2016 Hackaday Prize

234 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: An Open Bluetooth Switch Interface

October 12, 2016 by 3 Comments

The theme of the last Hackaday Prize challenge was Assistive Technologies, and there is perhaps no assistive technology as desperately needed as a device to help people who can’t use common input devices. Using a keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen can be hard, but this Hackaday Prize project turns all these problems into a simple Bluetooth-enabled switch.

The BOSI – the Bluetooth Open Source Switch Interface – is, at its heart, just a big Bluetooth button inside a 3D-printed enclosure designed in Solidworks. These enclosures house a button connected to an Adafruit Bluefruit EZ-Key. Add a battery and a charging circuit, and you have a button that can be pressed by anyone, that connects to any device, and can do anything.

The real trick to a system like this is the software stack, and for this, BOSI can be used with iOS and OS X using the Switch Control interface. Android works, too, and the entire device is exceptionally usable for anyone that can’t use a normal input device. A great entry for the Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Hands|On Gloves Speaks Sign Language

October 11, 2016 by 7 Comments

The Hands|On glove looks like it’s a PowerGlove replacement, but it’s a lot more and a lot better. (Which is not to say that the Power Glove wasn’t cool. It was bad.) And it has to be — the task that it’s tackling isn’t playing stripped-down video games, but instead reading out loud the user’s sign-language gestures so that people who don’t understand sign can understand those who do.

The glove needs a lot of sensor data to accurately interpret the user’s gestures, and the Hands|On doesn’t disappoint. Multiple flex sensors are attached to each finger, so that the glove can tell which joints are bent. Some fingers have capacitive touch pads on them so that the glove can know when two fingers are touching each other, which is important in the US sign alphabet. Finally, the glove has a nine degree-of-freedom inertial measurement unit (IMU) so that it can keep track of pitch, yaw, and roll as well as the hand’s orientation.

In short, the glove takes in a lot of data. This data is cleaned up and analyzed in a Teensy 3.2 board, and sent off over Bluetooth to its final destination. There’s a lot of work done (and some still to be done) on the software side as well. Have a read through the project’s report (PDF) if you’re interested in support vector machines for sign classification.

Sign language is most deaf folks’ native language, and it’s a shame that the hearing community can’t understand it directly. Breaking down that barrier is a great idea, and it makes a great entry in the Hackaday Prize!

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Augmented Reality Historical Reenactments

October 10, 2016 by 6 Comments

Go to a pier, boardwalk, the tip of Manhattan, or a battlefield, and you’ll see beautifully crafted coin operated binoculars. Drop a coin in, and you’ll see the Statue of Liberty, a container ship rolling coal, or a beautiful pasture that was once the site of terrific horrors. For just a quarter, these binoculars allow you to take in the sights, but simply by virtue of the location of where these machines are placed, you’re standing in the midsts of history. There’s so much more there. If only there was a way to experience that.

This is why [Ben Sax] is building the Perceptoscope. It’s a pair of augmented reality binoculars. Drop in a quarter, and you’ll be able to view the entirety of history for an area. Drop this in Battery Park, and you’ll be able to see the growth of Manhattan from New Amsterdam to the present day. Drop this in Gettysburg, and you’ll see a tiny town surrounded by farms become a horrorscape and turn back into a tiny town surrounded by a National Park.

This is a long term project, with any installations hopefully lasting for decades. That means these Perceptoscopes need to be tough, both in hardware and software. For the software, [Ben] is using WebVR, virtual reality rendering inside a browser. This means the electronics can just be a tablet that can be swapped in and out.

The hardware, though, isn’t as simple. This is going to be a device running in the rain, snow, and freezing weather for decades. Everything must be overbuilt, and already [Ben] has spent far too much time working on the bearing blocks.

Although this is an entry for The Hackaday Prize, it was ‘pulled out’, so to speak, to be a part of the Supplyframe DesignLab inaugural class. The DesignLab is a shop filled with the best tools you can imagine, and exists for only one goal: we’re getting the best designers in there to build cool stuff. The Perceptoscope has been the subject of a few videos coming out of the DesignLab, you can check those out below.

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These 20 Projects Won $1000 For Assistive Technologies

October 10, 2016 by 12 Comments

For the last seven months, Hackaday has been hosting the greatest hardware competition on Earth. The Hackaday Prize is a challenge to Build Something That Matters, asking hardware creators around the world to focus their skills to change the world.

The results have been spectacular. In five rounds of design challenges, we’ve seen more than 1000 entries and so far eighty of them have won $1000 and a chance to win the Grand Prize: $150,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe DesignLab in Pasadena.

Last week, we wrapped up the last challenge for the Hackaday Prize: Assistive Technologies. We’re now happy to announce twenty of those entries that have been selected to move to the final round and have been awarded a $1000 cash prize. Congratulations to the winners for the Assistive Technologies portion of the Hackaday Prize:

 

Who Will win the 2016 Hackaday Prize?

The finalists from each round are now being sent to our fantastic panel of judges. One of them will be awarded the Hackaday Prize. In addition to the prestige, they will win $150,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe DesignLab in Pasadena. Four more of the finalists will receive the other cash prizes of $25k, $10k, $10k, and $5.

Find out who will win live at the Hackaday Superconference on November 5th. The greatest hardware conference on the planet — the two-day hardware spectacular with an awesome speaker lineup, great workshops, and a fantastic community — includes the Hackaday Prize part. There’s still time to get a ticket to participate in this hardware spectacular and witness the crowning of the winner of The Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Raspberry Pi Zero Smart Glass

October 8, 2016 by 4 Comments

Some of the more interesting consumer hardware devices of recent years have been smart glasses. Devices like Google Glass or Snapchat Spectacles, eyewear incorporating a display and computing power to deliver information or provide augmented reality on an unobtrusive wearable platform.

Raspberry Pi Zero Smart Glass aims to provide an entry into this world, with image recognition and OCR text recognition in a pair of glasses courtesy of a Raspberry Pi Zero. Unusually though it does not take the display option of other devices of having a mirror or prism in the user’s field of view, instead it replaces the user’s entire field of view with a display and re-connects them to the world through the Raspberry Pi camera.

The display in question is an inexpensive set of “3D Virtual Stereo Digital Video glasses”, of the type that can be found fairly easily on your favourite auction site. They aren’t particularly high-resolution, but the Pi can easily drive them with its composite video output. The electronics and camera are mounted on a headband, in a custom 3D-printed enclosure. All files can be downloaded from the project page.

There is some Python software, but it’s fair to say that there is not a clear demo on the project page showing it working. However this is no reason to disregard this project, because even if its software has yet to achieve its full potential there is value elsewhere. The 3D-printed Raspberry Pi enclosure should be of use to many other similar wearable projects, and we’d almost say it’s worthy of a project all of its own.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Vendotron

October 7, 2016 by 11 Comments

A recurring idea in hackspaces worldwide seems to be that of the vending machine for parts. Need An Arduino, an ESP8266, or a motor controller? No problem, just buy one from the machine!

Most such machines are surplus from the food and drink vending industry, so it’s not unusual to be able to buy an Arduino from a machine emblazoned with the logo of a popular chocolate bar. These machines can, however, be expensive to buy second-hand, and will normally require some work to bring into operation.

A vending machine is not inherently a complex machine nor is it difficult to build when you have the resources of a hackspace behind you. [Mike Machado] is doing just that, building the Vendotron, a carousel vending machine constructed from laser cut plywood and MDF. The whole thing is controlled by an Arduino, with the carousel belt-driven from a stepper motor.

It’s not doing anything commercial vending machines haven’t been doing for years, except maybe having a software interface that allows phone and Bitcoin payments. Where this project scores though is in showing that a vending machine need not be expensive or difficult to build, and broadening access to them for any hackspace that wants one.

We’ve had a few vending machines here before, like this feature on the prototyping process for commercial machines, or even this one that Tweets. Sadly few have a secret button to deliver a free soda though.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: $50 Foot Controlled Mouse

October 6, 2016 by 14 Comments

ALS robbed one of [C. Niggel]’s relative’s of the use of their upper body. This effectively imprisoned them in their house; ALS is bad stuff. Unfortunately too, the loss of upper body mobility meant that they couldn’t even use the computer to interact with people and the outside world. However, one day [C. Niggel] noted that the relative’s new electric wheelchair was foot controlled. Could this be adapted to a computer mouse?

He looked up commercial solutions and found them not only prohibitively expensive, but also fraught with proprietary drivers and all sorts of bad design nonsense. With all of the tools out there today there was no reason this couldn’t be quickly prototyped and sent to the relative in need.

He used a combination of conductive thread, neoprene, and velostat to build the pads themselves. The pads were balanced with some adjusting resistors in series. The signals are sent to an Adafruit Feather board which interprets them and converts it to a PS/2 standard.

The first version of the mouse used separate pads glued to a MDF board with contact cement. However this, along with some other initial design flaws, resulted in premature failure of the mouse. [C. Niggel] quickly returned to the lab and produced a new version with more robust construction and mailed it off. So far so good!

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