2017 Hackaday Prize

238 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: Water Level Station

June 3, 2017 by 17 Comments

All over the world, in particular in underdeveloped countries, people die every year by the thousands because of floods. The sudden rise of water levels often come unannounced and people have no time to react before they are caught in a bad spot. Modern countries commonly have measure equipment deployed around problematic areas but they are usually expensive for third world countries to afford.

[Benne] project devises a low-cost, cloud-connected, water level measuring station to allow remote and central water level monitoring for local authorities. He hopes that by being able to monitor water levels in a more precise and timely fashion, authorities can act sooner to warn potentially affected areas and increase the chance of saving lives in case of a natural disaster.

At the moment, the project is still in an early stage as they are testing with different sensors to figure out which would work best in different scenarios. Latest version consists essentially in an Arduino UNO, an ultrasonic distance sensor, and a DHT temperature/humidity sensor to provide calibration since these characteristics affect the speed of sound. Some years ago, we covered a simple water level monitoring using a Parallax Ping sensor, but back then the IoT and the ‘cloud’ weren’t nearly as fashionable. They also tested with infrared sensors and a rotary encoder.

They made a video of the rotary encoder, which we can see below:

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Refugee Reuniter

June 2, 2017 by 15 Comments

The world is dealing with a serious refugee crisis, and with that comes a problem: finding people. The Refugee Reuniter, a project entered into this year’s Hackaday Prize, is a possible solution to this problem. It’s a device that allows people to reconnect with their family, whether it’s children lost in transit to destination countries, or mothers and fathers reuniting.

The basic problem the Refugee Reuniter is trying to solve is tracking people. This is a whole ball of wax that involves privacy and technological concerns. Ideas put forward so far include GPS trackers, implantable RFID tags, and other such draconian measures. The Refugee Reuniter puts another spin on this, while still assigning a unique, electronic ID to every name.

The basic hardware for the Refugee Reuniter is simply an RFID wristband or token, carried with the refugee at all times. This token is mapped to a name that can be looked up in a small terminal, tied to a specific location. If a refugee logs into one of these terminals, their location is logged and they can search for their relatives. It’s a simple technological solution to what is basically a gigantic dead-tree logbook, only backed up into an online database.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Community Mesh Network

June 1, 2017 by 26 Comments

While the Internet of Things is here to stay, and will kill us all, there are a few places left on the planet that will remain unscathed during the robot uprising. These underserved communities still have a need for communications and networking, leading [hlew] to create a Community Engagement Mesh Network as an entry for The Hackaday Prize.

While there are many, many options available for DIY networking solutions out there today, [hlew] is leaning on some work done by some of [Bruce Land]’s students at Cornell. This project used simple and cheap nRF24 radio modules for a true mesh network with multi-node communication, dynamic route discovery, and dynamic route reconfiguration.

The CEMN will rely on this network to provide communications to underserved communities. The primary goal of this network is to broadcast information like crop reports and health advisories, but it can also be used for peer to peer communications between individuals.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: 3D Printed Mini-Lathe

May 31, 2017 by 20 Comments

Lathes can be big, powerful, dangerous machines. But sometimes there’s a call for making very small parts out of soft materials, like plastic and wood. For jobs like this, you could use something like this 3D printed mini-lathe.

The benefits of 3D printing a tool like this are plentiful. The design can be customized and refined by the end user; [castvee8] notes that the machine can be made longer simply by increasing the length of the lead screw and guide rails. The machine does rely on some metal parts and a motor; but the real power here is that if you can’t source the exact components, you can always customize the files to suit what you have on hand.

[castvee8] aimed to make the entire build as easy as possible for the novice – even the motor and speed controller are off-the-shelf modules. It’s a testament to the golden age we live in that an entire lathe can be built out of modules and 3D printed parts. The project makes up another member of the family of 3D printed tools [castvee8] is showing off on Hackaday.io.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Modular Open-Source AV Receiver

May 30, 2017 by 24 Comments

Hi-Fi hasn’t changed much in decades. OK, we’ll concede that’s something of a controversial statement to make in that of course your home hi-fi has changed immensely over the years. Where once you might have had a turntable and a cassette deck you probably now have a streaming media player, and a surround sound processor, for example.

