World Create Day: Hackaday Meetups Reach Europe And Africa

April 20, 2016 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

We are now just three days away from Hackaday World Create Day. On Saturday, April 23rd, the Hackaday community around the world will come together in real life to have fun, share their stories, and to do a little bit of engineering.

A few weeks ago, we put out the call for local meetup organizers and were overwhelmed by the response. The World Create Day events in Europe and Africa span pretty much from pole to pole with meetups in Salangen and Cape Town.

If you are near any of the events on the map, please join in the camaraderie on Saturday If you don’t see a marker near you, it’s not too late, you can still host your own meetup. Follow these easy steps to get your town on the map!

What can you expect from World Create Day? At its simplest, gather together and talk about solving a technology problem facing humanity. This can be submitted as your Challenge 1 entry for the 2016 Hackaday Prize. But many organizers have more planned. We’ve heard from groups who are hosting hardware show-and-tell, others have lined of speakers or workshops, and we always suggest hosting lightning talks where anyone at the meetup can speak for around two minutes.

Hackaday is made up of doers. It’s time we all got together and celebrated what that means. Don’t miss out this Saturday!

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Good News! It’s The Dacia 1310!

April 19, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

Although we’ve never had the privilege to drive one, [skaarj] tells us Dacia made some terrible cars. The Dacia 1310, a communist clone of the Renault 12, was cheap, had sixty-two horses under the hood, and was easy to maintain. The cabin, by all accounts, is a bit lacking, giving [skaarj] the opportunity to improve the instrument cluster and dash. He’s not throwing a stereo in and calling it a day – [skaarj] is upgrading his Dacia with retro-futuristic components including a vacuum tube amp, a CRT computer display, and an unspeakably small dumb terminal.

[skaarj]’s build began with a hit and run accident. With most of the body panels on the passenger side of the car removed, [Skaarj] ground some rust, rattle canned some rust proof paint, and bondoed the most offensive corrosion. Work then began on the upgraded dash, with a few choice components chosen including an old Soviet television, a hardware neural network to determine hardware faults, and a bizarre implementation of a CAN bus on a car without any of the requisite electronics.

This is one of those projects that can go on forever; there’s a lot you can do with the dashboard of a car if you’re not constrained by a suffocating desire to appear normal. In that respect, [skaarj] has this one locked up – he’s got a vacuum tube amplifier and enough CRTs in this car to add retro satellite navigation. It’s a great entry for The Hackaday Prize, as something cool is sure to come out of this project.

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World Create Day: A Meetup Across The Americas

April 19, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

This Saturday, April 23, we’re hosting a worldwide Hackaday meetup called World Create Day, and we want you to be a part of it. The 2016 Hackaday Prize is all about solving technology problems, and if you’re looking for an excuse to meet up with a few fellow tinkerers, this is it.

Right now, we have dozens of Hackaday meetup hosts planning their own get together. It’s six continents of awesome, and that’s only because winter is starting to set in on Antarctica. Today we’re taking a closer look at what’s lined up in North and South America. We have meetups from the shores of Venezuela to the birthplace of the worst president the United States has ever had. We have meetups in Baltimore and El Paso, and from Silicon Valley to New York City.

The goal for these meetups is to find fellow hackers and tinkerers, suss out a few ideas on what you’re working on, and start a project for The Hackaday Prize. We’re wrapping up the first stage of The Hackaday Prize, Design Your Concept this coming Monday, where all you need is an idea. Saturday’s World Create Day is the perfect time to brainstorm your tech solution with some friends and get it submitted ahead of the deadline. If you have an idea for the next great Internet of Things, an application for the RISC architecture that is gonna change everything, or just want to show off your flubber prototype, this is the event to go to.

This is the opportunity to find some like-minded hackers in your neck of the woods, and it’s not an event to miss. If you’re looking for a meetup in your area, check out the map here. If you’re interested in hosting one of these shindigs, fill out this form and we’ll set you up.

We’ll take a closer look at the meetups planned on other continents as the week progresses. If you’re still thinking of getting your own meetup on the map, now’s the time!

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First Hackaday Prize Challenge Closes In One Week

April 18, 2016 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

The first five weeks of the Hackaday Prize have flown by but many of you have already been busy, submitting over 400 entries! For those that haven’t (or for those considering a second entry) there’s still time. You have until 7am PDT on Monday 4/25 to Design Your Concept.

20 Entries Will Win $1000

This is the round that everyone should enter. It’s all about documenting your idea to solve a technology problem; showing you have a plan that will lead to success. From this first challenge, 20 entries will be selected to win $1000 each and move on to the final round of the 2016 Hackaday Prize.

Design with a Team During World Create Day

That’s right, you don’t need to build anything to be eligible for this round. It’s the perfect opportunity to get your engineering dream team together for an afternoon and come up with that impressive design concept. We’re making this even easier with Hackaday World Create Day. This Saturday, 4/23, there will be Hackaday Meetups all over the world. Show up, brainstorm your concept, and submit it as an entry. Many of the World Create Day meetups have more in store, like talks and socializing. Don’t miss this opportunity to meet the Hackaday community in your town!

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GameGirl: A Better Portable Raspberry Pi

April 17, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

For better or worse, the most popular use for the Raspberry Pi – by far – is media centers and retro game consoles. No, the great unwashed masses aren’t developing Linux drivers for their Pi peripherals, and very few people are tackling bare metal ARM programming. That doesn’t mean creating a handheld console based on the Pi isn’t a worthy pursuit.

For their entry for the 2016 Hackaday Prize, [David] and [Jean-André] are building a portable Pi console that’s much better than an old Bondo-encrusted Game Boy enclosure stuffed with hot glue and wires. They’re doing this project the right way with a hardware accelerated display, custom software, and a high quality case.

[David] is in charge of the hardware, and that means making a very, very small handheld console. The design of this GameGirl is extremely similar to the old-school Game Boy Pocket (or Game Boy Light). There’s a D-pad, four buttons, select, start, and two ‘shoulder’ buttons on the back. The build is based on the Raspberry Pi Zero, and thanks to the Pi’s standard 40-pin header, [David] is able to configure the display to use an RGB565 DPI interface. This means the display is stupidly cheap while still leaving a few GPIO pins left over for the SPI, buttons, backlight, and PWM audio.

[Jean-André] is the other half of the team, and his contributions to open source software make him exceptionally qualified for this project. He’s the main developer for Lakka, a DIY retro emulation console, and the #5 RetroArch contributor. No, this project isn’t using RetroPie – and there’s a reason for that. Emulator hackers are spending a lot of time optimizing emulators for the Raspberry Pi, only because of RetroPi. If these emulator hackers spent their time optimizing for an API like LibRetro, you could eventually play a working version of Pilotwings 64 on the Raspberry Pi and every other platform LibRetro is available for. All the effort that goes into making a game work with a Raspberry Pi is effort that goes into making that game work for the PSP, Wii, iOS, and a PC. Yes, its philosophical pissing in the wind while saying, ‘this is what the community should do’; this is open source software, after all.

With the right ideas going into the hardware and software, [David] and [Jean-André] have an amazing project on their hands. It’s one of the most popular entries and are near the top of the charts in the community voting bootstrap effort where every like on a project gets the team a dollar for their project. GameGirl is shaping up to be a great project, and we can’t wait to see the it in action.

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Digital Logging Of Analog Instruments

April 16, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

The only useful data you’ll ever find is already digitized, but a surprising number of gauges and meters are still analog. The correct solution to digitizing various pressure gauges, electric meters, and any other analog gauge is obviously to replace the offending dial with a digital sensor and display. This isn’t always possible, so for [Egar] and [ivodopiviz]’s Hackaday Prize entry, they’re coming up with a way to convert these old analog gauges to digital using a Raspberry Pi and a bit of computer vision.

The idea behind this instrument digitizer isn’t to replace the mechanics and electronics, as we are so often wont to do. Instead, this team is using a 3D printed bracket that mounts a Raspberry Pi and camera directly in front of an analog gauge. Combine this contraption with OpenCV, and you have a device that’s just smart enough to look at a needle on a dial, convert that to a number, and save it to a file or send it out over WiFi.

It’s an extremely simple device for what [Egar] and [ivodopiviz] admit is a relatively niche application. However, if you only need digital measurements of an analog meter for a month or so, or you don’t want to mess up your steampunk decor, it’s an ingenious build.

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A Star Tracking Telescope Mount

April 14, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

[Chris] recently got his hands on an old telescope. While this small refractor with an altitude-azimuth mount is sufficient for taking a gander at big objects in our solar system, high-end telescopes can be so much cooler. Large reflecting telescopes can track the night sky for hours, and usually come with a computer interface and a GOTO button. Combine this with Stellarium, the open source sky map, and you can have an entire observatory in your back yard.

For [Chris]’ entry into the 2016 Hackaday Prize, he’s giving his old telescope an upgrade. With a Raspberry Pi, a few 3D printed adapters, and a new telescope mount to create a homebrew telescope computer.

The alt-az mount really isn’t the right tool for the astronomical job. The earth spins on a tilted axis, and if you want to hold things in the night sky still, it has to turn in two axes. An equatorial mount is much more compatible with the celestial sphere. Right now, [Chris] is looking into a German equatorial mount, a telescope that is able to track an individual star through the night sky using only a clock drive motor.

To give this telescope a brain, he’ll be using a Raspberry Pi, GPS, magnetometer, and ostensibly a real-time clock to make sure the build knows where the stars are. After that, it’s a simple matter of pointing the telescope via computer and using a Raspberry Pi camera to peer into the heavens with a very, very small image sensor.

While anyone with three or four hundred dollars could simply buy a telescope with similar features, that’s really not the point for [Chris], or for amateur astronomy. There is a long, long history of amateur astronomers building their own mirrors, lenses, and mounts. [Chris] is just continuing this very long tradition, and in the process building a great entry for the 2016 Hackaday Prize

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