Modern Evolution Of The Classic Water Rocket

Whether it was home-built from scraps or one of the various commercial versions that have popped over up over the years, there’s an excellent chance that the average Hackaday reader spent at least a couple of their more formative summers flying water rockets. You might not have realized it at the time, but with shirt soaked and head craned skywards, you were getting a practical physics lesson that was more relatable than anything out of a textbook. Water rockets are a great STEM tool for young people, but in a post-Fortnite world, the idea could use a little modernization to help keep kids engaged.

With his entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Darian Johnson] hopes to breathe some new life into this classic physics toy. His open source kit would provide a modular water rocket intended for a wide range of ages thanks to various payloads and upgrade options. The younger players would be content to simply see it take off, but high school students could outfit the craft with an electronic payload to capture performance data or an automatic parachute.

[Darian] has been building and flying rockets with his own children and other youth in community for years now, and has found them to be a huge hit. They became so popular that he started thinking of a way to not produce them in larger quantities, but make them stronger so they would survive more flights.

Of course, the fuselages are easy enough; there’s no shortage of one-liter bottles you can recycle. But for the nose cone, fins, and ultimately even the launch pad, [Darian] turned to 3D printing. This allows him to continually optimize the design while delivering repeatable performance. When he had a semi-printable water rocket on his hands, he started to wonder if he could get older kids interested by adding some electronics into the mix.

His current proof of concept is a flight data recorder using a Adafruit nRF52 Bluefruit LE Feather, a BMP280 sensor to determine altitude via barometric pressure, and an SD card breakout for local data storage. Long term, [Darian] wants to be able to stream flight data to student’s phones over Bluetooth, with the SD card providing a local copy which can be analyzed after the flight.

[Darian] has leaned heavily on the open source community for the various components of his water rocket kit, and is dedicated to giving back. He hopes that his final kit will allow communities to create engaging STEM activities at little to no cost. This includes creating a repository of lesson plans and designs contributed from others experimenting with water rockets. It’s a noble goal, and we’re excited to see how the project progresses.

Bringing Battle Bots Into The Modern Classroom

With the wide array of digital entertainment that’s available to young students, it can be difficult for educators to capture their imagination. In decades past, a “volcano” made with baking soda and vinegar would’ve been enough to put a class of 5th graders on the edge of their seats, but those projects don’t pack quite the same punch on students who may have prefaced their school day with a battle royale match. Today’s educators are tasked with inspiring kids who already have the world at their fingertips.

Hoping to rise to that challenge with her entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Misty Lackie] is putting together a kit which would allow elementary and middle school students to build their very own fighting robots. Thanks to the use of modular components, younger students don’t have to get bogged down with soldering or the intricacies of how all the hardware actually works. On the other hand, older kids will be able to extend the basic platform without having to start from scratch.

The electronics for the bot consist primarily of an Arduino Uno with Sensor Shield, a dual H-bridge motor controller, and a wireless receiver for a PS2 controller. This allows the students to control the bot’s dual drive motors with an input scheme that’s likely very familiar to them already. By mapping the controller’s face buttons to digital pins on the Arduino, additional functions such as the spinner seen in the bot after the break, easily be activated.

[Misty] has already done some test runs with an early version of the kit, and so far its been a huge success. Students were free to design their own bodies and add-ons for the remote controlled platform, and it’s fascinating to see how unique the final results turned out to be. We’ve seen in the past how excited students can be when tasked with customizing their own robots, so any entry into that field is a positive development in our book.

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Tracking Stolen Bikes With Narrowband IoT

For his entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Marin Vukosav] is working on an ambitious project to create a small GPS tracking device which utilizes Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) for long range communications. Rather than using a GSM modem which would suck the batteries dry in short order, NB-IoT can theoretically maintain a connection within a 10 to 15 kilometer range while keeping the energy consumption low enough that the tracker could go up to a year before needing to be recharged.

At this point, the hardware is still in the proof of concept phase. [Marin] is using an Arduino with a GPS shield and a SIM7000 NB-IoT module to experiment with the concept, but ultimately says he wants to shrink the hardware down to the point it could fit inside of a bike light. Looking even farther ahead, he’d like to make deals with bike manufacturers so the module could be integrated into the frame itself, where a thief wouldn’t be able to access it at all.

Of course, nothing says this technology has to be limited to bikes. If [Marin] can get it small enough, and reach even half of his goal battery life, he’d have a very compelling product on his hands. Who wouldn’t want to add something like this to their long-range drone in case it gets lost?

There’s still a long way to go on this project, and it’s not all hardware. [Marin] will also have to create the software side of things, a site where you can register your tracker and be able to view its near real-time position on the map. It’s a lot of work, especially if you’re planning on turning it into a commercial product, and we’re very interested to follow along and see where the project goes throughout the year.

A Cyclonic Vacuum Cleaner On A Hacker’s Budget

Have you ever seen a product in the store and been shocked at what the manufacturer was trying to charge for it? Since you’re reading Hackaday, we can safely assume the answer to that question; building a homebrew version of some commercial product for a fraction of its retail price is practically a rite of passage around these parts. So it’s fitting that for his entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Madaeon] submitted the “DIYson”, an open source version of a popular high-end vacuum made by a British company who’s name you can surely guess.

As [Madaeon] explains on the project’s Hackaday.io page, the idea behind “cyclonic” vacuums is not particularly complex. Essentially, with a powerful enough blower and carefully designed chamber, the incoming air will spin around so fast that dust is pulled out by centrifugal force. The trick is getting it working on a small enough scale to be a handheld device. Especially given the energy requirements for the blower motor.

Luckily for the modern hacker, we’re living in the “Golden Age” of DIY. With a 3D printer you can produce plastic components with complex geometry, and thanks to a resurgence in remote controlled aircraft, powerful motors and high capacity lithium-ion batteries are easily obtainable. Powered by what’s essentially the hardware that would go into an electric ducted fan plane, the total cost of all the electronics for the DIYson comes in right around $60 USD. Even with a roll of printer filament added to the mix, you’re still comfortably at half the cost of the “name brand” alternative.

With some refinements, [Madaeon] hopes that this open source dust-buster will be a staple of labs and hackerspaces all over the world. Judging by the performance his early prototype shows in the video after the break, we know we wouldn’t mind having one.

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Perfecting The Open Source RC Controller

Over the last few months we’ve seen an influx of homebrew RC controllers come our way, and we’re certainly not complaining. While the prices of commercial RC transmitters are at an all-time low, and many of them can even run an open source firmware, there’s still nothing quite like building the thing yourself. How else are you going to get exactly what you want?

For this entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Vitor de Miranda Henrique] is working on his own version of the ultimate open source remote control. His design follows some of the trends we’ve already seen in terms of outward design and hardware expandability, but also branches off into some new territory with features such as dual integrated displays.

Why does your controller need two displays? The top 4.3 inch TFT is linked up to a 5.2 GHz video receiver, which makes it perfect for controlling vehicles in “first-person” view, such as drones. The lower screen is a 2.8 inch touch screen from Adafruit, which is intended to be used for navigating through menus and options once the firmware is fully fleshed out.

Powering the controller is a ESP32 and dual MCP23017 GPIO expanders to connect up to the array of input devices available to the user. The current iteration of the controller has ten switches, two encoders, some buttons, and a pair of scroll wheels for good measure. Oh, and of course there are a couple of joysticks in the mix as well. All the devices terminate at a custom PCB in the back of the controller which looks to make modifying and adding input devices simple and neat.

We’ve previously seen the Alpha V1, an open source controller with a fairly similar setup, albeit without the dual displays. If even that one is a bit more complex than you’d like, you can always just do it with an Arduino.

A Full-Stack Web Browser

Interviewing to be a full-stack engineer is hard. It’s a lot harder than applying for a junior dev job where you’re asked to traverse a red-black tree on a whiteboard. For the full-stack job, they just give you a pile of 2N2222 transistors. (The first company wasn’t a great fit, and I eventually found a place that gave me some 2N2907s for the interview.) That said, there’s a certain challenge in seeing how far you can push some doped silicon. Case in point, [Alastair Hewitt]. He’s building a computer to browse the world wide web from the gate level up.

The goal of this project is to browse the web using only TTL logic. This presents problems that aren’t readily apparent at first glance. First up is being able to display text on a screen. The easiest way to do this now is to get a whole bunch of modern memories that are astonishingly fast for a 1970s vintage computer. This allows for VGA output, and yes, we’ve seen plenty of builds that output VGA using some big honkin’ memories. It turns out these RAM and ROM chips are a little better than the specs say they are, and this computer is overclocked from the very beginning.

A bigger problem is how to interface with a network. This is a problem for very old computers, but PPP still exists and if you have the software stack you can read something from a server over a serial connection. [Alistar] actually found the UART frequency was more important than the dot clock frequency of VGA, and the system clock must therefore be built around the serial port, not the display interface. This means the text mode interface is actually 96 columns instead of the usual 80 columns.

It’s very easy to say that you’re building a computer on a bread board. It’s another thing entirely to actually do it. This is actually a surprisingly well-though out sketch of a computer system that will, theoretically, be able to connect to the Internet. Of course, the reality of the situation is that this computer will be connecting over serial to a computer that’s connected to the Internet, but there’s no shame in that. You can check out the progress on the GitHub for this project.

Your Masterclass In Product Design: Hackaday Prize Mentor Sessions

New to this year’s Hackaday Prize is a set of live mentor sessions and you’re invited! Being at the center of a successful product design project means having an intuitive sense in many, many areas; from industrial design and product packaging, to manufacturing and marketing. This is your chance to learn from those experts who have already been there and want to make your experience better and easier.

We want you to get involved by entering your own project into the Hackaday Prize; now is the time to tell us you’re ready to demo your project with a mentor. Hackaday Prize Mentor Sessions are happening every two weeks throughout the summer. In these video chats we’re inviting some promising Hackaday Prize entries to start off with a “demo day” type of presentation, followed by an interactive session with the mentor hosting each event.

It’s also important that this incredible resource be available to all, so these videos will be published once the mentor session wraps up. This is a master class format where the advice and shared experience have a beneficial effect far beyond the groups sharing their projects.

The 2019 Hackaday Prize focuses on product development. Show your path from an idea to a product design ready for manufacturing and you’ll be on target to share in more than $200,000 in cash prizes!

Meet Some of Our Mentors:

Below you will find just a taste of the mentor sessions in the works. These are the first three mentor session videos that will be published, but make sure you browse the full set of incredible mentors and get excited for what is to come!

Bunnie Huang

Co-founder, Chibitronics


Bunnie is best known for his work hacking the Microsoft Xbox, as well as
his efforts in designing and manufacturing open source hardware. His past projects include the chumby (app-playing alarm clock), Chibitronics (peel-and-stick electronics for crafting), and the Novena (DIY laptop). He currently lives in Singapore where he runs a private product design studio, Kosagi, and actively mentors several startups and students of the MIT Media Lab.

Mattias Gunneras & Andrew Zolty

Co-founders, BREAKFAST NY


Zolty and Mattias founded BREAKFAST in 2009. This studio of multidisciplinary artists and engineers conceives, designs, and fabricates high-tech contemporary art installations and sculptures. BREAKFAST has over 15 large-scale pieces that can be found in various museums, arenas, and lobby spaces throughout the world.

Giovanni Salinas

Product Development Engineer, DesignLab


Giovanni is the Product Development Engineer at Supplyframe DesignLab. He has designed and developed hundreds of products, including consumer electronics, kitchenware, and urban furniture for the North American, European, Chinese and Latin American markets. Through his experience he has honed his expertise in rapid prototyping and DFM in plastics, wood, and metals.

We Want You To Demo Your Product!

Mentor sessions will continue throughout the summer with these and other mentors! Sign up to demo your 2019 Hackaday Prize entry!