Vote Or Be Sorry — Round 2 Of Astronaut Or Not

July 10, 2014 by Mike Szczys 37 Comments

Have you voted in the second round of Astronaut or Not? You’d better get in there by Friday at 9pm EDT or miss your chance to win a Bukito Portable 3D Printer in the voter’s lottery.

You must vote at least once per round to be eligible. At the appointed time we’ll draw a random number and look up to see if that profile on Hackaday.io has voted. If so, winner winner (like the Rigol scope that was awarded last Friday). If not, no Bukito for you! This new round just started at the beginning of the week. Your vote quota has been restored, and we tweaked the interface to only show you each project once.

In addition to your own gain, you’re helping us choose which projects deserve a bit of swag. We’re one again sending shirts to the projects who rise to the top of the head-to-head gudgematch.

UPDATE: To clarify, you must vote in the current round to be eligible for the current voter lottery. Your participation in previous rounds has no bearing on the current round eligibility.

THP Hacker Bio: Nsted

July 10, 2014 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

thp-contestant-bio-nsted

Have you ever wanted to build a robot arm, or even a full robot, but were put off by the daunting task of making all of those articulations work? Moti could make that a lot easier. The project seeks to produce smart servo motors which can connect and communicate in many different ways. It’s a great idea, so we wanted to know more about the hacker behind the project. After the jump you’ll find [nsted’s] answers to our slate of question for this week’s Hacker Bio.

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THP Entry: TOME, The Portable 3D Printer

July 9, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

TOME Alright, 3D Printers exist. They’re machines you can simply buy for a few hundred dollars, set them on your desk, and have them start churning out plastic parts. A little pedestrian, isn’t it? How about something you can take into the field for a client, and print out some new parts right there? How about sending a printer to the latest humanitarian crisis? After all, all those humanitarian uses for 3D printers we’ve been hearing about won’t do any good without a 3D printer.

TOME is [Philip]’s attempt at portabilizing a 3D printer and also his entry into The Hackaday Prize. The preliminary goals for TOME are the ability to print for four hours on a single battery, an auto leveling bed, and an accessible hot end that’s easy to replace.

Already the design for TOME is rather interesting. The astute printer aficionado will notice there is no stepper motor on the X carriage. The task of moving the head in the X axis is taken care of by a stepper in the base, with a square shaft and set of gears moving everything back and forth.

With this odd yet ingenious motor setup, the entire printer is able to collapse in on itself, allowing it to be installed in a waterproof plastic case. That’s something you’re going to need if you’re taking a printer on the road.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

All Precincts Reporting — Next Round Of Voting Is Now

July 8, 2014 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

Check out the vote tally which [Alek] put together (click for a much larger version). We couldn’t be more delighted at how the first round of voting for Astronaut or Not went. With very nearly 50k votes it’s time to start another round.

This is an entirely new round. Your 30 votes have been restored and you must vote at least once in this new round to be eligible for the voter lottery. The theme has also changed; vote for projects whose ideas are most likely to be used in other projects. That is to say: is there a core piece of cleverness that, properly explained and modularized, would be extremely extensible? Then vote for that one!

Links to the 15 winners are listed after the break; everyone on this list is getting a T-shirt and some stickers. The same will be true for the next round but we’re changing up the Voter Lottery prize — it’ll be similarly valuable and desirable but we’ll save details for this for Thursday. Make sure you vote or risk losing Friday’s lottery!

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Judge Spotlight: Elecia White

July 8, 2014 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

If you’re a fan of the Embedded podcast you know her voice well. If not, you need to check out the show! Of course we’re talking about [Elecia White], who spent her recent holiday answering our questions.

She’s an accomplished embedded systems engineer — she literally wrote the book on it. We’re delighted that [Elecia] agreed to lend us her skill and experience as a judge for The Hackaday Prize!

We find that embedded engineers come from all manner of backgrounds. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into the field?

I majored in a combination of applied computer science and theoretical systems engineering: my classes were all about programming, C, Fourier, and control loops. I had no idea I’d built a major that would be perfect for low level embedded development.

After school, I went to Hewlett-Packard. I was in the network server division, monitoring servers, writing drivers, and getting ever closer to the hardware. I moved over to HP Labs’ BioScience division to do real embedded work, though I didn’t understand that at the time (yay for a hiring manager who did!). Once I made a motor move, well, it was all over for me. I loved having my software touch the physical world. Happily, the environment was great and the electrical engineers were very patient.

Do whimsical embedded challenges ever come to mind? For instance, do you ever flip on the TV and think to yourself: “some day I’m going to reprogram the uC and write something that works!”?

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THP Entry: A Digital Large Format Camera

July 7, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 50 Comments

Click to embiggen. It's seriously worth it. — Click to embiggen. It’s seriously worth it.

After 20 or so years of development, digital cameras may soon be superior to film in almost every way, but there are a few niches where film cameras reign supreme. Large format cameras, for example, are able to produce amazing images, but short of renting one for thousands of dollars a day, you’ll probably never get your hands on one. For his entry to The Hackaday Prize, [Jimmy.c..alzen] decided to build a digital large format camera, using an interesting device you don’t see used very often these days – a linear CCD.

[Jimmy]’s camera is built around a TAOS TS1412S, a linear CCD that is able to capture a line of light 1536 pixels across. The analog values are clocked out from this chip in sequence, going straight into an Arduino Due for processing, saving, and displaying on a small screen.

Inside the camera, the sensor is on a pair of rails and driven across the focal plane with the help of a stepper motor. The effect is something like the flatbed scanner to camera conversions we’ve seen in the past, but [Jimmy] is able to adjust the exposure of the camera simply by changing the integration time of the sensor. He can also change the delay between scanning each column of pixels, making for some really cool long-exposure photography techniques; one side of an image could be captured at noon, while the other side could be from a beautiful sunset. That’s something you just can’t do otherwise without significant digital manipulation outside the camera.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

THP Entry: Embedded Hardware Security With The ChipWhisperer

July 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

There are thousands upon thousands of papers discussing various aspects of embedded hardware security, and dozens of books covering the same subject. The attacks discussed in the literature are very cool – things like side-channel power analysis and clock glitching used to extract keys from a system. The experimental setups in these papers are extraordinarily expensive – you can buy a new car for less. [coflynn] was disheartened with the price of these tools, and thought building his own would make for a great entry to The Hackaday Prize.

The hardware part of the ChipWhisperer includes a breakout board with an FPGA, ADC, and connectors for a lot of different probes, adapters, breakout boards, and a target board, With all these tools, it’s not unreasonable to say that [coflynn] could carry out a power analysis attack on a lot of embedded hardware.

Open source hardware is just one part of this entry. The biggest focus of this project is the open source software for analyzing whatever the probes and target boards record. With this software, anyone can monitor the power used when a chip runs a cryptographic function, or glitch a clock for some unintended functionality in a device. In keeping with the academic pedigree of all the literature on these attacks, there are a ton of tutorials for the ChipWhisperer for all those budding security researchers out there. Very cool stuff, and arguably one of the most technical entries to The Hackaday Prize.

Video below.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

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