[iskor12] put together a blu-ray laser that is waterproof and packs quite a punch. At 182 mW there is enough power here to pop dark colored balloons (see the video after the break). To make this happen, he found an LED flashlight that has rubber o-rings for waterproofing. Although small, there is enough space in the case to house the battery, driver, and laser diode. A thick ring of aluminum is placed around the laser diode to act as heat sink.
We’ll admit, we don’t know that much about lasers. This is probably the wrong question to ask, but now that he has this what do you do with it? Leave us a comment about your plans for this diabolical creation.
Jason wanted a simple underwater housing for his cheap X10 camera. He decided to add IR illumination and thrusters to move it around. Before he knew it he had a simple PVC remote operated vehicle on his hands. The lights and camera are housed in the upper PVC tubes. Six 12V bilge pumps are located below for directional control.
We live in a time of unparalleled access to technology and this has the power to make life better for everyone. Today we are excited to announce twenty spectacular builds that use access to technology to move scientific exploration within the reach of all. These are the winners of the Citizen Scientist challenge of the 2016 Hackaday Prize. Themes tackled in this round include blood glucose monitoring, insole sensing for analyzing your footfalls, lab equipment like automated microscopy, sensors to measure the world around us, and more.
The winners for the Citizen Scientist portion of the Hackaday Prize are, in no particular order:
The Hackaday Prize is the greatest hardware competition on earth. We want to see the next great Open Hardware project benefit everyone. We’re working toward that by recognizing people who build, make, and design the coolest and most useful devices around.
These twenty projects just won $1000 and will now move on to the final phase of The Hackaday Prize, to be judged by our fourteen celebrity judges. Awesome! Now get to work: there’s a lot the hackers behind these projects need to do before the final judging in October where they’ll compete for the grand prize of $150,000 and four other top prizes.
If your project didn’t make the cut, there’s still an opportunity for you to build the next great piece of hardware for The Hackaday Prize. The Automation Challenge is currently under way. It encourages everyone to build devices that make your life easier.
Automate your life; build a device that makes your breakfast, a robot to mow your lawn, or software that does your taxes. Build a device that automatically tracks laundry detergent, automates washing the dishes, or a robot that obeys every command.
Like the Design Your Concept, Anything Goes, and Citizen Science rounds of The Hackaday Prize, the top twenty projects will each win $1000, and move on to the Hackaday Prize finals for a chance to win $150,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe DesignLab in Pasadena.
If you don’t have a project up on Hackaday.io, you can start one right now and submit it to The Hackaday Prize. If you’re already working on the next great piece of hardware design, add it to the Automation challenge using the dropdown menu on the sidebar of your project page.
By the time you read this the Iowa-class battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62) should be making its way along the Delaware River, heading back to its permanent mooring on the Camden waterfront after undergoing a twelve week maintenance and repair period at the nearby Philadelphia Navy Yard.
The 888 foot (270 meter) long ship won’t be running under its own power, but even under tow, it’s not often that you get to see one of the world’s last remaining battleships on the move. The New Jersey’s return home will be a day of celebration, with onlookers lining the banks of the Delaware, news helicopters in the air, and dignitaries and veterans waiting eagerly to greet her as she slides up to the pier.
But when I got the opportunity to tour the New Jersey a couple weeks ago and get a first-hand look at the incredible preservation work being done on this historic ship, it was a very different scene. There was plenty of activity within the cavernous Dry Dock #3 at the Navy Yard, the very same slip where the ship’s construction was completed back in 1942, but little fanfare. Staff from North Atlantic Ship Repair, the company that now operates the facility, were laboring feverishly over the weekend to get the ship ready.
While by no means an exhaustive account of the work that was done on the ship during its time in Dry Dock #3, this article will highlight some of the more interesting projects that were undertaken while it was out of the water. After seeing the thought and effort put into every aspect of the ship’s preservation by curator Ryan Szimanski and his team, there’s no doubt that not only is the USS New Jersey in exceptionally capable hands, but that it will continue to proudly serve as a museum and memorial for decades to come.
While it doesn’t look like a traditional robot, the hydrogel robot from [Zi Liang Wu] forms a möbius strip and can be activated by light. They also experimented with shaping the hydrogels as a Seifert ribbon.
The key is that the hydrogels contain gold nanoparticles. Light heats the gold particles and this causes the hydrogels to move. The connections between the strips of hydrogels causes them to move in predictable ways. You can see a video about the experiments below.
These robots aren’t going to be for warehouse or factory work. But they can do tasks like collecting plastic beads, something difficult for conventional robots to do. They also hope to demonstrate that these soft robots could work in the body for taking samples or delivering a drug, although it isn’t apparent how light would get to them inside your body.
The dark side of the material tends to turn towards the light. The continuous loop structure means it never runs to the end of its travel. Watching it move on a string is pretty impressive.
Crawling and slithering robots may be the answer for certain specialized applications. After all, it works well in nature.
Humans have been sailing various seas and oceans for thousands of years, and using boats for potentially even longer than that. But as a species we wouldn’t have made it very far if it was only possible to sail in the same direction the wind is blowing. There are a number of methods for sailing upwind, but generally only up to a certain angle. [rctestflight] wondered if there was some way of sailing straight upwind instead and built this rotary sail craft to test the idea.
Normally a boat sailing upwind will sail approximately 45° into it, then “tack” 90° across the wind until they’re at another 45° angle from the wind, this time facing the opposite direction. This back-and-forth nature is not the most efficient path, so this vessel uses a few propellers to bypass the traditional sail. The first iteration, built on a sleek catamaran hull, uses a large propeller to catch the wind’s energy, then transfers it mechanically through a set of shafts to an underwater prop.
It took a few tries to get the size and pitch of both propellers narrowed down to where the boat would move forward into the wind, but move it does. A second major iteration of the build uses a single shaft with no gears, with the trade-off that neither propeller is facing an ideal direction, but this has the added benefit of the boat naturally pointing itself upwind.
While none of the designs are speed demons, the concept is sound enough. It’s just that, in most cases, performing multiple tacks to get upwind is acceptable compared to the extreme efficiency losses and drag from propeller-driven sailing crafts like these. A more effective way of propelling a boat upwind, at least using modern technology, might be to trade sails for solar panels.
Back in the old days, finding out your location on Earth was a pretty involved endeavor. You had to look at stars, use fancy gimballed equipment to track your motion, or simply be able to track your steps really really well. Eventually, GPS would come along and make all that a bit redundant for a lot of use cases. That was all well and good, until it started getting jammed all over the place to frustrate militaries using super-accurate satellite-guided weapons.
Today, there’s a great desire for more accurate navigational methods that don’t require outside communications that can easily be jammed. High-tech gyroscopes have long been a big part of that effort, allowing the construction of inertial navigation systems with greater accuracy than ever before.
If your project didn’t make the cut, there’s still an opportunity for you to build the next great piece of hardware for The Hackaday Prize. The 
