2017 Hackaday Prize

238 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: Elderly Autonomous Fall Detection

September 4, 2017 by 16 Comments

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [having11] is building a simple and cheap fall detection notification button that can be worn by senior citizens, young kids, or others affected by medical conditions. [having11] did some fact-finding, and it appears that falls are one of the leading causes of injury for seniors, according to data available from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

This device will sense a fall and send a text message or email to a recipient caregiver, loved one, or friend. The notification can also be manually triggered using a pushbutton. There’s a 5-second delay before it actually sends the alert, allowing a false trigger to be canceled. On receiving the alert, the recipient can decide how to proceed and if the situation requires a call to emergency services.

The device uses an ESP8266, a MPU6050 MEMS gyro-accelerometer combo, and MyDevices Cayenne IoT service. The Cayenne IoT service is free for Makers and non-commercial use at the moment. The only other components needed are a few discretes and a small LiPo battery, keeping the cost of the device under $10. The whole assembly is housed in a 3D-printed enclosure. The next steps would probably be to make it more compact and design a housing that can be worn as an arm or chest band or on a waist belt. An important requirement of such monitoring devices is being able to notify when/before it is unable to fulfill its primary requirements. Towards that end, maybe adding a low battery and low WiFi signal strength indicators would be nice.

If you have more suggestions on making this better, chime in with your comments below.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Remote Control By Head Gestures

September 3, 2017 by 8 Comments

Some people may think they’re having a bad day when they can’t find the TV remote. Yet there are some people who can’t even hold a remote, let alone root around in the couch cushions where the remote inevitably winds up. This entry in the Assistive Technologies phase of the 2017 Hackaday Prize seeks to help such folks, with a universal remote triggered by head gestures.

Mobility impairments can range from fine motor control issues to quadriplegia, and people who suffer from them are often cut off from technology by the inability to operate devices. [Cassio Batista] concentrated on controlling a TV for his project, but it’s easy to see how his method could interface with other IR remotes to achieve control over everything from alarm systems to windows and drapes. His open-source project uses a web cam to watch a user’s head gestures, and OpenCV running on a CHIP SBC looks for motion in the pitch, yaw, and roll axes to control volume, channel, and power. An Arduino takes care the IR commands to the TV. The prototype works well in the video below; with the power of OpenCV we can imagine mouth gestures and even eye blinks adding to the controller’s repertoire.

The Assistive Tech phase wraps up tomorrow, so be sure to get your entries in. You’ll have some stiff competition, like this robotic exoskeleton. But don’t let that discourage you.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Fighting Dehydration One Sip At A Time

September 2, 2017 by 22 Comments

Humans don’t survive long without water, and most people walk around in a chronic state of mild dehydration even if they have access to plenty of drinking water. It’s hard to stay properly hydrated, and harder still to keep track of your intake, which is the idea behind this water-intake monitoring IoT drinking straw.

Dehydration is a particularly acute problem in the elderly, since the sense of thirst tends to diminish with age. [jflaschberger]’s Hackaday Prize entry seeks to automate the tedious and error-prone job of recording fluid intake, something that caregivers generally have to take care of by eyeballing that half-empty glass and guessing. The HydrObserve uses a tiny turbine flowmeter that can mount to a drinking straw or water bottle cap. A Hall sensor in the turbine sends flow data to a Cypress BLE SoC module, which totalizes the volume sipped and records a patient identifier. A caregiver can then scan the data from the HydrObserve at the end of the day for charting and to find out if anyone is behind on their fluids.

There are problems to solve, not least being the turbine, which doesn’t appear to be food safe. But that’s a small matter that shouldn’t stand in the way of an idea as good as this one. We’ve seen a lot of good entries in the Assistive Technology phase of the 2017 Hackaday Prize, like a walker that works on stairs or sonic glasses for the blind. There are only a couple of days left in this phase — got any bright ideas?

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An E-Ink Calendar

September 1, 2017 by 12 Comments

E-ink displays are becoming almost common in DIY electronics circles, and now we have very capable, low-power microcontrollers, some of which feature some sort of wireless connectivity. Combine these two, and you have the potential for a basic information screen — a low-power device that always displays some sort of relevant information, whether it’s the date or the weather.

