Supercon On The Rise: More Amazing Talks Revealed

October 3, 2018 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

The drum beat of the Hackaday Superconference grows louder. Are you ready for it? We’re spending the week revealing the talks and on our third day we’re barely half-way through. Check out the incredible speakers who will be at Supercon to share tales of hardware creation.

This is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops as final confirmations come in. Supercon will sell out so grab your ticket now before it’s too late.

Jeroen Domburg
Magic Paintbrush: Everyone Can Paint with Printer Cartridges

Always wanted to paint like Bob Ross, but have the artistic skills of a wet cardboard box? Perhaps you can be helped by a printer cartridge and some electronics.

Bryce Salmi
3D Printing An Orbital Class Rocket

Challenging traditional manufacturing techniques used to build orbital class rockets. Here’s how Relativity Space 3D prints rocket engines (104 tests already) and avionics.

Sarah Petkus
Sensing and Indicating a Sensual State

“SHE BON” can sense and indicate the wearer’s level of arousal/excitement. It explores ways in which we can use our bio-data to communicate aspects of our being that would otherwise go unnoticed, as well as how technology can help us add another layer of texture to how we express our individuality.

Zach Fredin
Novelty Soldering

Novel soldering techniques for building art, prototypes, and short hand-built production runs using techniques like SMT cordwood, carved FR4, and small scale free-air.

Kelly Ziqi Peng
Diffractive Optics for Augmented Reality

Learn to design optical elements like diffractive waveguides (Magic Leap, Hololens, Akonia, Digilens), and electronically controlled elements that can changing depth in real-time. More importantly, learn how to make your own with accessible machine shop equipment.

Brett Smith
Why Do It the Hard Way?

Microcontrollers have lots of built-in functionality that goes unused because long datasheets can be overwhelming. That ends now.

Chris Gammell
Improve Your Circuit Toolbox

Simple designs will save your next product if you know which circuits to piece together. Utility circuits practical for everyday electronics.

Arsenijs Picugins
DIY Linux Portables

From powering it efficiently, to software constraints, picking the right hardware, and connecting it all in a fail-safe way, know the pitfalls of designing a Linux-powered portable.

We Want You at Supercon!

The Hackaday Superconference is a can’t-miss event for hardware hackers everywhere. Join in on three amazing days of talks and workshops focusing on hardware creation. This is your community of hardware hackers who congregate to hack on the official hardware badge and on a slew of other projects that show up for the fun. Get your ticket right away!

Eight More Speakers You’ll See At Supercon

October 2, 2018 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

Level-up your hardware chops at the Hackaday Superconference. We’re delighted to share more of the amazing speakers who are headed to Pasadena in just a few weeks. Scroll down for eight incredible talks that will inform, inspire, and excite the engineering muse inside of you.

Kitty Yeung
Tech-Fashion Designs and the Wearables Industry

Driven by creative designs, the wearables industry has tremendous opportunities but also faces significant challenges in scaling and scientific research. Building programmable garments and what the future will bring.

Erika Earl
How to Stay Grounded When You Have Zero Potential

Why “ground” is critical and important for developing electronic hardware and how to approach a grounding scheme in your designs.

David Prutchi
DIY Ultraviolet Photography

Modifying cameras, building lenses, and selecting filters to see like the bees. Exploring ultraviolet spectrum for the artistic and technically-minded.

Brad Luyster
Communication, Architecture, and Building Complex Systems for SPAAACE

Building the first dual-rotor modular centrifuge to fly on the ISS. Ingenuity and standing on the shoulders of giants to build complex systems.

Estefannie
Daft Punk Is Playing In My Helmet

A whirlwind tour of tools and techniques for fabricating amazing reproductions in the home workshop; electronics, vacuum forming, 3D printing, and sooooo much sanding bring a faithful Daft Punk Helmet clone to life.

Scott Swaaley
Lessons Learned in Designing High Power Line Voltage Circuits

Practical tips for designing with high-power line voltage circuits to make AC design and tinkering safe, effective, and just as cheap as DC.

Alex Hornstein
Hacking the Lightfield

Taking holographic photos and video with regular cameras and panache. Custom photo rigs and the crazy problem of making a lightfield video rig.

Ted Yapo
Dealing with a Cheap Spectrum Analyzer

A surprisingly simple circuit, some interesting math,
and an article in the inaugural edition of the Hackaday Journal of What You Don’t Know.

We Want You at Supercon!

Just A Taste Of The Talks At Supercon

October 1, 2018 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

The Hackaday Superconference is taking on a life of its own. Speaker selection is done and invitations are on the way out. Below is a taste of the confirmed talks in store for you this November in Pasadena.

Ben Krasnow
Depositing copper circuitry and optical displays onto 3D-printed parts

Producing printed circuits on plastic mechanical parts can be accomplished with a standard laser cutter and a handful of chemicals available from online retailers.

Ruth Grace Wong
Firmware From the Firehose

Practical tips for people who don’t know anything about firmware for deciphering the code and tracking down bugs.

Amie Danielle Dansby
Swords and High Voltage: Creating 3D Printing Designs for Electronics Props

You can easily bring digital video game assets to the human world with 3D printing, but what about modifying files, or adding electronics?

Sam Zeloof
Home Chip Fab: Silicon IC Fabrication in the Garage

IC and semiconductor fabrication techniques, tools, and processes that allow for mid 1970’s era device fabrication on a small budget in the home workshop.

Zach Archer
Live Coding a 40-Foot LED Sign

This is the story of how the massive 500-watt LED Toorcamp sign was designed, developed, and constructed inside of 3 weeks.

Leigh Johnson
Portable Deep Object Detection

The fundamentals of deep learning modules and object detection using Tensorflow and Keras on a Raspberry Pi.

We Want You at Supercon!

Maker Faire NY: Getting Physical With Minecraft

September 30, 2018 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

If you’ve been hanging around Hackaday for a while, you’ve likely seen a few attempts to bridge the real world with the voxel paradise that is Minecraft. In the past, projects have connected physical switches to virtual devices in the game, or took chunks of the game’s blocky landscape and turned it into a 3D printable file. These were interesting enough endeavors, but fairly limited in their scope. They assumed you had an existing world or creation in Minecraft that you wanted to fiddle with in a more natural way, but didn’t do much for actually playing the game.

But “Physical Minecraft” presented at the 2018 World Maker Faire in New York, offered a unique way to bring players a bit closer to their cubic counterparts. Created by [Manav Gagvani], the physical interface has players use a motion detecting wand in combination with an array of miniature Minecraft blocks to build in the virtual world.

The wand even detects various gestures to activate an array of “Spells”, which are effectively automated build commands. For example, pushing the wand forward while making a twisting motion will automatically create a tunnel out of the selected block type. This not only makes building faster in the game, but encourages the player to experiment with different gestures and motions.

A Raspberry Pi 3 runs the game and uses its onboard Bluetooth to communicate with the 3D printed wand, which itself contains a MetaWear wearable sensor board. By capturing his own moves and graphing the resulting data with a spreadsheet, [Manav] was able to boil down complex gestures into an array of integer values which he plugged into his Python code. When the script sees a sequence of values it recognizes, the relevant commands get passed onto the running instance of Minecraft.

You might assume the wand itself is detecting which material block is attached to it, but that bit of magic is actually happening in the base the blocks sit on. Rather than trying to uniquely identify each block with RFID or something along those lines, [Manav] embedded an array of reed switches into the base which are triggered by the presence of the magnet hidden in each block.

These switches are connected directly to the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi, and make for a very easy way to determine which block has been removed and installed on the tip of the wand. Things can get tricky if the blocks are put into the wrong positions or more than one block are removed at a time, but for the most part it’s an effective way to tackle the problem without making everything overly complex.

We’ve often talked about how kid’s love for Minecraft has been used as a way of getting them involved in STEM projects, and “Physical Minecraft” was a perfect example. There was a line of young players waiting for their turn on the wand, even though what they were effectively “playing” was the digital equivalent of tossing rocks. [Manav] would hand them the wand and explain the general idea behind his interface, reminding them that the blocks in the game are large and heavy: it’s not enough to just lower the wand, it needs to be flicked with the speed and force appropriate for the hefty objects their digital avatar is moving around.

Getting kids excited about hardware, software, and performing physically demanding activities at the same time is an exceptionally difficult task. Projects like “Physical Minecraft” show there can be more to playing games than mindless button mashing, and represent something of a paradigm shift for how we handle STEM education in an increasingly digital world.

Maker Faire NY: Cocoa Press Chocolate Printer

September 29, 2018 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

If you haven’t figured it out by now, the hype over desktop filament printers is pretty much over. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t new avenues worth exploring that use the basic FDM printer technology. If anything, the low cost and high availability of 3D printer parts and kits makes it easier to branch off into new territory. For example, experimenting with other materials which lend themselves to being “printed” layer by layer like a thermoplastic. Materials such as cement, clay, or even chocolate.

[Ellie Weinstein] brought her Cocoa Press printer to the 2018 World Maker Faire in New York, and we have to say it’s a pretty impressive piece of engineering. Hackers have been known to throw a syringe-based paste extruder onto a regular 3D printer and try their luck with squirting out an edible object from time to time, but the Cocoa Press is truly a purpose built culinary machine.

Outwardly it features the plywood case and vaguely Makerbot-looking layout that we’ve seen plenty of times before in DIY 3D printers. It even uses the same RAMPS controller running Marlin that powers your average homebrew printer. But beyond these surface similarities, the Cocoa Press has a number of purpose-built components that make it uniquely qualified to handle the challenges of building with molten chocolate.

