With the Intertubes atwitter about the finalist – and winner – of the Hackaday Prize, it’s only fitting the rest of you get to hear what the judges thought about the finalists.
We had some amazing judges combing over these projects, ranging from people who have told Congress they could shut down the Internet at will to a Dutch guy that just figured out how to order a plain hamburger in the Munich train station. Really, really smart people. Here’s what they had to say about each project:
We had a few very cool workshops at our party in Munich today, with Moog synths, robotic arms, Linksys routers splayed open on a table, and Club Mate flowing like water. We’re wrapping the workshops up right now and the kegs are being tapped. Before that, though, it might be a good idea to show off all the other Hackaday Prize projects that showed up today.
The M.A.R.S. Rover, a 3D-printed rocker-bogie robot showed up around noon. I didn’t see it driving around, but there will probably be video up later.
Also shown was the AutoCut robotic lawn mower. No blood was shed today.
[Mario] was cool enough to fly in and show off the OpenExposer, a laser resin printer that is heavily inspired by the RepRap project.
Pictures below.
We’re only a few hours away until we announce the winner of The Hackaday Prize. Until then, we have a huge workshop and party to put together. It’s only noon here in Munich, and we’ve been up since the crack of dawn putting stuff together.
The doors open in a little bit, but so far we have people putting together the workshops. [Ben Gray] from Phenoptix is busy putting together a few MeArm robots for a workshop. They take one person 45 minutes to put together. There’s kinda something resembling an assembly line going on:
Since we’re announcing the winner of The Hackaday Prize, there was the question of what the trophy should be. Trophies are not utilitarian in any way, so we thought we would put our own spin on this. It’s a PanaVise, emblazoned with a 3D printed plaque.
Doors open in a few minutes. More updates to follow
And so we come to the final finalist bio for The Hackaday Prize. In only three days, we’ll know whether [fl@C@]’s RamanPi Spectrometer or one of the four other projects to make it into the finals round will be making it to space, or only Japan.
There are a surprising number of spectrometer projects out there on the Intertubes, but most of these setups only measure the absorption spectrum – literally what wavelengths of light are absorbed by the material being measured. A Raman spectrometer is completely different, using a laser to illuminate the sample, and measuring the scattering of light from the material. It’s work that has won a Nobel prize, and [fl@C@] built one with a 3D printer.
Bio below, along with the final video that was sent around to the judges. If you’re wondering who the winner of The Hackaday Prize is, even I don’t know. [Mike] and a few Hackaday overlords do, but the rest of us will remain in ignorance until we announce the winner at the party we’re having in Munich next Thursday.
Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Finalist: An Un-noodly Spectrometer”
There are astonishing things you can do with a network of sensors spread across the globe, all connected to the Internet. Thousands of people have already installed hardware to detect lightning and flightaware gives out subscriptions to their premium service to anyone who will listen in to airplane transponders and send data back to their servers. The folks behind SatNOGS, one of the five finalists for The Hackaday Prize are using this same crowdsourced data collection for something that is literally out of this world: listening to the ever-increasing number of amateur satellites orbiting the planet.
There are dozens of cubesats and other amateur satellites flying every year, and they have become an extremely popular way of experimenting in a space environment, giving some budding engineers an awesome project in school, and testing out some technologies that are just too weird for national space agencies. The problem with sending one of these birds up is getting the data back down; a satellite will pass above the horizon of a single location only a few times a day, and even then for only minutes at a time. The SatNOGS team hopes to change that by planting receivers all around the globe, connecting them to the Internet, and hopefully providing real-time telemetry from dozens of orbiting satellites.
[Pierros] from the SatNOGS team was kind enough to sit down and answer a few questions for us about his entry to The Hackaday Prize. That’s below, right after their finalist video. Some of the SatNOGS team will also be at our Munich event where we announce the winner of the Prize.
Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Finalist: A Network Of Satellite Ground Stations”
No other project to make it to The Hackaday Prize has people throwing money at their computer screen hoping something would happen than [Michael Colton]’s PortableSDR. It’s a software defined radio designed for coverage up to 30MHz. Amateur radio operators across the world are interested in this project, going so far as to call this the first Baofeng UV-5R killer. That’s extremely high praise.
[Michael] was kind enough to sit down and answer a few questions about how his entry to The Hackaday Prize has gone. You can check that out below, along with the final round video of the project. Anyone who wants their own PortableSDR could really help [Michael] out by taking this survey.
Smartphones are the most common expression of [Gene Roddneberry]’s dream of a small device packed with sensors, but so far, the suite of sensors in the latest and greatest smartphone are only used to tell Uber where to pick you up, or upload pics to an Instagram account. It’s not an ideal situation, but keep in mind the Federation of the 24th century was still transitioning to a post-scarcity economy; we still have about 400 years until angel investors, startups, and accelerators are rendered obsolete.
Until then, [Peter Jansen] has dedicated a few years of his life to making the Tricorder of the Star Trek universe a reality. It’s his entry for The Hackaday Prize, and made it to the finals selection, giving [Peter] a one in five chance of winning a trip to space.
[Peter]’s entry, the Open Source Science Tricorder or the Arducorder Mini, is loaded down with sensors. With the right software, it’s able to tell [Peter] the health of leaves, how good the shielding is on [Peter]’s CT scanner, push all the data to the web, and provide a way to sense just about anything happening in the environment. You can check out [Peter]’s video for The Hackaday Prize finals below, and an interview after that.
Continue reading “The Hackaday Prize: The Hacker Behind The First Tricorder”
