The Hackaday Prize

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Hackaday Prize Worldwide: Maker’s Asylum Meetup In Mumbai

March 19, 2015 by 3 Comments

I am excited to announce Hackaday’s first ever event in India. We have a huge readership in the country and because I am based in Mumbai there is an opportunity to organize some events. On this Saturday, March 21st, at Maker’s Asylum hackerspace we will gather for “Bring-A-Hack Maker’s Asylum” to talk about our passion for making and hacking. We’ll discuss the 2015 Hackaday Prize which offers $500,000 in prizes for hackers who can build solutions to problems faced by a wide-range of people. What does that really mean? That’s one of the topics of the evening. Of course there will be plenty of time to show off your own hacks, ask for advice on difficult projects, and to socialize with everyone that attends. Please visit the event page for all the details.

For all of you who aren’t in the area, I’d like to share with you a little background about hackerspaces in India.

Hacking in India

Hack : “To use something in a way it was not originally intended”. This could sound very familiar when you say that “Hack is the English equivalent of Hindi-Urdu word Jugaad“. So Hacking has a very positive and useful connotation when used in such a context. Everybody does it some time or the other – sometimes unknowingly, but quite often on purpose. It follows that people who Hack be called Hackers – and again, that description is used in a very positive sense.

Sometime around the turn of the 21st century, individual Hackers who up until then used to work in isolation, started congregating together to form clubs and community spaces which came be called – no points for guessing – Hacker Spaces. The movement spread over Europe rapidly and then on to the United States, and slowly to other parts of the world. Hacker Spaces became the breeding grounds for individual innovation. People with bright ideas would seek guidance and peer reviews of their hacks, and if it was interesting enough for the wider community, they would launch themselves as enterprising startups. Hacker Spaces provided the environment, the tools, and a community for people to tinker away and build stuff. In a sense, it is like going back to our enterprising roots before the advent of wide spread industrialization stifled individual entrepreneurship.

Rise of our Hackerspace Culture

Around 2008, when my interest in hacking got revived, I could not find a single Hacker Space in India. It wasn’t until late 2013 that I found another hacker with similar interests who wanted to set up a Hacker Space. When [Vaibhav Chabbra] met me in Ahmedabad during Maker Fest and mentioned that he had set up such a space in Mumbai, I immediately jumped in to help him out. Thus was born Makers’ Asylum. Since then, within a span of just 1 1/2 years, Hacker Spaces have sprung up in Ahmedabad, Surat, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, New Delhi, Meerut, and I am sure we will hear about more of them soon in other Cities. The Hacker movement is very much here, and here to stay and grow.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

We Have A Problem: Shower Feedback Loop

March 18, 2015 by 206 Comments

Hackaday, we have a problem. Clean water is precious and we want to come up with some ideas to help conserve it. Today’s topic is water wasted while showering. Let’s kick around some ideas and prompt some new builds for The Hackaday Prize.

We’ve all done it; your mind wanders and before you know it you’ve been standing in the shower for far too long. How much water have you wasted? Who know’s, there’s no feedback loop in the shower. But we think adding a little bit of feedback is a fantastic avenue to help combat wasteful habits.

Color Changing Showerheads

shower-feedback-color-idea

What if the showerhead changed colors based on how much water had flowed through it? We’ve already seen consumer showerheads that have the LEDs inside of them, and flow meters are readily available. Start your shower off in the green, as you lather up the suds it moves through blue, purple, orange, red, and finally to flashing red. It doesn’t have to be annoying, but just enough to help quantify how much is pouring down the drain.

Shower Beats

We were big fans of the game SSX Tricky back in the day. The better you were at tricks, the better the music was. If you crashed hard, you’d be listening to nothing more than hi-hat and subdued bass. Apply this to shower time. What if that flow meter you installed on your shower head was connected to a shower radio? Start it off with the best music in the world and progress to the lamest as you run the reservoir dry (ymmv on these selections of course).

Now You Try

If you shave off 5 seconds from your shower it will have a tiny impact in your household. But imagine the aggregate of every household in the world doing so.

This is part of what the 2015 Hackaday Prize is all about. Get the idea machine rolling. Tell us your riff on the shower feedback loop in the comments below. Put up a new project on Hackaday.io, write down an idea, and tag it “2015HackadayPrize”. We’re on the lookout for the best seed ideas and will be giving away shirts and stickers to the ones that show real promise. We’ll be featuring some of these in future installments of “Hackaday, We Have Problem” and if we choose yours it’ll land you with some swag of your own.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Crazy Whirlwind Pre-Hackaday Prize Launch Tour

March 18, 2015 by 3 Comments

The Hackaday Prize was about to launch but the date wasn’t public yet. I decided to do a pre-launch tour to visit a few places and to drop in on some of the Hackaday Prize Judges. It started in Chicagoland, looped through San Francisco for a hardware meetup and Hardware Con, then finished with visits to [Ben Krasnow’s] workshop, [Elecia White’s] studio, and the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

The Prize is now running and it’s time for you to enter. Look at some of the awesome hacking going on at the places I visited and then submit your own idea to get your entry started. Join me after the break for all the details of the adventure.

Continue reading “Crazy Whirlwind Pre-Hackaday Prize Launch Tour” →

Solar Charge Controller Improves Efficiency Of Solar Panels

March 17, 2015 by 54 Comments

The simplest and easiest way to charge a battery with a solar panel is to connect the panel directly to the battery. Assuming the panel has a diode to prevent energy from flowing through it from the battery when there’s no sunlight. This is fairly common but not very efficient. [Debasish Dutta] has built a charge controller that addresses the inefficiencies of such a system though, and was able to implement maximum power point tracking using an Arduino.

Maximum power point tracking (MPPT) is a method that uses PWM and a special DC-DC converter to match the impedance of the solar panel to the battery. This means that more energy can be harvested from the panel than would otherwise be available. The circuit is placed in between the panel and the battery and regulates the output voltage of the panel so it matches the voltage on the battery more closely. [Debasish] reports that an efficiency gain of 30-40% can be made with this particular design.

This device has a few bells and whistles as well, including the ability to log data over WiFi, an LCD display to report the status of the panel, battery, and controller, and can charge USB devices. This would be a great addition to any solar installation, especially if you’ve built one into your truck.

This is [Debasish]’s second entry to The Hackaday Prize. We covered his first one a few days ago. That means only one thing: start a project and start documenting it on hackaday.io

Terra Spider Repairs And Resurfaces New Frontiers

March 15, 2015 by 17 Comments

Is your landscape congested with toxic waste, parched, or otherwise abandoned? The Terra Spider may be your answer to new life in otherwise barren wastelands.

Bred in the Digital Craft Lab at the California College of the Arts, the current progress demonstrates the principle of deploying multiple eight-legged drones that can drill and deploy their liquid payload, intended to “repair or maintain” the landing site.

To deliver their project, students [Manali Chitre], [Anh Vu], and [Mallory Van Ness] designed and assembled a laser-cut octopod chassis, an actuated drilling mechanism, and a liquid deployment system all from easily available stock components and raw materials. While project details are sparse, the comprehensive bill-of-materials gives us a window into the process of putting together the pieces of a Terra Spider. The kinematics for movement are actuated by servos, a Sparkfun gear-reduced motor enables drilling, and a peristaltic pump handles the payload deployment.

It’s not every day that flying robots deploy drill-wielding spider drones. Keep in mind, though, that the Terra Spider is a performance piece, a hardware-based demonstration of a bigger idea, in our case: remote coverage and sample deployments in a barren wasteland. While, this project is still a work-in-progress, the bill-of-materials and successful deployment demos both testify towards this project’s extensive development.

With the earnest intent of repairing withering environments, perhaps this project has a future as an entry into this year’s Earth-saving Hackaday Prize….

Coming soon to a galaxy near you!

Continue reading “Terra Spider Repairs And Resurfaces New Frontiers” →

Solar nightlight

Nocturnal Solar Light Bulb Saves Your Lungs

March 14, 2015 by 43 Comments

India has a bit of a problem with electricity. In fact, over 74 million rural households live without power altogether. Instead they rely on burning fuel for light — and coincidentally, inhaling harmful smoke. Not to mention fuel isn’t cheap. [Debasish Dutta] wants to change this — so he came up with yet another solar powered light that is a low-cost alternative.

It’s a very simple light made out of a cheap Tupperware container, a 2V solar panel, a white LED, a rechargeable AA or AAA battery, a photo diode and a Joule thief (voltage boosting IC). One day of charging can provide approximately 20-22 lumens for the entire night of operation. While it doesn’t seem like much, a typical kerosene lamp puts out less than half that brightness.

And with the photo diode, it automatically turns on at night, and off during the day. A coat hanger doubles as both a stand for charging, and a hook for hanging it at night.

[Dabasish] says this is just the beginning and has a website dedicated to creating green energy and sharing it with the world. Video below.

Continue reading “Nocturnal Solar Light Bulb Saves Your Lungs” →

Hackaday Prize Worldwide: SXSW

March 12, 2015 by 3 Comments

Having announced the start of the 2015 Hackaday Prize a few days ago, it’s time to take the message to the people. We’ll be evangelizing the message of grass-roots hardware development all over the world this year. The next event starts tomorrow in Austin, Texas and is free for all to attend.

Friday Mid-Day Meetup

Join the Hackaday Crew at the Hackaday South by Southwest Meetup on Friday from 11am-12pm. We’ll be discussing the bright future of small shop and grass roots hardware development. This concept ties into the 2015 Hackaday Prize which calls on you do develop solutions to some of the problems found in your community. Want to organize your own #HackadayPrize event to help get the word out? Great! Email prize -at- hackaday.com and we’ll help with the planning.

Friday Night at Hardware House

Find us on Friday Night at Hardware House. They are presenting several talks; notably from [Huge Fiennes] (Co-founder of Electric Imp), [Sam de Brouwer] (Co-founder of Scanadu), [Nick Yulman] (from Kickstarter), and [Jason Johnson] (Co-Founder of August). In between there will be some lightning talks and [Sophi] will be giving one on the 2015 Hackaday Prize. and we’ll be sticking around for the socializing as well. It runs from 6-9pm… don’t forget to RSVP.

Stuffing 150 sq. ft. with Hardware

The finalists from last year’s Hackaday Prize were gracious enough to lend us their prototypes to exhibit at our SXSW Create Booth which is open Friday through Sunday. These are SatNOGS, ChipWhisperer, PortableSDR, Open Science Tricorder, and RamanPi. Thank you to them all, we’ll make sure to bring some of those along to the meetup. We’re also happy to have one of [Radu Motisan’s] uRADMonitor modules on hand, one of the Mooltipass beta units which were the topic of the Developed on Hackaday series, and one of [Macetech’s] new LED glasses (which we might just be giving away to someone who stops by).

Tacos or Drinks or Hangouts, oh my

The midway is open 11-6 everyday but you can bet after that (and perhaps before) we’ll be looking to do some socializing. Hit us up on Twitter if you have any suggestions or wonder what we’re up to. Assuming the Internet is working we’ll be checking and Tweeting regularly. On site we’ll be using the following accounts: @Hackaday, @Hackaday.io, @HackadayPrize.