Hackaday Prize Entry: Laptop Batteries For A Power Bank

June 30, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 48 Comments

USB power banks – huge batteries that will recharge your phone or tablet – are ubiquitous these days. You can buy them at a gas station or from your favorite online retailer in any capacity you would ever want. Most of these power banks have a tremendous shortcoming; they need to charge over USB. With a 10,000 mAh battery, that’s going to take a while.

We already have batteries with huge capacities, are able to charge quickly, and judging from a few eBay auctions, can be picked up for a song. [Kumar] is working on a device that leverages these batteries – and the electronics inside of them – to build a smarter power bank.

Right now, [Kumar] is working with Dell Latitude D5xx/D6xx replacement batteries that he can pick up easily. These batteries have an SMBus interface, and with a low power ARM microcontroller and a TI BQ24725a, he has everything he needs to efficiently and safely charge these batteries.

[Kumar] says he’s looking for some community suggestions and feature requests for his project. If you have any, be sure to drop them over on his project page.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Talk Of The Town: Hacker Channel Tomorrow

June 30, 2015 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Get in touch with Hackers everywhere. Take part in the Collabatorium tomorrow, live!

Things get started on Wednesday, July 1st at 6:30pm PDT (UTC-7). Hundreds of hackers will be on hand discussing what they’re building, all the stuff happening in the hacker-sphere these days, and joining forces for that next great hack!

All are invited to take part. Head on over the Hackaday Prize Hacker Channel right now and click on the left sidebar link that says “Request to join this project”.

We highly recommend adding a custom avatar (if you haven’t already) so that others in the Collabatorium will be able to put a picture to your personality. The interface is ready for chat, links, images, code and much more so bring your questions and share your knowledge.

Now that you’ve clicked for an invite, while away the hours until it begins by heading over to VOTE in this week’s Astronaut or Not. And soon after you run through your 50 votes we’re sure you’ll also figure out you don’t have to wait for us to get the conversation started in the Hacker Channel ;-)

Hackaday Prize Entry: Circular Knitting Machines

June 29, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

Deep in the recesses of a few enterprising hackerspaces, you’ll find old electronic knitting machines modified for use with modern computers. They’re cool, and you can knit colorful designs, but all of these machines are ultimately based on old equipment, and you’ll have a hard time building one for yourself.

For their entry to the Hackaday Prize, [Mar] and [Varvara] is building a knitting machine from scratch. Not only is it a 3D printed knitting machine anyone can build given enough time and plastic, but this machine is a circular knitting machine, something no commercial offering has yet managed.

We saw [Mar] and [Varvara]’s Circular Knitic last January, but this project has quite the pedigree. They originally started on their quest for a modern knitting machine by giving a new brain to old Brother machines. This was an incredible advancement compared to earlier Brother knitting machine hacks; before, everyone was emulating a floppy drive on a computer to push data to the machine. The original Knitic build did away with the old electronics completely, replacing it with a homebrew Arduino shield.

While the Circular Knitic isn’t completely 3D printed, you can make one in just about any reasonably equipped shop. It’s a great example of a project that’s complex and can be replicated by just about anyone, and a perfect example of a project for The Hackaday Prize.

Check out the video of the Circular Knitic below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: Circular Knitting Machines” →

THP Community Voting: Results & A New Round

June 29, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

Last Friday we wrapped up a round of community voting for The Hackaday Prize. The theme? Most Likely To Save The Planet. Now it’s time for some results:

The projects voted Most Likely To Save The Planet by the Hackaday.io community are, in order:

Congratulations to everyone who has a project that was voted up to the top. Even though these rounds of community voting don’t decided which projects make it into the Hackaday Prize semifinals, you’ve earned the respect of your peers and a nifty Hackaday Prize t-shirt.

Since NIRGM – Non-Invasive NIR Glucose Meter won last week, we’re moving down the list to #11 and awarding SciPlo a Hackaday Prize t-shirt as well.

A New Round Of Voting!

