The Hackaday Prize

1541 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: An Urban Kitchen Garden

June 21, 2015 by 20 Comments

[Eric] is used to growing his own food, and looked at the commercial options for growing veggies and herbs year round. It turns out the commercial options are terrible, with proprietary lighting, proprietary ‘seed pods,’ and no climate control.

Unsatisfied with the commercial options, [Eric] looked for a DIY solution. His entry for The Hackaday Prize is just that: an Urban Kitchen Garden.

The Urban Kitchen Garden was a peltier wide cooler in its former life, turned into a grow chamber with LED grow lights, an Arduino, a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, a soil moisture sensor, and an old Nokia LCD to keep track of everything. He’s been growing basil in it over the winter, and it just won’t die.

[Eric] won’t be growing tomatoes or beans in his tiny, desktop-sized garden, but it’s not really designed for that. It’s meant for herbs and seedlings, mostly, with larger plants moved outside when [Eric]’s Canadian winters finally subside.

There’s a video of the build, you can check that out below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Reagent Robot

June 20, 2015 by 8 Comments

If you’re testing the amount of ammonia, nitrates, or just the pH of a pond, pool, or aquaculture setup, there’s two ways to do it. The first is with test tubes and chemicals: put some water in the test tube, add some chemicals, and match it to a color card. The second option is with expensive sensors.

[James] has a better idea. Since pumps, RGB LEDs, and light sensors exist, he’s building a reagent robot that will be able to measure ammonia, chlorine, nitrates, and pH without purely electronic sensors. The idea is to fill a clear container with water, add those fancy chemicals that come from aquarium supply stores, and measure the color of the water.

Right now, [James] has a bunch of stepper motors, valves, and solenoids all working together to pump water into his clear container. The next step will be to mount some RGB LEDs, a light sensor, and calibrate everything so colors can be measured.

It’s a great idea for electronic monitoring of aquaponics, ponds, and aquariums; those indicator chemicals are pretty inexpensive compared to electronic sensors, and once [James] has one measurement/reagent working, adding another is just a matter of putting in a few more tubes and pumps. You can check out a video of the progress so far below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Hackaday Prize Entry: HOMER, A 2D GPU For Microcontrollers

June 19, 2015 by 37 Comments

Just about the hardest thing you’ll ever do with a microcontroller is video. The timing must be precise, and even low-resolution video requires relatively large amounts of memory, something microcontrollers don’t generally have a lot of. HDMI? That’s getting into microcontroller wizard territory.

Despite these limitations, [monnoliv] is working on a GPU for microcontrollers. It outputs 1280×720 over HDMI, has a 24 bit palette, and 2D hardware acceleration.

It’s a very interesting project; usually, if you want graphics and a display in a project, you’re looking at a Linux system, and all the binary blobs and closed source drivers that come with that. [monnoliv]’s HOMER video card doesn’t need Linux, and it doesn’t need a very high-powered microcontroller. It’s just a simple SPI device with a bunch of memory and an FPGA that turns the most minimal microcontroller into a machine that can output full HD graphics.

This isn’t the only open source graphics card for microcontrollers in the Hackaday Prize; just a few days ago, we saw VGAtonic, another SPI-controlled video card for microcontrollers, this time outputting VGA instead of HDMI. Both are excellent projects, and if either makes it into production, they’ll both be cheap: under $100 for both of them. Just the thing if you want to play around with high-resolution video without resorting to Linux.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Astronaut Or Astronot: Round 1 Over, Round 2 Begins

June 19, 2015 by 20 Comments

For the last two weeks, we’ve been asking everyone over on hackaday.io to participate in the current round of community voting. We were asking everyone to choose the projects that were Most Likely To Be Widely Used. We just turned off voting for this round, and it’s time for round two: Which project is most likely to save the planet?

Before we get to that, I need to pick a random person on hackaday.io, figure out if they have voted, and if so, send off a $1000 gift card to the Hackaday store. Vidya time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5cHeCntgL8

No one won a $1000 gift card for the Hackaday store this week. In lieu of that, we’re arming the t-shirt cannon and aiming it at three random people who did vote. They are, in order of appearance, [Nick], [dbcarp], and [Eugene].

If you’re wondering about the results of this current round of voting and which projects the Hackaday community think are most likely to be widely used, hold tight. There are a lot of votes, and all that needs to be tabulated and computed and presented in a friendly graphical format. Also, it’s Friday afternoon. The winners of the first round of voting will be announced on Monday.

Round Two…. Most Likely To Save The Planet

It’s time for a new round of voting! This time, the theme is, Most Likely To Save The Planet. Voting is easy, just go over to the community voting page. You will be presented with two projects entered in the Hackaday Prize. One of these projects will invariably be more likely to save the planet. It is your task to decide which one. Vote for the project that is more likely to save the planet, and you’re in the running for t-shirts or Hackaday store gift cards in the drawing next week.

Here’s a video showing you how to vote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeEf_VLKUl4

That’s all you have to do to vote in the Hackaday Prize community voting. Here’s a link to go do that. We’ll do the same thing next Friday afternoon – choose a random person on Hackaday.io, and if they have voted, they get a $1000 gift card for the Hackaday store. The only losing move is not to play, so go vote.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Recording RC Planes With Third Person View

June 18, 2015 by 7 Comments

With the latest advancements in small, cheap video transmitters, it’s no surprise First Person View remote-controlled aircraft are so popular. It’s the easiest way to get into a cockpit without having to spend thousands of dollars and fifty or so hours on a pilot’s license. Despite all the technical challenges of FPV flying, there’s still one underserved part of recording RC aircraft: third person view, or as it’s more commonly called, ‘handing a camcorder to your friend.’

[Walker Eric] would like to do something about that. He’s always wanted nice videos of him flying his plane, and he can’t film and fly at the same time. He can build a robot, though, and that’s his entry for The Hackaday Prize.

[Walker]’s project uses a base station with a camcorder mounted on a gimbal. The electronics for this setup are surprisingly simple – just a GPS beacon transmitting telemetry down to the base station. By comparing this data to a GPS receiver on the ground station, the direction of the plane can be computed.

There are a few problems with this setup. Altitude measurement with GPS isn’t very accurate, so [Walker] is using a pressure sensor as an altimeter on the GPS beacon. The current setup works great, and is a fantastic improvement over the OpenCV setup [Walker] tested out before moving to GPS.

[Walker] already has some incredible video of him flying some planes and quads around his local field shot with this system. You can check those out below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Astronaut Or Astronot: Vote For The Hackaday Prize!

June 17, 2015 by 14 Comments

Just in case we haven’t hammered it into your skull quite yet, we’re having a little contest over on Hackaday.io. It’s The Hackaday Prize, where everyone on Hackaday.io is invited to build something cool for the chance of winning a trip to space and hundreds of other prizes.

We know not everyone has the desire, skills, or the time to build a project, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still contribute. We’re holding a community voting round right now. Each week, we have a new round of community voting with a new theme. This week, we’re asking the Hackaday.io community to select the project that is most likely to be widely used. What do you have to do to participate? Just go over to the voting page, and choose between two projects our especially fair voting algorithm pulled from current Hackaday Prize entries. Pick the project that best meets the theme of the week.

Why would anyone want to do this? This Friday, I’ll be taking a look at everyone on Hackaday.io, pulling a number out of a hat, and if that person voted in the current round of voting, they win a thousand dollar gift card to the Hackaday store. We’re also giving away Hackaday t-shirts to random people who have voted each week.

The only losing move is not to play, so go over to the voting page and pick the projects that best meet the theme, “most likely to be widely used.”

Hackaday Prize Entry: Tearing Down A Tesla

June 16, 2015 by 21 Comments

We’ve seen a few people tear down the drive trains from electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf, Prisuses, or the Chevy Volt. We’ve also seen someone tear down the battery pack found in a Tesla Model S. What we haven’t seen until now is a reverse engineering of the Tesla Model S drive train.

A fortuitous circumstance landed [Michal] the crown jewel of the Tesla Model S – the 310kW, 590Nm drive train. Exactly how and where [Michal] landed this gigantic powerful motor is a question that remains unanswered, and the question unasked. We might not want to know.

Now that he has a motor, the name of the game is figuring out how to drive it. Usually that means capturing data from the CAN bus and replaying that data. This isn’t what [Michal] is doing; instead, he’s using a motor controller he developed for the Chevy Volt and Toyota Prius. It’s going to be a lot of work, but that’s only because these gigantic EV motors and controllers are pretty rare on the used market now. Give it a few years, and the work [Michal] is putting in now will pay off in hundreds of DIY electric vehicles.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by: