Hackaday Remoticon: Tickets And T-Shirts!

October 4, 2021 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Tickets for the Hackaday Remoticon are now available and there’s one big addition this year: Shirts!

As you have doubtless heard, the Supercon is on hold for one more year, so we’re doing Remoticon round two. And aside from missing the direct human contact, our conference t-shirt drawer is getting a little empty. While we can’t fix the global pandemic, we can fix the latter problem with this eye-catching design, the latest in a long line of art created by Aleksandar Bradic for Hackaday Conferences.

Remoticon will kick off on Friday, November 19th with some new social shenanigans. All day Saturday we’ll present talks, capped off by the Hackaday Prize Ceremony and a party that evening. Keep your eyes peeled for more info, but grab your ticket today and block off your calendar.

Attendance is free, and your registering early helps us plan our infrastructure to handle the crowd. If you want a t-shirt, you can order one at the same time for $25. Shipping for people in the US is included, but because of the realities of postal costs, shipping will be $10 for those everywhere else in the world.

We’re also still looking for more great talks! The Call for Proposals is open until October 14th. Don’t sit on the sidelines, do your Hackaday duty and give a talk about something that interests you. There’s a critical mass of other geeks into the same stuff that will delight in hearing from you! Come join us.

Continue reading “Hackaday Remoticon: Tickets And T-Shirts!” →

Hackaday Podcast 138: Breakin’ Bluetooth, Doritos Rockets, Wireless Robots, And Autonomous Trolling

October 1, 2021 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys peruse the great hardware hacks of the past week. There’s a robot walker platform that wirelessly offloads motor control planning to a computer. We take a look at automating your fishing boat with a trolling motor upgrade, building the Hoover dam in your back yard, and playing Holst’s Planets on an army of Arduini. Make sure you stick around until the end as we stroll through distant memories of Gopher, and peek inside the parking garages of the sea.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 138: Breakin’ Bluetooth, Doritos Rockets, Wireless Robots, And Autonomous Trolling” →

It’s Wildcard Time, Your Last Chance To Enter The Hackaday Prize!

September 27, 2021 by Mike Szczys No comments

The final entry round of the Hackaday Prize begins today, and the theme is… anything! While we’ve guided you through work-from-home, robots, displays, and supportive devices, there are countless great ideas that don’t fit in those boxes. So for this round, just show us what you got!

Entering the Reactive Wildcard round is easy. Publish a page about your project over on Hackaday.io and use the left sidebar “Submit-to” menu on that page to add it to the Hackaday prize. The point is to build a better future, and we can’t wait to see what you think that looks like. Need some inspiration? Check out the four challenge update videos below to see what others have been entering so far this year.

What’s at stake here? Ten entries in this round will each receive a cash prize of $500 and move onto the final round. There, they content with finalist from the other four rounds for the $25,000 Grand Prize, and four other top prizes. There is also the geek cred of making the finals, a priceless achievement, even if we do say so ourselves.

Continue reading “It’s Wildcard Time, Your Last Chance To Enter The Hackaday Prize!” →

Final Weekend Of Robots In The Hackaday Prize

September 24, 2021 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

This is the final weekend to enter your robot project in the 2021 Hackaday Prize.

The Redefine Robots challenge is looking to you for great ideas in making robots part of modern life. For too long, it’s been the vision of what these machines will look like in the future. But what should they look like right now? Sure, that might be C-3PO, but isn’t it more likely that your robot assistant lives on a smart watch, or that labor saving droid helps by passing the butter when limited mobility makes that a challenge for someone. Where are the everyday things that would be better with just a bit of clever technology?

This robot holds the flashlight , following your hands as you work.

Part of the challenge here is breaking out of that mold developed from decades of seeing robots that tend to take just a few forms; something with four wheels and a camera or bots designed to mimic the human body. One great example of rethinking these stereotypes is [Harry Gao’s] task lighting robot. It uses machine learning to look for your hands on a work surface and move a bright light to make sure you can always see what you’re doing.