This week, we’re asking the Hackaday.io community to vote for the most Amazingly Engineered project entered into the Hackaday Prize. To entice everyone to vote, I’m going to pick a random Hackaday.io user next Friday around 22:00 UTC. If that person has voted, they get a $1000 gift card for the Hackaday Store. If that person has not voted, I’ll be giving a few prizes away to people who have voted. Last week, we gave away a SmartMatrix, an Analog Stepper Gauge, and a Simon Says kit. We’ll probably change that up this week; I don’t know what it will be, but someone who votes will get something. Imagine; giving away stuff just for clicking a button. How magnanimous can we get?

As with every community voting update, it is requested that you vote. If you need a nudge to understand how this works, here’s a video tutorial on how to vote.

The Spirit Of Hackaday Shines In Shenzhen

June 29, 2015 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

Hackaday loves to spread the message of the hardware hacking lifestyle. That’s only possible where there are hardware hackers willing to spend their time getting together to talk the future of the hardware industry, and to celebrate where we are now. We’re honored that you came out en masse for our Shenzhen Workshop and Meetup!

Zero to Product

[Matt Berggren] has presented his Zero to Product workshop a few times now as part of our Hackaday Prize Worldwide series. This spring that included Los Angeles, San Francisco, and ten days ago it was Shezhen, China.

[Matt] leading Zero to Product workshop

Participants designing a PCB

All levels of experience are welcome

We partnered with MakerCamp, a week-long initiative that pulled in people from all over China to build a Makerspace inside of a shipping container. Successful in their work, the program then hosted workshops. The one caveat, Shenzhen in June is a hot and sticky affair. Luckly our friends at Seeed Studio were kind enough to open their climate-controlled doors to us. The day-long workshop explored circuit board design, using Cadsoft Eagle as the EDA software to lay out a development board for the popular ESP8266 module.

Continue reading “The Spirit Of Hackaday Shines In Shenzhen” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: An SD Card Arduino

June 28, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

About a year ago, Intel announced they’d be launching a new platform stuffed into an SD card. Imagine – an entire computer packaged into an SD card, with nine whole pins for power and I/O. Cooler heads prevailed, the Intel Edison was launched, but the idea stuck; why can’t you fit an Arduino in an SD card?

[kodera2t] found out there’s no real reason why you can’t put a small microcontroller inside an SD card. For his Hackaday Prize entry, he created the SDuino, and it’s exactly what it says on the tin: an ATMega328p stuffed into a microSD adapter.

Unlike the other microcontroller stuffed in an SD card platform — the Electric Imp, [kodera] is, for the most part, respecting the standard pinout for SD cards. The MISO and MOSI signals are reversed, of course, one of the grounds on the SD pinout is tied to an analog input pin on the microcontroller, and the chip select on the SD pinout is ignored completely. Other than that, it’s the closest you’re going to get to an SD card with a microcontroller.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Lose Yourself To Dance

June 26, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

Not every project for The Hackaday Prize needs to solve a pressing concern, save the planet, or help people. Sometimes, it just needs to be cool. [Jeremy]’s project is certainly cool. He’s building a touch-sensitive disco floor for the awesomeness of Saturday Night Fever combined with the technical complexity of the Billy Jean music video.

We’ve seen a few disco floor builds over the years, and for the most part, [Jeremy] isn’t straying too far from a well-tread path. He’s using LED strips to light his build, cutting the frame for the floor out of plywood and translucent squares, and using an ATMega to control each panel. So far, nothing out of the ordinary.

The trick to this build is that every square has a capacitive touch sensor. Underneath each translucent panel is a bit of wire mesh. Because the disco floor has 144 nodes, running the standard capacitive sensor library just wouldn’t work; the delay in measuring each node adds up very fast. By rewriting [Paul Stoffregen]’s capacitive sensor library, [Jeremy] was able to run many panels at once.

Right now [Jeremy] has a single panel that responds equally well to bare feet as it does to motorcycle boots. It’s exactly what you need in an interactive dance floor, and we can’t wait to seen the entire floor running.