New Round Of Astronaut Or Not: Too Cool For Kickstarter

August 4, 2014 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Round 3 of Community Voting has drawn to a close. This time around we had nearly 60,000 votes for 420 projects! The first voter lottery drawing didn’t turn up a winner, but on Friday we ended up giving away the bench supply. We’ll cover the projects with the top votes in just a moment, but first let’s take a look at the voter lottery prize for the new round.

You must vote at least once in this new round to be eligible for the voter lottery on Friday!

We’ve got so many prizes in the package for the fourth round of Astronaut or Not that we’re just showing you a few in this image.

On Friday morning we’ll be drawing a random number and checking it against the Hacker profiles on Hackaday.io. If that person has voted in this current round, they win. If not, they’ll be kicking themselves (emptyhandedly) for not taking part in the festivities.

This week’s prize package includes:

Now onto the results:

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Restarting 3D Prints

August 2, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 18 Comments

If a 3D printer is interrupted during a print, it will usually result in a junk part. Resuming the print can be very difficult. A group of researchers at MIT have built an add-on for 3D printers that uses a laser scanner to evaluate the state of the print, and allows the printer to restart.

While this will allow you to salvage some partially competed prints, the interesting application is switching between materials. In the image above, the lower piece was printed in ABS. The print was interrupted to change materials, and the top cube was printed in PLA. This allows for prints to mix materials and colors.

The add-on was tested with the Solidoodle 3D printer, and can be built for about $60. It requires a laser mounted to the print head, and a low-cost webcam for performing the measurements. While the group will not be continuing work on this project, they plan to open source their work so others can continue where they’ve left off.

After the break, we have a video of the printer performing a scan and resuming a print.

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Electric Go-Cart Has Arduino Brains

July 26, 2014 by Rich Bremer 16 Comments

arduino powered go cart

Oh how times have changed. Back in the 30’s the VW Beetle was designed to be cheap, simple and easy for the typical owner to maintain themselves. Nowadays, every aspect of modern cars are controlled by some sort of computer. At least our go-carts are spared from this non-tinkerable electronic nightmare…. well, that’s not completely true anymore. History is repeating itself as [InverseCube] has built an electronic go-cart fully controlled by an Arduino. Did I forget to mention that [InverseCube] is only 15 years old?

The project starts of with an old gas-powered go-cart frame. Once the gas engine was removed and the frame cleaned up and painted, a Hobbywing Xerun 150A brushless electronic speed controller (ESC) and a Savox BSM5065 450Kv motor were mounted in the frame which are responsible for moving the ‘cart down the road. A quantity of three 5-cell lithium polymer batteries wired in parallel provide about 20 volts to the motor which results in a top speed around 30mph. Zipping around at a moderate 15mph will yield about 30 minutes of driving before needing to be recharged. There is a potentiometer mounted to the steering wheel for controlling the go-cart’s speed. The value of the potentiometer is read by an Arduino which in turn sends the appropriate PWM signal to the ESC.

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All Precincts Reporting — Next Round Of Voting Is Now

July 8, 2014 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

Check out the vote tally which [Alek] put together (click for a much larger version). We couldn’t be more delighted at how the first round of voting for Astronaut or Not went. With very nearly 50k votes it’s time to start another round.

This is an entirely new round. Your 30 votes have been restored and you must vote at least once in this new round to be eligible for the voter lottery. The theme has also changed; vote for projects whose ideas are most likely to be used in other projects. That is to say: is there a core piece of cleverness that, properly explained and modularized, would be extremely extensible? Then vote for that one!

Links to the 15 winners are listed after the break; everyone on this list is getting a T-shirt and some stickers. The same will be true for the next round but we’re changing up the Voter Lottery prize — it’ll be similarly valuable and desirable but we’ll save details for this for Thursday. Make sure you vote or risk losing Friday’s lottery!

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The Old Ping-Pong Ball Levitation Trick

July 2, 2014 by Adam Fabio 15 Comments

pingpongLev

[Jacob] has put a slightly new twist on the levitating ball trick with his ping-pong ball levitation machine. We’ve all seen magnetic levitation systems before. Here on Hackaday, [Caleb] built a Portal gun which levitated a Companion Cube. Rather than go the magnetic route, [Jacob] levitated a ping-pong ball on a cushion of air.

