These Twenty Amazing Projects Won The Open Hardware Design Challenge

May 2, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

Right now, we’re running the greatest hardware competition on the planet. The Hackaday Prize is the Academy Awards of Open Hardware, and we’re opening the gates to thousands of hardware hackers, makers, and artist to create the next big thing.

Last week, we wrapped up the first challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize. We’re now happy to announce twenty of those entries that have been selected to move to the final round and have been awarded a $1000 cash prize. Congratulations to the winners for the Open Hardware Design Challenge portion of the Hackaday Prize. Here are winners, in no particular order:

Open Hardware Design Challenge Hackaday Prize Finalists:

These projects are fantastic

The Oasis 3D Printer repurposes HP ink cartridges to build a powder-baseed 3D printer

Just take a look at these projects. They are the best of the best, and there’s still more to come. We enjoyed seeing projects that repurpose off-the-shelf technology to vastly extend the capabilities of home manufacturing with the Oasis 3DP. This project from [Yvo de Haas] takes ink cartridges from HP printers and uses it to build a powder-based 3D printer. That’s something that really hasn’t been done in the world of homebuilt 3D printers, and the Oasis 3DP already has working hardware. It truly is one of the more interesting projects we’ve ever seen, and not just because [Yvo] is dealing with dozens of tiny micro pumps squirting binder out of microscopic nozzles.

But that’s not all. There were hundreds of projects entered in the Hackaday Prize for this round, and our only regret is that we could only pick twenty winners for the Open Hardware Design Challenge. Just check out Semiconductors @ Home, a project from [Nixie] — it’s a project trying to make sand blink. [Nixie] is building all the tools to make semiconductors at home. Being able to build a simple FET is amazing, and to do that you need a fume hood to contain the dangerous hydrofluoric acid, a vacuum chamber for sputtering deposition, and a fancy oven with a controlled atmosphere. These tools are [Nixie’s] entry in the design challenge. This isn’t your garden variety hardware hacking; this is advanced hardware hacking.

Semiconductors @ home is turning ions into FETs

Not impressed with DIY semiconductors? You’re a terrible person, but okay. How about an easy way to read rotary encoders? [fattore.saimon] and [Atikaimu] are building an I2C Encoder, an easy way to read multiple rotary encoders with just two microcontroller pins. Reading rotary encoders is one of the deceptively difficult tasks in electrical engineering; you really need some interrupts to do it right, and a microcontroller really only has a few of those to spare. [fattore] and [atikaimu]’s project does away with that problem, and puts rotary encoders on a board that can be read with a normal I2C bus. This means anyone can add a dozen rotary encoders to any project easily. Did anyone say MIDI controllers? Yes, that is possible. Everything from musical instruments to impressive control panels is possible with the I2C encoder, and it’s all Open Hardware.

Are you still not entertained? [Carl Bugeja] built a motor out of a PCB. Over the last decade, the price of custom fabricated printed circuit boards has dropped precipitously, and that means anyone can experiment with copper foil and fiberglass. [Carl] figured that since you can put coils on a PCB, you could also make a motor. While we’re only looking at a 1 Watt motor here, this is a brushless motor made out of printed circuit boards. It’s amazing, you’ve never seen it before, and we have absolutely no idea how many uses people will find a use for this amazing technology.

These are the winners of the Open Hardware Design Challenge in the Hackaday Prize, and we have a fondness for Open tools that are capable of building even more open hardware. If you want an example of that, you need only look at the Arcus-3D-P1 from [Daren Schwenke]. This is a project to add a lightweight pick and place head to any 3D printer. Below a certain size, a pick and place machine is necessary to create electronics, and almost everyone has a 3D printer these days. The Arcus-3D-P1 is an attachment for any 3D printer to turn it from a CNC hot glue gun into a machine that builds electronics. It’s Open Hardware, and hardware that creates hardware. It’s astonishing, and it’s happening on Hackaday.io.

