Year: 2015

10 Best Product Finalists Announced

August 24, 2015 by 11 Comments

The Best Product competition within the 2015 Hackaday Prize highlights the work it takes for any hardware developer or startup to move from prototype to a manufacturable product. To compete, each entry had to go well beyond the standard requirements of the Hackaday Prize with more in-depth documentation, and by shipping three working beta units to Hackaday for judging.

The 10 Finalists featured below are all exceptional and will compete for the next four weeks to be named The Best Product. In addition to the top spot, they will secure a $100,000 cash prize, a six month residency in the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena, California, and help with making connections needed to move their product forward. This is the perfect contest for product engineers, hardware startups, or anyone else who can design the next great thing.

We spent last week judging all the entries for the Best Product contest, and the results are in. Who are the winners? Which products are moving on to the next round of judging? See the full details of all Best Product finalists or browse a summary of each below, presented in no particular order whatsoever.

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Robots Are Coming For Our Jobs. Just Not All Of Them.

August 24, 2015 by 98 Comments

There is a lot to be said for replacing certain kinds of jobs with robots. Most people would agree that replacing physical human labor with automation is a good thing. It’s especially good to automate the dangerous kinds of labor like some facets of factory work. What about automation in fields that require more mental labor, where physical strain isn’t the concern? Is replacing humans really the best course of action? A year ago, a video called Humans Need Not Apply set forth an explanation of how robots will inevitably replace us. But that narrative is a tough sell.

Whether it is even possible depends on the job being automated. It also depends on how far we are able to take technology, and the amount of labor we are willing to offload. Automation has been replacing human workers in assembly and manufacturing industries for years. Even with equipment and upkeep expenses, the tireless nature of robotic workers means dramatically lower overhead for businesses.

Many of the current forms of factory automation are rather dumb. When something goes wrong and their task is compromised, they keep chugging away. That costs time and money. But there are companies out there producing robots that are better on many levels.

May Your Robot Overlords Be Cute and Cuddly

baxter-heroIn 2013, Rethink Robotics started filling orders for a new line called Baxter. They are a class of general purpose robot that can be programmed to do many kinds of manual tasks. Baxter bots have vision, and they can learn how to do a job simply by watching. They don’t need to be programmed in the traditional sense.

Baxter even has a face – a screen that shows different expressions depending on his state. When he’s in the midst of a task, his eyes are cast downward. If something goes wrong, he stops what he’s doing. His cartoon face appears sort of shocked, then sad. He goes into safe mode and waits to be fixed.

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100 Semifinalists For The 2015 Hackaday Prize

August 24, 2015 by 26 Comments

Entries for the 2015 Hackaday Prize — the nine-month design contest that challenges you to build something that matters — closed one week ago today. There were over 900 entries and everyone at Hackaday has been blown away by the different approaches used to solve problems affecting a large number of people, and at the huge body of Open Hardware that has been documented by the process.

Today it is our pleasure to announce the 100 Semifinalists who will move on to the next round. Congratulations to you all on this accomplishment. These designs will continue to be refined as we approach the September 21st deadline where 10 finalists will be chosen by our expert judging panel: Akiba, Pete Dokter, Lenore Edman, Limor Fried, Jack Ganssle, Dave Jones, Heather Knight, Ben Krasnow, Ian Lesnet, Windell Oskay, Micah Scott, and Elecia White. The 10 finalists will go on to compete for the Grand Prize: A Trip into Space or $196,883.

For those who didn’t move on to the Semifinal round, please do not take this as a strike against your work. Don’t stop now, your ideas can still change the world!

Best Product finalists were announced in this post.

Browse the 2015 Semifinalists List or the full list of entries.

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And For My Next Trick, I’ll Be Pulling Carbon Nanofibers Out Of Thin Air!

August 24, 2015 by 77 Comments

Scientists at the George Washington University have managed to figure out a process in which they can literally grow carbon nanofibers out of thin air, using solar power.

Not only that, they do it using carbon dioxide — you know, that gas that contributes heavily to climate change? Using two electrodes, they pump power into a mixture of molten salt; lithium carbonate and lithium oxide. Then, carbon dioxide from the air reacts with the lithium oxide, producing carbon nanofibers — with more lithium carbonate and oxygen as byproducts.

The carbon nanofibers can then be used for a wide range of products or further processes. But beyond getting a useful material out of it, getting rid of carbon dioxide, if done on a large scale, could be beneficial for climate change. Unfortunately, they haven’t figured out how to do that just yet…

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Using A Laser Cutter To Decap ICs

August 24, 2015 by 26 Comments

The black blob IC is of a particular annoyance to the modern hacker. There is no harm in peeking under the hood to see how the IC works. But when it’s covered in a mountain of seemingly indestructible epoxy, this can be a bit difficult. And such was the case for [Jamie], who had found an old electronic pocket dictionary whose main PC board boasted not one, but two of the black blob ICs.

ICThe lack of traces between the two pushed [Jamie’s] curiosity past the tipping point. He didn’t have access to any nitric acid which is used in the customary chemical decapping process. He did, however, have access to a laser cutter. It turns out that decapping ICs with a laser cutter is not only possible, it’s not that difficult.

100% power at 300mm per seconds on a cheap 40 Watt “eBay” laser cutter is all it takes. Three passes did the trick for [Jamie], but this will be dependent on the thickness of the black blob epoxy. Each case will likely be unique.

Got a laser cutter? Then take a peek at a few black blob ICs and let us know what you find.

Thanks to [ex-parrot] for the tip!

Hackaday Prize Entry: Feral Cats Phone Home With Das Katzetelegraf

August 23, 2015 by 41 Comments

Feral cats are a huge problem in some areas. Roaming freely in cities and in rural settings and reproducing with reckless abandon, colonies of feral cats can exhibit nuisance behavior that often results in unpleasant measures being taken to control their population. More humane programs, such as trap-neuter-return (TNR), seek to safely trap cats, give them basic vaccinations and neuter them, and either return them to their colony or, for a lucky few, ready them for adoption. Such programs are proving successful, but are not without issues. Enter Das Katzetelegraf.

You don’t need to understand a lick of German to figure out exactly what Das Katzetelegraf does from its name. Consisting of an Arduino, a GSM module, and a simple magnetic reed switch attached to the door of a humane cat trap, Das Katzetelegraf sends a text message to a TNR program volunteer when a cat has been trapped. Instead of waiting in the trap for the TNR workers to make daily rounds, the cats are quickly retrieved and the trap is reset for the next cycle. This reduces the time the cat spends in the trap, stressed and without access to food or water, and improves the animal’s outcome. As a bonus, each trap’s throughput is increased, so more animals can be cycled through the TNR program.

TNR can really help reduce feral cat populations, and Das Katzetelegraf can make them even more effective. But if you just have a stray cat pooping up your garden, a Raspberry Pi cat-deterring sprinkler might be a better choice.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Transfer Data Via YouTube

August 23, 2015 by 31 Comments

The original steganography technique dates back to 440 BC (according to Wikipedia) when a Greek wrote secret messages on a piece of wood, covered it in wax, and then wrote innocent text on the wax. The term, in general, means hiding a message in something that looks harmless. The LVDO project (and a recent Windows fork) says it is steganography, but we aren’t quite sure it meets the definition. What it does is converts data into a video that you can transfer like any other video. A receiver that knows what LVDO parameters you used to create the video can extract the data (although, apparently, the reproduction is not always completely error-free).

The reason we aren’t sure if this really counts as steganography is that–judging from the example YouTube video (which is not encoded)–the output video looks like snow. It uses a discrete cosine transform to produce patterns. If you are the secret police, you might not know what the message says, but you certainly know it must be something. We’d be more interested in something that encodes data in funny cat videos, for example.

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