Why Should You Enter The Hackaday Prize? Because [Ben Heck] Says So.

August 15, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

[Ben Heck] is well-known in the circles we frequent for being a consummate modder, tinkerer, builder, and hacker. We’ve seen his XBox 360 laptops, portabalized PS3s, the ultimate glue gun, and shutter shades that are too cool for [Kanye]. Now he’s telling us about something else that’s really cool – The Hackaday Prize.

All you need to be in the running for prizes that range from a thousand dollars in electronic components to milling machines to a trip to space is build a project that is open, connected (smoke signals count), and documented on hackaday.io. Think you don’t have time to submit an entry before the first round cutoff next week? You’re wrong. You can sit down and hit all the requirements in an hour. All you need is an idea at this point, and you have until November to actually build it.

Talking to Hackaday readers IRL gives us the impression that a lot of you have an idea for something cool and spaceworthy, but you just need a kick in the pants to write it down and start building it. Here it is. Go.

Astronaut Or Astronot: Somebody Won Something!

August 15, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

It’s time once again for our weekly installment of people complaining about our community voting system for The Hackaday Prize! The theme this week – as it was last week – is ‘too cool for Kickstarter’. We’re looking for projects that are so awesome they would never see any mainstream appeal. If you’re still wondering what we mean by that, if this amazing project doesn’t make the top ten in this round of voting, I’ll be terribly disappointed.

Just like last week, we’re trying to give away a goodie bag of programmers, dev boards, and essential bench tools (prize list here) to someone on hackaday.io who has voted for a project that is too cool for Kickstarter.

This week one of you got lucky. Because [Eric] is such a good sport and was kind enough to click a few buttons during this round of community voting, we’re sending him a boat load of dev boards, all the programmers he’ll ever need, a meter that will last him for the rest of his life, and a pretty good power supply. Awesome. Now go congratulate him.

There’s only five days left until the cutoff, so get your project into The Hackaday Prize. At this stage the requirements are extremely minimal, and you can knock everything out in a few hours.

THP Entry: A 433MHz Packet Cloner

August 14, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

ooklone The first generation of The Internet Of Things™ and Home Automation devices are out in the wild, and if there’s one question we can ask it’s, “why hasn’t anyone built a simple cracking device for them”. Never fear, because [texane] has your back with his cheap 433MHz OOK frame cloner.

A surprising number of the IoT and Home Automation devices on the market today use 433MHz radios, and for simplicity’s sake, most of them use OOK encoding. [Texane]’s entry for THP is a simple device with two buttons: one to record OOK frames, and a second to play them back.

Yes, this project can be replicated with fancy software defined radios, but [Texane]’s OOKlone costs an order of magnitude less than the (actually very awesome) HackRF SDR. He says he can build it for less than $20, and with further refinements to the project it could serve as a record and play swiss army knife for anything around 433MHz. Video demo of the device in action below.

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Scribble: Wait, Kickstarter Is Vetting Projects Now?

August 14, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 102 Comments

Pen First rule of reading anything: if a headline is an interrogative, the answer is a resounding ‘no’. This might be the one exception to that rule.

This Kickstarter is actually fairly interesting. Not because it’s an obvious scam, mind you, as there’s very, very little to actually call a scam. It’s noteworthy because it was on track to be a highly successful campaign but it was shut down by the creators just days after its launch.

Before getting to the unsavoriness of this Kickstarter campaign, a little bit of history is in order. Several years ago and before crowd funding was a thing, a designer came up with a rather clever if completely improbable idea: a color picking pen. Simply hold the end of a pen up to an object, press a button, and using technology and/or magic the pen now writes in that color. There are obvious shortcomings in the design like using red, green, and blue ink cartridges for color mixing – a classic case of confusing additive and subtractive color models. Still, this is just a design concept and over the years the idea of a color sensing pen that mixes ink has bounced around the Internet. With enough people willing to throw money at their screens in the hopes of actually getting a product as interesting as this, you just know it’s going to be on Kickstarter sooner or later.

Enter the Scribble Pen. Yes, it’s the same idea as the 5+ year-old color picking pen, with a few of the technical challenges already addressed. They’re using a CMYK (plus White) color model that can theoretically reproduce just about any color, and do so on any color paper. How are they doing this? I have no idea, but the whole campaign is super, super sketchy.

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Joe Grand Talks Deconstructing Circuit Boards

August 12, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

With the exception of [Eric Evenchick], the Hackaday crew are safely back from Defcon and not missing in the desert. This means we can really start rolling out all the stuff we saw this weekend, beginning with an interview with [Joe Grand], creator of the JTAGulator, early member of l0pht, and generally awesome dude.

The focus of [Joe]’s many talks this year was reverse engineering circuit boards. Most of these techniques involved fairly low-tech methods to peel apart circuit boards one layer at a time: sandpaper and milling machines are the simplest techniques, but [Joe] is also using some significantly more uncommon methods. Lapping machines get a mention, as do acoustic microscopy, CAT scans, and x-rays. [Joe]’s Defcon talk isn’t up on the intertubes yet, but his BSides talk about techniques that didn’t work is available.

In case you forgot, [Joe] is also a judge for a little contest we’re running, and we asked what he’s looking for in a truly spaceworthy entry. [Joe]’s looking for projects with a lot of effort put into them. Don’t get us wrong, project that require no effort can be extremely popular, but documentation is king. [Joe] thinks well documented projects are evidence project creators are building something because they want to build it, and not because they want to win a prize. That’s intrinsic motivation, kiddies. Learn it.

LittleRP, The Latest Of The Resin Printers

August 11, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

LitleRP Over the last few years, a few resin / stereolithography printers have been made a few headlines due to print quality that cannot be matched by the usual RepRap style filament printers. These used to be extremely expensive machines, but lately there have been a few newcomers to the field. The latest is the LittleRP, an affordable DLP projector-based resin printer that can be put together for under a kilobuck.

Instead of proprietary resins, the LittleRP is designed to use as many different formulations of UV curing resin as possible, including those from MadeSolid and MakerJuice. These resins are cured with a DLP projector, providing a print area of 60x40x100mm with the recommended 1024×768 projector, or 72x40x100mm with the alternative 1080p projector.

This isn’t the only resin printer that’s come out recently; SeeMeCNC recently announced their cleverly named DropLit resin printer kit, going with the same ‘bring your own projector’ idea as the LittleRP. With the price of the printer, both of these kits should cost less than $1000 USD. With the price of UV resin dropping over the last few years, it might be just the time to get in the resin printer game.

Astronaut Or Astronot: Don’t Try To Record SQL Queries At DEFCON

August 8, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

It’s Friday morning and time for another round of Astronaut Or Astronot, the little lottery thing where we’re giving away lots of dev boards, programmers, and an awesome meter to someone on hackaday.io if they have voted in the latest round of voting.