Prize Alert: Submit By Monday For Chance At Hundreds

June 25, 2015 by 9 Comments

For the past two weeks we’ve been on the lookout for the best 2015 Hackaday Prize entries which are using parts manufactured by Atmel, Freescale, Microchip, and Texas Instruments. All four are sponsors of this years initiative to solve problems faced by a large number of people.

list-banners-in-project-sidebarThe three-week mini-contest will come to a close on Monday and the Hackaday crew will begin to assign 200 prizes to the entries; 50 for each of the curated lists. Prizes include Mooshimeters, DS Logic Analyzers, Stickvise, Bluefruit BLE Sniffers, Cordwood Puzzle kits, and TV-B-Gone kits.

There are two things you need to do in order to be considered for this contest: make sure your project has been submitted as an official 2015 Hackaday Prize entry, and that the project is listed on the list associated with the parts manufacturer you’ve used in your project design. The easiest way to get on the list is to leave a comment on the .Stack thread.

You can check to ensure you’ve met these two requirements by viewing your project page and looking in the left sidebar. The square thumbnail photo at the top will have a black flag with the astronaut logo at “2015”. Below that you will see banners for the lists on which your project is included. You should be on at least one of the following lists: 2015 THP: Atmel Parts, 2015 THP: Freescale Parts, 2015 THP: Microchip Parts, 2015 THP: Texas Instruments Parts.

Don’t miss out on this stage of the contest. You stand a really great chance of being selected as a winner! And for those already on the lists we can offer some advice for rising to the top. Polish up your documentation. Tell us how the parts are used in your design, where you are in the prototyping process, and list the tasks you have yet to accomplish. Share the whole story of what you’re working on. Good luck!

Those looking to discover and be inspired by the existing entries should give Astronaut or Not a try. The side-by-side comparisons are a great way to browse, and could also win you some prizes.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

BeagleBones And Teensies Become KVMs

June 25, 2015 by 41 Comments

[pmf], like most of us, I’m sure, spends most of his days on a computer. He also has a smartphone he keeps at his side, but over the years he’s grown accustomed to typing on a real keyboard. He came up with the idea of making a USB switch that would allow his keyboard to control either his computer or his phone, and hit upon a really neat way of doing it. He’s using a BeagleBone Black and a Teensy to switch his keyboard between his computer and his phone with just a press of a button.

This homebrew smart KVM uses a BeagleBone Black for most of the heavy lifting. A keyboard and mouse is connected to the USB host port of the BeagleBone, and the main computer is connected to the device port. The BeagleBone is set up to pass through the USB keyboard and mouse to the computer with the help of what Linux calls a ‘gadget’ driver. This required an update to the Linux 4.0 kernel.

With the BeagleBone capable of being a USB pass through device, the next challenge was sending keypresses to another USB device. For this, a Teensy 2.0 was connected to the UART of the BeagleBone. According to [pmf], this is one of the few examples of the Teensy serving as a composite USB device – sending both keyboard and mouse info.

There are a few neat features for [pmf]’s build: the keyboard and mouse don’t disconnect when switching, and thanks to a slight modification of the USB OTG adapter, this will also charge a phone as well as allow for the use of a keyboard. Because the BeagleBone Black has more than one UART this build can also switch keyboards and mice between more than two computers. For those of us who invest heavily in keyboards, it’s a godsend.

Caption CERN Contest – I’ve Got My Eye On You

June 25, 2015 by 22 Comments

As week 20 of the Caption CERN Contest comes to a close, we can say that this scientist may have been a bit sleepy from all his hard work, but all our caption writers certainly were not! Thank’s to everyone who stayed up late and entered.

Whiteboards and their associated dry erase markers have become a staple in every office, school, and home. It’s getting hard to remember that everyone used blackboards not so long ago. High energy physics,and flammable dust probably are not a good mix. Let’s hope our sleeping scientist cleaned the erasers outdoors after he woke up.

The Funnies:

  • “A weekend at CERNies”- [Rob]
  • “After bitten by the Schrödinger’s cat, Doc Brown acquired the most useful power of a cat – being able to sleep anywhere, any time.” – [K.C. Lee]
  • “CERN’s infamous “wind tunnel” experiments” – [Rollyn01]

This week’s winner is [MechaTweak] with “During the great blackboard shortage of ’66, scientists went to great lengths to protect their unfinished work from premature erasure”. [MechaTweak] describes himself as a “Mild mannered design engineer by day, father of four crazy kids by night.” With all those kids running around, he’s going to enjoy having a Stickvise from The Hackaday Store. You can bet he’ll be using the Stickvise to solder up some boards for Shower water saver, his entry in the 2015 Hackaday Prize.

