Hackaday Prize Entry: Shakelet

July 7, 2016 by Moritz Walter 62 Comments

A person who is deaf can’t hear sound, but that doesn’t mean they can’t feel vibrations. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Alex Hunt] is developing the Shakelet, a vibrating wristband for that notifies hearing impaired people about telephones, doorbells, and other sound alerts.

To tackle the difficulty of discriminating between the different sounds from different sources, [Alex’s] wants to attach little sound sensors directly to the sound emitting devices. The sensors wirelessly communicate with the wristband. If the wristband receives a trigger signal from one of the sensors, it alerts the wearer by vibrating. It also shows which device triggered the alert by flashing an RGB LED in a certain color. A first breadboard prototype of his idea confirmed the feasibility of the concept.

After solving a few minor problems with the sensitivity of the sensors, [Alex] now has a working prototype. The wristband features a pager motor and is controlled by an ATMEGA168. Two NRF24L01+ 2.4 GHz wireless transceiver modules take care of the communication. The sound sensors run on the smaller ATTiny85 and use a piezo disc as microphone. Check out the video below, where Alex demonstrates his build:

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Last Chance To Get In On The Citizen Scientist Challenge

July 7, 2016 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

The last week of the Citizen Scientist challenge round is drawing a close. Here’s what you need to know to enter your project, and to give it the best chance at making the top twenty. You need to do this by Monday morning, July 11th, to be in the running.

What is Citizen Scientist?

Citizen Scientist is part of the Hackaday Prize. This round challenges you to make meaningful scientific study more approachable for everyone. Examples include projects that let people build their own lab equipment, sensor modules that can be distributed (or bootstrapped) for widespread data collection like weather stations and pollution monitors, or a new way of studying the world around us. The important thing is your explanation of the project. Show off your idea for making us all Citizen Scientists.

Right now we have a few hundred entries in this challenge round. Twenty of them will be selected to win $1000 and move on to the final round for consideration in the top five prizes: $150,000, $25,000, $10,000, $10,000, and $5,000.

This round ends on Monday morning, so make sure to enter your project now. Starting a new entry is easy but you may also enter a project that you have already document, or one that was submitted to an earlier round of the Hackaday Prize. In all cases, use the “Submit Project to” menu on the left sidebar of your project.

What Your Project Needs to Succeed

An entry boils down to an idea, a picture, documentation, and four project logs.

You want to show that you are progressing toward a fully working prototype. We suggest that you start with a quick overview of the topic you chose for your entry. How does your project move Citizen Science forward? What led you to the idea, and what kind of impact do you hope it will have.

Don’t forget the build logs! One requirement of your entry is to have at least four build logs. At the minimum, pull out four different aspects of your design process and make them logs. To the right you can see a screenshot from the top of a project page. The log count is there and it needs to be at least 4.

A picture is worth a thousand words. You need at least one image, and we suggest that you put it in the image gallery — use the “Edit Project” button on the top right of your project page for this. It’s best to include some kind of system diagram that shows all parts of the overall project. If you have pictures of an actual prototype make sure to include those, as well as any other schematics, renders, CAD drawings, etc.

Upcoming Challenge Rounds

Don’t have something the fits with Citizen Scientist? Don’t worry, there are still two more rounds coming. On Monday July 11th we will begin the Automation challenge round. The name says it all; any and all automation projects will make great entries. The final challenge round, Assistive Technologies, begins August 22nd and seeks great ideas to make people’s lives better though technology that overcomes difficulties of body and mind.

No need to wait until those dates. Start your project now and you will be able to enter it into those challenges once they officially begin.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Source FFT Spectrum Analyzer

July 6, 2016 by Moritz Walter 14 Comments

Every machine has its own way of communicating with its operator. Some send status emails, some illuminate, but most of them vibrate and make noise. If it hums happily, that’s usually a good sign, but if it complains loudly, maintenance is overdue. [Ariel Quezada] wants to make sense of machine vibrations and draw conclusions about their overall mechanical condition from them. With his project, a 3-axis Open Source FFT Spectrum Analyzer he is not only entering the Hackaday Prize 2016 but also the highly contested field of acoustic defect recognition.

For the hardware side of the spectrum analyzer, [Ariel] equipped an Arduino Nano with an ADXL335 accelerometer, which is able to pick up vibrations within a frequency range of 0 to 1600 Hz on the X and Y axis. A film container, equipped with a strong magnet for easy installation, serves as an enclosure for the sensor. The firmware [Ariel] wrote is an efficient piece of code that samples the analog signals from the accelerometer in a free running loop at about 5000 Hz. It streams the digitized waveforms to a host computer over the serial port, where they are captured and stored by a Python script for further processing.

From there, another Python script filters the captured waveform, applies a window function, calculates the Fourier transform and plots the spectrum into a graph. With the analyzer up and running, [Ariel] went on testing the device on a large bearing of an arbitrary rotating machine he had access to. A series of tests that involved adding eccentric weights to the rotating shaft shows that the analyzer already makes it possible to discriminate between different grades of imbalance.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Cheap, Open LiDAR

July 5, 2016 by Moritz Walter 19 Comments

[adam] is a caver, meaning that he likes to explore caves and map their inner structure. This is still commonly done using traditional tools, such as notebooks (the paper ones), tape measure, compasses, and inclinometers. [adam] wanted to upgrade his equipment, but found that industrial LiDAR 3D scanners are quite expensive. His Hackaday Prize entry, the Open LIDAR, is an affordable alternative to the expensive industrial 3D scanning solutions out there.

The 3D scan of a small cave near Louisville (source: [caver.adam's] Sketchfab repository) — The 3D scan of a small cave near Louisville from [caver.adam’s] Sketchfab repository

LiDAR — Light Detection And Ranging — is the technology that senses the distance between a sensor and an object by reflectively measuring the time of flight of a light beam between the two. By acquiring a two-dimensional array of multiple distance readings, this can be used for 3D scanning. Looking at how the industrial LiDAR scanners capture the environment using fast spinning mirrors, [adam] realized that he could basically achieve the same by using a cheap laser range finder strapped to a pan and tilt gimbal.

The gimbal he designed for this task uses stepper motors to aim an SF30-B laser rangefinder. An Arduino controls the movement and lets the eye of the sensor scan an object or an entire environment. By sampling the distance readings returned by the sensor, a point cloud is created which then can be converted into a 3D model. [adam] plans to drive the stepper motors in microstepping mode to increase the resolution of his scanner. We’re looking forwards to see the first renderings of 3D cave maps captured with the Open LIDAR.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: ESP Swiss Knife

July 4, 2016 by Moritz Walter 5 Comments

The best equipment won’t help you if you don’t have it with you in the moment you need it. Knowledge, experience, and a thick skin may help you out there in the mud of the hardware battlegrounds, but they can’t replace a multimeter, an oscilloscope, a logic analyzer, a serial console or a WiFi access point. [Arcadia Labs] has taken on the challenge of combining most of these functions into a single device, developing the Hacker’s equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife: The ESP Swiss Knife.

Just like a Swiss Army Knife is first and foremost a knife, the EPS Swiss Knife is first and foremost an ESP8266. That means it is already a great platform for any kind of project, and [Arcadia Labs] supercharged the plain ESP-12E module by adding a couple of useful features commonly used in many projects. There’s an OLED display, four pushbuttons, a temperature sensor, and a Li-Ion cell with a charging module to power the device on the go. A universal “utility socket” breaks out the ESP8266’s leftover GPIOs and the supply voltage for attaching further peripherals.

With the hardware up and running, [Arcadia Labs] went on with building a couple of applications to provide the functionality that would make the device earn its name. Among them is a basic oscilloscope, a digital NTP based clock, a thermometer, a WiFi tester, a weather station and a 3D printer status monitor. More applications are planned, such as a chronometer, a timer, a DSLR intervalometer and more. A protective 3D printable enclosure is also in the works. [Arcadia Labs] has been joining the Hackaday Prize 2014 and 2015 before and we’re glad to see another great build coming into existence!

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Dtto Modular Robot

July 3, 2016 by Moritz Walter 16 Comments

A robot to explore the unknown and automate tomorrow’s tasks and the ones after them needs to be extremely versatile. Ideally, it was capable of being any size, any shape, and any functionality, shapeless like water, flexible and smart. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Alberto] is building such a modular, self-reconfiguring robot: Dtto.

To achieve the highest possible reconfigurability, [Alberto’s] robot is designed to be the building block of a larger, mechanical organism. Inspired by the similar MTRAN III, individual robots feature two actuated hinges that give them flexibility and the ability to move on their own. A coupling mechanism on both ends of the robot allows the little crawlers to self-assemble in various configurations and carry out complex tasks together. They can chain together to form a snake, turn into a wheel and even become four (or more) legged walkers. With six coupling faces on each robot, that allow for connections in four orientations, virtually any topology is possible.

Each robot contains two strong servos for the hinges and three smaller ones for the coupling mechanism. Alignment magnets help the robots to index against each other before a latch locks them in place. The clever mechanism doubles as an ejector, so connections can be undone against the force of the alignment magnets. Most of the electronics, including an Arduino Nano, a Bluetooth and a NRF24L01+ module, are densely mounted inside one end of the robot, while the other end can be used to add additional features, such as a camera module, an accelerometer and more. The following video shows four Dtto robots in a snake configuration crawling through a tube.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Minimal ATtiny Voltage And Frequency Counter

July 2, 2016 by Jenny List 4 Comments

Sometimes when you build something it is because you have set out with a clear idea or specification in mind, but it’s not always that way. Take [kodera2t]’s project, he set out to master the ATtiny series of microcontrollers and started with simple LED flashers, but arrived eventually at something rather useful. An ATtiny10 DVM and DFM all-in-one with an i2c LCD display and a minimum of other components.

The DFM uses the ATtiny’s internal 16 bit timer, which has the convenient property of being able to be driven by an external clock. The frequency to be measured drives the timer, and the time it returns is compared to the system clock. It’s not the finest of frequency counters, depending as it does on the ATtiny’s clock rather than a calibrated crystal reference, but it does the job.

The results are shown in the video below, and all the code has been posted in his GitHub repository. We can see that there is the basis of a handy little instrument in this circuit, though with the price of cheap multimeters being so low even a circuit this minimal would struggle to compete on cost.

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