Congratulations to all who entered the first challenge, and the twenty excellent entries that are moving to the finals. We can’t wait to see what other projects will make it to the finals in the Hackaday Prize, the greatest hardware competition on the planet.

Who will win the 2018 Hackaday Prize?

Who will win the Hackaday Prize? These finalists in the Open Hardware design challenge are now in the running for the final round of the Hackaday Prize where they will have the chance to win the Grand Prize $50,000 USD. That doesn’t mean you still can’t get in on the action; there are four more challenges left in the Hackaday Prize.

Right now, we’re in the middle of the Robotics Module Challenge, and after that, we’ll launch into the Power Harvesting Challenge, the Human Computer Interface Challenge, and finally the Musical Instrument challenge. There’s still time to win your place among the hardware greats, so start your Hackaday Prize entry now.

Friday Hack Chat: Building Robotics With The MeArm

May 2, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

Somewhere, in a storage closet used by every computer science or engineering program, is a robot arm. It’s there, you’ve probably never seen it, but it’s there. Originally, this hugely expensive robotic arm was intended to be a truly remarkable pedagogical tool, allowing students to learn about reverse kinematics and control systems. Now, most likely, that robotic arm is covered in dust, either because the arm itself is broken or because the only instructor that used it retired.

These days, robotic arms are within nearly everyone’s reach. Ben Gray’s MeArm is a popular robotic arm made out of laser cut acrylic and powered by hobby servos that anyone can put together. It’s the minimum viable robotic arm, and for this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about robot arms, what they can do, and how they can be used in education.

During this Hack Chat, we’ll be discussing the ins and outs of reverse kinematics and manufacturing robot kits with Ben. We’ll also be talking about Ben’s current efforts to get people of various backgrounds in on robotics education. Topics that will be covered include:

designing and manufacturing the MeArm
robotic arms
robotics kits
robots made for hacking

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Hack Chat Event Page and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week is just like any other, and we’ll be gathering ’round our video terminals at noon, Pacific, on Friday, May 4th. Here’s a clock counting down the time until the Hack Chat starts.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Scotty Allen Builds A USB Drive From An IPhone

May 2, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

What happens when you come across a mysterious, partially populated circuit board in the Huaqiangbei electronics market in Shenzhen? If you’re [Scotty Allen], the only answer is to make your own USB drive from iPhone parts.

[Scotty] made a name for himself through his YouTube channel Strange Parts where he built his own iPhone from scratch, added a headphone jack to an iPhone, and other various exploits involving hot air in Shenzhen. This latest build is no different. It begins with a random PCB [Scotty] found at the electronics market. It has a USB port on one end, it has pads for an iPhone memory chip, and it has an IC that looks like a USB to Flash converter.

The build involved finding a few broken iPhones, desoldering and reballing their Flash chips, and when those didn’t work, finding the correct Flash chips for this tiny little USB adapter board. Here, [Scotty] ran into trouble. The first Flash chip didn’t have the right pins, there was blue smoke, and the toolchain for initializing the USB to Flash IC was a mess.

In the end, [Scotty] managed to create a USB Flash drive after five or six visits to the electronics market, two stencils to reball Flash chips, and finding the OEM software for the USB to Flash chip on this very special PCB. That, itself, required Windows (the horror!), and finding the right version of the software.

Is this technically building a Flash drive purely from disposed iPhone components? We’d quibble. But is it a cool build, regardless? Absolutely. And the real story here is how quickly [Scotty] could iterate on his engineering. When the greatest electronics market is right around the corner, you can do anything with a microscope and a hot air gun.

Hackaday Links: April 29, 2018

April 29, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Amazon has released the Echo Dot Kids Edition, an always-on, Internet-connected microphone. According to Amazon’s Children’s Privacy Disclosure, the Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition collects data such as, ‘name, birthdate, contact information (including phone numbers and email addresses), voice, photos, videos, location, and certain activity and device information. The Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition is able to read audiobooks for bedtime reading and teaches your children to live in a dystopian panopticon of Orwellian proportions. It comes in green, red, and blue.

