Hackaday Prize Entry: Detecting Adulterated Food Using AI

April 10, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 17 Comments

Adulterated food is food that has a substance added to it to save on manufacturing costs. It can have a negative effect, it can reduce the food’s potency or it can have no effect at all. In many cases it’s done illegally. It’s also a widespread problem, one which [G. Vignesh] has decided to take on as his entry for the 2017 Hackaday Prize, an AI Based Adulteration Detector.

On his hackaday.io Project Details page he outlines some existing methods for testing food, some which you can do at home: adulterated sugar may have chalk added to it, so put it in water and the sugar will dissolve while the chalk will not. His approach is to instead take high-definition photos of the food and, on a Raspberry Pi, apply filters to them to reveal various properties such as density, size, color, texture and so on. He also mentions doing image analysis using a deep learning neural network. This project touches us all and we’ll be watching it with interest.

If all this talk of adulterated food makes you nervous about your food supply then consider growing our own, hacker style. One such project we’ve seen here on Hackaday is Farmbot, an open-source CNC farming robot. Another such is MIT’s OpenAg Food Computer, a robotic control and monitoring growing chamber.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Obsolete Time Lite

April 9, 2017 by Jenny List 13 Comments

There are very few constants in the world of home-made electronics. Things that you might have found on the bench of a mid-1960s engineer working with germanium PNP transistors just as much as you might find on the bench of one in 2017 working on 32-bit microcontrollers. One of these constants is the humble Altoids tin. The ubiquitous mint container is as handy a size for the transistor circuits of previous decades as it is for the highly integrated circuits of today, and has become something of a standard form factor.

One thing you might not expect in an Altoids tin though is a vacuum tube, even one protruding through the lid. [opeRaptor] though has done just that, though, with a very nicely executed design for a NIXIE clock in your favorite mint container. We’re writing this up as a Hackaday Prize entry so at this stage in the competition the boards are still in design for the prototype, but the difficult power supply to make 180 V DC from a single cell is already proven to work, as it the clock circuitry. The final clock will be a very compact device given the size of the tin, and will contain an ESP8266 board for wireless network connectivity.

For a project at this early stage, there is frustratingly little real work to go on aside from some renders, but there is at least a video showing the PSU working driving a NIXIE, which we’ve put below the break.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: Obsolete Time Lite” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: An Electric Longboard

April 8, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

The Hackaday Prize is in full swing, and that means we’re starting to see all the builds a few select people have been saving up for the past few months. [yowhwui] has been working on a 3D printed electric longboard for a while now, and this build is really solid. He already has over 150km on the odometer, and the 3D printed parts are still holding up.

The power for this motor comes from a 6374 brushless motor running at 192 kV. This, plus two 4S 30C 5000mAh LiPo batteries propel this longboard to speeds up to 42 km/h (2.18 Saxon leagues per quarter hour), all while weighing about 8kg.

Since [yowhwui] is using the motor for power and braking (electric motors are neat), this longboard needs to be designed with belt skipping in mind. To that end, he’s designed a drive system with an idler, and nearly every single part is 3D printed. The first revision of the hardware was printed in PETG. While PETG was more than strong enough, it was also too brittle. This led to a few cracks. After printing the parts out again in ABS, [yowhwui] put a few more kilometers on this longboard, and there are no immediate signs of wear.

Hackaday Prize Entry: WiFi In Wall Switches

April 7, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

The Internet of Things and Home Automation are the next big thing, even though we’ve had X10 switches and controllers for forty years. Why the sudden interest in home automation? Cheap microcontrollers with WiFi, ZigBee, and Z-wave, apparently. For this Hackaday Prize entry, [Knudt] is building a WiFi switch, meant to be retrofitted into any Euro wall switch.

There are three parts of [Knudt]’s WiFi wall switch, each of them with different requirements. The top layer is the switch itself and a small OLED display. These switches are really two small capacitive switches, which means there’s no reason to go through the work of sourcing a proper mechanical switch. Good thinking, there. The second layer of this contraption is basically an ESP8266, providing all the logic for this wall switch. The bottom layer is a bit more interesting, housing the 110-230V input, with a Triac or relay. This is where the fun, burny stuff happens.

Right now, you can go down to your local home supply store and simply buy a device like this. History has shown that’s a terrible idea. With home automation cloud services shutting down and security vulnerabilities abound, a DIY or Open Source home automation project really is the best idea. That makes [Knudt]’s project a great entry for the Hackaday Prize.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Pocket Serial Terminal

April 6, 2017 by Jenny List 37 Comments

When you have a microcontroller or other microcomputer on the bench in front of you and it lacks the familiar keyboard and display of a modern desktop computer, what do you do when you wish to program it or otherwise issue commands? Unless you are a retro computer enthusiast who longs for a set of Altair-style toggle switches, the chances are you’ll find its serial port and attach a terminal.

Serial terminals, devices containing a screen and keyboard hooked up to send and display text from a serial port, used to be a staple of computing, but as standalone devices, they’re now rather rare. In most cases nowadays using a serial terminal will mean opening up a terminal emulator in your modern OS, Linux, Windows, or MacOS, but there is still a use for standalone hardware. [Kuldeep Singh Dhaka] certainly thinks so, because he’s making an extremely nice portable terminal with an LCD screen.

The terminal emulates a venerable DEC VT-100 terminal, but since it’s built around an STM32F105 ARM microcontroller we’re sure it could emulate other models with appropriate software. It takes either a USB or a PS/2 keyboard, so we’d expect to see it paired with a suitably tiny portable keyboard when it in use. There is no source code available for it yet since this is very much still a project in development that we’re featuring now because it is a 2017 Hackaday Prize entry, but he assures us that code will be on its way and it will be GPL licenced.

He’s even posted a video that we’ve placed below the break of the device in operation, connected to a machine running MicroPython. We’d probably turn off that beep, though.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: Pocket Serial Terminal” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Modular Instrumentation For Aircraft

April 5, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

Parts, tools, and components for aviation and aerospace are sold in ‘Aviation Monetary Units’ (AMU). Right now, the conversion factor from USD to AMU is about 1000 to 1. This stuff is expensive, but there is a small portion of the flying community that prides itself on not breaking the bank every time something needs to be replaced. Theses are often the microlight, ultralight, and experimental aircraft enthusiasts. Steam gauges are becoming obsolete and expensive to repair, and you’re not going to throw a 15 AMU Garmin G500 in an ultralight that only costs 10 AMU.

To solve this problem, [Rene] is turning to sensors, displays, and microcontrollers that are cheap and readily available to build modular aviation instruments.

As with all aviation gear, the first question that springs to mind is, ‘what will the FAA think about this?’. [Rene] is in South Africa, so the answer is, ‘nothing’. If a few American pilots decide to build one of these, that’ll fly too; these are instruments designed for non-type-certified aircraft. That’s not to say there are no rules for what goes into these aircraft, but the paperwork is much easier.

Right now, the design goals for [Rene]’s instruments is under 0.1 AMU per module, robust, RF shielded, with engine monitoring, fuel management, heading, air and ground speed, altitude, attitude, and all the other gauges that make flying easy. He’s using a CAN bus for all of these modules, and in the process slowly dragging the state of the art of ultralight aviation into the 1990s. It’s fantastic work, and we can’t wait to see some of these modules in the air.

World Create Day: The Hackaday Event In Your Town

April 5, 2017 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

It’s official, World Create Day is on April 22nd. Get together with hackers in your area and create something! This is best way to meet all the Hackaday readers in your area, and a great excuse to carve out a few hours of your busy life to have fun working on a project.

These are really easy to organize, but we can’t do it without you. Sign up now to host a meetup in your town!

The Hackaday community around the world will meetup and spend time building together on Saturday, April 22nd. If you’re like us you have a long list of projects you want to do ‘some day’, this is the day. Pack up your current build (or grab gear to start a new one), get together with some old and new friends, and hack on your projects with each other.

It’s traditional to block out a bit of time at the end for lightning talks to show off the builds each of you has been working on. Don’t forget to take pictures and post the story of your World Create Day meetup. We enjoyed getting a great look at many of last year’s meetups this way and want to expand the builds we feature on the front page this year.

Meetup Organizers Wanted

Fill out this form to let us know you want to host a meetup.

This is the second year of World Create Day. Last year we saw meetups in 64 cities. Many of those will happen again this year, but we also need you to organize an event in your area. We’ll help you get things set up and put your event up on the big map so others in your area will plan to join in. Do it now, if we get your shipping info early we’ll send you stickers and other swag to hand out at your gathering.

Build Something that Matters

The core of World Create Day is to stop making excuses and just build something. Since you’re already getting together with other people consider forming a team to enter the 2017 Hackaday Prize. Currently we’re in the idea phase: Design Your Concept means tackling a problem and planning a build to solve it. When you get a bunch of creative people together in one place, great ideas begin to flow. Seize the moment by turning that creativity into an entry for the Hackaday Prize and see where it takes you!