2016 Hackaday Prize

234 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: An Oven Of Raspberry Pis

August 13, 2016 by 49 Comments

When the Raspberry Pi was introduced, the world was given a very cheap, usable Linux computer. Cheap is good, and it enables one kind of project that was previously fairly expensive. This, of course, is cluster computing, and now we can imagine an Aronofsky-esque Beowulf cluster in our apartment.

This Hackaday Prize entry is for a 100-board cluster of Raspberry Pis running Hadoop. Has something like this been done before? Most certainly. The trick is getting it right, being able to physically scale the cluster, and putting the right software on it.

The Raspberry Pi doesn’t have connectors in all the right places. The Ethernet and USB is on one side, power input is on another, and god help you if you need a direct serial connection to a Pi in the middle of a stack. This is the physical problem of putting a cluster of Pis together. If you’re exceptionally clever and are using Pi Zeros, you’ll come up with something like this, but for normal Pis, you’ll need an enclosure, a beefy, efficient power supply, and a mess of network switches.

For the software, the team behind this box of Raspberries is turning to Hadoop. Yahoo recently built a Hadoop cluster with 32,000 nodes used for deep learning and other very computationally intensive tasks. This much smaller cluster won’t be used for very demanding work. Instead, this cluster will be used for education, training, and training those ever important STEAM students. It’s big data in a small package, and a great project for the Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Good Electronics Learning Toolkit

August 12, 2016 by 60 Comments

The Maker movement is a wildly popular thing, even if we can’t define what it is. The push towards STEM education is absolutely, without a doubt, completely unlike a generation of brogrammers getting a CS degree because of the money. This means there’s a market for kits to get kids interested in electronics, and there are certainly a lot of options. Most of these ‘electronic learning platforms’ don’t actually look that good, and the pedagogical usefulness is very questionable. Evive is not one of these toolkits. It looks good, and might be actually useful.

The heart of the Evive is basically an Arduino Mega, with the handy dandy Arduino shield compatibility that comes with that. Not all of the Mega pins are available for plugging in Dupont cables, though – a lot of the logic is taken up by breakouts, displays, buttons, and analog inputs. There’s a 1.8″ TFT display in the Evive, an SD card socket, connectors for an XBee, Bluetooth, or WiFi module, motor drivers, a fast DAC, analog inputs, and a plethora of buttons, knobs, and switches. All of this is packed into a compact and seemingly sturdy plastic case, making the Evive a little more durable than a breadboard and pile of jumper wires.

You can check out a remarkably well produced video for the Evive below.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Autorouters Are For The Weak

August 11, 2016 by 11 Comments

[Yann]’s DYPLED entry into this year’s Hackaday Prize isn’t very useful to most people. It’s a tiny module that connects to a 16-bit parallel bus, and displays a hexadecimal number on a few LEDs. It’s useful if you’re diagnosing a problem on a computer from 1982, but just barely. The real wonder here is how [Yann] is doing this cheaply and easily using some weird techniques and strange parts.

The display for this tiny device is an array of 36 LEDs, arranged into a set of five seven-segment displays. Homebrew seven-segment displays are cool, but how is he driving it? Not with a microcontroller, that’s for sure. Instead, [Yann] is using an old trick of using parallel memory to store the patterns of the seven-segment displays. This parallel memory comes in the form of a two megabit Flash chip, with the data inputs tied to the 16-bit input on the board and the data outputs connected directly to the LEDs. It’s a brute force approach, but it works.

There are a few additional features for this tiny board, including a switch to display a 16-bit bus in hexadecimal or decimal, signed or unsigned, and a pot to change how bright the LEDs are. The most amazing part is how [Yann] managed to fit all of this on a very, very small PCB. Most of that trick is due to using a thin, small TSSOP package for the Flash memory, but fitting this circuit onto a two layer board is amazing work, and a great entry for the Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An Open Source Retina Scanner

August 10, 2016 by 16 Comments

An ophthalmoscope is a device used to examine the back of the eye. This is useful for diagnosing everything from glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, to detecting brain tumors. As you would expect from anything related to medicine, these devices cost a lot, making them inaccessible for most of the world’s population. This project for the Hackaday Prize is for an ophthalmoscope that can be built for under $400.

