Building An Automatic Bicycle Transmission In A Week

January 18, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 58 Comments

Every year, the ECE department of Carnigie Mellon University hosts Build18, an engineering festival intended to get students out of the classroom and into the workshop. [Andrew Toth] along with team members [Jenna MacCarley], [Peter McHale], and [Nicolas Mellis] have been busy this last week putting together an automatic bicycle transmission.

Most cyclists agree that a cadence of 80 RPM is just about right for most cycling. The team’s transmission uses Hall effect sensors to sense the cadence of the rider and will change to a higher gear if the cadence drops below 60 RPM and a lower gear if the cadence is above 100 RPM.

One of the requirements of the Build18 festival is the completed project must cost less than $250. By using an Arduino Mega and a servo to change gears, the team has a fairly low cost solution to automatically changing bicycle gears.

It’s a very cool project, and hopefully we’ll see a video once the competition is over at noon, EST today.

Engadget Trying Out Some Crowd-funding

December 29, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

Engadget has decided to give this whole crowd-funding thing a try with a competition called Insert Coin. This is part of an upcoming event called Expand that is supposed to let us get inside information on gadget construction and conception. This actually sounds refreshing compared to the giant commercial that other tech conferences can be (This is why Hackaday has never returned to CES).

Insert Coin is a contest that has hardware at the forefront. If you qualify, you could win $25,000 for your device as well as $1,000 to come show it off at their event.

Continue reading “Engadget Trying Out Some Crowd-funding” →

7400 Logic Competition Winners Announced

November 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

The 7400 Logic Competition has drawn to a close. The winners were announced and there are quite a few of them. There were fifteen first place winners named, nine second place, and nineteen third place projects. The bounty of quality entries is a testament to the popularity of the contest. It helps to have a wide range of prizes and the post linked above lists all of the sponsors who donated goodies as an incentive.

The board seen above was awarded the reader’s choice, to which the grand prize was awarded. It is a 7400 series calculator. [Umair Mukati] and [Naveed Ahmed] — both are students at the Institute of Industrial Electronics Engineering in Karachi, Pakistan — developed the device as part of a class project. It is capable of adding or subtracting two digit numbers. This includes support for negative numbers as results. We’ve embedded a video demo of the calculator in action after the break.

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DSO Quad Contest Has A Quartet Of Cash Prizes

October 30, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

Seeed Studios has launched a contest centered around the DSO Quad. In case you’re unfamiliar with the hardware, the DSO Quad is a low-cost standalone oscilloscope. It’s got four channels, two of which are analog, and includes an ARM Cortex-M3 processor as well as an FPGA. Why are we recapping the hardware with the contest announcement? Because the contest rules state that you are allowed to alter the hardware despite the fact that this is more of a software-focused event.

But what you really should know about are the cash prizes going to the winners. Rank in the top four and you’ll claim $3000, $1500, $800, and $300 in cold hard cash. But even if you don’t take one of the top spots everyone still wins. That’s because all entries are open source and will be found in Seeed’s DSO Quad forums.

If judging people is more your thing Seeed needs some help with that too. They’re looking for qualified judges and application details are includes at the bottom of the contest page.

[Thanks Petteri]

Find A Way To Stop Robocalls To Grab This $50k Prize

October 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 111 Comments

Here’s a challenge tailored to our community if we’ve ever seen one. You know those delightful unsolicited prerecorded calls you get from time to time? They might be political, but they also come from companies trying to sell you vinyl siding, or promising improvements in your business. Well they’re against the law in many cases, and complaints to the Federal Trade Commission have been piling up. So now the FTC is offering a $50,000 bounty to anyone who can find a way to block the calls.

It’s called the Robocall Challenge and you’ve got until January 17th, 2013 to get your entry submitted. The great thing is, this doesn’t need to be a fully working solution. Your entry may be: “proposed technical solutions or functional solutions and proofs of concept “. Even better, you retain ownership of the solution even if you win. This type of recognition will surely have telco related companies beating a path to your door.

Of course if you do have a solution, we’d love to hear about it too!

[Thanks Filespace via WCPO]

Rewiring A Free Carnival Sign

October 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Late last September, Hackaday along with other hackerspaces including North Street Labs, 1.21 Jigawatts, Maker Twins, made their way to the NYC Maker Faire via the Red Bull Creation contest. The objectives of the contest were simple: build a game in 72 hours, have people vote on it, and join the Red Bull crew in Queens for a carnival-like atmosphere.

When the Maker Faire was over, Red Bull had some leftover props from their Midway at Maker Faire setup, including a few illuminated carnival signs. Without any use for them, they graciously gave Hackaday, North Street, Maker Twins and the Jigawatts the signs to their respective rides.

Now that things have settled down and the rides have returned to their home base, the folks over at North Street decided to improve their sign. At Maker Fair, these signs were illuminated by 50 incandescent bulbs, all wired on the same circuit. [Steve] over at North Street had the awesome idea of adding a persistence of vision aspect to the sign, so work began on wiring every fourth bulb in series.

To drive the light circuits, North Street repurposed the Arduino Relay shield originally used for the lights on the Centrifury, their competitive centrifuge and spinning hell of a game. In the video after the break, you can see the addition of POV lights really brings out the carnival atmosphere. A literally brilliant build, and a wonderful addition to the scariest game ever made.

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2012 Open 7400 Logic Competition

September 6, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

The Open 7400 Logic Competition is being held again this year. Start thinking about your entries, they’ll need to be finished and submitted by October 31st. As motivation, Digilent has put up two of their Analog Discovery kits as prizes. They can be used as a dual channel oscilloscope, function generator, or 16-channel logic analyzer. Last year was the first time the competition was held. As hype for the event built, more and more prize sponsors signed on and we hope to see the same thing happen this year.

Your entry can be just about anything as long as you show your schematic, explain the project, and use logic. It can be 7400 TTL, 4000 CMOS, discrete gates, or even a CPLD. Last year’s entries spanned a wide range of themes from LED blinkers, to unorthodox 74xx chip hacking, to boards packed full of chips. Good luck and don’t forget to tip us off about your work!

[Thanks Adrian]