Our Hackaday Prize Challenges are evaluated by a panel of judges who examine every entry to see how they fare against judging criteria. With prize money at stake, it makes sense we want to make sure it is done right. But we also have our Hackaday Prize achievements, with less at stake leading to a more free-wheeling way to recognize projects that catch our eye. Most of the achievements center around fun topics that aren’t related to any particular challenge, but it’s a little different for the Infinite Improbability achievement. This achievement was unlocked by any project that impressed with their quest for power, leading to some overlap with the just-concluded Power Harvesting Challenge. In fact, when the twenty Power Harvesting winners were announced, we saw that fourteen of them had already unlocked the achievement.
Each of the Power Harvesting winners will get their own spotlight story. And since many of them have unlocked this achievement, now is the perfect time to take a quick tour through a few of the other entries that have also unlocked the Infinite Improbability achievement.
We’ve all seen acoustic levitation, it’s one of the scientific novelties of our age and a regular on the circuit of really impressive physical demonstrations of science to the public. The sight of arrays of ultrasonic speakers causing small objects and beads of liquid to float in mid-air without any suspension is magical, captivating people of all ages. Thus a lecture at Hackaday Belgrade on the subject from Asier Marzo, a research scientist with a speciality in the field of ultrasonics at the UK’s University of Bristol, was a particularly fascinating and informative one.
He started by explaining acoustic levitation as a concept, and its mechanism. As an idea it’s one with a long history, he tells us that hundreds of years ago people tried mass ranks of the loudest musical instruments at their disposal to move rocks, all to no avail. The array of musicians of yore lacked the ability to control their individual phase, and of course their combined output would have balked at a pea-sized piece of gravel, let alone a boulder.
Explaining the standing wave produced by an ultrasonic array.
The Power of Standing Waves
Given that we can now create standing waves between phased arrays of ultrasonic speakers, he explained the mechanism that allows the levitation. The standing wave creates patterns of high intensity and “quiet” low intensity sound, and the object nestles in one of these quiet areas. There is thus a size limit dictated by the wavelength of the sound in question, which for the ultrasound he’s using is in the order of a few millimetres.
Having explained how it all works, we were then taken into the fields in which it finds an application. This was particularly interesting, because it’s the side we never see in the for-the-kids demos where it’s all about “Look, we can make the water droplet float!”. The number of fields that can find a use for it was a surprise, and formed the next phase of the talk.
Real World Uses for Acoustic Levitation
The first example given was in the field of spectroscopy, when reflecting light from a droplet of liquid on a substrate a certain amount of the reflected light comes from the substrate. If the sample is levitated, all the reflection comes from it and nothing else. Microgravity experiments are another interesting application, where it is possible to replicate some of the work that has previously required the environment of a space craft such as the International Space Station. This was a particularly unexpected twist.
Manipulating a solid particle with a wearable array.
The technique can be used for tiny particles in a liquid medium with a much higher frequency — a demonstration involves moving a single blood cell in a pattern. But Asier has more tricks up his sleeve. This technique can be used in human interactions with computers and with the real world. We saw a display in which the pixels were small plastic balls suspended in a grid, they could even be flipped in colour by being rotated under an electric field. A successive display used the balls not in a grid but as a point cloud in a graph, proving that rasters are not the only means of conveying information. Finally we saw the arrays applied to wearable devices, a handheld tractor beam, and a set of standing wave tweezers. He gave the example of picking up an SMD component, something that we can see would be invaluable.
Levitation is Within Our Grasp
The good news for us is that this is a piece of cutting-edge science that is accessible to us at our level too. He’s made a selection of designs available online through the Acoustic Levitator site. There is an ultrasonic array, an acoustic levitator, and an acoustic tractor beam, and the components are such run-of-the-mill parts as Arduinos and motor driver boards. Even schoolchildren building them from kits, with an experimenter using one for Schlieren photography of the acoustic field. Finally we’re shown Ultraino, an ambitious project providing software and driver hardware for large arrays in which every transducer is individually driven, before a tantalising look at future work in fluid ultrasonics and the promise of an ultrasonic audio speaker project.
Hackaday covers a huge array of projects and topics from all corners of our community. Each one is exciting in its own way, from a simple-looking Arduino project that encapsulates a cool hack to a multi-year labour of love. It’s not often though that we can say we’ve seen a genuinely cutting-edge piece of science, while simultaneously having it explained in terms we understand and being given an accessible version that we can experiment with ourselves. We are really looking forward to the projects that will come from this direction, as acoustic levitation becomes yet another known quantity in the hardware hacker’s armoury.
One of the most amazing technological advances found in this year’s Hackaday Prize is the careful application of copper traces turned into coils. We’ve seen this before for RFID tags and scanners, but we’ve never seen anything like what Carl is doing. He’s building brushless motors on PCBs.
All you need to build a brushless motor is a rotor loaded up with super powerful and very cheap magnets, and a few coils of wire. Now that PCBs are so cheap, the coils of wire are easily taken care of. A 3D printer and some eBay magnets finish off the rest. For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking with Carl about PCB motors.