But it’s still safe to say that hi-fi reproduction hasn’t changed much in decades. You can still hook up the latest audio source to an amplifier and speakers made decades ago, and you’ll still enjoy great sound.

Not so though, if instead of a traditional amplifier you bought an AV receiver with built-in amplifier and processing. This is a fast-moving corner of the consumer electronics world, and the lifetime of a device before its interfaces and functionality becomes obsolete can often be measured in only a few years.

To [Andrew Bolin], this makes little sense. His solution has some merit, he’s produced a modular open-source AV processor in which the emphasis is on upgradeability to keep up with future developments rather than on presenting a black box to the user which will one day be rendered useless by the passage of time.

His design revolves around a backplane which accepts daughter cards for individual functions, and a Raspberry Pi to do the computational heavy lifting. So far he has made a proof-of-concept which takes in HDMI audio and outputs S/PDIF audio to his DAC, but plans are in hand for further modules. We can see that this could become the hub of a very useful open-source home entertainment system.

If you make one, please remember to enhance it with our own sound-improving accessory.

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Hackaday Prize Entry : DEER — An Electronic Repellent

May 29, 2017 by 37 Comments

Ultrasonic repellent devices used to keep away insects, rodents, birds, and even large animals have been around for quite a while, but their effectiveness depends on who you ask.  Some critters just don’t seem affected, while some others definitely will avoid being around such a device. Deploying a few of these devices to scare off animals seems to be working quite well for [Ondřej Petrlík]. Around where he lives, the fields of tall grass need to be mowed down during the spring. Unfortunately, the tall grass is ideal for young, newborn animals to stay hidden and safe. The mowing machines would often cripple and hurt such animals, and [Ondřej] desperately wanted to solve the problem and prevent these mishaps.

He built an electronic repeller to keep away wild animals and their young from his farm/ranch/range back in the Czech Republic. He used an Arduino Mini to drive a large piezo transducer to scare away the wild animals from the vicinity of the device. He likely used a high enough frequency beyond human range, but we’ll know more when he publishes his code and details. There are also a few large 10mm LED’s – either to visually locate the device or help drive the animals away in conjunction with the ultrasound, with an LDR that activates the LEDs at night. Using the Arduino helps to turn on the transducer at random intervals, and hopefully, he is using a range of different frequencies so the animals don’t become immune to the device.

His first prototype was cobbled together using vanilla, off the shelf parts. An Arduino, a step up converter, an LDR, a couple of LEDs, a reed switch for powering it on via a magnet, and a large ultrasonic transducer, all powered by three alkaline AA batteries. He stuffed it all inside a weatherproof molded enclosure, holding it all together with a lot of hot glue. This didn’t make it very rugged for the long-term, outdoor field use. While the prototype worked well, he needed several of the devices to be placed all around his farm. To make assembly easy and make it more reliable, he designed a custom PCB to fit in the weather proof enclosure. This allowed him to easily mount all the required parts for a more reliable result. His project is still a work in progress, so if you have worked with these types of ultrasonic repellent devices to keep away animals, and have any insights that may help him, do chime in with your comments. [Ondřej] seems pretty satisfied with the results so far.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: ESP32 Monster And Getting Started Quickly

May 28, 2017 by 19 Comments

Prolific hacker [kodera2t] is working on his own “ESP32 monster board” dev board for the still-newish ESP32 WiFi module. His board has everything: Ethernet, OLED, LiPo, and even CAN-bus. But all that peripheral connectivity is worth nothing if you can’t program the microcontroller to use it.

The Arduino environment for the ESP32 is coming along quite nicely, but it’s not yet fully featured enough to run all of [kodera2t]’s hardware. To take advantage of all that, he needs to use Espressif’s SDK — called the “IoT Development Framework” or IDF for short. In his latest project log, [kodera2t] goes through everything necessary to get the IDF up and compiling on OSX. (It’s strangely similar to the Linux procedure.) Read through the official instructions here, if you want more, but we think [kodera2t] hits all the high points.

While we’re tooting [kodera2t]’s horn, check out his old project — an Arduino shoehorned into an SD card — or watch his alter-ego [Toshiro Kodera] give a serious talk about his day job, engineering radio-frequency meta-materials.

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