A Raspberry Pi In An FPGA

April 26, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 50 Comments

Somehow or another, the Raspberry Pi has become a standardized form factor for single board computers. There are now Raspberry Pi-shaped objects that can do anything, and between the Odroid and bizarre Intel Atom-powered boards, everything you could ever want is now packaged into something that looks like a Raspberry Pi.

Except for one thing, of course, and that’s where [antti.lukats]’s entry for the 2016 Hackaday Prize comes in. He’s creating a version of the Raspberry Pi based on a chip that combines a fast ARM processor and an FPGA in one small package. It’s called the ZynqBerry and will, assuredly, become one of the best platforms to learn FPGA trickery on.

Xilinx’ Zynq comes with a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 running around 1GHZ, and from that fact alone should be about comparable to the original Raspberry Pi. Also inside the Zynq SoC is a very capable FPGA that [antti] is using to drive HDMI at 60hz, and can stream video from a Raspberry Pi camera to a display.

Last year for the Hackaday Prize, [antti] presented some very cool stuff, including a tiny FPGA development board no bigger than a DIP-8 chip. He’s hackaday.io’s resident FPGA wizard, and the ZynqBerry is the culmination of a lot of work over the past year or so. While it’s doubtful it will be as powerful as the latest Raspberry Pis and Pi clones, this is a phenomenal piece of work that puts an interesting twist on the usual FPGA development boards.

The HackadayPrize2016 is Sponsored by:

A Green Powered Sailboat

April 25, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

Drones fill the sky raining hellfire on unsuspecting civilians below. Self-driving cars only cause half as many accidents as carbon-based drivers. Autonomous vehicles are the future, no matter how bleak that future is. One thing we haven’t seen much of is autonomous marine vehicles, be they submarines, hovercrafts, or sailboats. That’s exactly what [silvioBi] is building for his entry into the Hackaday Prize: a sailboat that will ply the waters of Italy’s largest lake.

Every boat needs a hull, but this project will need much more, from electronics to solar panels to sensors. Luckily for [silvio], choosing a hull is as simple as heading over to eBay. [silvio] picked up a fiberglass boat hull for about €40 that fill fit both is needs and his workbench.

The electronics are a bit trickier, but the basic plan is to cover the deck with solar panels, and use a few sensors including GPS, IMU, and an anemometer to steer this sailboat around a lake. Building an autonomous vehicle is a hard challenge, and for the electronics, [silvio] has a trick up his sleeve: he’s using redundant electronics. All the sensors are connected via an I2C bus, so why not put two microcontrollers on that bus in a master and slave configuration? It won’t add much mass, and given the problems had by a few of the teams behind robotic sailing competitions, a bit of redundancy isn’t a bad thing to have.

The HackadayPrize2016 is Sponsored by:

2016 Hackaday Prize Begins Anew And Anything Goes

April 25, 2016 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Today marks the beginning of the Anything Goes challenge, a 2016 Hackaday Prize contest that will reward 20 finalists with $1000 for solving a technology problem and a chance at winning the entire Hackaday Prize: $150,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena.

The Hackaday Prize is empowering hackers, designers, and engineers to use their time to Build Something that Matters. For the next five weeks what matters is solving a technology problem. Have an idea to power vehicles without polluting the atmosphere? Great! Want to figure out how to get your washing machine to work better? We want to see that too. Anything goes so design it, prototype it, document it and you could be one of the twenty entries headed to the final round.

We have already seen a groundswell of progress in the Hackaday Prize. The first round, Design Your Concept, had over five hundred entries! But today is a brand new day, a new challenge, and all bets are off. It’s the perfect clean slate for you to join the movement.

Start your project right now and submit it to the Hackaday Prize. If you have previously started a project page you can add it to the Anything Goes challenge using the “Submit Project To” dropdown menu on the left sidebar of your project page.

Talk about your idea, document your plan for seeing it through to completion, and then start writing build logs as you begin to work on the prototype. On May 30th our panel of judges will review all the entries and choose twenty that exhibit the best the Hackaday Prize has to offer.

You have the talent. You can make the time. You will make a difference. The greatest things in the world start small but with passion. This is your moment, now start your journey.

The HackadayPrize2016 is Sponsored by:

Poopable Cameras

April 24, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 51 Comments

Pill cameras, devices for ‘capsule endoscopy’, or in much cruder terms, ‘poopable cameras’, are exceedingly cool technology. They’re astonishingly small, communicate through a gastrointestinal tract to the outside world, and have FDA certification. These three facts also mean pill cameras are incredible expensive, but that doesn’t mean a hardware hacker can’t build their own, and that’s exactly what [friarbayliff] is doing for his entry into The Hackaday Prize.

