Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: Haptic Navigation

August 26, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

For his project entered in the Hackaday Prize, [Neil] is working on a navigation aid for the blind. He’s calling his device Pathfinder, and it’s designed to allow greater freedom of motion for the disabled.

Pathfinder is a relatively simple device, with a cheap, off the shelf ultrasonic distance sensor, an ATMega, and a few passives. On its own, the ultrasonic distance sensor is only accurate to about 5%. By incorporating a temperature sensor, [Neil] was able to nail down the accuracy of his sensor to about 1%. Impressive!

For the machine to human interface, [Neil] chose haptic feedback, or small vibration motors tucked away inside a wristband. It’s by far the easiest way to add the output needed, and with a haptic motor driver, it’s easy to add specialized drive patterns to the vibration motor

You can check out [Neil]’s quarterfinal entry video for the Pathfinder below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: CANcrusher

August 25, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

In 2007, everyone discovered you could blink an LED with an Arduino. A few years after that, someone discovered you could make a PID controller work with an Arduino, and a great number of sous vide cooker hacks showed up on the Internet. Trends in electronics projects come and go, and this year we have CANbus sniffers and development platforms. One of these CAN dev platforms, CANcrusher, is a semifinalist for the Hackaday Prize, and does a great job at poking and prodding a CANbus.

Like a lot of very excellent projects, the CANcrusher is based on a Teensy 3.1 microcontroller. This, along with the MCP2515 CAN controller gives the CANcrusher three independent CAN channels supporting DW-CAN, SW-CAN, and LSFT. The software for the device can stream data directly to a computer over USB.

Simply providing an interface for a CAN bus is something that has been done to death, and to improve upon the many CANbus projects out there, the CANcrusher is adding Bluetooth, a GSM radio, SD datalogging, and a real time clock. It’s a great project for the Hackaday Prize with multiple videos explaining how it works and what it can do. You can check out the entry video for the CANcrusher below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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10 Best Product Finalists Announced

August 24, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

The Best Product competition within the 2015 Hackaday Prize highlights the work it takes for any hardware developer or startup to move from prototype to a manufacturable product. To compete, each entry had to go well beyond the standard requirements of the Hackaday Prize with more in-depth documentation, and by shipping three working beta units to Hackaday for judging.

The 10 Finalists featured below are all exceptional and will compete for the next four weeks to be named The Best Product. In addition to the top spot, they will secure a $100,000 cash prize, a six month residency in the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena, California, and help with making connections needed to move their product forward. This is the perfect contest for product engineers, hardware startups, or anyone else who can design the next great thing.

We spent last week judging all the entries for the Best Product contest, and the results are in. Who are the winners? Which products are moving on to the next round of judging? See the full details of all Best Product finalists or browse a summary of each below, presented in no particular order whatsoever.

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100 Semifinalists For The 2015 Hackaday Prize

August 24, 2015 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

Entries for the 2015 Hackaday Prize — the nine-month design contest that challenges you to build something that matters — closed one week ago today. There were over 900 entries and everyone at Hackaday has been blown away by the different approaches used to solve problems affecting a large number of people, and at the huge body of Open Hardware that has been documented by the process.

Today it is our pleasure to announce the 100 Semifinalists who will move on to the next round. Congratulations to you all on this accomplishment. These designs will continue to be refined as we approach the September 21st deadline where 10 finalists will be chosen by our expert judging panel: Akiba, Pete Dokter, Lenore Edman, Limor Fried, Jack Ganssle, Dave Jones, Heather Knight, Ben Krasnow, Ian Lesnet, Windell Oskay, Micah Scott, and Elecia White. The 10 finalists will go on to compete for the Grand Prize: A Trip into Space or $196,883.

For those who didn’t move on to the Semifinal round, please do not take this as a strike against your work. Don’t stop now, your ideas can still change the world!

Best Product finalists were announced in this post.

Browse the 2015 Semifinalists List or the full list of entries.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Feral Cats Phone Home With Das Katzetelegraf

August 23, 2015 by Dan Maloney 41 Comments

Feral cats are a huge problem in some areas. Roaming freely in cities and in rural settings and reproducing with reckless abandon, colonies of feral cats can exhibit nuisance behavior that often results in unpleasant measures being taken to control their population. More humane programs, such as trap-neuter-return (TNR), seek to safely trap cats, give them basic vaccinations and neuter them, and either return them to their colony or, for a lucky few, ready them for adoption. Such programs are proving successful, but are not without issues. Enter Das Katzetelegraf.

You don’t need to understand a lick of German to figure out exactly what Das Katzetelegraf does from its name. Consisting of an Arduino, a GSM module, and a simple magnetic reed switch attached to the door of a humane cat trap, Das Katzetelegraf sends a text message to a TNR program volunteer when a cat has been trapped. Instead of waiting in the trap for the TNR workers to make daily rounds, the cats are quickly retrieved and the trap is reset for the next cycle. This reduces the time the cat spends in the trap, stressed and without access to food or water, and improves the animal’s outcome. As a bonus, each trap’s throughput is increased, so more animals can be cycled through the TNR program.

TNR can really help reduce feral cat populations, and Das Katzetelegraf can make them even more effective. But if you just have a stray cat pooping up your garden, a Raspberry Pi cat-deterring sprinkler might be a better choice.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Twitter Goes To The Dogs With Raspberry Pi Hack

August 21, 2015 by Richard Baguley 7 Comments

Dogs are remarkable creatures. Anybody who has lived with one will know that they are very vocal beasts, with barks that range from noting the presence of a squirrel in the yard to the warning whine that says “I am about to pee on your shoes if you don’t take me outside.” [Henry Conklin] decided to computerize the analysis of these noises, putting his dog [Oliver Twitch] on Twitter so he could hear what he was saying while he was at work. [Henry] that is: [Oliver] stays at home.

He did this using a Raspberry Pi, which is set to record sound above a certain volume. With the system sitting by [Oliver’s] favorite window, this records his barks. The recordings are then analyzed using PyAudioAnalysis, a library that analyzes sounds, compares them to reference ones and classifies them. The Raspberry Pi then posts the results onto twitter using Python-twitter.

The setup used by [Oliver] to capture the barks: a USB microphone, Raspberry Pi and WiFi USB dongle.

Or rather, it will when [Henry] fixes a few bugs: right now it just posts a random string that is based on the length of the bark, not the type. [Henry] says he is working on the dog translation at the moment. It’s still a neat project that shows you how simple it is to use a few small bits of code to gather info from your environment and share these over the Internet. [Henry] also says that the next step is creating a weekly podcast for [Oliver]. I, for one, will be subscribing to hear his thoughts on how annoying the postman is, and how vexing it is to see a squirrel and not be able to chase them.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Lighting The Way For Walkers

August 20, 2015 by James Hobson 8 Comments

Chances are, you probably know someone who uses a walker to assist in their mobility. Ever wonder about how they could be made better? When [Alan McFarland] noticed his friend using his iPhone as a light to walk down a hallway — with only one hand on his walker — he realized something could easily be done to make the walker more functional. His own light bar.

Sure you could get a flashlight, zip tie it to the walker, or maybe a bike light with a dedicated mount — but [Alan] wanted it to be a bit more elegant; and functional. With this in mind, he attached an LED light strip to the lower frame of the walker to help illuminate the path ahead. A button is wired up to the handle for easy access, and he’s even using a PIC12F1501 microcontroller to give it some logic — it’ll turn off by itself, fading out, giving the person a chance to sit down before the lights go out.

The thing we like about this project is he programmed it using the PICBASIC PRO compiler — the same compiler that [Alan] himself used nearly 20 years ago programming the Borg suits and spacesuit lighting on Star Trek: First Contact — how’s that for a random trivia fact!