Hackaday’s Assistive Technology Challenge Begins Now

July 24, 2017 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

This morning marks a new challenge in the Hackaday Prize: we want to see what you can do with Assistive Technology. Twenty entries will win $1000 each, becoming part of the final round for a chance at the top prizes ranging from $5,000 to $50,000.

Assistive Technology means things that help people by improving their quality of life. This can take so many forms but broadly speaking this could make aging easier, turn disabilities into abilities, or enhance the access and delivery of health care.

We’ve seen great things in this area from the Hackaday community. The Grand Prize for the 2015 Hackaday Prize went to an assistive technology that linked motorized wheelchairs to gaze-controlled computers, called Eyedrivomatic. And at the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference we learned how common tools and crowd sourced skills can lead to a new take on physical rehabilitation with a robot-assisted elbow.

The Hackaday Prize challenges us all to Build Something that Matters. It’s hard to argue that there is a better place to take on this challenge than with Assistive Technologies. Enter your project today!

Hackaday Prize Entry: Minimalist HTTP

July 23, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Yann] is building something that isn’t hardware, but it’s still fascinating. He’s come up with a minimalist HTTP compliant server written in C. It’s small, it’s portable, and in some cases, it will be a bunch better solution than throwing a full Linux stack into a single sensor.

This micro HTTP server has two core modules, each with a specific purpose. The file server does exactly what it says on the tin, but the HTTaP is a bit more interesting. HTTaP is a protocol first published in 2014 that is designed to be a simpler alternative to WebSockets.

[Yann] has been experimenting with HTTaP, and the benefits are obvious. You don’t need Apache to make use of it, HTTaP can work directly with an HTML/JavaScript page, and using only GET and POST messages, you can control hardware and logic circuits.

As this is a minimalist HTTP server, the security is dubious at best. That’s not the point, though. This is just a tool designed for use in a lab or controlled environments with an air gap. Safety, scheduling, encryption, and authentication are not part of HTTaP or this micro HTTP server.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Source Patient Monitor

July 22, 2017 by John Baichtal 24 Comments

Vital sign monitors are usually found in developed countries; they just cost too much for less affluent communities to afford. The HealthyPi project aims to change that by developing an inexpensive but accurate monitor using a Raspberry Pi, a custom hat studded with sensors, and a touch screen. The resulting monitor could be used by medical professionals as well as students and private researchers.

[Ashwin K Whitchurch] and his team created HealthyPi, a Raspberry Pi hat that includes an AFE4490 chip serving as the pulse oximeter front end, an analog to digital converter that interprets the ECG and respiration data, and a MAX30205 body temperature sensor. The hat has its own microcontroller, a ATSAMD21 Cortex M0+ that can also be loaded with the Arduino Zero bootloader.

This project is capable of monitoring a patient’s pulse, respiration, body temperature, and all the other vital signs made measure d by other ‘medical-grade’ vital sign monitors at a fraction of the cost. It’s a democratizing technology, and [Ashwin] already has some working hardware available on Crowd Supply.

Learn more about HealthyPi at the project page or download the code from GitHub.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Source Patient Monitor” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Hydroponic Garden Control

July 21, 2017 by John Baichtal 12 Comments

[Todd Christell] grows tomatoes in hydroponic buckets in his backyard, and recently he suffered a crop loss when a mechanical timer failed to dispense the nutrient flow as directed. He decided the solution was to add a sensor array to his home network.

[Todd]’s home automation setup runs on a Raspberry Pi loaded with Jessie OS and Node-Red, with Mosquitto as his MQTT message broker. With a sensor network in place, [Todd] would get updates on his phone alerting him if there was a problem with the pumps or if the nutrient bath was getting too low.

The proposed hydroponic setup would consist of an ESP8266-12 equipped with a DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor, a reed sensor detecting nutrient levels, and a relay board triggering one pump to fill the grow buckets from the main sump and another to top off the sump with the solution from a reserve tank. One early problem he encountered was the electric fence (pictured above) that he employs to keep squirrels away from his tomatoes, interfered with the ESP8266’s signal.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Disaster Recovery WiFi

July 20, 2017 by John Baichtal 37 Comments

The Meshpoint project originated in Croatia during the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, when [Valent Turkovic] and other volunteers noticed that first responders, including NGOs like Greenpeace and the Red Cross, often struggled to set up communications in the field. They came to the conclusion that they couldn’t rely on the normal communications infrastructure because it was either damaged or overloaded.

The solution is a net of open source, autonomous WiFi mesh routers, scalable from a single team to serving thousands of people. Responders who won’t have time for a difficult login process, should find setup as easy as signing in to a social media site.

The physical nodes would consist of a router robust for up to 150 connections, all run by an ESP8266 and protected by a weatherproof enclosure. They would feature 6-8 hour battery lives with recharging via solar/wind, AC from wall current or generators, or simply DC car batteries.

You can learn more about the project or download their code from GitHub.

Hackaday Prize Entry: BeagleLogic

July 19, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

A few years ago, [Kumar] created the BeagleLogic, a 14-channel, 100 MSPS logic analyzer for the BeagleBone as an entry for the Hackaday Prize. This is a fantastic tool that takes advantage of the PRUs in the BeagleBone to give anyone with a BeagleBone a very capable logic analyzer for not much cash.

This year, [Kumar] is back at it again. He’s improving the BeagleLogic with a BeagleBone on a chip. This is the BeagleLogic Standalone, a 16-channel logic analyzer at 100 MSPS using a single chip.

Like the BeagleLogic from a few years ago, [Kumar] is relying on those fancy PRUs in the BeagleBone that make reading GPIOs and blinking LEDs so easy and fast. Unlike the BeagleLogic shield/cape/whatever, the BeagleLogic Standalone uses the Octavo Systems’ OSD3358 — the BeagleBone on a chip — for the hardware. This incorporates everything in a BeagleBone into a single package, making for a compact unit that still has all the capabilities of the bigger BeagleLogic.

On board this pocket-sized logic analyzer is the OSD3358 itself, the logic analyzer frontend, a gigabit Ethernet port, USB, an SPI Flash, SD card slot and eMMC, and an RTC. An expansion header breaks out a UART, I2C, SPI, two PWM outputs, 6 GPIOs, and a clock to a PRU for experimental synchronous captures.

With a web-based frontend for this Logic Analyzer, this looks like it’ll be a fantastic tool for any hardware hacker, and something that should be reasonably inexpensive.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Dongle For A Headless Pi

July 18, 2017 by Elliot Williams 27 Comments

Mass production means that there’s a lot of great hardware out there for dirt cheap. But it also means that the manufacturer isn’t going to spend years working on the firmware to squeeze every last feature out of it. Nope, that’s up to us.

[deqing] took a Bluetooth Low Energy / USB dongle and re-vamped the firmware to turn it into a remote keyboard and mouse, and then wrote a phone app to control it. The result? Plug the USB dongle in, and the computer thinks it sees a keyboard and mouse. Connect the phone via BLE, and you’re typing — even if you don’t have your trusty Model F by your side.

[Deqing] points out that ergonomics and latency will make you hate using this in the long term, but it’s just meant to work until you’ve got SSH up and running on that headless single-board Linux thing. If you’ve ever worked with the USB or BLE specifications, you can appreciate that there’s a bit of work behind the scenes in making everything plug and play, and the web-based interface is admirably slick.

Kudos, [deqing]!