First things first: [friarbayliff] is not building one of these for human consumption. That’s a morass of regulatory requirements and ethical issues. This pill camera is only being built as an experiment, because it would be fun to build one. The pill cams swallowed by patients every day have millions of dollars in R&D behind them before human trials. That said, given a good food-safe enclosure, I’d down one of these as an experiment.

This pill camera will use a simple, off-the-shelf 2 megapixel image sensor that can be bought on eBay for less than five dollars. With a small 32-bit micro, these cameras are easy to drive and capture images from. Power is provided from a single silver oxide button cell battery and a boost converter. In total, [friarbayliff] estimates the total PCB area to be just under one square inch, making this a relatively inexpensive device to build. There will be a radio transceiver in there somewhere, but [friar] hasn’t figure that part out yet.

Pill cameras are some amazing technology, but relatively inaccessible unless you get a used one. Ew. [Mike Harrison] tore one of these pill cams apart a few years ago, and it really is an incredible device. Building one for fun – even if it won’t be used in a human – is a fantastic learning experience and a great entry for the 2016 Hackaday Prize.

The HackadayPrize2016 is Sponsored by:

Magical Blinky Capacitive Sensing Tweezers

April 23, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

Electronic tweezers – the kind that can test the voltage between two contacts, the resistance of an SMD resistor, or the capacitance of a circuit – are very cool and very useful if somewhat expensive. We’ve seen commercial versions of these smart tweezers, hacks to make them more useful, and homebrew versions that still work very well. All of these versions are pretty large, as far as tweezers go. [kodera2t]’s version of electronic tweezers submitted for this year’s Hackaday Prize goes in the other direction: it’s the smallest set of electronic tweezers that’s still useful.

[kodera]’s electronic sensing tweezers only measure capacitors, and for good reason: chip caps usually don’t have values printed on them. These tweezers don’t print out the value of a cap on a display, either. Instead, these tweezers just flash an LED if the value of the cap is above 0.1uF. It’s simple, but surprisingly useful for most soldering jobs.

The circuit for this pair of magical tweezers is about as simple as if can get, with all the smarts contained in a very small ATtiny10. The PCB [kodera] designed is smaller than the coin cell battery, and with the help of some copper tape and possibly an insulator, this device can be mounted to any pair of tweezers. It’s a simple tool, yes, but that’s the beauty of it, and makes for a great entry into the Hackaday Prize

Continue reading “Magical Blinky Capacitive Sensing Tweezers” →

Today Is World Create Day

April 23, 2016 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

It has finally arrived, today is World Create Day which is being celebrated with Hackaday Meetups in 64 cities throughout the world.

If you are at one of these meetups, share the fun and excitement of your event today using the hashtag #WorldCreateDay. We want a taste of what is going on in your town so Tweet early and Tweet often! If you can’t be there, join in on Hack Chat and watch the projects as they come in throughout the day. If you see one you love you can even request to join the team.

We want to feature your meetup on the Hackaday front page but we need your help to do it. Make sure you take a lot of pictures, and maybe even some video. Send those along with your tale of World Create Day to: prize at hackaday email address.

If you can’t make it to a live meetup, don’t let that stop you. Design Your Concept today and submit it to the Hackaday Prize; you’ll be making it in just ahead of the Monday deadline. Follow along with the #WorldCreateDay hashtag, encouraging others and posting info about your own project.

Oh, and that amazing art at the top of this post? There’s more were that came from. See all of the designs we’ve put together for World Create Day.

The HackadayPrize2016 is Sponsored by:

TinyDriver – ATtiny84 Platform Without Arduino

April 22, 2016 by Anool Mahidharia 28 Comments

You don’t need an Arduino for everything! Or do you? This is an argument that plays out here quite often. Whatever the outcome, most folks agree that once you’ve dipped your feet in the shallow end of the pool, the real fun is when you dive into the deep end.

[Mahesh Venkitachalam] designed tinyDriver, an experimental Open Source breakout board for the Atmel ATtiny84 chip. His idea was to create a convenient platform which can be used to understand microcontrollers in-depth, by letting users dive under the hood and make use of the various features of the chip such as timers, PWM, interrupts, ADC, and digital I/O. The ATtiny84 is cheap and simple enough for starters. Add a low-cost AVR programmer, install the free and cross-platform avr-gcc and avrdude tool chain, read up the data sheet, learn some C programming and start experimenting. Rinse and repeat and you’ll be a pro at it soon. He’s got a few starter projects documented on his website to get you going.

The hardware is open source, and the Git repository contains the hardware source and example code. If you’re a hardware noob, he’s thoughtfully added a PTC resettable fuse and reverse polarity protection on the board to make sure you don’t release the magic blue smoke prematurely. All of the I/O’s are broken out on a header, and the motor driver and RGB LED can be disabled when not needed. The board isn’t hand-assembly friendly, but he plans to crowd fund it shortly. If you want to move beyond the Arduino platform, projects like the tinyDriver are the way to go.

The HackadayPrize2016 is Sponsored by: