Last Chance To Re-engineer Education For The 2023 Hackaday Prize

April 19, 2023 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

The first round of the 2023 Hackaday Prize closes next Tuesday, ~~March~~ April 25th. If you’ve got an educational project – whether that’s a robot technique you just need to share, or an instructional radio build – you’ve got this weekend left to get your project into shape, whip up a Hackaday.io page in support, and enter. The top 10 projects get a $500 prize award, and a chance to win the big prizes in the final round. You want to get your project in now.

We’ve already seen some great entries into this first round of the Prize. Ranging from a trainer robot for First Robotics teams, through a complete learn-electronics kit on a PCB, building radios in High Schools, and all the way to an LED-and-lightpipe map to help teachers and students with their geography lessons, we’ve got a broad range of educational projects so far.

ElectroLab

FRC Trainer

The World is Mine!

High Schoolers Build a Radio Receiver

But there is still room for your project! And with the deadline closing in, your best bet at the $500 prize money relies on you burning a bit of the midnight oil this weekend, but Hackaday glory awaits those who do.

Sufficiently Advanced Tech: Has Bugs

April 15, 2023 by Elliot Williams 74 Comments

Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. He was a sci-fi writer, though, and not a security guy. Maybe it should read “Any sufficiently advanced tech has security flaws”. Because this is the story of breaking into a car through its headlight.

In a marvelous writeup, half-story, half CAN-bus masterclass, [Ken Tindell] details how car thieves pried off the front headlight of a friend’s Toyota, and managed to steal it just by saying the right things into the network. Since the headlight is on the same network as the door locks, pulling out the bulb and sending the “open the door” message repeatedly, along with a lot of other commands to essentially jam some other security features, can pull it off.

Half of you are asking what this has to do with Arthur C. Clarke, and the other half are probably asking what a lightbulb is doing on a car’s data network. In principle, it’s a great idea to have all of the electronics in a car be smart electronics, reporting their status back to the central computer. It’s how we know when our lights are out, or what our tire pressure is, from the driver’s seat. But adding features adds attack surfaces. What seems like magic to the driver looks like a gold mine to the attacker, or to car thieves.

With automotive CAN, security was kind of a second thought, and I don’t mean this uncharitably. The first goal was making sure that the system worked across all auto manufacturers and parts suppliers, and that’s tricky enough. Security would have to come second. And more modern cars have their CAN networks encrypted now, adding layers of magic on top of magic.

But I’m nearly certain that, when deciding to replace the simple current-sensing test of whether a bulb was burnt out, the engineers probably didn’t have the full cost of moving the bulb onto the CAN bus in mind. They certainly had dreams of simplifying the wiring harness, and of bringing the lowly headlight into the modern age, but I’d bet they had no idea that folks were going to use the headlight port to open the doors. Sufficiently advanced tech.

Congratulations Low-Power Winners

April 13, 2023 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

Congratulations to the winners of the 2023 Hackaday.io Low Power Contest! We challenged you to show us how much you could do with how little, and you did not disappoint. Our judges have put their heads together, and thanks to Digi-Key, our contest sponsor, the top three entries will be taking home a $150 gift certificate for yet more hacking supplies.

We saw a great diversity of ideas here, all on the low-power theme. So without further ado…

The Prize Winners

[Christoph]’s Ultra Low Power RF-Sensor arose out of necessity. Having just repaired a shower drain, he couldn’t be sure that it wouldn’t start leaking again at some point in the future, but couldn’t go ripping up the floor under the shower tray every week to check. He needed a remote moisture sensor that would do the job for a long time with no intervention.

This superb solution combines an Atmel ATmega328P, an HDC1080 humidity sensor, a 433 MHz radio transmitter, and an RTC to keep power consumption super-low when everything else is shut down. Idling at 600 nA total most of the time, taking a reading every 15 minutes, this device should last for 12 years, and it’s been installed and running for five so far, so we’d say that it’s already proven itself very worthy of taking home the prize here.

[BleakyTex]’s Compact, low-power Geiger counter is absolutely the lowest power Geiger counter we’ve ever seen and maybe also the cutest. With the ambitious goal of running up to two years on two tiny LR44 batteries and a proven runtime of about six months by now, this is the radiation detector you can take with you every day, should you need to. The key is a custom HV section that’s designed for efficiency and the screen – even today, it’s still hard to beat the low power consumption of the humble LCD screen. All this, and it still makes those satisfying clicks when it’s enabled. [BleakyTex] says he might make a kit from this, and we absolutely hope he does!

[mircemk]’s Microwatt Pulse Motor took one of our suggestions in the announcement of the contest and ran with it. This eight-pole handmade electric motor doesn’t actually do anything other than spin, but it does that when hooked up to a literal potato. Pulling around 40 mA at 600 mV, it can easily run on solar power with enough power left over to charge up a battery for when the sun doesn’t shine. All of this is made with extremely simple circuitry and parts scavenged from old relays with a sewing needle held up by a magnet for the bearing. This is pure ingenuity and a sweet low-power demo.

Continue reading “Congratulations Low-Power Winners” →

Analog Anoraks: The Op Amp Contest Starts Now!

April 11, 2023 by Elliot Williams 28 Comments

We thought it was time to give the analog side of Hackaday their chance to shine, and what’s the quintessential analog IC? The op amp! Whether you’re doing tricky signal conditioning, analog computations like it’s 1960, or just making music sound good, op amps are at the heart of many designs. This contest, starting right now, is your chance to show off what you can do with a good op amp, or a few.

And for everyone else, here’s your chance to dip your toes into the warm analog waters. Whether you’ve always wanted to build a Chua’s chaos circuit or just to listen to music, there’s probably an op-amp project that will fit your personal bill. All you have to do to enter is set up a project on Hackaday.io, and use the pull-down menu to enter. We welcome shows of op-amp bravado, naturally, but we’re also stoked to see your simple projects that might help our digital friends leave their world of black and white, and enter into the shades of grey.

Thanks to Digi-Key, our sponsor for the challenge, there are three $150 shopping sprees on the line for the winners. And as always, there are some honorable mention categories to help whet your analog whistle, and to give us an excuse to feature a lot of great projects. You’ve got until June 6, to get your entry in, but these aren’t necessarily simple builds, so get going now.

Continue reading “Analog Anoraks: The Op Amp Contest Starts Now!” →

Design For People

April 8, 2023 by Elliot Williams 52 Comments

We all make things. Sometimes we make things for ourselves, sometimes for the broader hacker community, and sometimes we make things for normal folks. It’s this last category where it gets tricky, and critical. I was reminded of all of this watching Chris Combs’ excellent Supercon 2022 talk on how to make it as an artist.

“But I’m not making art!” I hear you say? About half of Chris’ talk is about how he makes his tech art worry-free for galleries to install, and that essentially means making it normie-proof – making sure it runs as soon as the power is turned on, day in, day out, without hacker intervention, because venues hate having you on site to debug. As Tom joked in the podcast, it’s a little bit like designing for space: it’s a strange environment, you can’t send out repair teams, and it has to have failsafes that make sure it works.

What is striking about the talk is that there is a common core of practices that make our hardware projects more reliable, whatever their destination. Things like having a watchdog that’ll reboot if it goes wrong, designing for modularity whenever possible, building in hanging or mounting options if that’s relevant, and writing up at least a simple, single-page info sheet with everything that you need to know to keep it running. Of course with art, aesthetics matters more than usual. Or does it?

So suppose you’re making a thing for a normal person, that must run without your babysitting. What is the common core of precautionary design steps you take?

Hackaday Does Berlin

April 1, 2023 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

If you’re wondering why there was no newsletter last weekend, it was because we had our hands full with Hackaday Berlin. But boy, was it worth it! Besides being the launch party for the tenth annual Hackaday Prize, it was the first Hackaday gathering in Europe for four years, and it was awesome to see a bunch of familiar faces and meet many more new ones.

In a world that’s so interconnected, you might think that social media can take care of it all for you. And to some extent that’s true! If I could count the number of times I heard “I follow you on Twitter/Mastodon” over the course of the event!

But then there were tons of other meetings. People who are all interested in building and designing analog synthesizers, even some who live in the same urban megalopolis, meeting each other and talking about modules and designs. People who love flip dots. On the spot collaborations of people writing video drivers and people making huge LED walls. And somehow there’s still room for this to happen, even though the algorithms should have probably hooked these folks up by now.

From the perspective of hosting the conference, I get the most satisfaction from seeing these chance meetings and the general atmosphere of people learning not only new things, but new people. This cross-fertilization of friendships and project collaborations is what keeps our community vital, and especially coming out of the Pandemic Years, it’s absolutely necessary. I came away with a long list of new plans, and I’m sure everyone else did too. And for some reason, social media just isn’t a substitute. Take that, TwitFace!

The 2023 Hackaday Prize Is Ten, First Challenge Is Educational

March 28, 2023 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

If you were anywhere near Hackaday over the weekend, you certainly noticed that we launched the tenth annual Hackaday Prize! In celebration of the milestone, we picked from our favorite challenges of years past and came up with four of our favorite, and even one new one just to keep you on your toes. But the first challenge round is running right now, so get your hacking motors turning.

Re-engineering Education

The first challenge this year showcases educational projects, but broadly construed. Hackers tend to learn best by doing. In the Re-engineering Education challenge, we want you to help give others a chance to learn new skills. Whether you’re building a DIY radio kit, a breadboard-it-yourself computer, or even a demonstrator robot arm, if it helps pass on your hard-earned skills, we want you to enter it here.

It’s fresh on my mind because we were just playing with one this weekend, but [deshipu]’s Fluffbug robot project is a great inspiration for non-traditional education. What better way to discover the intricacies of four-legged walking machine gaits than to have one to play with on your desktop? It’s not going to take over the world, but if you can make it walk, you’ve learned something.

More obviously educational is [Joan Horvath]’s Hacker Calculus, an entry in last year’s Prize. The connections between a function’s height, and the area or volume that it integrates up to can be awfully abstract. Printing out 3D models of the resulting shapes can really help to bring the point home. Or maybe you could really drive home the speed of a comet in its orbit with a physical model? They’ve got you covered, but also ideas for generating your own plastic math toys.

When we think educational computer builds, the amazing reproduction of the WDC-1 “Working Digital Computer” by [Michael Gardi] springs instantly to mind, but perhaps it goes too far down the rabbit hole. Just another rung up on the complexity ladder gets you the Blinking Computer by [Tony Robinson]. Or if you want to figure out how an almost-commercial Z80 computer works from the ground up, consider the Baffa 2.

So what skills do you have that you want to teach other hackers? Can you embody that in a project?

All the Challenges

If you don’t have education in your sights, have a look at the rest of the 2023 Hackaday Prize Challenge rounds. We’re sure you’ll find something you like.

To enter, simply set up a project on Hackaday.io. When the challenge is running, you’ll be able to enter. Full rules over at the 2023 Hackaday Prize landing page.

Challenge	Date	The Details
Re-engineering Education	March 25 – April 25	Educational projects of all stripes welcome. If the goal is to teach, enter it here.
Assistive Tech	April 25 – May 30	The Assistive Tech challenge calls for projects that help people with disabilities to learn, work, move around, and simply live their lives to the fullest.
Green Hacks	May 30 – July 4	Help reduce our impact on the planet. Do more with less, or help clean up the mess.
Gearing Up	July 4 – August 8	Hackers build their own tools. What have you made that makes your making easier? Share it with us.
Wildcard	August 8 – September 12	This is where anything goes. The wildcard challenge lets your projects speak for themselves.