Of course movement isn’t a prerequisite, if you want to think of this as a smart automation challenge. The best robots from science fiction are remembered because of their interaction with people — machines with personality. There’s certainly a place in our world for companion robots that keep you company like this entry called Stack-chan. It’s not a replacement for human interaction, but a complement to the way we communicate with each other and the world around us.

You still have time to get in on this round if you make this weekend your own personal hackathon. Ten entries will be selected to receive a $500 prize and move on to the final round at the end of October. Next week we’ll begin the final, wildcard round as we head into the fall and eventually award $25,000 for the top prize!

Hackaday Podcast 137: Maximum Power Point, Electric Car Hacking, Commodore Drive Confidential, And Tesla Handles

September 24, 2021 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams marvel at a week packed full of great hardware hacks. Do you think the engineers who built the earliest home computers knew that their work would be dissected decades later for conference talks full of people hungry to learn the secret sauce? The only thing better than the actual engineering of the Commodore floppy drive is the care with which the ultimate hardware talk unpacks it all! We look upon a couple of EV hacks — one that replaces the inverter in a Leaf and the other details the design improvements to Telsa’s self-hiding door handles. Before we get to medieval surgery and USB-C power delivery, we stop for a look at a way to take snapshots of Game Boy gameplay and an electric plane engine that looks radial but is all gears.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (52 MB)

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 137: Maximum Power Point, Electric Car Hacking, Commodore Drive Confidential, And Tesla Handles” →

Hackaday Podcast 136: Smacking Asteroids, Decoding Voyager, Milling Cheap, And PS5 Triggered

September 17, 2021 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys look back on a great week of hardware hacking. What a time to be alive when you can use open source tools to decode signals from a probe that has long since left our solar system! We admire two dirt-cheap builds, one to measure current draw in mains power, another to mill small parts with great precision for only a few bucks. A display built from a few hundred 7-segment modules begs the question: who says pixels need to be the same size? We jaw on the concept of autonomous electric cargo ships, and marvel at the challenges of hitting an asteroid with a space probe. All that and we didn’t even mention using GLaDOS as a personal assistant robot, but that’s on the docket too!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 136: Smacking Asteroids, Decoding Voyager, Milling Cheap, And PS5 Triggered” →

Pick Up The Ball And Run With It

September 11, 2021 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Once in a while we get to glimpse how people build on each other’s work in unexpected and interesting ways. So it is with the GateBoy project, a gate-level emulator built from die shots of the original Game Boy processor. The thing is, [Austin Appleby] didn’t have to start by decapping and taking photos of the chip. He didn’t even have to make his own schematics by reverse engineering those structures. Someone else had already done that and made it available for others to use. A couple of years back, [Furrtek] started manually tracing out the DMG chip and posted schematics to the DMG-CPU-Inside repo, kindly licensing it as CC-BY-SA 4.0 to let people know how they can use the info.

But playing Game Boy games isn’t actually the end game of [Austin’s] meticulous gate-level recreation. He’s using it to build “a set of programming tools that can bridge between the C/C++ universe used by software and the Verilog/VHDL universe used by hardware.” A new tool has been born, not for gaming, but for converting a meta language that assigns four-letter codes to gate structures (somewhat reminiscent of DNA sequences) and will eventually convert them to your choice of C++ or a Hardware Description Language for use with FPGAs.

The open source community is playing four-dimensional football. Each project moves the ball downfield, but some of them add an additional goal in an alternate hardware universe — advancing the aims of both (like finding and fixing some errors in [Furrtek’s] original schematics).

Of course the real challenge is getting the word out that these projects exist and can be useful for something you’re working on. For instance, [Neumi’s] depth sounding rowboat allows an individual to make detailed depth maps of lakes, rivers, and the like. It was in the comments that the OpenSeaMap project was brought up — a site working to create crowd sourced waterway charts. It’s the perfect place for [Neumi] to get inspiration, and help move that ball toward a set of goals.

How do we get the word out so more of these connections happen? We’ll do our part here at Hackaday. But it’s the well-document and thoughtfully-licensed projects that set the up playing field in the first place.