2017 Hackaday Prize Begins Right Now

March 20, 2017 by Mike Szczys 75 Comments

Today the 2017 Hackaday Prize begins!

This is Hackaday’s global engineering initiative that encourages people to direct their skill and energy to make the world a better place. We call it the Hackaday Prize, but it’s far more than that. Join a community of talented people who enrich their own lives by seeking out new challenges and new technologies, then pioneers a way to combine them to Build Something that Matters. Show us your build by starting a Hackaday.io project page and enter today!

You Have Every Reason to Get Involved

The Hackaday Prize truly has something for everyone. Making the world a better place doesn’t end with a grand prize for a single build. Just by talking about your ideas and sharing your excitement you become the inspiration for this and every successive generation of problem solvers. But yes, there are prizes — a lot of prizes — and they’re spectacular.

We have over $250,000 in cash going out to hundreds of entries this year. The Grand Prize of $50,000 is joined once again this year by the Best Product Prize of $30,000. Four other entries will place second through fifth and receive $20k, $15k, $10k, and $5k respectively.

But the breadth of entries is too great to stop at that. We’ll select 120 projects as finalists and award each $1000. You can even get in on Seed Funding starting right away. We’re saving those details for the end of this announcement.

How Do I Build Something that Matters?

Whoa, all this talk of prizes, but you want to know what kind of hardware will be a hit for the Hackaday Prize? Here’s what you need to know: you can enter your project at any time from now until October 16th. But the exact time that you enter matters.

Your best bet is to get started right away. The first challenge of the Hackaday Prize is: Design Your Concept. Every great build starts with a plan and this is the time to show us what you got. The key is to consider if the project benefits society in some way. Show us how, document your build plan, and you can be one of the first twenty finalists to receive $1k cash and move on to compete for the big prizes.

We’ll have four more challenges that focus on different types of entries. You only need to enter one challenge, but you may choose to enter (and win) as many of the five challenges as you wish. We’ll be looking for ~~connected devices that don’t suck~~ Internet of Useful Things during the IuT ! IoT challenge. After that, it’s on to all things mobile with the Wheels, Wings, and Walkers challenge. Assistive Technology challenges you to make the world a better place for the physically or mentally challenged and aging or sick people of the world. And finally, a Hackaday favorite closes the challenge rounds with Anything Goes — as long as it clearly benefits society. Each of these five challenges will yield twenty finalists who receive $1000. That’s $100k!

The Return of Best Product

Two years ago we tried something new by adding the Best Product Prize to the mix and it was an enormous hit. We’re happy to be able to bring it back again this year.

There is a difficult path from a working prototype to a product ready for its audience. As hardware development is unlocked for an ever wider engineering community, we want to see the path made wider so that the journey becomes easier. Best Product is designed to do just that.

Any Hackaday Prize entry may also choose to compete and be named the Best Product (receiving much deserved recognition as well as the addition $30k prize). You need to submit your entry no later than July 24th, which includes full documentation of the project as well as a bill of materials used in the build. We’ll select twenty finalists (sending $1k to each) who will then need to deliver three working beta test units for the final judging round of the Best Product.

How Can We Pick the Top Entries?

One amazing part of the Hackaday Prize family are the world-renowned experts who donate their time and talent as Judges. They are just as eager as everyone else to see all of this creative energy focused on solving the problems facing our civilization.

Learn more about all of these amazing people on the Hackaday Prize page.

One Last Thing: Seed Funding

When realized to their full potential, design concepts should knock the socks off of anyone who reads through them. Because of this we have one more thing in store for you during the first challenge which starts right now.

Entries with the most likes at the end of the first round will split $4,000. Each time someone on Hackaday.io “likes” your project it will move a bit higher on the leaderboard found on the Hackaday Prize page. The top projects will receive $1 for each like, with a max of $200 per entry so that at least twenty will win (but likely many more).