Kim Possible! The biggest news headline this week is the coming end of the Korean War. The peninsula has been in a state of war since 1950, but leaders from both countries have agreed to negotiate a treaty to replace the 60-year-old truce. There is also an agreement between the two countries for complete denuclearization. This is great news for Hackaday. Every day, we’re eyeing our North Korean readership. Some days we get a view, some days we don’t, but year over year we’re always getting more views. Will this treaty result in even more Hackaday readers in North Korea? Only time will tell. Here’s some music. It wasn’t a chicken.

The East Coast RepRap Festival is on. Inspired by the Midwest RepRap Festival, the ERRF is happening north of Baltimore on June 23rd and 24th. What’s it going to be like? Nobody knows! This is the first time ERRF is happening, but judging by MRRF standards, it should be awesome. Also, crab season.

One of the most interesting hacks of this year is [Steve Markgraf]’s tool to allow transmit-only SDR through cheap USB 3.0 to VGA adapters. The hack relies on the Fresco Logic FL2000 chip and gives you the ability to transmit FM, TVB-T, and create your own GSM cell site. You can also spoof GPS to get something besides a rattata in Pokemon Go or hack your ankle bracelet to keep your parole officer off your back. The open question, though, is which USB to VGA adapter has the FL2000 chipset. I can confirm this one on Amazon has the relevant chipset. It’s a bit expensive at $15 (the same chipset is available from the usual eBay and AliExpress suppliers for $6), but if you’re looking for something that is available with Prime, there you go. Now we’re looking for shared OSH Park projects with a VGA input on one end and some antennas on the other. Make it happen, people.

Supercapacitors are awesome, but is it possible to fly a drone with a bank of them? Sure, for about 10 seconds. [dronelab] built a 7-cell, 200F supercap and managed to fly a little racing quad for about ten seconds. Not terribly great, but this is going to be awesome when we get multi-thousand Farad superultramegacaps.

Like Open Hardware? The Open Source Hardware Association is opening up the Ada Lovelace Fellowship for women, LGTBA+ and other minorities to attend the Open Hardware Summit. The deadline is tomorrow, so do it soon.

M3D has announced a new 3D printer that can print with four filaments. The Crane Quad is your basic i3 ripoff with an interesting extruder. It looks like it uses four tiny motors to feed filament into the main extruder motor. This isn’t really anything new; the Prusa i3 multimaterial upgrade does the same thing. However, M3D claims they have mastered color mixing. The Prusa upgrade doesn’t do mixing, and this is most likely the reason it works so well. Can M3D pull it off? This is a very, very, very hard problem.

Towards More Automated Printers

April 29, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

3D printers can be used in a manufacturing context. This might be surprising for anyone who has waited hours for their low-poly Pokemon print, but for low-volume plastic parts, you can actually run a manufacturing line off a few 3D printers. The problem with 3D printers is peeling the print off when it’s finished. If only there were a conveyor belt solution for a bed that wasn’t forgotten by MakerBot.

[Swaleh] may have a solution to the problem of un-automated 3D printers. He’s designing the WorkHorse 3D, a printer that uses a conveyor belt as a bed. When the print is finished, the conveyor belt rolls forward, depositing a printed part in a bin. It’s the solution to truly automated printing.

The use of conveyor belts to automate a batch of 3D prints isn’t a new idea. Way back in the Before Time, MakerBot released the Automated Build Platform, and used it in production to print off parts for Thing-O-Matics. This bit of Open Hardware was left by the wayside for some reason, and last year saw the invention of a new type of conveyor belt-based printer, The Infinite Build Volume Printer (for lack of a better name) from [Bill Steele]. This printer angles the print bed at 45 degrees, theoretically allowing for prints that are infinitely long. This idea was turned into the Printrbot Printrbelt, and the Blackbelt 3D printer was made public around the same time.

