2015 Hackaday Prize: Build Something That Matters

March 10, 2015 by Mike Szczys 86 Comments

Last year we challenged you to build the next generation of connected devices. Six months later, the best teams and projects from around the world battled for the greatest prize of all: the respect of their peers and a trip to space. This year, we’re issuing a call to hackers, engineers, makers and startups from all over the world, to focus their creative efforts on nothing less than solving serious issues facing humanity.

Fix the World

We’ll all be facing a lot of problems in the next few decades, whether they’re from rising costs and consumption of oil, droughts, access to food, demographic shifts in populations, or increasing health care costs. These problems need to be dealt with, and there’s no better time than right now to start working on solutions.

What do we want from you? We want you to identify the greatest problems faced by humanity in the next few years and come up with a solution. This can be anything from better, lower-cost solar power components, inexpensive ultrasound machines, better ways to store drugs, more advanced ways of measuring farm production, or cheaper, more sustainable smartphones to bridge the digital divide. The world is full of problems, but if there’s one thing hackers have taught us, it’s that there are more than enough people willing to find solutions.

Prizes

If worldwide notoriety isn’t enough personal incentive, Hackaday is back with a huge slate of prizes for those devices that best exemplify solutions to problems that matter.

The Grand Prize is a trip to space on a carrier of your choice or $196,883 (a Monster Group number). Other top prizes include a 90-Watt laser cutter, a builder kit (pcb mill, 3d printer, cnc router, bench lathe), a tour of CERN in Geneva, and a tour of Shenzhen in China.

New this year is the Best Product award. Go the extra mile and show a production-ready device (in addition to supplying three beta test units for judging) and you can score $100,000! The entry is of course still eligible to compete for the Grand prize and other top prizes.

We’re able to pull this off once again thanks to the vision of Supplyframe who managed to unite giants of the electronics industry as sponsors of the 2015 Hackaday Prize. Atmel, Freescale, Microchip, Mouser, and Texas Instruments have all signed on in supporting this mission.

Individuals, Colleges, Hackerspaces, and Startups

If you just don’t want to go-it alone, get your team excited. After all, it was a team that won the Grand Prize last year. SatNOGS transformed the cash-option of $196,418 into a jumpstart for a foundation to carry the project forward. Get the boss on board by touting the notoriety your company will get from showing off their engineering prowess. Or help build your resume by herding your college buddies into some brainstorming session. And the Best Product prize is perfect for Startups who want to show off their builds.

Judges

Joining the Judging Panels this year are Akiba (Freaklabs), Pete Dokter (Sparkfun), Heather Knight (Marilyn MonRobot), Ben Krasnow (GoogleX & host of Applied Science on YouTube), Lenore Edman & Windell Oskay (Evil Mad Scientist Labs), and Micah Scott (Scanlime).

Our returning judges are Limor “Ladyada” Fried (Adafruit), Jack Ganssle (Ganssle Group, & The Embedded Muse), Dave Jones (EEVBlog), Ian Lesnet (Dangerous Prototypes), and Elecia White (Logical Elegance).

You can read all of the judge bios and find social media and webpage links for them on our Judges page. We are indebted to these industry experts for sharing their time and talent to make the Hackaday Prize possible.

Tell Everyone

We don’t ask often: please tell everyone you know about the 2015 Hackaday Prize! Social media share icons are just above the image at the top of this post. Submit this page or the prize page (http://hackaday.io/prize) to all your favorite sites. No hacker should get through this day without hearing about #HackadayPrize and we can’t reach total media saturation without your help. Thanks in advance!

GET STARTED NOW

Don’t wait, put up an idea right now and tag it with “2015HackadayPrize”. We’re sending out swag for early ideas that help get the ball rolling. And as you flesh out your plans you could score prizes to help build the prototype like PCBs, 3D prints, laser cutting, etc. Make it to the finals and you’ll be looking at the five top prizes we mentioned earlier. A simple idea can change the world.

Open Source, 3D Printed Rocket Engines

March 10, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

A liquid-fuel rocket engine is just about the hardest thing anyone could ever build. There are considerations for thermodynamics, machining, electronics, material science, and software just to have something that won’t blow up on the test rig. The data to build a liquid engine isn’t easy to find, either: a lot of helpful info is classified or locked up in one of [Elon]’s file cabinets.

[Graham] over at Fubar Labs in New Jersey is working to change this. He’s developing an open source, 3D printed, liquid fuel rocket engine. Right now, it’s not going to fly, but that’s not the point: the first step towards developing a successful rocket is to develop a successful engine, and [Graham] is hard at work making this a reality.

This engine, powered by gaseous oxygen and ethanol, is designed for 3D printing. It’s actually a great use of the technology; SpaceX and NASA have produced 3D printed engine parts using DMLS printers, but [Graham] is using the much cheaper (and available at Shapeways) metal SLS printers to produce his engine. Rocket engines are extremely hard to manufacture with traditional methods, making 3D printing the perfect process for building a rocket engine.

So far, [Graham] has printed the engine, injector, and igniter, all for the purpose of shoving oxygen and ethanol into the combustion chamber, lighting it, and marveling at the Mach cones. You can see a video of that below, but there’s also a few incredible resources on GitHub, the Fubar Labs wiki, and a bunch of pictures and test results here.

Continue reading “Open Source, 3D Printed Rocket Engines” →

Fail Of The Week : Measuring DC Current Has To Be Easy, Right?

March 10, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 129 Comments

[DainBramage] needed a DC ammeter to check how long his amateur radio station would be able to stay powered on battery backup power. The one’s he already had on hand were a Clamp Meter, which could only measure AC, and another one that measured just a few milliamps. Since he didn’t have one which could measure up to 25A, he decided to build his own DIY DC Ammeter with parts scavenged from his parts bin. Measuring DC current is not too difficult. Pass the current to be measured through a precision resistor, and measure the voltage drop across it using a sensitive voltmeter.

I = V/R

So far, so good. If it’s late at night and you’ve had a lot of coffee, busy building your DC ammeter, things could head south soon. [DainBramage]’s first step was to build a suitable Shunt. He had a lot of old, 1Ω, 10W resistors lying around. He made a series-parallel combination using nine of them to create a hefty 1Ω, 90W shunt (well, 0.999999999 Ohms if you want to be picky). This gave him a nice 1 Volt per Amp ratio, making it easy to do his measurements.

Next step was to hook up the shunt to a suitable voltmeter. Luckily, he had a Micronta voltmeter lying around, ripped out from a Radio Shack product. Since he didn’t have the voltmeter data, he hooked up a 10k resistor across the meter inputs, and slowly increased the voltage applied to the meter. At 260mV, the needle touched full-scale and the voltage across the inputs of the voltmeter was 33mV. [DainBramage] then describes the math he used to calculate the resistors he would need to have a 10A and a 25A measurement range. He misses his chance to catch the fail. His project log then describes some of the boring details of putting all this together inside a case and wrapping it all up.

A while later, his updates crop up. First thing he probably realized was that he needed more accurate readings, so he added connectors to allow attaching a more accurate voltmeter instead of the analog Micronta. At this point, he still didn’t catch the fail although it’s staring him straight in the face.

His head scratching moment comes when he tries to connect his home made ammeter in series with the 12V DC power supply to his amateur radio station. Every time he tries to transmit (which is when the Radio is drawing some current), the Radio shuts off. If you still haven’t spotted the fail, try figuring out how much voltage gets dropped across the 1Ω shunt resistor when the current is 1A and when it is 5A or more.

Dirt Cheap Plywood Bike Holder

March 9, 2015 by James Hobson 24 Comments

Commuting to work on a bicycle saves tons of dough, but sometimes storing your bike isn’t that easy. [Lewis] has been playing around with a few prototype bike stands and seems to have found the ticket, and it’s way cheaper –maybe even free, if you have the supplies. All you need is a single strip of plywood, and some wood screws, or wood glue! Well, that and a woodworking clamp.

The stand is designed to clamp onto 4×4 posts, or even a 2×4 stud. It’s great for storing bikes along your fence! It’s built purposefully snug, which allows you to add a small clamping force to make for a very rigid stand, suitable for even old steel-framed clunkers. Hooray for friction! Oh and if you’re happy with the location you could always get rid of the clamp and screw it in place instead.

Simple? Yup. Effective? Totally.

Oh and if it’s still crummy old winter where you live, why not beat the cold weather blues with an indoor bicycle roller?

DIY Turntable In A Beautiful Wooden Case

March 9, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 44 Comments

Old timers who have been around for the last 40 years or so have been fortunate enough to have lived through several audio reproduction technologies – Vinyl Records, Cassette Tapes, Laser Disks and CD-ROM’s. Most will also swear that analog, especially vinyl records, sounded the best. And when it comes to amplifiers, nothing comes close to the richness of vacuum tubes.

[MCumic10] had a long time desire to build his own HiFi turntable encased in a nice wooden housing, with the electronics embedded inside. When he chanced upon an old and battered turntable whose mechanism barely worked, he decided to plunge right in to his pet project. The result, at the end of many long months of painstaking work, is a stunning, beautiful, wooden turntable. Especially since in his own words, “I didn’t have any experience in electronics or woodworking before I started this project so it took me many long months in learning analyzing and frustration. I burned some electronic parts few times and made them from the beginning.”

The build is a mix of some off the shelf modules that he bought off eBay and other sources, and some other modules that he built himself. He’s divided the build in to several bite sized chunks to make it easy to follow. The interesting parts are the 6N3 Valve Preamplifier (the main amplifier is solid-state), the motorized Remote Volume Control Input kit, and the Nixie tube channel indicator. And of course the layered, plywood casing. By his own reckoning, this was the toughest and longest part of his build, requiring a fairly large amount of elbow grease to get it finished. He hasn’t yet measured how much it tips the scales, but it sure looks very heavy. The end result is quite nice, especially for someone who didn’t have much experience building such stuff.

Thanks [irish] for sending in this tip.

3D Printer Plays Classic MIDIs

March 9, 2015 by James Hobson 7 Comments

For whatever reason we all seem to have this obsession with making things other than speakers into speakers. Hard drives, floppy drives, CD drives, fax machines, inanimate objects, dot-matrix printers, and now — well let’s stay with times — a 3D printer!

[Andrew Sink] wanted to give stepper music a try (is that seriously a genre now? (Yes, we’re calling it Stepstep – Ed.)), so he found HomeConstructor.de, which happens to have an awesome MIDI to G-CODE converter specifically designed for making those steppers hum. His instrument of choice is an original Printrbot but unfortunately it did require a few hours of tweaking the G-Code to get it to work just right.

Feast your ears on this beautiful rendition of the Jurassic Park Theme song below.

Continue reading “3D Printer Plays Classic MIDIs” →

Execution Tracing On Cortex-M3 Microcontrollers

March 9, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

The higher-power ARM micros have a bunch of debugging tools for program and data tracing, as you would expect. This feature – CoreSight Trace Macrocells – is also found in the lowly ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller. The Cortex M3 is finding its way into a lot of projects, and [Petteri] wondered why these debugging tools weren’t seen often enough. Was it a question of a lack of tools, or a lack of documentation? It doesn’t really matter now, as he figured out how to do it with a cheap logic analyzer and some decoders for the trace signals.

There are two trace blocks in most of the Cortex M3 chips: the ITM and ETM. The Instrumentation Trace Macrocell is the higher level of the two, tracing watchpoints, and interrupts. The Embedded Trace Macrocell shows every single instruction executed in the CPU. Both of these can be read with a cheap FX2-based logic analyzer that can be found through the usual outlets for about $10. The problem then becomes software, for which [Petteri] wrote a few decoders.

To demonstrate the debugging capability, [Petteri] tracked down a bug in his CNC controller of choice, the Smoothieboard. Every once in a great while, the machine would miss a step. With the help of the trace tool and by underclocking the micro, [Petteri] found the bug in the form of a rounding error of the extruder. Now that he knows what the bug is, he can figure out a way to fix it. He hasn’t figured that out yet. Still, knowing what to fix is invaluable and something that couldn’t be found with the normal set of tools.