2022 Hackaday Prize: Reuse, Recycle, Revamp Finalists

June 28, 2022 by 13 Comments

The 2022 Hackaday Prize is focused on taking care of the planet. The theme of our second challenge round, “Reduce, Recycle, Revamp” is all about tailoring your projects to make use of existing resources and keeping material out of the landfill rather than contributing to it. Our judges have scrutinized the entries and handed me the sealed envelope. All of these ten projects will receive $500 right now and are eligible for the Grand Prize of $50,000, to be announced in November.

We were looking for two broad types of recycling projects in this round, either projects that incorporate a significant recycled component in their build, or projects that facilitate recycling themselves, and frankly we got a good mix of both!
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Food Irradiation Detector Doesn’t Use Banana For Scale

June 28, 2022 by 66 Comments

How do the potatoes in that sack keep from sprouting on their long trip from the field to the produce section? Why don’t the apples spoil? To an extent, the answer lies in varying amounts of irradiation. Though it sounds awful, irradiation reduces microbial contamination, which improves shelf life. Most people can choose to take it or leave it, but in some countries, they aren’t overly concerned about the irradiation dosages found in, say, animal feed. So where does that leave non-vegetarians?

If that line of thinking makes you want to Hulk out, you’re not alone. [kutluhan_aktar] decided to build an IoT food irradiation detector in an effort to help small businesses make educated choices about the feed they give to their animals. The device predicts irradiation dosage level using a combination of the food’s weight, color, and emitted ionizing radiation after being exposed to sunlight for an appreciable amount of time. Using this information, [kutluhan_aktar] trained a neural network running on a Beetle ESP32-C3 to detect the dosage and display relevant info on a transparent OLED screen. Primarily, the device predicts whether the dosage falls into the Regulated, Unsafe, or just plain Hazardous category.

[kutluhan_aktar] lets this baby loose on some uncooked pasta in the short demo video after the break. The macaroni is spread across a load cell to detect the weight, while [kutluhan_aktar] uses a handheld sensor to determine the color.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen AI on the Hackaday menu. Remember when we tried those AI-created recipes?

Lenses: From Fire Starters To Smart Phones And VR

June 28, 2022 by 21 Comments

In antiquity, we see examples of magnifying crystals formed into a biconvex shape as early as the 7th century BC. Whether the people of that period used them either for fire-starting purposes or vision is unclear. Still, it is famously said that Emperor Nero of Rome watched gladiator games through an emerald.

Needless to say, the views we get through modern lenses are a lot more realistic. So how did we get from simple magnifying systems to the complex lens systems we see today? We start with a quick journey through the history of the camera and the lens, and we’ll end up with the cutting edge in lens design for smartphone cameras and VR headsets.

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Retrocomputing, Time To Hang Up The Original Hardware?

June 28, 2022 by 57 Comments

For those of us with penchant for older technology, there’s something special about operating with older hardware. Whether it’s a decades-old camera, a vintage keyboard, or a home computer from the 1980s, the modern equivalent just doesn’t quite compare. But working with older parts definitely isn’t for the faint-hearted, as the passage of time has taken its toll on their reliability. Is it time to recognize that the supply of replacement vintage parts is not infinite, and to switch from using original hardware to more modern alternatives? [Retro Recipes] poses this question after a particularly difficult-to-find Amiga fault, and discusses it while evaluating a replacement Amiga made entirely from modern parts.

The new Amiga in question is a recreation of an A1200 with a re-manufactured case and keyboard, and the guts of an A500 Mini retro console taking the place of the Commodore board. He goes through the process of making an Amiga hard drive image on a USB drive using the image from his original drive in his teenage years, and boots it both on the 500 Mini based machine and on the UAE emulator on a Mac laptop. You can follow him in the video below the break.

We can see the logic in treating original hardware as a precious resource that’s not to be run up for fear of breaking it, but by the same token we’re still standing by that first sentence. But should the enjoyment of an older machine be limited only to those who have an original? We think not, so if enjoying an Amiga without an Amiga can be as good as the real thing then we’re all for it.