This seed funding is a little push to help offset the cost of building prototypes. But it really comes down to your decision to make the time and to make a difference. Enter your project in the Hackaday Prize now.

Animated Picture Frame Needs Charging Once Per Month

March 19, 2017 by Will Sweatman 29 Comments

[Kyle Stewart-Frantz] took one look at a black and white photo of a mountain stream, and decided it was way too boring. How much cooler would it be if the water was moving! Like any good hacker worth his weight in 2N2222s, [Kyle] set out to make his idea a reality. After discovering some pricey options, he found a Kindle Paperwhite with a display that had decent resolution and 16 levels of grey. But would 16 levels be sufficient to produce an animation that’s pleasing to the eye?

After stumbling upon a community dedicated to hacking Kindles, [Kyle] got to work. Using a custom Amazon command called eips, he was able to access the display’s memory location and paint images to it. The next trick was to write a script that called the command multiple times to produce a GIF-like animation effect. This… didn’t work so well. He then found some code from [GeekMaster] (thanks for the tip!) that ran a specialized video player on the Kindle that used something called ordered dithering. After a few more tweaks, he got everything working and the end result looks like something straight out of the world of Harry Potter.

The animated picture frame can run for three to four weeks between charges. This is a hack that would make a great gift and look nice in your office. If you make one, be sure to put the skull and wrenches on it first and let us know!

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Modern Wooden Houses With No Glue Or Nails

March 18, 2017 by Jenny List 94 Comments

Depending where you are in the world, the techniques used to build houses can sometimes seem to be stuck in another century. Bricks and mortar, for instance, we build with them because we are used to them and have a large workforce of people trained to work with them and not much else. But in the 21st century with more advanced building technologies sitting relatively unused and looming housing crises at every turn, does it make sense to still build houses the slow and expensive way our great-grandparents did? Probably not.

Wooden houses are a promising solution to some of the problems outlined in the previous paragraph, and indeed in large parts of the world wood is the housing material of choice. It’s eco-friendly, not too expensive, and can be applied easily to multiple different types of structure. If you think of a wooden house, does the image of a log cabin come to mind, or perhaps a weatherboard house? Both construction methods that would be familiar again to your great-grandparents, so perhaps you might not call it an advanced building technology.

It’s interesting then to see an innovation from France, a system of interlocking wood sections that can be built into walls that look very similar to brick (Here’s the French language original). These are short sections of board cleverly designed with dovetailing to engage with vertical sections that interlock between different courses and leave a gap between wooden inner and outer faces of the wall that can be filled with insulation material. The effect is to create a wooden building system that can produce a vast range of structures that can be assembled in a very short time indeed. This isn’t prefabricated housing, but it delivers the speed you’d expect from it.

They have a video shoving construction of a typical house in rather idyllic French countryside, which we’ve put below the break. It has French language annotations, however for non Français speakers the context is pretty obvious.

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PiSound, The Audio Card For The Raspberry Pi

March 16, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

Kids today are being loud with their ‘drum machines’ and ‘EDM’. Throw some Raspberry Pis at them, and there’s a need for a low-latency sound card with MIDI and all the other accouterments of the modern, Skrillex-haired rocker. That’s where PiSound comes in.

Of course, the Pi already comes with audio out, but that’s not enough if you want to do some real audio processing. You need audio in as well, and while you’re messing around with that, adding some high-quality opamps, ADCs, DACs, and some MIDI would be a good idea. This is what the PiSound is all about.

[Pranciskus], the guy who has been working on the PiSound for a while now, developed this multitool for audio on a tiny Linux system. One of the killer features on the PiSound is ‘The Button’, a simple tact switch that runs a script if the button is pressed, another script if the button is held down, and two more if the button is pressed two or three times. This is actually a pretty nifty UI, and we wouldn’t mind seeing this on a few more Pi accessories.

If you’d like to see some example projects using the PiSound, there example MIDI controllers, networked audio players, and some goofing around with LV2 plugins over here.