An ophthalmoscope is a relatively simple device, that really only requires a clinician to wear a head-mounted lamp and hold a condensing lens in front of the patient’s eye. Light is reflected off the retina and into the clinician’s view. Of course, the simplest ophthalmoscope requires a bit of training to get right, and there’s’ no chance of being able to take a picture of a patient’s retina to share with other clinicians.

The Open Indirect Ophthalmoscope gets around these problems by using a digital camera in the form of a Raspberry Pi camera module. This camera, with the help of a 3 W LED, is able to image the back of the eye, snap a picture, and send that image anywhere in the world. It’s a simple device that can be constructed from a few mirrors, a cheap lens, and a few 3D-printed parts, but is still very valuable for the detection of ophthalmological disorders.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Non-Computational Fluid Dynamics

August 9, 2016 by 21 Comments

Computational Fluid Dynamics, or CFD, and is applied to everything from aircraft design to how good of a wing a new skyscraper will be. Of course, the science of building airfoils is much older than CFD, leading to the question of how airfoil design was done before computers.

The answer, of course, is a wind tunnel. Walk around a few very good air museums, and you’ll find wind tunnels ranging from the long wooden boxes built by the Wright brothers to fantastic plywood contraptions that are exceptionally interesting to woodworkers.

[Joel] needed final project as an upcoming aeronautical engineer, but he wanted his project to be something physical, and a tool that could be used again. He decided to build a wind tunnel that’s also his entry for The Hackaday Prize.

This wind tunnel isn’t a gigantic device the size of a building. The very first wind tunnels were simple devices just a few meters long. With a fan at one end, a section to stabilize the wind, a chamber, and a place for the air to go, it’s also a very simple device. Just because something is simple doesn’t mean anyone has built one recently, though: [Joel] couldn’t find anyone who built a wind tunnel with step-by-step instructions. This project is just that – an Open Source wind tunnel.

The design of this wind tunnel is simple enough, built out of fiberglass with relatively simple molds. The design can be adapted to various electric fans, and the most fun part of the build – the smoke machine – is already complete.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Solar WiFi Rover Roves At Night

August 8, 2016 by 11 Comments

[TK] has a stretch goal for his RC car project — enabling it to recharge on solar power during the day and roam around under remote Internet control at night. It’s like a miniature, backyard version of NASA’s Curiosity rover.

Right now, he’s gotten a Raspberry Pi Zero and a camera on board, and has them controlling the robot over WiFi. He looks like he’s having a great time piloting it around his house. Check out the video down below for (crashy) remote-controlled operation.

We can’t wait to see if solar power is remotely possible (tee-hee!) as an option for this vehicle. The eventual plan to connect it via 3G cellular modem is still off in the future, and will probably demand more of the smarts of the Raspberry Pi than at present. But we love the idea of a long-running autonomous vehicle, so we’re pulling for you, [TK]!

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A WiFi Swiss Army Knife

August 7, 2016 by 18 Comments

WiFi is all around us, but if you want to work with this ubiquitous networking protocol, you’ll need to pull out a laptop or smartphone like a caveman. [Daniel] has a better idea. It’ s a simple, compact tool for cracking WiFi passwords or sending deauth packets to everyone at the local Starbucks. It’s an ESP Swiss Army Knife, and a great entry for the Hackaday Prize.

As you would expect, this WiFI Swiss Army Knife is powered by the ESP8266 and features a tiny OLED display and a bunch of buttons for the UI. With this, [Daniel] is able to perform a deauth attack on a network, kicking anyone off the network, provided this device already has the MAC address of the victim.

This tiny wireless tool also has an SD card, making it possible to collect authentication frames for later decryption on a device that actually has the power to crack a network. With a LiPo charge controller and a sufficiently large battery, this tiny device could be left in the corner of an office collecting authentication packets for days until it’s later retrieved, opening up the network to anyone with a sufficiently fast computer. It’s a great build and very useful, making this a great entry for The Hackaday Prize.

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