For their Hackaday Prize entry, [Wenting] and [Dong] are building an e-ink calendar. It’s a calendar, it displays bitmaps, it can display the time, and with a little more hacking it can display the weather, current traffic, or train schedule. If this were the 90s, we would have called this an information appliance, and it would have blown everyone’s minds.

The current design of this e-ink calendar uses an 800 x 600 pixel display working in 16-level grayscale mode. The processor is an STM32F4, and in a cost-reducing revision, an external SRAM was thrown out and the frame buffer was moved to the internal RAM. The e-ink display is actually pretty quick, allowing for greater than 10 FPS in 1-bit mode.

As with any e-ink project, driving the display is a minor nightmare, but [Wenting] is able to push a few frames per second to the display. That’s good enough for a device that shouldn’t actually change all that much — this is a calendar, after all.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: ESPMetric, A Simple And Easy Matrix

August 31, 2017 by 5 Comments

There’s a lot you can do with a bunch of LEDs connected to the Internet. You can display the time, the weather, the bus schedule, or any one of a number of important data points in your life. Custom matrices are a pain in the butt to set up, which is why we like to see one looking rather polished and clean. [Faire-soi-meme] prettied up an 8×32 NeoPixel matrix with some diffusers and a grid bezel. It’s the ESPMetric, and it’s also an entry for this year’s Hackaday Prize.

The NeoPixel matrix is controlled by a NodeMcu using elements from [squix]’s ESP82666 weather station code as well as Adafruit’s NeoMatrix library. There is a photoresistor to control brightness as well as 3 buttons to control its various modes. Tapping the buttons brings you by various settings like the time, WiFi status, stock market, and so on.

If you parlez-vous français–or enjoy the Google Translate experience–[Faire-soi-meme] has detailed the build steps on his blog, though you can also download his code from his GitHub repository. There’s a great video of this build, you can check that out below.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An Open Source Kiln

August 30, 2017 by 16 Comments

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Matt] is building a small kiln for melting metals and firing clay.  He’s making this kiln out of materials anyone can acquire — dirt and a bit of nichrome wire.

Most kiln builds you’ll find on the Internet use fancy refractory bricks and other materials you may not have in your back yard. [Matt]’s project is entirely DIY, and starts with a large pile of dirt and rocks. Aftter shaking off the sifted dirt, washing the rocks, straining off the gravel, getting rid of the sand, and siphoning off the water, [Matt] has a big bag of wet clay. This clay is mixed with perlite, an insulating, refractory material, molded into bricks, and fired. The result is a brick that looks good enough to be made into a kiln.

[Matt] has already put a lot of work into the calculations required to figure out the heat transfer of this kiln. At best, this kiln is going to take 14 hours to get up to temperature. That’s incredibly slow, but then again, this kiln will be electric, and will only use 1500 Watts. That’s nothing compared to a commercial electric kiln, but it is a build [Matt] designed himself without any outside help, using only parts he can easily acquire. In any event, this is an excellent project for the Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Manual, CNC Pick And Place Machine

August 29, 2017 by 31 Comments

Everyone who wants a 3D printer probably already has one, and even laser cutters and CNC machines are making their way into garages and basements ’round the world. Pick and place machines are the next great frontier of personal manufacturing, and even though that’s a long way off, [Tegwyn]’s project for this year’s Hackaday Prize is bringing us that much closer to popping down 0201 LEDs reliably.

This project is a manual pick and place machine — otherwise known as ‘tweezers’. It’s a bit more complicated than that, because the entire idea behind [Tegwyn]’s build is to decouple a human’s fine motor skills from the ability to place components on a board. To do that, this project is using an off-the-shelf, blue light special CNC machine. There’s not much to it, just a bit of aluminum extrusion and some threaded rods. However, with the addition of a vacuum pump, a hollow needle, and a few manual controls to move the axes around, the operator has very fine control over where a resistor, cap, or LED goes.

There are a few neat additions to the, ‘put a vacuum pump on a CNC machine’ idea. This is a 4 axis machine, giving the user the ability to rotate the part around a pad. There’s also a microscope hooked up to a small monitor mounted to the machine. If you’re assembling hundreds of boards, this is not the machine you want. If, however, you only need a handful, don’t mind spending a few hours placing parts, and don’t want to go insane with tiny QFN packages, this is a great build and a great entry for the Hackaday Prize.

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