2015 Hackaday Prize

234 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: Recording RC Planes With Third Person View

June 18, 2015 by 7 Comments

With the latest advancements in small, cheap video transmitters, it’s no surprise First Person View remote-controlled aircraft are so popular. It’s the easiest way to get into a cockpit without having to spend thousands of dollars and fifty or so hours on a pilot’s license. Despite all the technical challenges of FPV flying, there’s still one underserved part of recording RC aircraft: third person view, or as it’s more commonly called, ‘handing a camcorder to your friend.’

[Walker Eric] would like to do something about that. He’s always wanted nice videos of him flying his plane, and he can’t film and fly at the same time. He can build a robot, though, and that’s his entry for The Hackaday Prize.

[Walker]’s project uses a base station with a camcorder mounted on a gimbal. The electronics for this setup are surprisingly simple – just a GPS beacon transmitting telemetry down to the base station. By comparing this data to a GPS receiver on the ground station, the direction of the plane can be computed.

There are a few problems with this setup. Altitude measurement with GPS isn’t very accurate, so [Walker] is using a pressure sensor as an altimeter on the GPS beacon. The current setup works great, and is a fantastic improvement over the OpenCV setup [Walker] tested out before moving to GPS.

[Walker] already has some incredible video of him flying some planes and quads around his local field shot with this system. You can check those out below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Hackaday Prize Entry: OpenBionics

June 17, 2015 by 11 Comments

For the last few years now, the 3D printing community has been searching for a groundbreaking application for out little boxes of plastic squirting goodness. On of the most interesting applications the community has stumbled upon is prosthetics.

There have been a lot of people warming up their 3D printers and laser cutters to make prosthetic limbs in recent years. For [OpenBionics]’ entry for The Hackaday Prize, they’re building a prosthetic hand that costs less than $200, weighs less than 300 grams, and can be easily fabricated with 3D printers and laser cutters.

The human hand is the most complex end-effector on the planet, and emulating its range of motion is a difficult task. Still, the [OpenBionics] team is working hard to properly emulate a thumb with three degrees of freedom, putting 144 different grasps on the hand, and making their hand useful with soft fingertips.

Even with all this capability, [OpenBionic]’s robotic hand – motors and all – is about the same size as a normal human hand. That’s incredible, especially when you consider the motors for your hand – muscles – are all in your arm.

The team has put together a video demoing the capabilities of their hand. It’s somewhat remarkable, and able to do everything from lift a coffee cup to holding a pen. You can check that video out below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Astronaut Or Astronot: Vote For The Hackaday Prize!

June 17, 2015 by 14 Comments

Just in case we haven’t hammered it into your skull quite yet, we’re having a little contest over on Hackaday.io. It’s The Hackaday Prize, where everyone on Hackaday.io is invited to build something cool for the chance of winning a trip to space and hundreds of other prizes.

We know not everyone has the desire, skills, or the time to build a project, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still contribute. We’re holding a community voting round right now. Each week, we have a new round of community voting with a new theme. This week, we’re asking the Hackaday.io community to select the project that is most likely to be widely used. What do you have to do to participate? Just go over to the voting page, and choose between two projects our especially fair voting algorithm pulled from current Hackaday Prize entries. Pick the project that best meets the theme of the week.

Why would anyone want to do this? This Friday, I’ll be taking a look at everyone on Hackaday.io, pulling a number out of a hat, and if that person voted in the current round of voting, they win a thousand dollar gift card to the Hackaday store. We’re also giving away Hackaday t-shirts to random people who have voted each week.

The only losing move is not to play, so go over to the voting page and pick the projects that best meet the theme, “most likely to be widely used.”

Hackaday Prize Entry: Tearing Down A Tesla

June 16, 2015 by 21 Comments

We’ve seen a few people tear down the drive trains from electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf, Prisuses, or the Chevy Volt. We’ve also seen someone tear down the battery pack found in a Tesla Model S. What we haven’t seen until now is a reverse engineering of the Tesla Model S drive train.

A fortuitous circumstance landed [Michal] the crown jewel of the Tesla Model S – the 310kW, 590Nm drive train. Exactly how and where [Michal] landed this gigantic powerful motor is a question that remains unanswered, and the question unasked. We might not want to know.

Now that he has a motor, the name of the game is figuring out how to drive it. Usually that means capturing data from the CAN bus and replaying that data. This isn’t what [Michal] is doing; instead, he’s using a motor controller he developed for the Chevy Volt and Toyota Prius. It’s going to be a lot of work, but that’s only because these gigantic EV motors and controllers are pretty rare on the used market now. Give it a few years, and the work [Michal] is putting in now will pay off in hundreds of DIY electric vehicles.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: An Open Source Graphics Card

June 15, 2015 by 22 Comments

For last year’s Hackaday Prize, [PK] tried to build a video card for microcontrollers and headless Linux systems. It was only 640×480 resolution VGA, but the entire project was designed around a CPLD communicating with a microcontroller over SPI. This prize entry was, by [PK]’s own admission, a failure. It was late, but now he’s had an entire year to perfect his design. That means he can enter version two of his VGATonic in The Hackaday Prize.

The VGATonic version 2 uses a Xilinx XC95144XL CPLD for the VGA timing, and an ATTiny 2313a to read the SPI bus. Video memory is four megabits of static RAM. That’ls pretty much all you need for the most basic VGA graphics card, and all of this is packed onto a 3×3 inch PCB.

You can do a lot with 640×480 8-bit graphics running at 25FPS. In the video below, [PK] has a ‘hello world’ of sorts, Doom, running on a Raspberry Pi 2 with his SPI graphics card. Yes, it’s a graphics card for the Raspberry Pi, and it looks really good.

Further refinements of the design will include some primitive graphics routines. Not OpenGL or anything fancy, just something to reduce the number of writes on the SPI bus. It’s a great project, and perfect if you want to add video out to an Intel Galileo or other microcontroller project. [PK] has a video demo, you can check that out below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An Open Source Industrial Camera

June 14, 2015 by 36 Comments

Over the last few years, connecting a camera to the Internet has gotten cheaper and cheaper. The advances that made this possible did not come through security cameras, but instead tiny cell phone camera modules, ARM boards, and embedded computing. Right now, if you want a livestream of your back yard, you’d probably get a Raspberry Pi and camera module. This will work for 90% of cases, but what if you want to livestream a slightly harsher environment? What if you want image processing right on the camera? What if you want this camera to have a rating for environmental protection?

[Apodiant]’s entry for the 2015 Hackaday Prize is solving the latter problem. It’s an Open Source Industrial Smart Camera with Ethernet, USB, and serial outputs, an ARM CPU for image processing, all tucked away in a sturdy aluminum enclosure.

The preliminary BOM for this camera is an iMX6 – a very capable microcontroller that can run Linux and OpenCV. The image sensor is a 1.2 megapixel unit [Apodiant] already has experience with, and the enclosure is an off the shelf deal for anyone who wants to build their own.

 

If this sort of setup sounds familiar, you’re right: there have been a few projects that have taken camera modules, added a powerful microcontroller, and run image processing on them. The latest in a long line of these projects is the OpenMV. That had a successful Kickstarter, and since [Apodiant] is going for the Hackaday Prize Best Product competition, it looks like a good fit.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: A DIY Smartphone

June 13, 2015 by 12 Comments

It may not change the world, but [Tyler]’s DIY smartphone is a great example of what you can do with off-the-shelf parts. He built a complete, working cell phone using a Raspberry Pi, a few parts from Adafruit, and a 3D printed enclosure.

Inside the Tyfone is a Raspberry Pi Model A, an Adafruit FONA cellular module, a PiTFT, and not much else. There’s a 1200 mAh battery in there, and a 3D printed case keeps everything together.

For the OS, [Tyler] isn’t running Android; that’s only for the Raspi 2, and the Raspberry Pi 2 Model A isn’t out yet. Instead, [Tyler] wrote his own not-OS in Python. It can send and receive SMS messages, make calls, take pictures, connect to WiFi networks, and do just about everything else a Nokia from 2003 can do.

[Tyler] put together a video going over all of the features of his Tyfone. You can check that out below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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