Carl Bugeja is a 23-year old electronics engineer who is trying to design new robotics technology. His PCB Motor design won the Open Hardware Design Challenge and will be going to the Finals of the Hackaday Prize. This open-source PCB motor is a smaller, cheaper, and easier to assemble micro-brushless motor.
[Carl]’s main project, the PCB Motor is a stator that is printed on a 4-layer PCB board. The six stator poles are spiral traces wound in a star configuration. Although these coils produce less torque compared to an iron core stator, the motor is still suitable for high-speed applications. [Carl]’s been working on other PCB motor designs, like the Linear PCB motor which is a monorail on a PCB and the Flexible PCB actuator where the coils of wire are tucked inside Kapton.
During this Hack Chat, we’re going to be discussing:
The design and construction of brushless motors
How to drive these motors
PCB applications beyond standard circuitry
Building accessible robotics technology
You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Hack Chat Event Page and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.
It is pretty unusual to be reading Bloomberg Businessweek and see an article with the main picture featuring a purple PCB (the picture above, in fact). But that’s just what we saw this morning. The story is about an open source modification to an insulin pump known as the RileyLink. This takes advantage of older Medtronic brand insulin pumps and allows you to control the BLE device from a smartphone remotely and use more sophisticated software to control blood sugar levels.
Of course, the FDA isn’t involved. If they were, the electronics would cost $7,000 instead of $250 — although, in fairness, that $250 doesn’t cover the cost of the used pump. Why it has to be a used pump is a rather interesting story. The only reason the RileyLink is possible is due to a security flaw and an active hacker community.
Given its appearance in one form or another in all but the cheapest audio gear produced in the last 70 years or so, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the ubiquitous VU meter is just one of those electronic add-ons that’s more a result of marketing than engineering. After all, the seemingly arbitrary scale and the vague “volume units” label makes it seem like something a manufacturer would slap on a device just to make it look good. And while that no doubt happens, it turns out that the concept of a VU meter and its execution has some serious engineering behind that belies the really simple question it seeks to answer: How loud is this audio signal?
Improvements in methodology have dramatically dropped the cost of DNA sequencing in the last decade. In 2007, it cost around $10 million dollars to sequence a single genome. Today, there are services which will do it for as little as $1,000. That’s not to bad if you just want to examine your own DNA, but prohibitively expensive if you’re looking to experiment with DNA in the home lab. You can buy your own desktop sequencer and cut out the middleman, but they cost in the neighborhood of $50,000. A bit outside of the experimenter’s budget unless you’re Tony Stark.
But thanks to the incredible work of [Alexander Sokolov], the intrepid hacker may one day be able to put a DNA sequencer in their lab for the cost of a decent oscilloscope. The breakthrough came as the result of those two classic hacker pastimes: reverse engineering and dumpster diving. He realized that the heavy lifting in a desktop genome sequencer was being done in a sensor matrix that the manufacturer considers disposable. After finding a source of trashed sensors to experiment with, he was able to figure out not only how to read them, but revitalize them so he could introduce a new sample.
To start with, [Alexander] had to figure out how these “disposable” sensors worked. He knew they were similar in principle to a digital camera’s CCD sensor; but rather than having cells which respond to light, they read changes in pH level. The chip contains 10 million of these pH cells, and each one needs to be read individually hundreds of times to capture the entire DNA sequence.
Enlisting the help of some friends who had experience reverse engineering silicon, and armed with an X-Ray machine and suitable optical microscope, he eventually figured out how the sensor matrix worked electrically. He then designed a board that reads the sensor and dumps the “picture” of the DNA sample to his computer over serial.
Once he could reliably read the sensor, the next phase of the project was finding a way to wash the old sample out so it could be reloaded. [Alexander] tried different methods, and after several wash and read cycles, he nailed down the process of rejuvenating the sensor so its performance essentially matches that of a new one. He’s currently working on the next generation of his reader hardware, and we’re very interested to see where the project goes.
It’s the suburbanista’s weekend nightmare: you’re almost done with the weekly chores, taking the last few passes with the lawn mower, when you hear a pop and bang. The cylinder head on your mower just blew, and you’re out of commission. Or are you? You’ve got a 3D printer – couldn’t it save the day?
If this bench test of plastic cylinder heads is any indication, it’s possible – just as long as you’ve only got 40 seconds of mowing left to do. [Project Farm] has been running all sorts of tests on different materials as field-expedient cylinder heads for small gasoline engines, using everything from JB Weld epoxy to a slab of walnut. For this test, two chunky heads were printed, one from ABS, of the thermochromic variety apparently, the other in PLA. The test went pretty much as expected for something made of thermoplastic exposed to burning gasoline at high pressure, although ABS was the clear winner with two 40-second runs. The PLA only lasted half as long before the spark plug threads melted and the plug blew out. A gasket printed from flexible filament was also tested, with predictably awful results.
As bad as all this was, it still shows that 3D-printed parts are surprisingly tough. Each part was able to perform decently under a compression test, showing that they can stand up to pressure as long as there’s no heat. If nothing else, it was a learning experience. And as an aside, the cylinder heads were printed by [Terry] from the RedNeckCanadians YouTube channel. That video is worth a watch, if just for a few tips on making a 3D-printed copy of an object. Continue reading “Results Of 3D-Printed Cylinder Head Testing Fail To Surprise”→
