The Hackaday Prize

1541 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: Bellcycles Are Open-Source, Compact, And Unique

October 12, 2017 by 37 Comments

What do we want in a bicycle? It should be able to be constructed at home, even if your home is a New York apartment. It should be Open Source so our friends can make their own. It should be compact so it won’t clutter up our little apartments. It should be unique instead of another me-too. [Alex Bell], of Bellcycles, is showing off his bicycle on hackaday.io and it fills all the requirements.

The unusual shape drastically reduces the size, turning radius, and storage footprint from a traditional bicycle. It shares the large front wheel design of the penny farthing. Unlike the giant wheeled penny-farthing, the rider is much closer to the ground so it doesn’t require a special technique to get on. In fact, dismounting the cycle is as easy as standing up since there is nothing in front of the rider which is great news for urban commuting.

If practicality takes a back seat to peculiarity, check out this Strandbeest bicycle and if you’d just rather stay in your apartment, you can still take a worldwide cycling tour in VR.

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Paperback: ePaper desktop monitor playing Doom

Hackaday Prize Entry: PaperBack Desktop EPaper Monitor

October 11, 2017 by 23 Comments

When we announced the Hackaday Prize with its Best Product category, [PK] polled his wife and co-workers about the idea of making a desktop monitor using 6″ 800×600 ePaper, which he has since built and calls the PaperBack. One such requirement for a monitor is to be able to connect to it using one of the usual desktop methods: VGA, DVI or HDMI. Given his previous experience making his own VGA card for the 2015 prize, he went with that. HDMI is in the works.

But it ended up being more than a desktop monitor. He first made a power and breakout board that a VGA input board would eventually connect to. To test it, he included a socket for plugging in an ESP32. With only one bodge he had the Hackaday logo displayed on the ePaper. He also now had the option of using it as a wireless internet connected display.

Moving on to VGA support, [PK] made a VGA input board using the MST9883 chip, which does the A/D conversion of the VGA RGB graphics signal and also recovers a pixel sampling clock from the HSYNC. His new VGA ePaper monitor has to identify itself to the VGA source, telling it dimensions, resolution and so on. This is called the EDID and was handled by the addition of an Atmel ATmega328 to the board. To finish it off, an LCMXO1200C FPGA does the high-speed conversions with the help of a 4 MBit SRAM framebuffer.

His very first test involved simply displaying the Hackaday logo using the ESP32, but now with the VGA input board he has it displaying Doom. Since it’s using ePaper it has only a 1-second refresh rate but it’s hard to come up with a more awesome way to proved that it works. He can also unplug it at any time and walk away with the latest screenshot intact. See it for yourself in the video below.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: UAProsthetics, A Powered Hand

October 10, 2017 by 6 Comments

One of the great successes of desktop 3D printers is custom prosthetics and orthotics. For a fraction of the price of a prosthetic arm, you can buy a machine capable of producing hundreds of completely customizable prosthetics. [Taran Ravindran]’s project in the running for the 2017 Hackaday Prize follows the long tradition of building customized prosthetics. His prosthetic hand designed to be simpler and cheaper than conventional artificial limbs while still giving us some innovation in how this hand will move.

The digits on [Taran]’s hand are controlled by linear servos pulling on a series of Bowden cables. One servo actuates the index finger, with a double differential to close the three less important figures — the middle, ring, and pinky fingers don’t need the articulation of the forefinger and thumb. Those three are actuated together, saving cost and complexity — they basically operate to support the index and thumb rather than being controllable independently. The thumb has 2 DOF by itself to give it the maximum amount of utility.

Another area of importance [Taran]’s focusing on is the matter of ease of use. If the prosthesis is too complicated, difficult, or unpleasant to use, it won’t get used regardless of its awesome features. Knowing this, he focused on making the hand as simplified as possible. Right now, the project has been modeled in CAD, and [Taran] is just waiting for the SLS parts to arrive before assembling the whole thing. It’s a great project, and a great entry for this year’s Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Personal Guardian Keeps An Eye Out

October 8, 2017 by 14 Comments

The Personal Guardian is a wearable tracking and monitoring device intended to help vulnerable people. The project goal is to allow these patients as much independence and activity as possible without a caregiver needing to be present. Wearing a sensor package might allow a memory care patient (for instance) greater freedom to wander.

The device consists of an Arduino 101 development board with a GSM shield that it uses to send SMS messages to the caregiver — for instance, if the accelerometer shows the patient fell over, or moved beyond certain GPS coordinates. Furthermore, the care-giver can monitor the device to determine the device’s status, and sees the patient’s heart rate thanks to a BLE sensor strap.

The patient can also press a panic button or toggle through a series pre-set SMS messages. In terms of complexity, the project’s creator [Ray Lynch] intended the interface to be simpler than a smart phone.

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The Hackaday Prize: Growing Your Own Soil

October 7, 2017 by 17 Comments

When a rainforest is clearcut for agricultural use, we only see the surface problems: fewer trees, destruction of plant and animal habitats, and countless other negative effects on the environment. A lurking problem, however, is that the soil is often non-ideal for farming. When the soil is exhausted, the farmers move further into the rainforest and repeat the process.

In the Amazon, however, there are pockets of man-made soil that are incredibly nutrient-dense. Figuring out how to make this soil, known as Terra Preta, on a massive scale would limit the amount of forest destruction by providing farmers a soil with more longevity which will, in turn, limit the encroachment on the rainforest. That’s the goal of this Hackaday Prize entry by [Leonardo Zuniga]: a pyrolysis chemical reactor that can make this soil by turning organic matter into a type of charcoal that can be incorporated into the soil to make Terra Preta.

As a bonus to making this nutrient-dense soil on a massive scale, this reactor also generates usable energy as a byproduct of processing organic waste, which goes several steps beyond simple soil enrichment. If successful and scalable, this project could result in more efficient farming techniques, greater yields, and, best of all, less damage to the environment and less impact on the rainforests.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Economical Bionic Leg

October 6, 2017 by 9 Comments

When it comes to high-tech bionic legs for amputees, all the cool stuff is titanium, carbon fiber or other, more exotic materials. With carbon fiber “blades” all the rage, it’s easy to forget that simpler technologies still work, and could be made to work even better with the addition of some inexpensive electronics. The Economical Bionic Leg project is the result of that idea.

Project creators [PremJ20] and [G.Vignesh] aren’t kidding about bringing the cost of these bionic legs down. The target goal is $60 per, with stainless steel and silicon rubber as a cheaper alternative to carbon fiber — the rubber would be molded to fit the amputated region. The heart of the project is a Particle Photon development board, with a flex sensor and accelerometer monitoring the prosthesis and supplying data to the cloud. It’s essentially a basic prosthetic leg with a monitoring system built in. Placing a sensor cuff on the regular leg, the artificial limb’s flexibility can be fine-tuned to match the two.

Will this inexpensive bionic leg ever compete in the Olympics, like [Oscar Pistorious] run in the 2012 London event? Probably not — the tech that goes into artificial limbs has the same amount of material science going into it as F1 racing and turbojet design. Still, this is a very cheap way to bring tech into something that desperately needs to be cheaper, and it’s a great Hackaday Prize entry, to boot.

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