The Hackaday Prize

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Hackaday Prize Entry: MCXY – Mini Laser Cut Aluminum 3D Printer

April 24, 2017 by 11 Comments

With the easy availability of cheap and 3D printers from the usual Chinese websites, you might think that there could be little room for another home-made 3D printer project. fortunately, the community of 3D printer making enthusiasts doesn’t see it that way.

[Bobricius] has a rather nice 3D printer design in the works that we think you’ll like. It follows the MakerBot/Ultimaker style of construction in that it is a box rather than a gantry, and it is assembled from CNC-cut aluminum for a sturdy and pleasing effect. Whar sets it apart though is its size, at only 190x190x251mm and with an 80x80x80mm print volume, it’s tiny. You might wonder why that could be an asset, but when you consider that he already has a much larger printer it becomes obvious that something small and portable for quick tiny prints could be an asset.

Unusually for a home-made 3D printer, it has no 3D printed parts, instead, it is laser cut throughout. And also unusually all the CAD work was done in EAGLE, better known for PCB work. It’s a work in progress we’re featuring today because it’s a Hackaday Prize entry, but it looks as though the finished item will be something of a little gem.

Homemade 3D printers can be particularly impressive, for example, we’ve shown you this excellent SLA printer.

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Behold The Many Builds Of World Create Day

April 24, 2017 by 6 Comments

World Create Day was huge this year. Over 70 different groups on six continents got together on Saturday to work on projects as a global Hackaday community.

LearnOBots Labs in Islamabad, Pakistan

Perhaps the best documented World Create Day so far comes from our friends in Pakistan. LearnOBots hosted a day-long extravaganza of projects on everything from home automation, to wearable computing.

[Haziq] and [Rafay] didn’t just build an IoT lighting project together, they took the time to present their work in this excellent demo video. The build connects Arduino, a Bluetooth module, and a relay to drive the lightbulbs all controlled by an app they built with MIT app inventor to help a friend who is stuck on bed rest.

Browse through the event logs LearnOBots has posted and see a lot more of what went on. This image shows work on wearable interfaces. Fabric markers are used to draw out interesting designs which are then given interactivity using conductive thread and Lilypad boards. We also get a look at a user interface for Summer camp sign-up that was made using Raspberry Pi Zero and a 7″ screen. Other groups were working on custom input projects using Makey Makey and Arduino. The image at the top of this article shows some of the LearnOBots crew with a World Create Day poster, neat!

Appalachian Forge Works in Newland, North Carolina

World Create Day at Appalachian Forge Works brought a baby guitar amp to life on World Create Day. The basic circuit is built around an LM386 amp. It was designed using a whiteboard schematic before moving to the breadboard for prototyping.

For some folks that might be enough of a hacking sessions, but the effort didn’t stop there. An enclosure was designed and laser cut from plywood. This included etching labels for the power button and volume knob. There’s even fabric mesh for the speaker grill for a completely finished look that’s a showpiece even when not belting out some Black Keys.

Baltimore Hackerspace Breaks Out the Welder

Tiny wheels, big motors, and square tubing — it’s almost ready to hit the test track for some time trials. The gang over at Baltimore Hackerspace spent their World Create Day fabricating what surely will be the next championship entry in the Power Racing Series.

After this picture was snapped the team got to work on the control electronics for the racer, which end up in a transparent box between the motors. The team didn’t have time to install a driver’s seat but that didn’t prevent a late night test run.

Sounds of Sewing and Embedded Tinkering at The Bodgery in Madison

I celebrated World Create Day at The Bodgery in Madison, Wisconsin. There were a surprising variety of projects worked on at the meetup, at least three of them using something new to me:

[Josh Lange] brought along the driver boards he’s been designing. I was delighted to see the batteries used in the project. I didn’t realize you could buy 18650 Lithium cells in a consumer-friendly package (like AA batteries but larger) and there are battery holders to go along with them. I’m used to seeing these pulled out of old laptop batteries.

Hackaday’s own [Bob Baddeley] was on hand, working feverishly at the sewing machine. He’s fabricating an entire line of Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tubemen costumes. They use those springy laundry baskets as the internal skeleton. Also being worked on at The Bodgery was an NES expansion port project that will make a custom cartridge hosting a Raspberry Pi Zero utilize the NES video hardware without altering the stock hardware. We also had a fun time working on embedded basics with a software engineer who is getting up to speed with embedded.

Tell Us About Your World Create Day!

We want to hear about what you did on World Create Day. We’ll be covering more events in the coming days so make sure you add your pictures and stories to your WCD event page. Event organizers get a special treat for making that effort. But mainly we want to show off the excitement and ingenuity that was abuzz around the world this past weekend.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Memes

April 23, 2017 by 13 Comments

Snap, Inc., the company behind Snapchat, is branding itself as a hardware company. What hardware does Snap make? Spectacles, or a camera attached to a pair of sunglasses. Snap, Inc. has a market value of around $30 Billion USD.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [William Glover] is building a device that’s easily worth $100 Billion. It’s called SnappCat, and it’s a machine learning, AI, augmented reality, buzzword-laden camera that adds memes to pictures of cats. Better get in on the Series A now because this is ????????????.

Here’s the use case for SnappCat. Place a small device containing a camera and some sort of WiFi chip. During the day, this device will take pictures. If the device recognizes your cat in a picture, it adds a meme (we assume this means text, probably using the Impact typeface), and sends it to your mobile device. Just imagine sitting in a meeting at work. Your phone buzzes, you look at the message, and you laugh uproariously. Yes, you can has fud Mr. Pibbles, you can has so much fud.

This is the height of technology. That’s not to say landing on the moon or building a civilization on Mars isn’t a superior technological achievement. SnappCat is simply the best technology humanity will every produce because it’s all downhill from here.

That said, this is a pretty interesting problem. A small, cheap device that does image recognition is hard, and adding memes is just the cherry on top. We can’t wait to see where this project goes, and it’s a great entry to the Best Product portion of the Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Complete Suite Of Biomedical Sensors

April 22, 2017 by 13 Comments

The human body has a lot to tell us if we only have the instruments to listen. Unfortunately, most of the diagnostic gear used by practitioners is pricey stuff that’s out of range if you just want to take a casual look under the hood. For that task, this full-featured biomedical sensor suite might come in handy.

More of an enabling platform than a complete project, [Orlando Hoilett]’s shield design incorporates a lot of the sensors we’ve seen before. The two main modalities are photoplethysmography, which uses the MAX30101 to sense changes in blood volume and oxygen saturation by differential absorption and reflection of light, and biopotential measurements using an instrumentation amplifier built around an AD8227 to provide all the “electro-whatever-grams” you could need: electrocardiogram, electromyogram, and even an electrooculogram to record eye movements. [Orlando] has even thrown on temperature and light sensors for environmental monitoring.

[Orlando] is quick to point out that this is an educational project and not a medical instrument, and that it should only ever be used completely untethered from mains — battery power and Bluetooth only, please. Want to know why? Check out the shocking truth about transformerless power supplies.

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Thanks to [fustini] for the tip.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Portable LED Flash For Photography

April 21, 2017 by 24 Comments

Photography is all about light. It’s literally right there in the name – stemming from the Greek word, photos. This is why photographers obsess over the time of day of a shoot, why Instagrammers coalesce around landmarks at sunset, and why a flash helps you take photos in darkness. Historically, flashes have worked in all manner of ways – using burning magnesium or xenon lamps for example. For this Hackaday Prize entry, [Yann Guidon] is developing a portable flash using LEDs instead.

By this point in time, you might be familiar with LEDs as flash units from your cellphone. However, [Yann] is taking this up a notch. The build is based around 100W LED modules, which obviously can pump out a lot of light. The interesting part of the build is its dual nature. The LEDs are intended to operate in one of two ways. The first is in a continuous lighting mode, running the modules well below their rated power to reduce the stress on the LEDs and power supply, and to enable the flash to run on the order of an hour. In this mode, temperature feedback will be used to control the LEDs to manage power use. The other is a pulsed mode, where the LED will be overvolted for a period of milliseconds to create a much more powerful flash.

It’s this dual nature which gives the LED-based flash a potential advantage over less versatile xenon-based units, which are limited to pulsed operation only. We can see the continuous lighting mode being particularly useful for videographers needing a compact, cheap lighting solution that can also work as a pulsed unit as well.We’re excited to see how [Yann] tackles the packaging, thermal and control issues as this project develops!

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Do Something Constructive Tomorrow

April 21, 2017 by 20 Comments

This Saturday is a great day to change the world. It’s Earth Day. There’s a National March for Science where millions will demand evidence-based change. We’re doing our own thing. We’re leading a World Create Day, where hackers gather ’round the soldering iron and find solutions to problems we all face.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been getting Hackaday readers to organize meetups in their hometowns, encouraging them to get a few people over, and sending them a bit of neat Hackaday swag. We couldn’t do this without the community leaders out there, and we’d just like to take a moment and recognize a few of the fablabs and hackerspaces that are making World Create Day possible.

A keyfob that makes turning a lock easier for those with limited mobility

Up in Vancouver, the folks at the Spinal Cord Injury Forum will be spending their World Create Day building tools that make life easier for people with limited mobility. Already they’re doing some awesome work with 3D printing, and with a few more minds tackling these problems, they’re sure to come up with something good.

This is a worldwide event, and we have hackerspaces from Cairo to Osaka taking part. Do you know where Tenerife is? There’s a World Create Day meetup there, too.

To give you a little more encouragement to attend a World Create Day meetup near you, just remember we’re still at the start of the Hackaday Prize, a competition where we’re giving away a quarter million dollars to build hardware that will change the world. Even if there isn’t a World Create Day meetup near you, you can always start your own meetup for tomorrow, or just go solo. And don’t forget to show off what’s going on using the #WorldCreateDay hashtag.

This isn’t an event to miss. When else will you be able to come up with creative solutions to problems with a worldwide audience? Find a meetup near you and do something constructive tomorrow.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: DIY ARM Scientific Calculator

April 20, 2017 by 59 Comments

What does a hacker do when he or she wants something but can’t afford it? They hack one together, of course. Or, in the case of [Ramón Calvo], they thoughtfully plan and prototype. [Ramón Calvo] wanted a scientific calculator, but couldn’t afford one, so he designed and built one himself.

[Ramón] started off with Arduino but upgraded initially to Freescale’s Freedom KL25Z development board upgraded to an ARM Cortex-M0+ programmed using mbed. The display is an Electronic Assembly DOGL-128 128×64 pixel LCD. [Ramón] did a couple of iterations on the PCB, going from a large DIY one in order for the Arduino version to work, to the current, smaller version for the ARM chip with hand soldered SMD components. After that, [Ramón] looked into the algorithms needed to parse mathematical input. He settled on the shunting-yard algorithm, which converts the input into Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), which is easier for the software to work with.

[Ramón] has a ton of features working, including your standard add, subtract, multiply and divide operations, square root, nth root and exponentiation, trigonometry, log and log10, and factorial(!) There are a few things still on the to-do list, such as low power and a graphing mode, and there are a couple of bugs still in the system, but the overall system is up and running. [Ramón] has put up the schematic and KiCAD files up on his Hackaday.io project page along with the bill of materials.

We’ve had a few Hackaday prize entries in the form of calculators, such as this one with Nixie tubes and this one that emulates 70’s HP calculators.

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