Hackaday Prize Entry: One-Handed, No-Look Keying

July 12, 2017 by John Baichtal 3 Comments

Chorded keysets can be found all over. For instance, Braille writers and court stenographers both use them. These chorded keyboards create each letter by pressing a combination of keys rather just one, making for much smaller keyboards [Christine] got the idea to create wearable rig that uses an accelerometer and vibe motor attached to each finger to serve as a one-handed, no-look, silent keyer. Forget small keyboards, this project does away with it altogether, relying on the accelerometers to keep track of your fingers.

[Christine]’s prototype consists of a Bluno BLE controller, a GSM module, and a few accelerometers and motors. The vibration motors not only provide haptic feedback so you know you tapped something, but also replays the chords so you can double-check what you’re writing.

Typically one-handed keyboards rely on button presses, with no-look use dependent on memorizing the layout—think of a 10-key pad. [Christine]’s project lets you type on any surface or none at all, making it handy for typing while you work with the other hand. It also has great potential for vision impaired users.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Stroke Rehabilitation Through Biofeedback

July 10, 2017 by John Baichtal 8 Comments

Students at Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering created ExoMIND, an Arduino-powered glove that helps a stroke victim recover by tracking the range of motion the patient experiences.

A set of 7 accelerometers in the fingers, wrist, and forearm track the range of movements the patient is experiencing with that hand. An accelerometer on the back of the hand serving as a reference. Meanwhile, an EMG sensor working with a conductive fabric sleeve to measure muscle activity. The user follows a series of instructions dished out by an interactive software program, allowing the system to test out the patient’s range of motion at the beginning of the regime as well as to record whether any improvement was noted at the end. The data is used by a physical therapist to personalize the treatment plan. The interactive program also raises the possibility of patients self-directing their exercises with the ExoMIND telling them how to adjust their motion to get the most out of the experience.

Produced as part of the university’s MIND Biomedical Engineering Club, the ExoMIND prototype was designed by three interdisciplinary teams focusing on electronics, materials, and programming, respectively.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: Stroke Rehabilitation Through Biofeedback” →

Best Product Entry: Open Source Internet Of Dosimeter

July 8, 2017 by Jack Laidlaw 24 Comments

[Radu Motisan] Has entered a cool project into the Best Product portion of this year’s Hackaday Prize. It’s called an Open Source IoT Dosimeter. It has a Geiger tube for detecting radiation levels along with Internet connectivity and a host of other goodies.

Dubbed the KIT1, this IoT dosimeter can be used as a portable radiation detector with its Nokia 5110 LCD as an output or a monitoring station with Ethernet. With its inbuilt speaker, it alerts users to areas with excessive radiation. KIT1 is a fully functioning system with no need for a computer to get readouts, making it very handy and easy to use. It also has room for expansion for extra sensors allowing a fully customized system. The project includes all the Gerbers and a BOM so you can send it off to a PCB fab lab of your choice, solder on a few components, and have a fully functioning IoT Dosimeter. you don’t even need the LCD or the Ethernet; you can choose which output you prefer from the two and just use that allowing for some penny-pinching.

This is a great project and who doesn’t need an IOT Dosimeter these days?

Hackaday Prize Entry: Wireless Weather Station Protects Crops From Frost

July 7, 2017 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

It seems like you hear it every year — a late or early frost threatens some crop or another, forcing farmers to take drastic action to avoid financial ruin. But even when the weather cooperates on a large scale, microclimates can still cause big problems in small enough areas to go unnoticed until after the damage is done.

As always, better data can lead to better decisions, and increased granularity of environmental data could do wonders for certain kinds of agriculture. Enter SLoRa, a wireless weather station for agriculture. Aimed at providing a network of cheap, low-power temperature sensors, [Dorijan]’s proposed system would allow farmers to take active measures to protect their trees from frosts — smudge pots to heat the nascent fruit, sprinklers to apply a protective layer of ice, or even hovering helicopters to move massive amounts of warmer air into cold spots. With a solar powered sensor array and a LoRa link to a hilltop gateway, each SLoRa sensor deployed will be one more data point a farmer can use to determine where to deploy his or her limited resources.

Need to get up to speed on LoRa? You could do worse than learning how to listen in on LoRa signals with an SDR dongle.

Hackaday Prize Entry: An Internet Doorbell

July 5, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

The Internet of Things will kill us all and is the worst idea anyone has ever had. However, just because something could be labeled an ‘Internet of Things thing’ doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. The Hackaday Prize’s Internet of Useful Things challenge was all about finding the Internet of Useful things, and one of these projects is so simple yet so elegant, we’re surprised no one has thought of it yet.

[David]’s entry to the Hackaday Prize is effectively an Internet of Things doorbell. You might think an IoT doorbell would just consist of a device sending push notifications to your phone. That’s part of the project, but it gets so much better.

The brilliant part of this build boils down to a simple relay. On command, [David] can turn his doorbell off. This means no ringing doorbell interrupting meals or naps. By sending a command to the ESP32 in this little device, [David] can enable or disable his doorbell. Of course, this doorbell also sends push notifications to his phone, so if the UPS guy throws a package at his front door and manages to hit the doorbell, [David] will still hear it even if he’s upstairs, in the garage, or in the backyard.

This is the simplest and most brilliant Internet of Things device ever created. It solves an obvious problem with surprisingly little hardware. The only data this device collects is the state of a doorbell, and even if this device was completely hacked by balaclava-wearing hackers, they still can’t F5 the doorbell. This is the best the Internet of Things has to offer, and we’re proud to have the Internet of Doorbells make it to the finals of the Hackaday Prize.

Hackaday Prize Entry: DIY 6-Axis Micro Manipulator

July 4, 2017 by Donald Papp 18 Comments

[David Brown]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize is a design for a tool that normally exists only as an expensive piece of industrial equipment; out of the reach of normal experimenters, in other words. That tool is a 6-axis micro manipulator and is essentially a small robotic actuator that is capable of very small, very precise movements. It uses 3D printed parts and low-cost components.

SLS Nylon Actuator Frame. Motor anchors to top right, moves the central pivot up and down to deflect the endpoints.

The manipulator consists of six identical actuators, each consisting of a single piece of SLS 3D printed nylon with a custom PCB to control a motor and read positional feedback. The motor moves the central pivot point of the 3D printed assembly, which in turn deflects the entire piece by a small amount. By anchoring one point and attaching the other, a small amount of highly controllable movement can be achieved. Six actuators in total form a Gough-Stewart Platform for moving the toolhead.

Interestingly, this 6-Axis Micro Manipulator is a sort of side project. [David] is interested in creating his own digital UV exposer, which requires using UV laser diodes with fiber optic pig tails attached. In an industrial setting these are created by empirically determining the optimal position of a fiber optic with regards to the laser diode by manipulating it with a micro manipulator, then holding it steady while it is cemented in place. Seeing a distinct lack of micro manipulators in anything outside of lab or industrial settings, and recognizing that there would be applications outside of his own needs, [David] resolved to build one.

Best Product Entry: Telescope Control With RDuinoScope

July 3, 2017 by John Baichtal 2 Comments

The Hackaday Prize is more than just giving tens of thousands of dollars to hardware hackers. It’s also about funding the next batch of Open Source hardware products. Alongside The Hackaday Prize — the contest where we’re funding hardware that will change the world, — we’re also giving away $30,000 to the project that will best become a product. It’s almost like we’re funding hardware startups here.

[Dessislav Gouzgounov] wanted to build a small piece of hardware — a GoTo for his telescope. This handheld controller would allow him to use software to align the telescope with whatever celestial body he’s checking out.

Many GoTos simply interface with a laptop, but [Dessislav] built a standalone system centered around an Arduino Due and 240×400 touch screen, with GPS, RTC, and Bluetooth under the hood. It works on both hemispheres and contains a database of 250 celestial objects, features different speeds for time-delayed tracking of celestial, lunar, and solar phenomena, and it can work with any stepper-equipped telescope.

We covered [Dessislav]’s previous version of the RDuinoScope, but he’s improved the project considerably with over 2,400 lines of code including a new menu system and added a star atlas showing the location of the sky at which the telescope is currently pointed, among other improvements. The project is open source and you can learn more about it on [Dessislav]’s project page or check out his code on GitHub.

Continue reading “Best Product Entry: Telescope Control With RDuinoScope” →