2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Picking The Best Of The Best

October 13, 2022 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

Given how many incredible builds we’ve covered over the last couple of years, we knew that an official Cyberdeck Contest would certainly receive some impressive entries. But never in our wildest dreams could we have predicted that more than 100 decks would end up crossing the finish line, or that of them, the vast majority would be never-before-seen designs. In fact, the response to this contest was so overwhelming that the judging process took far longer than we originally anticipated.

Ultimately, we decided that there were simply too many phenomenal builds entered into the contest to award $150 Digikey spending sprees to just three of them. So as an added bonus, we’ve rustled up some $50 Tindie gift certificates that will go to the four special category honorable mentions.

With that, let’s take a look at the cyberdecks that took top honors as decided by our panel of judges.

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An acrylic map of the state of Lagos. Each region is lit a different color by LEDs shining on the acrylic panels. The colors coorespond to the air quality index key which is lit in cooresponding colors to the value.

Hackaday Prize 2022: This Interactive Air Quality Map Makes The Invisible Visible

October 11, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 2 Comments

Air quality can have a big impact on your health, but it isn’t always something you can see. [Ahmed Oyenuga] wanted to make air quality something more tangible and developed an Interactive Air Quality Map.

Using addressable LEDs and acrylic panels, [Oyenuga]’s map lights up different regions of his state (Lagos) with colors that correspond to qualitative values of the air quality readings. The color key on the edge of the map becomes a readout when you touch a specific region of the map.

Most of the map’s functionality is handled by an Arduino WiFi 1010, but the capacitive touch is running on a custom board [Oyenuga] designed with an ATSAMD21J17. [Oyenuga] is getting air quality data via a DesignSpark Environmental Sensor Development Kit (ESDK) and then uses reverse geocoding to take the GPS data and turn it into a location the map will understand.

If you’re interested in different options for monitoring air quality that could feed into a map like this, why don’t you check out this LoRa Air Quality Monitor or even a Mobile Air Quality Monitor.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2022: This Interactive Air Quality Map Makes The Invisible Visible” →

Custom Macro Pad Helps Deliver Winning Formulas

October 5, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 18 Comments

For those of us with science and engineering backgrounds, opening the character map or memorizing the Unicode shortcuts for various symbols is a tedious but familiar part of writing reports or presentations. [Magne Lauritzen] thought there had to be a better way and developed the Mathboard.

With more than 80 “of the most commonly used mathematical operators” and the entire Greek alphabet, the Mathboard could prove very useful to a wide number of disciplines. Hardware-wise, the Mathboard is a 4×4 macro pad, but the special sauce is in the key set implementation firmware. While the most straightforward approach would be to pick 16 or 32 symbols for the board, [Magne] felt that didn’t do the wide range of Unicode symbols justice. By implementing a system of columns and layers, he was able to get 6+ symbols per key, giving a much greater breadth of symbols than just 16 keys and a shift layer. The symbols with a dot next to them unlock variants of that symbol by double or triple-tapping the key. For instance, a lower or capital case of a Greek letter.

The Mathboard currently works in Microsoft Office’s equation editor and as a plain-text Unicode board. [Magne] is currently working on LaTeX support and hopes to add Open Office support in the future. This device was an honorable mention in our Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest. If you’d like to see another interesting math-themed board, check out the one on the MCM/70 from 1974.

2022 Hackaday Prize: Congratulations To The Winners Of The Climate-Resilient Communities Challenge

September 28, 2022 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

Holy humanitarian hacking, Batman! We asked you to come up with your best climate-forward ideas, and you knocked it out of the ionosphere! Once again, the judges had a hard time narrowing down the field to just ten winners, but they ultimately pulled it off — and here are the prize-winning projects without much further ado.

In the Climate-Resilient Challenge, we asked you to design devices that help build communities’ resilience to severe weather and the increasing frequency of natural disasters due to climate change, and/or devices that collect environmental data that serves as hard evidence in the fight for changes in local infrastructure. While several people focused on air quality, which is something we tend to think of as a human need, plenty others thought of the flora and fauna with which we share this planet.

