easy to replicate [Shane] went about making his own version. Using PCV pipe to make the framework for the LED’s a 9 volt DC power supply, and a list of electronic components all that was left to figure out was the motion controls.

PIR motion sensors are the natural choice and its simple enough to hook them up to the micro of your choice and bang out some code. It’s just as simple to hard wire them into a circuit skipping the added cost of the micro and complexity of the software.

The two PIR sensor outputs are wired though a diode OR gate, to a potentiometer to control sensitivity, and then to a pair of NPN transistors to ultimately control power to the LED strips. Now they have motion controlled night lights for their bed when nature calls in the middle of the night.

Growing Copper And Silver Crystals For Art

August 17, 2015 by George Graves 35 Comments

Usually when Hackaday covers electroplating techniques, it’s to talk about through-hole PCB plating. But did you know you can use the same method to produce beautiful copper and silver crystal structures?

[Fred and Connie Libby] are kind enough to share how they make their crystals that they sell in tiny glass vials you can wear around your neck. The process is simple as you would think; it’s just an electrolyte solution, with a current passing through it, depositing the metal in an ion-exchange. Rather then stop once the part is sufficiently covered, you let the process run amok, and soon large crystal formations begin to emerge. [Fred and Connie] share their technique very briefly, so if you’re looking for a more detailed how-to guide, you can find one here.

Although silver crystals are a bit out of our budget, we wonder how large of a copper crystal could be grown? Large enough to be displayed on a coffee table? Surely such a work of art and science could be an interesting conservation piece in any hacker’s home.

Hackaday Prize Entry Closes But Work Continues

August 17, 2015 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

If you’ve been watching the countdown timer you’ve noticed that it’s run its course. The entry window for the 2015 Hackaday Prize is now closed, but that doesn’t mean you can stop what you’ve been doing. As we begin judging this slate of entries, heed my advice and continue working on your project in earnest because the next judging deadline is right around the corner: September 21st at 1:50pm Pacific Time.

For all entries complete the following:

A second video of no more than 5 minutes including footage of your prototype in action
A total of 8 project logs
A nearly complete components list
A rendering or drawing of the design/look and feel of the project

Early next week we will announce the 100 projects that move on to the next round. We will also announce which of the Best Product entries will be among the 10 finalists. The Best Product competitors have additional benchmarks to meet:

Best Product Entries must complete the following:

A third video between 5-10 minutes in length
A total of 12 project logs
A compete components list and a bill of materials for one unit
Schematics
Design Files

Of course the Hackaday Prize is about building something that matters and documenting it as an Open Hardware project. Thank you for sharing your time and talent in preparing your entry. To recognize your effort this year, we’ll be awarding a commemorative T-shirt to all who complete the entry requirements. More information about claiming that shirt will be sent in the coming weeks.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Taking Atlas For A Walk

August 17, 2015 by James Hobson 46 Comments

Remember Atlas, the humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics? The company bought by Google, er, owned by Alphabet, and uh, most likely to become Skynet? Well — they’ve just shown us that Atlas can take a light jog through the woods now.

Published on YouTube a few days ago, Boston Dynamics gave a quick presentation on some of the upgrades the company has been working on for their bots. First up is a demonstration of Big Dog’s new appendage… What looks like an elephant trunk with a prosthetic hand on the end. Big Dog can now leave the testing lab any time he wants — door knobs are no longer an obstacle. Considering its been able to traverse extremely rough terrain for years now, this doesn’t bode well…

Atlas on the other hand has also come a long way. From standing on his own for the first time back in 2013, he moved quickly to being hit with medicine balls (and not falling over!) — and now, he can run outside. Luckily they haven’t quite figured out the battery pack solution yet… Video of his outdoor escapades after the break.

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You Can Have My TIPs When You Pry Them From My Cold, Dead Hands

August 17, 2015 by Adam Fabio 154 Comments

We’ve seen a growing number of posts and recommendations around the net regarding components, specifically transistors. “Don’t use old parts” they cry, “Go with newer components.” You can often find these recommendations on Arduino forums. This all came to a head with a page called “Do Not TIP,” which was linked in the Arduino subreddit. This page belongs to [Tom Jennings], creator of Fidonet, and one of the early authors of what would become Phoenix BIOS. [Tom] and a few others have been calling for everyone to send their old parts to the landfill – not use them, nor gift them to new experimenters. Get them out of the food chain. No offense to [Tom], but we have to disagree. These parts are still perfectly usable for experienced designers, and have a lot to offer new hardware hackers.

TIP is the part number prefix for a series of power transistors created by Texas Instruments. In fact, “TIP” stands for Texas Instruments Power. The series was originally released in 1969. Yes, that’s right, 1969. Why are we still using parts designed when man first walked on the moon? The same reason people are still using the 555 timer: they’re simple, they’re easily available, they’re robust, and most of all, they get the job done. The TIP series has been used in thousands of classes, tutorials both online and off, and millions of projects over the years. Much of that documentation is already out there on the internet. The TIP series is also out in the distribution channel – they’ve been used for 40 years. Any retail shop that stocks a few electronics parts will have at least one of the TIP series.

The TIP series aren’t always the best transistors for the job. However, for most hobbyist-designed circuits, we don’t need the best performance, nor the best price – we’re going to use the parts we have on hand. There is always room to improve once you get the basic circuit working.

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Developed On Hackaday: Let’s Build An Electronic Hackaday Badge

August 17, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 44 Comments

We’re going to build an electronic Hackaday Badge, and by “we”, I mean Hackaday community members who are passionate about the project.

I’ll be leading the charge. I had a great learning experience the last time I helped design the e-paper badge for the 2013 Open Hardware Summit, and hope to learn a lot along the way this time too. Since then, Badges have come a long way – at cons like DEFCON, LayerONE, Shmoocon, The Next Hope, Open Hardware Summit, The EMF, SAINTCON, SXSW Create, The Last Hope, TROOPERS11, ZaCon V and of course the rad1o from this year’s CCCamp. Word is that this year’s Open Hardware Summit badge is going to be pretty kickass too. So, we have some very big shoes to fill. But this doesn’t have to be about “my badge is better than yours”. And this badge isn’t meant to be specific to any single con or event. So what does the Badge do, then? “It’s a physical extension of the hackaday.io community, made specifically for hacker gatherings of all types and sizes.”

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