[Swaleh]’s printer is not of the infinite build volume variety. Instead of concentrating on creating long beams, most of the engineering work has gone into making a printer that’s designed to just push prints out. The conveyor belt bed is flat — and may unfortunately infringe on the MakerBot patents — but if you want a printer that’s designed to dump parts out like a very slow injection molding machine, this is the design you want.

The print queue application for this project is just a simple desktop app that serves as a buffer for G-code files. The app sends one G-code file off to the printer, rolls the bed forward, and queues up the next part. It’s simple, yes, but there aren’t too many things that do this now because there aren’t too many printers built to be factories. It’s impressive, and you can check out a few videos of this printer in action below.

Continue reading “Towards More Automated Printers” →

Vastly Improving The Battery Life On Cheap Action Cams

April 28, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

At one time, GoPro was valued at over eleven Billion dollars. It’s now on the verge of being a penny stock, because if surfers can make action cams and video editing software, anyone can. Action cams are everywhere, and one of the cheapest is the SQ11. It’s a rip-off of the Polaroid Cube, has a non-standard USB socket, a tiny battery, and the video isn’t that great. It only costs eight dollars, though, so [pixelk] decided to vastly expand the abilities of this cheap camera for a Hackaday Prize entry.

The major shortcoming of the SQ11 action cam is the tiny battery. Reportedly, it’s a 200 mAh battery, but the stated 1-2 hours of runtime bears no resemblance to reality. The solution to this problem, as with most things in life, is to throw some lithium cells at the problem.

[pixelk] disassembled the SQ11 action cam and 3D printed a much longer enclosure meant to fit a single 18650 battery. There’s a protection circuit, so that’s fine, but there’s still a problem: the charging circuit in the camera is tailored for a 200 mAh battery — charging an 18650 cell would probably take a day. That’s no problem, because this enclosure leaves the battery removable, for easy recharging in an external device.

Does this make the SQ11 a good camera? Marginally, yes. If you need to record video for hours and hours, you won’t be able to do better than an eight dollar camera and four dollars in parts.

A Mini-ITX PDP-11

April 26, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 36 Comments

The PDP-11 is perhaps the most important computer in history. This was the king of all minicomputers, and once you get past the amazing front panels of the 11/20, 11/40, and 11/70, you’ll find PDP-11s everywhere. Heathkit sold one. It was the smallest computer that could run Unix. There were desktop versions sold as DEC Professionals. I have been told Ticketmaster — the entire backend of all event ticket sales in the United States — still runs on PDP-11s.

One of the interesting bits of the PDP-11 is the miniaturization that happened over the course of its development. Over time, the Unibus processor cards of the earlier models were shrunk down into a single chip. This PDP-on-a-chip was then cloned by the Soviets, and like most vintage Eastern European electronics, they’re all readily available on eBay.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [SHAOS] is taking one of these chips and turning it into a modern machine. The PDPii is a project to bring the PDP-11 back to life in the form of an Open Source motherboard with a Mini-ITX motherboard. Is it game-changing? No, not really; you could buy a desktop PDP-11 thirty years ago. This project, though, is taking new old stock chips you can buy for ten dollars and turning it into something resembling a modern system. Finally, Ticketmaster can upgrade.

The design of this project doesn’t quite meet the spec for the Mini-ITX form factor; it’s based off the RC2014 backplane Z80 computer, but desktop computer cases are cheap, as are power supplies, and I’m sure someone out there knows how to fit an eight inch floppy in a five and a quarter inch hole.

The key feature for this Mini-ITX backplane PDP-11 is a redesign of the Q-bus found in later PDPs to something that’s a bit smaller, a bit cheaper to manufacture, and still has all the relevant pins accessible. With some reconfiguring of the baroque DEC standards, [SHAOS] came up with the Bread-Board Friendly Q-bus Extended, or BBQ-Bus+. The next step for this project is gathering up a few PDP-11 compatible Russian КР1801ВМ2 CPUs and going to town on the architecture of what is probably the most replicated computer design ever.