Now, it would be possible to cheat here, anyone who’s seen a demonstration of Bernoulli’s principle knows that the ball will remain stable in a stream of air. [Jacob] proves that his system is actually working by levitating ping-pong balls with different weights.

A Parallax Ping style ultrasonic sensor measures the distance between the top of the rig and the levitating ball. If the ball gets above a set distance, [Jacob’s] chipKit based processor throttles down his fans. If the ball gets too low, the fans are throttled up. A software based Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) loop keeps the system under control. A graph of the ball distance vs fan speed is displayed on an Android tablet connected to the controller via USB.

When [Jacob] switches a heavy ball for a light one, the lighter ball is pushed beyond the pre-programmed height. The controller responds by reducing the fan speed and the ball falls back. Who said you can’t do anything good with a box of corn dogs?

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Hackaday Links: June 29, 2014

June 29, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

Ever see a really cool build on YouTube with no build details at all? Frustrating, right? That’s us with the NES Keytar covering the Game of Thrones theme. He’s using a Raspi with the sound chip in the NES to do live chiptunes. Freakin’ awesome. There’s also the ST:TNG theme as well.

A few years ago the folks at Oculus had an idea – because of cellphones, small, high resolution displays are really cheap, so why not make VR goggles? At Google IO this week someone figured out everyone already has a cellphone, so just wrap it in some cardboard and call it a set of VR goggles. You can get a kit here, but the only difficult to source components are the lenses.

What happens when you put liquid nitrogen under a vacuum? Well, it should evaporate more, get colder, and freeze. Then it breaks up into solid nitrogen snow. No idea what you would do with this, but there ‘ya go. Oh, [NC], we’re going to need a writeup of that LN2 generator.

About a month ago, the House4Hack hackerspace in South Africa told us of their plans to bring a glider down from 20km above the Earth. They finally launched it, The CAA only allowed them to glide back from 6km (20,000 feet), but even from there the foam glider hit 230kph (124 knots). That’s a little impressive for a foam FPV platform, and we’re betting something with a larger wingspan would probably break a spar or something. Shout out to HABEX.

All the electronic dice projects we’ve seen have one thing in common: they’re not cubes. Thus uberdice. It’s six nine-pixel displays on the faces of a cube, powered by a battery, and controlled by an accelerometer. Yes, it is by far the most complicated die ever made, but it does look cool.

THP Entry: SatNOGS

June 13, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

NOGS Here’s an interesting thought: it’s possible to build a cubesat for perhaps ten thousand dollars, and hitch a ride on a launch for free thanks to a NASA outreach program. Tracking that satellite along its entire orbit would require dozens of ground stations, all equipped with antennas, USB TV tuners, and a connection to the Internet. It’s actually more expensive to build and launch a cubesat than it costs to build a network of ground stations to get reasonably real-time telemetry from a cubesat. The future is awesome and weird, it seems.

This is the observation the guys behind SatNOGS have made. They’re developing a platform for a completely open source ground station network, with the idea being people an institutions along every longitude and latitude would build a simple satellite tracking antenna mount, connect it to the Internet, and become part of an open source Near Space Network, capable of receiving telemetry from any one of the small cubesats whizzing around in low earth orbit.

Despite being what is probably one of the most ambitious and far-reaching projects in open source hardware, the design of the system is relatively simple: the hardware is a 3D printed alt-az mount, capable of pointing a pair of antennas anywhere in the sky. The stepper motor driver board is based on the Arduino, and the computer running each antenna node is powered by a BeagleBone Black or a WR703N router. The antenna receiver is, of course, an RTL-SDR dongle, capable of listening to all the common cubesat bands. Even the software is derived from open source projects. Tracking a satellite across the sky can be calculated with GPredict, and the team is working on an observation scheduling and management system that combines multiple ground stations for coverage across the globe.

It’s a great idea, crowdsourcing satellite tracking from people around the globe, and something that could be used by hundreds of institutions lucky enough to launch a small cube of electronics into orbit.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.