Week 21

cern-21-smThese two CERN scientists are looking through some kind of optical apparatus. There is a plano-convex lens mounted on an adjustable arm. The scientists appear to be looking through a window while adjusting some controls.

Is this some kind of physics experiment? Could it be research into psychomotor acuity? Maybe the dark-haired scientist is just getting her yearly CERN eye exam? You tell us!

This week’s prize is the ever poular Teensy 3.1 from The Hackaday Store.  Add your humorous caption as a comment to this project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the contest log, not on the contest itself.

As always, if you actually have information about the image or the people in it, let CERN know on theoriginal image discussion page.

Good Luck!

Talking Big Changes At SparkFun With Nathan Seidle

June 25, 2015 by 31 Comments

SparkFun, you know them, you love them. They list themselves as “an online retail store” but I remember them for well-designed breakout boards, free-day, videos about building electronics, and the Autonomous Vehicle Competition. This week SparkFun turned my head for a different reason with the announcement that [Nathan Siedle], founder and CEO will be stepping down. He’s not leaving, but returning to the Engineering department while someone else takes the reigns. I spoke with him yesterday about what this means for him, the company, and what SparkFun has planned for the future.

Stepping Down Without Saying Goodbye

[Nate] founded Sparkfun in 2003 while still working on his Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Colorado Boulder. He cites wanting to return to his engineering roots as the reason for his title shift, which won’t happen for at least 9 or 10 months. It’s the concept of leaving the CEO position without leaving the company that raises many questions in my mind.

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Embed With Elliot: I2C Bus Scanning

June 25, 2015 by 15 Comments

A lot of great ICs use I2C to communicate, but debugging a non-working I2C setup can be opaque, especially if you’re just getting started with the protocol/bus. An I2C bus scanner can be a helpful first step in debugging an I2C system. Are all the devices that I think should be present actually there and responding? Do they all work at the bus speed that I’m trying to run? If you’ve got an Arduino or Bus Pirate sitting around, you’re only seconds away from scanning your I2C bus, and answering these questions.

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Blinking LEDs For A Timeless Fountain

June 25, 2015 by 15 Comments

We’ve seen a few of these builds before, but the build quality of [Mathieu]’s timeless fountain makes for an excellent display of mechanical skill showing off the wonder of blinking LEDs.

This timeless fountain is something we’ve seen before, and the idea is actually pretty simple: put some LEDs next to a dripping faucet, time the LEDs to the rate at which the droplets fall, and you get a stroboscopic effect that makes tiny droplets of water appear to hover in mid-air.

Like earlier builds, [Mathieu] is using UV LEDs and is coloring the water with fluorescein, a UV reactive dye. The LEDs are mounted on two towers, and at the top of the tower is a tiny, low power IR laser and photodiode. With the right code running on an ATxmega16A4, the lights blink in time with the falling water droplet, making it appear the drop is hovering in midair.

Blinking LEDs very, very quickly isn’t exactly hard. The biggest problem with this build was the mechanics. The frame of the machine was machined out of polycarbonate sheets and went together very easily. Getting a consistent drip from a faucet was a bit harder. It took about fifteen tries to get the design of the faucet nozzle right, but [Mathieu] eventually settled on a small output hole (about 0.5 mm) and a sharp nozzle angle of about 70 degrees.

[Mathieu] created a video of a few hovering balls of fluorescence. You can check that out below. It’s assuredly a lot cooler in real life without frame rate issues.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Ultimate Circuitbending

June 24, 2015 by 13 Comments

Circuit bending is the process of taking a small electronic toy or musical instrument, soldering wires to pads on the PCB, and hoping the sounds it produces will be cool. It’s not a science by any means, and any good, weird sounds you’ll get out of a Speak ‘N Spell or old MIDI keyboard are made entirely by accident or hours and hours of experimentation.

[Alpha Charlie]’s entry for the Hackaday Prize is the most technologically advanced circuit bending you’ll ever see. He’s using an old digital beat box, the Roland TR-626, with computer-controlled wires between random pads on the PCB.

Until now, you could tell how technically adept a circuit bender was simply by how many switches were on the circuit-bent instrument. [Alpha Charlie] doesn’t need switches. Instead, he’s using a few crosspoint switch ICs to connect different pins and pads on the TR-626’s PCB with an Arduino. All of this is controlled by a touchscreen display, and experimenting with the circuit is as simple as pushing a few buttons. Each ‘bend’ is computer controlled, and can be saved and recalled at will.

Of course, circuit bending doesn’t do anyone any good if it sounds like crap. [Alpha Charlie] doesn’t have to worry there. In the video below, he’s getting some very unique sounds that sound like a choir of angels to dorks like myself that listen to Nintendo music.

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