Retrotechtacular: How Old Is The Remote?

March 16, 2017 by Al Williams 69 Comments

A few weeks ago we covered a (probably) bogus post about controlling a TV with the IR from a flame. That got us thinking about what the real origin of the remote control was. We knew a story about the 38 kHz frequency commonly used to modulate the IR. We’ve heard that it was from sonar crystals used in earlier sonic versions of remotes. Was that true? Or just an urban myth? We set out to find out.

Surprise! Remotes are Old!

If you are a younger reader, you might assume TVs have always had remotes. But for many of us, remotes seem like a new invention. If you grew up in the middle part of the last century it is a good bet you were your dad’s idea of a remote control: “Get up and turn the channel!” Turns out remotes have been around for a long time, though. They just weren’t common for a long time.

If you really want to stretch back, [Oliver Lodge] used a radio to move a beam of light in 1894. In 1896, [Marconi] and some others made a bell ring by remote control. [Tesla] famously showed a radio-controlled boat in 1898. But none of these were really remote controls like we think of for a television.

Of course, TV wouldn’t be around for a while, but by the 1930’s many radio manufacturers had wired remotes for radios. People didn’t like the wires, so Philco introduced the Mystery Control in 1939. This used digital pulse coding and a radio transmitter. That’s a fancy way of saying it had a dial like an old telephone. As far as we can tell, this was the first wireless remote for a piece of consumer equipment.

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Super Computing With Mini ITX Cluster

March 16, 2017 by Will Sweatman 16 Comments

[Colin Alston] was able to snag a handful of Mini ITX motherboards for cheap and built a mini super computer he calls TinyJaguar. Named partly after the AMD Sempron 2650 APU, the TinyJaguar boasts four, yes that’s four MSI AM1I Mini-ITX motherboards, each with 4GB of DDR memory.

A Raspberry Pi with custom software manages the cluster, and along with some TTL and relays, controls the power to the four nodes. The mini super computer resides in a custom acrylic case held together by an array of 3D printed parts and fasteners.There’s even a rack-like faceplate near the bottom to host the RPi, an Ethernet switch, an array of status LEDs, and the two buttons.

With 16 total cores of computing power (including GPU), the TinyJaguar is quite capable of doing some pretty cool stuff such as running Jupyter notebook with IPyParallel. [Colin] ran into some issues getting the GPU to behave with PyOpenCL. It took a bit of pain and time, but in the end he was able to get the GPUs up, and wrote a small message passing program to show two of the cores were up and working together.

Be sure to check out [Colin’s] super computer project page, specifically the ten project logs that walk through everything that went into this build. He also posted his code if you want to take a look under the hood.

Scrap Wood And Metal Combined For DIY Mecanum Wheels

March 15, 2017 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

Some scrap wood, a few pieces of sheet metal, a quartet of old gear motors, and a few basic hand tools. That’s all it takes to build an omni-bot with Mecanum wheels, if you’ve got a little know-how too.

For the uninitiated, Mecanum wheels can rotate in any direction thanks to a series of tapered rollers around the circumference that are canted 45° relative to the main axle. [Navin Khambhala]’s approach to Mecanum wheel construction is decidedly low tech and very labor intensive, but results in working wheels and a pretty agile bot. The supports for the rollers are cut from sheet steel and bent manually to hold the wooden rollers, each cut with a hole saw and tapered to a barrel shape on a makeshift lathe. Each wheel is connected directly to a gear motor shaft, and everything is mounted to a sheet steel chassis. The controls are as rudimentary as the construction methods, but the video below shows what a Mecanum-wheeled bot can do.

There’s a lot of room here for improvement, but mainly in the manufacturing methods. The entire wheel could be 3D printed, for instance, or even laser cut from MDF with a few design changes. But [Navin] scores a win for making a working wheel and a working bot from almost nothing.

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