Of course, for those whose original Amigas have already broken, there are other ways to bring them back.

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Reverse-Engineering Forgotten Konami Arcade Hardware

June 28, 2022 by 4 Comments

When fully-3D video games started arriving in the early 90s, some companies were more prepared for the change than others. Indeed, it would take nearly a decade of experimentation before 3D virtual spaces felt natural. Even then, Konami seems to have shot themselves in the foot at the beginning of this era with their first foray into 3D arcade games. [Mog] shows us the ins-and-outs of these platforms while trying to bring them back to life via MAME.

These arcade machines were among the first available with fully-3D environments, but compared to offerings from other companies are curiously underpowered, even for the time. They include only a single digital signal processor which is tasked with calculating all of the scene geometry while competing machines would use multiple DSP chips to do the same job. As a result the resolution and frame rate are very low. Nonetheless, [Mog] set out to get it working in MAME.

To accomplish this task, [Mog] turned to a set of development tools provided to developers for Konami in the early 90s which would emulate the system on the PCs of the time. It surprisingly still worked on Windows 10 with minor tweaking, and with some other tools provided over the decades of others working on MAME these old Konami machines have some new life with this emulator support.

Not everything works perfectly, but [Mog] reports that most of the bugs and other issues were recently worked out or are being actively worked on by other experts in the field. If you remember these games from the arcade era of the 80s and early 90s, it might be time to grab an old CRT and fire this one up again.

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Homebrew Optical Sensor Helps Your Diesel Pass The Smoke Test

June 27, 2022 by 50 Comments

We’ve all heard of the smoke test, and we know that it’s the lowest possible bar for performance of an electronic device. If it doesn’t burst into flames when power is applied, you’re good to go for more functional testing. But the smoke test means something else for cars, especially those powered by diesel fuel. And passing diesel exhaust tests can become something of a chore.

To make passing these tests a little easier, [Janis Alnis] came up with this diesel exhaust monitor that measures the opacity of his car’s emissions. The sensor itself is quite simple, and mimics what commercial exhaust analyzers use: a LED and a photodiode at opposite ends of a tube of a specified length. Soot particles in exhaust passing through the tube will scatter light in a predictable way, and the numbers work out that a passing grade is anything greater than 53% transmission.

The sensor body is cobbled together from brass pipe fittings with glass windows epoxied into each end. Exhaust enters via a tee fitting attached to a hose and sampling tube, and exits through another tee. One window of the sensor has a cheap battery-powered flashlight as a light source, while the other end has a Texas Instruments OPT101 photodiode sensor. The sensor is connected to one of the analog inputs of an Arduino, which also runs a 128×64 pixel LCD display — inspired by this air quality meter — to show the current smokiness both graphically and as a percentage. The video below shows the sensor at work.

While there were some issues with soot buildup and water vapor condensation, using the sensor [Janis] discovered that a little bit of a warm-up drive got things hot enough to clear up his ride’s tendency to smoke a bit, allowing him to pass his inspection. Continue reading “Homebrew Optical Sensor Helps Your Diesel Pass The Smoke Test” →

Developing A Custom WearOS Watch Face

June 27, 2022 by 13 Comments

When you think about customizing the face of a smartwatch, you probably imagine something akin to selecting a new wallpaper on an Android device, or maybe tweaking the color scheme a bit. But not [Sebastian SARBU], his plans were a bit grander than all that. So he cracked open Android Studio and started writing a truly custom watch face that would make the most out of the device’s display. Luckily for us, he’s not only released the source code for others to study, but has documented the development process in a series of videos that you can see below the break.

He’s dubbed the new interface his “Pizza Watch Face”, as it breaks the circular screen down into slices complete with a bits of multi-colored “crust” that can show various notifications using the fewest pixels possible. There’s no question the layout is able to pack a lot of information into a relatively small space, and while aesthetics are naturally subjective, we happen to think it looks pretty slick. Continue reading “Developing A Custom WearOS Watch Face” →