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2022 Cyberdeck Contest: RPG Character Tracker

September 14, 2022 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

While it would be a mistake to think there are any firm rules for what constitutes a cyberdeck, we can at least identify some common traits that would seem to give us a baseline description. For example, most deck builds we’ve seen have been fully-functional Linux computers, more often than not powered by some Raspberry Pi variant. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room in the community for less computational powerful decks, or builds that are so bespoke that they can only perform a few selected tasks.

As a perfect example, take a look at the RPG Character Tracker from [Melissa Matos]. You won’t find a Raspberry Pi here, nor a full operating system. Instead, we’ve got a M5Stack Core2 and an I2C CardKB Mini Keyboard wrapped up in a foldable frame made from Erector Set pieces. Add in a little LED lighting for that cyberpunk feel, and the stage is set.

So what does this diminutive build do? Well, apparently nothing right now. [Melissa] just got the hardware together and has only recently started aligning all the 1s and 0s to do her bidding. But what it’s supposed to do is clear enough: it’s intended to be an electronic companion to complex RPG tabletop games to help with things such as character creation. Sounds like it will also have a “roll dice” mode that will save you the trouble of having to crawl under the table when one of your D20s goes rogue.

While such a device could be useful for many different games, it should come as no surprise to hear that [Melissa] is currently targeting the cyberpunk Shadowrun.

Although we were particularly taken with the online tool that let you generate 3D printed organizers for all your tabletop gaming needs, we’d definitely rather have digital companions like this which would make those plastic baggies full of parts obsolete.

2022 Cyberdeck Contest: The Folding Mini-Deck

September 10, 2022 by Jenny List 5 Comments

The trend for cyberdecks has brought us many takes on the home-made portable computers, but it’s fair to say that some of them can be rather unwieldy. This is not an accusation you can point at [Smeef] with the Mini-Deck though, because its Raspberry Pi Zero, Adafruit miniature display, and tiny keyboard make the whole unit able to fit in the palm of a hand. We’re not sure we’ve seen one so compact!

The most obvious feature is the keyboard, it’s a DreamGear MiniKey miniature USB keyboard. It doesn’t have all the useful buttons a PC board has, so there’s also a separate set of buttons to cover those. Then there’s an analog stick connected to an Arduino Pro Micro that takes the functionality of a mouse, and an Adafruit Mini PiTFT 1.3″ Display. While a fully-functional display for the Pi, we do wonder if this tiny screen might actually be a bit too tiny to be practical. Power for the unit comes via an 18650 battery, which also functions as a pin for a folding mechanism.

The result is something that looks, feels, and works like a cyberdeck, but all in miniature. It might be a stretch to write a Hackaday piece on a machine like it, but we’re guessing that merely having built something like this is cool enough in itself. Certainly it’s considerably smaller than previous contenders for the smallest build.

2022 Hackaday Prize: Save The World Wildcard Challenge Begins Now

September 6, 2022 by Kristina Panos 13 Comments

Continuing the concept of saving planet Earth with gnarly, repeatable hacks, the fifth and final challenge of the 2022 Hackaday Prize is all about making the world better with smart and sustainable hardware. While the focus is still on saving the planet, this time, anything goes. Does your project not fit within the confines of a previous challenge? Here is your last chance to enter the 2022 Hackaday Prize: Start your entry today!

Go Wild!

We’ve already run contest rounds that focused on green power generation, recycling, hacking tech out of the landfills, and just finished up making our world more climate-resistant and connected. How else do you want to use your hacking powers to make the world a better place? Well, that’s up to you. This is the wildcard round, after all. If your project helps to keep this planet running for future generations, you can enter it here.

The Save the World Wildcard challenge starts right now and runs until October 16th. As with previous rounds, we’ll award one of ten $500 prizes to each finalist, and the best projects will have a chance at the overall 2022 Hackaday Prize. So get hacking!