2015 Hackaday Prize

234 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: 20,000 Weather Stations

August 4, 2015 by 17 Comments

Team Tahmo has a plan to put a network of 20,000 weather stations across sub-Saharan Africa. That’s an impressive goal, and already they have pilot stations in Senegal, Chad, Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa. For their Hackaday Prize entry, they thought it would make sense to add more advanced sensors to their weather stations, and came up with GPS, lightning, and large scale soil moisture sensors.

The sensors already deployed have the usual complement of meteorological equipment – thermometers, anemometers, barometers, and rain gauges. These stations are connected to a school’s Internet connection where students can monitor the local weather patterns and upload the data. Team Tahmo is building a small add-on board for their Prize entry using an AS3935 Franklin Lightning sensor and a GPS module.

In the interests of rapid design cycles, the team is using off-the-shelf modules for the lightning detector and GPS module. They hit up the Hackaday Prize Collabratorium for some advice on PCB design and have everything pretty much nailed down thanks to a few helpful hackers.

It’s a great project for one of the most ambitious crowdsourced data gathering projects ever conceived, and something that would vastly improve weather predictions across the African continent. Even if their entry does just monitor lightning strikes, it’s still an admirable goal and one of the most useful projects for this year’s Hackaday Prize.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: The Internet Of Plants

August 2, 2015 by 7 Comments

The theme of this year’s Hackaday Prize is ‘build something that matters.’ Acrobotic Industries is in beautiful Southern California, where it won’t rain an appreciable amount until the mudslides come. For a little bit of help during this unprecedented drought, they’ve created Clouden, a system of irrigation that only waters yards and parks when the plants need it. This is apparently a novel concept for Southern California, and is most certainly something that matters.

The Clouden system has two parts. The first is a node with an array of soil water sensors and a Particle WiFi module. This node connects to the controller which alters watering schedules in response to actual conditions and predicted rainfall from the WeatherUnderground API.

There’s more to just listening to sensors – the Clouden controller also has the hardware to control 24VAC water valves and a web interface for scheduling irrigation times. With this many sensors – and the ability to not water when there’s a ban in place – it’s a great watering system, and something Southern California desperately needs.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Real Time Power Monitoring

August 1, 2015 by 19 Comments

The Internet of Things promises real-time monitoring of appliances, HVAC, and just about everything else in the home. One of the biggest technologies behind this is the smart meter, an electrical meter that will tell you how much power you’re sucking down from the grid at any given moment. A meter need not be smart, though, because [jlbrian7]’s entry for the Hackaday Prize does the same thing without an entirely new meter.

[jlbrian]’s power monitor is a non-intrusive monitor for electrical systems, allowing anyone to retrofit an electrical meter – or just a single breaker panel – with smart meter tech. It uses a small current transformer to monitor the amperage running through a wire. By sending that information to the Internet, anyone with this system gets power monitoring with much higher temporal resolution than what the power company provides in a monthly bill.

As a nice little addition to his Power Monitor, [jlbrian] is adding a few environmental sensors to his data logging platform. This allows for a little bit of interpolation to figure out what all that power is actually being used for; if the power turns on and a few minutes later the temperature drops, there’s a pretty good chance the AC just went on.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

The Countdown Begins — Last Two Weeks For Entries

August 1, 2015 by 13 Comments

Procrastination is a wonderful thing, but now is the time to stop delaying. Get those hacks documented and entered in the 2015 Hackaday Prize. We’ll close entries in just about two weeks. There’s a handy little countdown on the Prize page which lets you know that your entry must be in by August 17th at 1:50pm PDT (UTC-7).

There’s a lot at stake here, so let’s take another look at what this is all about: Build something that solves a problem faced by a lot of people and you could score a Trip to Space, $100,000 for Best Product, or 2nd-5th place prizes worth $5,000-10,000 each.

Of course the goal is to show off your build. This could end up inspiring others to Build Something that Matters and that means to win you need to document your work. Join us after the break to see the minimum needed for your entry to qualify for judging.

Continue reading “The Countdown Begins — Last Two Weeks For Entries” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: 10 Watt Individually Addressable RGB LEDs

July 31, 2015 by 20 Comments

Individually addressable RGB LEDs like Neopixels, WS2812s, and  WS2811s are the defacto standard for making blinkey glowey projects. To build a very bright display, you need a lot of them, relegating very bright RGB displays to those of us who can afford the hardware and figure out how to drive that many LEDs. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [AJ Reynolds] is cranking these tiny RGB LEDs up a notch by building an individually addressable 10 Watt RGB floodlight.

Instead of building an RGB LED floodlight from scratch, [AJ] is leveraging the most mediocre of what China has to offer. He found 10 Watt RGBs for a dollar a piece and a few floodlight cases that cost about $5 a piece. By dispensing with the white LED in the floodlight case and replacing it with a 10 Watt RGB LED and some custom circuitry, [AJ] can build a powerful RGB floodlight with a BOM cost of under $15.

While there are big RGB floodlights out there, controlling them either means a custom proprietary protocol or messing around with DMX. A floodlight that speaks the same language as a WS2811 leverages an enormous amount of work from the world of Arduino and a lot of projects from around the Internet, making this a great entry for really bright blinkies and an excellent entry for The Hackaday Prize.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Emoticon Keyboard

July 30, 2015 by 13 Comments

The Internet is raising an entire generation that can speak entirely in emoticons. This reverses the six thousand year old evolution of written language and makes us (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. It is, however, fun. There is a problem with these newfangled emoticons: no one actually types them; they’re all copied and pasted. This is inefficient, and once again technology is here to save us once again.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Duncan] is working on an EmojiPad. It’s a (mechanical!) keyboard for typing emoticons, but it can also be used for gaming, CAD design, or as a USB MIDI device.

The keyboard uses 16 Cherry MX switches in a standard diode matrix configuration. This is a USB keyboard, and for the controller, [Duncan] is using an ATMega328 with the V-USB library This is all well-worn territory for the mechanical keyboard crowd, so to spice things up, [Duncan] is going to add individually addressable LEDs underneath each keycap. The ATMega328 doesn’t have enough pins to do this the normal way, so all the LEDs will be Charlieplexed.

A keyboard for emoticons demands custom keycaps, but [Duncan] is having a hard time finding a good solution. Right now he’s planning on using blank keycaps with vinyl decals, a somewhat expensive option at $1 USD a keycap. A better, even more expensive option exists, but for something as ephemeral as an emoticon keyboard a sticker will do just fine.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: SnapVCC

July 29, 2015 by 59 Comments

While it’s the easiest way to lay out a simple circuit for prototyping, breadboards are a pain. They are the ultimate kludge; they work well enough, but no one will ever say that a solderless breadboard is the most elegant solution.

[Mahesh] isn’t completely fixing the problems of solderless breadboards, but he has come up with a better way to supply power to breadboards. It’s a project called snapVCC, and it turns a 9 volt battery into a regulated 3.3 or 5 volt supply.

The idea behind snapVCC is simple enough; just add a circuit board to the top of a nine volt and add a voltage regulator. [Mahesh] is using an LM317 adjustable regulator, with a switch to change the output voltage from 3.3 to 5 volts. An LED indicates the output active, and another switch disconnects the battery from the circuit. Yes, it’s very simple and very useful, confounding everyone who is wondering why this project didn’t already exist.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by: