The Hackaday Prize

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Aspirin For Everyone

May 6, 2015 by 62 Comments

When it comes to the history of medicine and drugs, Aspirin, or more properly acetyl-salicylic acid, is one of the more interesting stories. Plants rich in salicalates were used as medicines more than four thousand years ago, and in the fourth century BC, [Hippocrates] noted a powder made from willow bark was an excellent analgesic. It was only in the 1800s that acetylated salicylic acid was first synthesized. In 1897, chemists at Bayer gave this ancient remedy a new name: Aspirin. It’s on the WHO List of Essential Medicines, but somehow millions of people don’t have access to this pill found in every pharmacy.

[M. Bindhammer] is working to make Aspirin for Everyone for his entry to the Hackaday Prize, using a small portable lab designed around chemicals that can be easily obtained.

The most common synthesis of Aspirin is salicylic acid treated with acetic anhydrate. Acetic anhydrate is used for the synthesis of heroin, and of course the availability of this heavily restricted by the DEA. Instead, [M. Bindhammer] will use a different method using salicylic acid and acetic acid. If you’re keeping track, that’s replacing a chemical on a DEA list of precursors with very strong vinegar.

[M. Bindhammer] even has a design for the lab that will produce the Aspirin, and it’s small enough to fit in a very large pocket. Everything that is needed for the production of acetyl-salicylic acid is there, including a reaction vessel with a heating element, a water/oil bath, flask, an Allihn condenser, and a vacuum filtering flask. Even if shipping millions of pills to far-flung reaches of the planet were easy, it’s still an exceptional Hackaday Prize entry.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Safety Belt Holds Up Pants And Passwords

May 6, 2015 by 13 Comments

[Dan Williams] built a belt that holds up your pants while remembering your passwords. This was his project while camped out at the Hackaday Hardware Villiage at the 2015 TC Disrupt Hackathon last weekend.

safety-belt-pcb-sandwichThe idea started with the concept of a dedicated device to carry a complicated password; something that you couldn’t remember yourself and would be difficult to type. [Dan] also decided it would be much better if the device didn’t need its own power source, and if the user interface was dead simple. The answer was a wrist-band made up of a USB cable and a microcontroller with just one button.

To the right you can see the guts of the prototype. He is using a Teensy 2.0 board, which is capable of enumerating as an HID keyboard. The only user input is the button seen at the top. Press it once and it fires off the stored password. Yes, very simple to implement, but programming is just one part of a competition. The rest of his time was spent refining it into what could reasonably be considered a product. He did such a good job of it that he received an Honorable Mention from Hackaday to recognize his execution on the build.

Fabrication

IMG_20150502_183207[Dan] came up with the idea to have a pair of mating boards for the Teensy 2.0. One on top hosts the button, the other on the bottom has a USB port which is used as the “clasp” of the belt buckle. One side of the USB cable plugs into the Teensy, the other into this dummy-port. Early testing showed that this was too bulky to work as a bracelet. But [Dan] simply pivoted and turned it into a belt.

safety-belt-built-at-hackathon-thumb[Kenji Larsen] helped [Dan] with the PCB-sandwich. Instead of mounting pin sockets on the extra boards, they heated up the solder joints on a few of the Teensy pins and pushed them through with some pliers. This left a few pins sticking up above the board to which the button add-on board could be soldered.

To finish out the build, [Dan] worked with [Chris Gammell] to model a 2-part case for the electronics. He also came up with a pandering belt buckle which is also a button-cap. It’s 3D printed with the TechCrunch logo slightly recessed. He then filled this recess with blue painter’s tape for a nice contrast.

[Dan] on-stage presentation shows off the high-level of refinement. There’s not a single wire (excluding the USB belt cable) or unfinished part showing! Since he didn’t get much into the guts of the build during the live presentation we made sure to seek him out afterward and record a hardware walk through which is embedded below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Better KVM Switch

May 5, 2015 by 60 Comments

Now it’s not uncommon to have a desktop and a laptop at a battlestation with tablets waiting in the wings. Add in a few Raspis, consoles, and various cheap computers, and it’s pretty easy to have an enormous number of machines and monitors on a desk. Traditionally, a KVM switch would be the solution to this, sharing a keyboard, mouse, and monitor with many different boxes, but this is an ugly solution. [frankstripod] has a device that fixes that with some interesting software and a few USB hacks.

[frankstripod] is in love with a program called Synergy this program combines the keyboard, mouse, and display of several computers over a network so you’ll only ever have to use one keyboard and mouse; it’s as simple as dragging your mouse from one computer to the other. There are a few limitations, though: keyboards don’t work until the OS has loaded (no BIOS access, then), it doesn’t work if the network is down, and setup can be complicated. This project aims to replace the ‘server’ part of a Synergy setup with a small, networkable KVM.

Right now the plan is to use a small embedded board running Linux to read a USB keyboard and switch the output between several computers. A few scripts detect the mouse moving from one screen to another, and a microcontroller switches USB output between each computer. If it sounds weird, you’re right, but it does work: [frank]’s 2014 Hackaday Prize project was a mouse that worked with two computers at once.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

[Kenji Larsen] Shows Off The Ultimate Hacking Kit

May 5, 2015 by 40 Comments

If you roll into a hardware hackathon empty-handed, you’re going to be at a disadvantage compared to those who bring equipment with which they’re already familiar. Pray that you never roll into one where [Kenji Larsen] is your competitor. Luckily, this weekend he came out to mentor for Hackaday’s hardware hacking village at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon and not as a competitor. In this video he shows off the huge rollerbag which he calls his “Hack Pack”. I’d say there’s a 50/50 chance his travel setup is better than your home lab.

