The IFind Kickstarter Campaign Was Just Suspended

June 26, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 67 Comments

A little more than one month ago we featured a Kickstarter campaign that was raising quite a lot of eyebrows and over half a million dollars. This particular product was a battery-free tag meant to be attached to anything you may lose in your daily life. It was supposed to communicate with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices and have a 200ft (60m) detection range.

The main claim was that the iFind could harvest enough power from existing RF fields inside a typical home environment to operate for centuries. As Kickstarter just cancelled its funding a few minutes ago it seems that the basic maths Hackaday did a while ago were correct and that the project was in fact a scam. We’ll direct our readers to this particular comment that sums up all the elements pointing to a fraudulent campaign and show you the email that the backers received:

A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter’s rules, which include:

A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere

Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project

Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator

Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners

Putting aside this news, this campaign’s cancellation raises a bigger question: why didn’t it happen before and how could we control Kickstarter campaigns? On a side note, it’s still very interesting to notice the nearly religious fervor of the sunk cost fallacy that such campaigns create in their comments.

Thanks [Rick] for the tip!

Ask Hackaday: Program Passes Turing Test, But Is It Intelligent?

June 9, 2014 by Will Sweatman 119 Comments

A team based in Russia has developed a program that has passed the iconic Turing Test. The test was carried out at the Royal Society in London, and was able to convince 33 percent of the judges that it was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy named Eugene Goostman.

The Turing Test was developed by [Alan Turing] in 1950 as an existence proof for intelligence: if a computer can fool a human operator into thinking it’s human, then by definition the computer must be intelligent. It should be noted that [Turing] did not address what intelligence was, but only tried to identify human like behavior in a machine.

Thirty years later, a philosopher by the name of [John Searle] pointed out that even a machine that could pass the Turing Test would still not be intelligent. He did this through a fascinating thought experiment called “The Chinese Room“.

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Ask Hackaday: Can Battery-Free Bluetooth Item Locating Tags Exist?

May 21, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 220 Comments

[Vishak] tipped us about the iFind Kickstarter campaign, a 1.25×1.06×0.09″ (32x27x2.4mm) tag meant to be attached to anything you may lose in your daily life. This device communicates with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) enabled smartphones, has a 200ft (60m) detection range and a loud alarm. What is interesting to mention is that this device doesn’t need any battery to operate as it

recycles electromagnetic energy and stores it in a unique power bank.

As you can guess, this particular claim intrigued the Hackaday team given that we never featured so small energy harvesting devices. The ‘closest’ thing that comes to our minds is the Allsee project, a simple gesture recognition device that uses existing wireless signals (TV and RFID transmissions) to extract any movement that occur in front of it. However the antenna was quite big and very little power was extracted.

A quick Google search let us know that Bluetooth Low Energy solutions usually consume an idle current of around 10uA @ ~3V. The (very) successful Sticknfind campaign which promoted the same battery-enabled product claimed a one year autonomy with a CR2016 battery and a 100ft range, leading to a ~90mAh/24/30.5/12 = 10.2uA idle current. As we’re not expert on the subject, we would like to ask our readers if they ever came across such energy harvesting performances (3V*10.2uA = 30uW) in a normal home environment. Our very bad maths indicate that if one would like to extract power from a typical Wifi router located 2 meters from you emitting 0.5Watts of power (in a perfect vacuum environment) with a 32*27mm = 864mm = 0.000864m² tag you’d only be able to get 0.5 * (0.000864/(4*pi*2*2)) = 8.6uW.

It is therefore too bad that we can’t see in the presentation video what is inside the iFind, nor more details about the patent pending technologies involved. We hope that our dear readers will enlighten us in the comments section below.

Ask Hackaday: Auto Bed Leveling And High Temperature Force Sensitive Resistors

March 19, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

FSR

[Johann] over on the RepRap wiki has an ingenious solution for making sure a borosilicate glass bed is completely level before printing anything on his Kossel printer: take three force sensitive resistors, put them under the build platform, and wire them in parallel, and connect them to a thermistor input on an electronics board. The calibration is simply a bit of code in the Marlin firmware that touches the nozzle to the bed until the thermistor input maxes out. When it does, the firmware knows the print head has zeroed out and can calculate the precise position and tilt of the bed.

Great, huh? A solution to bed leveling that doesn’t require a Z-probe, uses minimal (and cheap) hardware, and can be retrofitted into just about any existing printer. There’s a problem, though: these force sensitive resistors are only good to 70° C, making the whole setup unusable for anything with a heated bed. Your challenge: figure out a way to use this trick with a heated bed.

The force sensitive resistors used – here’s a link provided by [Johann] – have a maximum operating temperature of 70° C, while the bed temperature when printing with ABS is around 130° C. The FSRs are sensitive to temperature, as well, making this a very interesting problem.

Anyone with any ideas is welcome to comment here, on the RepRap forums, the IRC, or anywhere else. One idea includes putting an FSR in the x carriage, but we’re thinking some sort of specialized heat sink underneath the bed and on top of the FSRs would be a better solution.

Video of the auto bed leveling trick in action below.

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Ask Hackaday: Wiping Your Bum With An Arduino?

March 9, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 83 Comments

Over or under? Standing or sitting? Truly, toilet paper has been the focus of the most irreconcilable arguments ever. The folks on the Arduino Stack Exchange have a far more important question: how do you trigger an alarm when your TP supply is low?

[user706837] asked the Internet this question in response to his kids never replacing an empty roll. This eliminates the most obvious means of notifying someone of an empty roll – looking at it before you sit down – and brings up a few interesting engineering challenges.

Most of the initial ideas deal with weight or some sort of light sensor that can differentiate between the white TP and the brown roll. A much, much more interesting solution puts a radioactive source in the TP holder’s spring-loaded rod and uses a sensor to detect how much TP is left. A quick back-of-the-wolfram calculation suggests this might be possible, and amazingly, not too dangerous.

We’re turning this one over to you, Hackaday readers. How would you design an empty toilet paper alarm? Bonus points awarded for ingenuity and cat resistance.

Image source, and also one of the longest and most absurd Wikipedia articles ever.

Ask Hackaday: What’s Up With This Carbon Fiber Printer?

January 29, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

The Hackaday Tip Line has been ringing with submissions about the Mark Forg3D printer, purportedly the, “world’s first 3D printer that can print carbon fiber.”

Right off the bat, we’re going to call that claim a baldfaced lie. Here’s a Kickstarter from a few months ago that put carbon fiber in PLA filament, making every desktop 3D printer one that can print in carbon fiber.

But perhaps there’s something more here. The Mark Forged site gives little in the way of technical details, but from what we can gather from their promo video, here’s what we have: it’s a very impressive-looking aluminum chassis with a build area of 12″x6.25″x6.25″. There are dual extruders, with (I think) one dedicated to PLA and Nylon, and another to the carbon and fiberglass filaments. Layer height is 0.1mm for the PLA and Nylon, 0.2mm for the composites. Connectivity is through Wifi, USB, or an SD card, with a “cloud based” control interface. Here are the full specs, but you’re not going to get much more than the previous few sentences.

Oh, wait, it’s going to be priced at around $5000, which is, “affordable enough for average consumers to afford.” Try to contain your laughter as you click the ‘read more’ link.

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Ask Hackaday: (How) Should We Control Kickstarter Campaigns?

November 14, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 112 Comments

Kickstarter campaigns helped bring new and innovative products to the market during these last years. However there often are failures that can happen at several stages. We’d like to hear your opinion about them and discover what you think could be done to foresee/prevent these kinds of bad experiences that damage the trust between individuals and funding platforms.

Post-funding failures

There are a few project teams that give up a few months after receiving the funds, like the people behind the iControlPad 2 recently (disclaimer: we’re not backers). Even if [Craig] stated that he would document the entire production process on film and be open about all the project life steps, that didn’t prevent the project from being dropped (oddly enough) exactly one year after they received the funds. The more the project was headed towards failure, less was the frequency of updates regarding the project’s current state. The official reasons for this decision were difficulties that arose with the chosen LEDs, we’ll let you make your own opinion by having a look at the updates section. Thanks [Nikropht] for the tipping us about it.

Pre-funding failures

What is happening even more often on kickstarter is (usually successful) campaigns being canceled by the website itself after a few people rang the alarm bell. This may be due to an unfeasible project idea, a fake demonstration video/photos or even an attempt to resell an existing item under a new name.

The best examples for the first category undeniably are free energy generators. Here is an indiegogo campaign which actually succeeded. The creators announced one month ago that the project is running a bit behind schedule (aha), that the machine will cost around $5000 and that they’ll “need the funds before they make the units”. What can be done to educate the public that such energy is not created out of thin air?

The second category includes the recently canceled LUCI advanced lucid dream inducer (thanks [Michael] for the tip), which ended 2 days before the deadline. Technical guys got skeptical when they saw that the electrode signals were amplified several feet from the brain with an audio amplifier. At first glance, this was the only sign that this project may have been a scam (let’s give them the benefit of the doubt). Further research indicated that GXP (the company behind the campaign) didn’t exist, and most of their pictures were photoshopped. Here is a link to a quick summary of the situation and if you want to be entertained we advise you to make some pop-corn and head to the comments section of the project. What’s terrible here is that backers started to turn against each other, as the company always had a ‘good’ explanation for all the backers’ questions.

At last, there are some persons that just make funding campaigns with already existing products. This is the case of the eye3 flying robot and the vybe vibrating bracelet (don’t order!). Note that all of them were successfully funded. The eye3 was created by the same persons that made LumenLab, a company that created the microcnc. You’ll find more details here. The vibrating bracelet was just this one, which would be made in different colors. We just discovered this website that covered both project in greater lengths as well as many others.

Kickstarter fraudsters

Scams can also happen on the backers’ side. Recently, a Kickstarter backer named “Encik Farhan” attempted to rip off many Kickstarter projects. A ‘credit card chargeback’ technique was used, were the backer would contribute to the campaign, receive his perk and later cancel his credit card transaction using diverse reasons. The money would later be taken from the campaign funding by the payment processor.

What can be done?

The examples cited in this article set precedents which may turn people away from crowdfunding. In your opinion, what could be done to prevent this? Another reason we ask is because Hackaday may launch a sponsored product soon, thanks to the new overlords. This hypothetical product would be designed with the Hackaday community in a completely transparent process.

In the meantime, if you find any perpetual motion machines on kicstarter or indiegogo, be sure to send them in. You may also want to checkout this website predicting the success probability of a given kickstarter campaign.