Your Masterclass In Product Design: Hackaday Prize Mentor Sessions

May 14, 2019 by 3 Comments

New to this year’s Hackaday Prize is a set of live mentor sessions and you’re invited! Being at the center of a successful product design project means having an intuitive sense in many, many areas; from industrial design and product packaging, to manufacturing and marketing. This is your chance to learn from those experts who have already been there and want to make your experience better and easier.

We want you to get involved by entering your own project into the Hackaday Prize; now is the time to tell us you’re ready to demo your project with a mentor. Hackaday Prize Mentor Sessions are happening every two weeks throughout the summer. In these video chats we’re inviting some promising Hackaday Prize entries to start off with a “demo day” type of presentation, followed by an interactive session with the mentor hosting each event.

It’s also important that this incredible resource be available to all, so these videos will be published once the mentor session wraps up. This is a master class format where the advice and shared experience have a beneficial effect far beyond the groups sharing their projects.

The 2019 Hackaday Prize focuses on product development. Show your path from an idea to a product design ready for manufacturing and you’ll be on target to share in more than $200,000 in cash prizes!

Meet Some of Our Mentors:

Below you will find just a taste of the mentor sessions in the works. These are the first three mentor session videos that will be published, but make sure you browse the full set of incredible mentors and get excited for what is to come!

Bunnie Huang

Co-founder, Chibitronics

Bunnie is best known for his work hacking the Microsoft Xbox, as well as
his efforts in designing and manufacturing open source hardware. His past projects include the chumby (app-playing alarm clock), Chibitronics (peel-and-stick electronics for crafting), and the Novena (DIY laptop). He currently lives in Singapore where he runs a private product design studio, Kosagi, and actively mentors several startups and students of the MIT Media Lab.

Mattias Gunneras & Andrew Zolty

Co-founders, BREAKFAST NY

Zolty and Mattias founded BREAKFAST in 2009. This studio of multidisciplinary artists and engineers conceives, designs, and fabricates high-tech contemporary art installations and sculptures. BREAKFAST has over 15 large-scale pieces that can be found in various museums, arenas, and lobby spaces throughout the world.

Giovanni Salinas

Product Development Engineer, DesignLab

Giovanni is the Product Development Engineer at Supplyframe DesignLab. He has designed and developed hundreds of products, including consumer electronics, kitchenware, and urban furniture for the North American, European, Chinese and Latin American markets. Through his experience he has honed his expertise in rapid prototyping and DFM in plastics, wood, and metals.

We Want You To Demo Your Product!

Mentor sessions will continue throughout the summer with these and other mentors! Sign up to demo your 2019 Hackaday Prize entry!

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

For Better Photogrammetry, Just Add A Donut

May 14, 2019 by 19 Comments

If you don’t have access to a 3D scanner, you can get a lot done with photogrammetry. Basically, you take a bunch of pictures of an object from different angles, and then stitch them together with software to create a 3D model. For best results, you need consistent, diffuse lighting, an unchanging background, and a steady camera.

Industrial designer [Eric Strebel] recently made an Intro to Photogrammetry video wherein he circled an object taking photos with his bare hands. One commenter suggested a different method: build a donut-shaped turntable that circles the object, which sits on a stationary platform. Attach the camera to the donut, counterbalance the weight, and Bob’s your proverbial uncle. [Eric] thought it was a brilliant idea (because it is), and he built a proof of concept. This is that video.

[Eric] can move the camera up and down the arc of the boom to get all the Z-positions he wants. The platform has a mark every 10° and there’s a pointer in the platform to line them up against for consistent camera positioning. He was pleasantly surprised by the results, which we agree are outstanding.

We always learn a lot from [Eric]’s videos, and this one’s no exception. Case in point: he makes a cardboard mock-up by laying out the pieces, and uses that to make a pattern for the recycled plywood and melamine version. In the photogrammetry video, he covers spray paint techniques to make objects reflect as little light as possible so the details don’t get lost.

If you prefer to rotate your objects, get an Arduino out and automate the spin.

Continue reading “For Better Photogrammetry, Just Add A Donut” →

What Happened With Supermicro?

May 14, 2019 by 45 Comments

Back in October 2018, a bombshell rocked the tech industry when Bloomberg reported that some motherboards made by Supermicro had malicious components on them that were used to spy or interfere with the operation of the board, and that these motherboards were found on servers used by Amazon and Apple. We covered the event, looking at how it could work if it were true. Now seven months have passed, and it’s time to look at how things shook out.

Continue reading “What Happened With Supermicro?” →

This Is The Raspberry Pi Mini Laptop That We Want

May 14, 2019 by 52 Comments

In the seven years since the Raspberry Pi was first launched to an expectant audience we have seen many laptops featuring the fruit-themed single board computers. Some of them have been pretty jaw-dropping in their quality, so for a new one to make us stop and gape it needs to be something really special. On cue, here comes [Igor Brkić] with one of the neatest efforts we’ve seen, a high quality Pi laptop that’s smaller in frontal area than many smartphones.

At its heart is a Pimoroni Hyperpixel touchscreen HAT, and a Pi sitting behind it that has been stripped of all bulky connectors to reduce its height. The keyboard is a mini Bluetooth affair, and power comes courtesy of a deconstructed USB power bank with a lithium-ion pouch cell. The whole is contained within a neatly designed 3D-printed clamshell enclosure, making for a tiny and very neat laptop. We want one, and now you probably do too. (We wouldn’t say “no” to some level shifters and a GPIO port…)

If we had to pick another high-quality Pi laptop to compare this one with, it would have to be this one with a Psion-inspired hinge.

In This Aussie’s Back Yard, No Cat Is Safe From An Automated Soaking!

May 14, 2019 by 32 Comments

Some of us here at Hackaday are cat lovers, but we also understand that a plethora of unwanted cats using a suburban back garden can be bothersome, and a few years ago we featured a project from Aussie YouTuber [Craig Turner], in which he created a motion-detecting water spray for use as a relatively harmless cat repellent. Now he’s back with an updated version which is a little slicker and easier to make.

At its heart is the same PIR-turns-on-water operation, but this time there is a solenoid valve and purpose-built nozzle instead of a car central locking actuator and a lawn sprayer. Doing the electronic work is an off-the-shelf PIR module, so there is no  longer any need to hack a security PIR detector. Add in some pipe sections and PTFE tape with a bit of hot glue, and the result is a far more professional and streamlined device. The video gives a full run-down on construction, though we notice he neglected to emphasise the polarity of his protection diode so keep an eye out if you follow his example.

So if the thought of a continuous supply of free feline company courtesy of your neighbours is not for you then now you are equipped to send them packing. The latest video incarnation of the project is below the break, but if you are in search of the original then you can go back to our coverage at the time.

Continue reading “In This Aussie’s Back Yard, No Cat Is Safe From An Automated Soaking!” →

LED Panel Lamp Is A Great Way To Use Protoboard

May 13, 2019 by 9 Comments

It’s now possible to source chip-on-board LED modules that have huge light output in a simple, easy to use package. However they can have major power requirements, and cheaper modules are also susceptible to dead spots.  [Heliox] put together a great LED lamp design the old-school way, showing there’s more than one way to get the job done.

Standard SMD LEDs are the order of the day here. The LEDs are laid out on protoboard in neat rows, making them easy to solder in place. This also makes power distribution a cinch, with the copper traces carrying the power to each row. Power is courtesy of 18650 lithium batteries installed in the back of the 3D printed housing. A GoPro-style mount is printed as part of the case, allowing the lamp to be easily mounted in a variety of ways.

It’s a quick, cheap and easy way to build a versatile LED lamp. With a diffuser installed and integrated USB charging, we could see this making an excellent portable device for on-the-go videographers or technicians. We’ve seen [Heliox]’s LED creations before, too. Video after the break.

Continue reading “LED Panel Lamp Is A Great Way To Use Protoboard” →

Analog Failures On RF Product Cause Production Surprise

May 13, 2019 by 15 Comments

A factory is a machine. It takes a fixed set of inputs – circuit boards, plastic enclosures, optimism – and produces a fixed set of outputs in the form of assembled products. Sometimes it is comprised of real machines (see any recent video of a Tesla assembly line) but more often it’s a mixture of mechanical machines and meaty humans working together. Regardless of the exact balance the factory machine is conceived of by a production engineer and goes through the same design, iteration, polish cycle that the rest of the product does (in this sense product development is somewhat fractal). Last year [Michael Ossmann] had a surprise production problem which is both a chilling tale of a nasty hardware bug and a great reminder of how fragile manufacturing can be. It’s a natural fit for this year’s theme of going to production.

Surprise VCC glitching causing CPU reset

The saga begins with [Michael] receiving an urgent message from the factory that an existing product which had been in production for years was failing at such a high rate that they had stopped the production line. There are few worse notes to get from a factory! The issue was apparently “failure to program” and Great Scott Gadgets immediately requested samples from their manufacturer to debug. What follows is a carefully described and very educational debug session from hell, involving reverse engineering ROMs, probing errant voltage rails, and large sample sizes. [Michael] doesn’t give us a sense for how long it took to isolate but given how minute the root cause was we’d bet that it was a long, long time.

The post stands alone as an exemplar for debugging nasty hardware glitches, but we’d like to call attention to the second root cause buried near the end of the post. What stopped the manufacturer wasn’t the hardware problem so much as a process issue which had been exposed. It turned out the bug had always been reproducible in about 3% of units but the factory had never mentioned it. Why? We’d suspect that [Michael]’s guess is correct. The operators who happened to perform the failing step had discovered a workaround years ago and transparently smoothed the failure over. Then there was a staff change and the new operator started flagging the failure instead of fixing it. Arguably this is what should have been happening the entire time, but in this one tiny corner of the process the manufacturing process had been slightly deviated from. For a little more color check out episode #440.2 of the Amp Hour to hear [Chris Gammell] talk about it with [Michael]. It’s a good reminder that a product is only as reliable as the process that builds it, and that process isn’t always as reliable as it seems.