For one, beyond the nozzle and the walls of the syringe, nothing physically comes into contact with the chocolate to be printed; keeping the mess and chance of contamination to a minimum. The leadscrew actuated plunger used in common paste extruders is removed in favor of a purely air powered system: a compressor pumps up a small reservoir tank with filtered and dried air, and the Marlin commands which would normally rotate the extruder stepper motor are intercepted and used to trigger an air valve. These bursts of pressurized air fill the empty area above the chocolate and force it out of the 0.8 mm nozzle.

In a normal 3D printer, the “melt zone” is tiny, which allows for the heater itself to be relatively small. But that won’t work here; the entire chocolate load has to be liquefied. It’s a bit like having to keep a whole roll of PLA melted during the entire print. Accordingly, the heater on the Cocoa Press is huge, and [Ellie] even had a couple spare heaters loaded up with chocolate syringes next to the printer to keep them warm until they’re ready to get loaded up.

Of course, getting your working material hot in a 3D printer is only half the battle, you also need to rapidly cool it back down if you want it to hold its shape as new layers are placed on top of it. A normal 3D printer can generally get away with a little fan hanging next to the nozzle, but [Ellie] found the chocolate needed a bit of a chill to really solidify.

So she came up with a cooling system that makes use of water-cooled Peltier units. The cold side of the Peltier array is inside a box through which air is forced, which makes its way through an insulated hose up to the extruder, where a centrifugal fan and 3D printed manifold direct it towards the just-printed chocolate. She reports this system works well under normal circumstances, but unusually high ambient temperatures can overwhelm the cooler.

While “the man” prevented show goers from actually eating any of the machine’s creations (to give out food in New York, you must first register with the city), they certainly looked fantastic, and we’re interested in seeing where the project goes from here.

Maker Faire NY: Developing For The Final Frontier

September 28, 2018 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

The cost of getting a piece of hardware into space is now cheaper than ever, thanks in no small part to the rapid progress that’s been made by commercial launch providers such as SpaceX. In the near future, as more low-cost providers come online, it should get even cheaper. Within a few years, we could be seeing per kilogram costs to low Earth orbit that are 1/10th what they were on the Space Shuttle. To be sure, this is a very exciting time to be in the business of designing and building spacecraft.

But no matter how cheap launches to orbit get, it’ll never be cheaper than simply emailing some source code up to the International Space Station (ISS). With that in mind, there are several programs which offer students the closest thing to booking passage on a Falcon 9: the chance to develop software that can be run aboard the Station. At the 2018 World Maker Faire in New York we got a chance to get up close and personal with functional replicas of the hardware that’s already on orbit, known in space parlance as “ground units”.

On display was a replica of one of the SPHERES free-flying satellites that have been on the ISS since 2006. They are roughly the size of a soccer ball and utilize CO2 thrusters and ultrasonic sensors to move around inside of the Station. Designed by MIT as a way to study spaceflight techniques such as docking and navigation without the expense and risk of using a full scale vehicle, the SPHERES satellites are perhaps the only operational spacecraft to have never been exposed to space itself.

Expansion port for additional hardware.

MIT now runs the annual “Zero Robotics” competition, which tasks middle and high school students with solving a specific challenge using the SPHERES satellites. Competitors run their programs on simulators until the finals, which are conducted using the real hardware on the ISS and live-streamed to schools.

We also saw hardware from “Quest for Space”, which is a company offering curricula for elementary through high school students which include not only the ground units, but training and technical support when and if the school decides to send the code to the matching hardware on the Station. For an additional fee, they will even work with the school to design, launch, and recover a custom hardware experiment.

Their standard hardware is based on off-the-shelf platforms such as Arduino and LEGO Mindstorms EV3, which makes for an easy transition for school’s existing STEM programs. The current hardware in orbit is setup for experiments dealing with heat absorption, humidity, and convection, but “Quest for Space” notes they change out the hardware every two years to provide different experiment opportunities.

Projects such as these, along with previous efforts such as the ArduSat, offer a unique way for the masses to connect with space in ways which would have been unthinkable before the turn of the 21st century. It’s still up for debate if anyone reading Hackaday in 2018 will personally get a chance to slip Earth’s surly bonds, but at least you can rest easy knowing your software bugs can hitch a ride off the planet.

Kipp Bradford On The Importance Of Boring Projects, Medical Tech, And Sci Fi Novels

September 27, 2018 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

If someone suggests you spend time working on boring projects, would you take that advice? In this case, I think Kipp Bradford is spot on. We sat down together at the Hackaday Superconference last fall and talked about medical device engineering, the infrastructure in your home, applying Sci-Fi to engineering, and yes, we spoke about boring projects.

Kipp presented a talk on Devices for Controlling Climates at Supercon last year. It could be argued that this is one of those boring topics, but very quickly you begin to grasp how vitally important it is. Think about how many buildings on your street have a heating or cooling system in them. Now zoom out in your mind several times to neighborhood, city, state, and country level. How much impact will a small leap forward have when multiplied up?

The next Hackaday Superconference is just around the corner. Before you join us below for the interview with Kipp, make sure you grab your 2018 Hackaday Superconference ticket to be there for great talks like Kipp’s!

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