Where do I begin (seriously, watch the video)? Perhaps best to note is how organized he is. For instance, the large plastic bag containing his battery-operated and plug-in Dremels also has conveniently sized stock like acrylic and metal. There are compartment boxes full of sensors, others contain things like passives, batteries, battery chargers, hundreds of Moteino modules, handfuls of BeagleBones Black, breakout and dev boards of every flavor. He has all the necessary tools like hemostat, x-acto blade, steel ruler, and magnifying glasses. There’s even a 3D printer in the bag — a Printrbot Simple which [Chris Gammell] played with all weekend err… learned to use as part of his role as a mentor.

We had a ton of hardware along with us, but time and again [Kenji] was there for the save on some of the less-common needs. He’s a expert when it comes to fabrication techniques and it showed. We also give him mad points for staying up overnight for all 20-hours of the build session. Thank you so much [Kenji], I think I speak for every one of the hardware hackers when I say you helped bring the event to the next level of exhilarating and exhausting fun. Please direct your own thanks, stories, and well-wishes, and follows to [Kenji’s] hacker profile.

If you weren’t able to make it to NYC this weekend, you definitely missed out. We’ll be telling the story of that all week. Those on the West Coast will have a chance next weekend at Hackaday Prize Worldwide: LA. The workshop is sold out but socializing on Saturday, and a Sunday free-build are both still available for RSVPs.

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Low Cost, Open Source MRI

May 4, 2015 by 58 Comments

This low cost magnetic resonance imager isn’t [Peter]’s first attempt at medical imaging, and it isn’t his first project for the Hackaday Prize, either. He’s already built a CT scanner using a barium check source and a CCD marketed as a high-energy particle detector. His Hackaday Prize entry last year, an Open Source Science Tricorder with enough sensors to make [Spock] jealous, ended up winning fourth place.

[Peter]’s MRI scanner addresses some of the shortcomings of his Open Source CT scanner. While the CT scanner worked, it was exceptionally slow, taking hours to image a bell pepper. This was mostly due to the sensitivity of his particle detector and how hot a check source he could obtain. Unlike highly radioactive elements, you can just make high strength magnetic fields, making this MRI scanner potentially much more useful than a CT scanner.

There are a few things that make a low-cost MRI machine possible, the first being a way to visualize magnetic fields. For this, [Peter] is using an array of Honeywell HMC5883L 3-axis magnetometers, the smallest sensors he could find with the largest range. These magnetometers are I2C devices, so with a few multiplexers it’s actually a relatively simple build.

Imaging with these magnetometers is not simple, and it’s going to take a lot of work to make a signal from all the noise this magnetic camera will see. The technique [Peter] will use isn’t that much different from another 2014 Hackaday Prize entry, A Proton Precession Magnetometer. When a proton in your body is exposed to a high strength magnetic field, it will orient towards the high strength field. When the large field is turned off, the proton will orient itself towards the next strongest magnetic field, in this case, the Earth. As a proton orients itself to the Earth’s magnetic field, it oscillates very slightly, and this decaying oscillation is what the magnetic camera actually detects.

With some techniques from one of [Peter]’s publication, these oscillations can be turned into images. It won’t have the same resolution as an MRI machine that fills an entire room, but it will work. Imagine, an MRI device that will sit on a desktop, made out of laser-cut plywood. You can’t have a cooler project than that.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Fixation On Nitrogen

May 3, 2015 by 89 Comments

The reason we can feed six or seven billion people isn’t GMOs. It’s the massive increase in the use of fertilizers over the past hundred years. Most of the nitrogen-based fertilizers are produced using the Bosch-Haber process, a bit of chemical engineering that consumes one percent of all energy worldwide.

For his entry in the Hackaday Prize this year, [Peter Walsh] is improving the Bosch-Haber process, making the production of nitrogen simpler with less equipment.

The Bosch-Haber process runs at temperatures 400°C and pressures of about 200 atmospheres. Right now, this process is run in huge pressure vessels. [Peter]’s idea is to use ultrasonic cavitation to produce the same environment in equipment that can sit safely on a workbench.

[Peter]’s idea is inspired by sonoluminescence, a phenomenon seen when tiny bubbles in water implode producing light. It’s estimated that pressures and temperatures inside these imploding bubbles reach 2000 atmospheres and 5000°C – more than enough for the Bosch-Haber process. By injecting hydrogen and nitrogen into a machine that creates these sonoluminescent bubbles, ammonia will be created and turned into fertilizers to feed the planet.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

An Exceptionally Small UV Sensor

May 2, 2015 by 7 Comments

Most of the hacks we see hitting the tip line are exactly that – hacked up hardware projects held together with hot glue and duct tape. [x-labs]’ entry for the 2015 Hackaday Prize, the UV badge, is certainly not one of these projects. It’s a professional one-off, capable of displaying the UV index, temperature, humidity, and pressure in one tiny little enclosure.

The UV badge is designed to be used outdoors. This means any old display ripped from a Nokia phone won’t do; that will wash out in the sun. Instead, [x-labs] is using a very sunlight-readable Sharp Memory LCD. A nice choice, as it’s an exceptionally low-power device.

Inside the 54 x 34 x 7.1 mm 3D printed enclosure is a very thin PCB, and all surface-mount components. The device is powered by a single coin cell battery that should give months of run time.

With a product designed so well, we’re wondering if the UV badge will be in the running for the Best Product category of the Hackaday Prize this year. There aren’t many projects in the running, and the winner gets a enough funding, machinery, and experience to turn their project into a product.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by: