2019 Hackaday Prize

209 Articles

UECG – A Very Small Wearable ECG

November 8, 2019 by 16 Comments

[Ultimate Robotics] has been working on designing and producing an extremely small ECG that can stream data real time.

Typical electrocardiogram equipment is bulky: miniaturization doesn’t do much for a hospital where optimizations tend to lean towards, durability, longevity, and ease of use. Usually a bunch of leads are strung between a conductive pad and an analog front end and display which interprets the data; very clearly identifying the patient as a subject for measurement.

uECG puts all this in a finger sized package. It’s no surprise that this got our attention at Maker Faire Rome and that they’re one of the Hackaday Prize Finalists. The battery, micro controller, and sampling circuitry are all nearly packed onto the board. The user has the option of streaming through BLE at 125 Hz or using a radio transceiver for 1 kHz of data. Even transmitting at these sample rates and filtering the signal of unwanted noise the device draws less than 10 mA.

The files to make the device are all on their page. Though they are planning to produce the boards in a small run which should be the best way to acquire one and start experimenting with this interesting data.

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Bobble-Bot Teaches Modern Real-Time Robot Control

November 7, 2019 by 7 Comments

Bobble-Bot uses the standard inverted pendulum problem to teach modern robotic control using a Raspberry Pi, RT-Linux, and ROS.

We’re really impressed by the polish and design effort put into this project, and it’s no surprise that it’s a finalist in the 2019 Hackaday Prize. Bobble-Bot is a top heavy bot sitting on two BLDC motors. The brains of the operation is a Raspberry Pi running real-time Linux and ROS. This allows the robot to respond in a predictable manner to its inputs, and also allows for more control over thread priority than a regular kernel. In the past we’ve seen these inverted pendulum bots mostly being run on micro-controllers for just this reason, so it’s cool to see it make the jump to Linux.

Mechanically the bot can be printed on any consumer grade printer and assembled. We really appreciate the small details like making sure one screw size could be used to assemble the entire bot, eliminating the need for multiple tools.

They also have a simulator, and the bot’s software was built inside of that. It was a big moment when the real-world behavior finally matched the simulated performance. In fact, if you’re interested in the Bobble-Bot, you can try it out in simulation before committing to building the whole thing.

This project seems like a fun build for any hacker. We would have loved to have a project as polished and up-to-date as this one when we were learning controls in university. Video introducing it after the break.

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Giving Sight To The Blind With A Wave Of The Hand

November 6, 2019 by 1 Comment

[Jakob Kilian] is working on a glove that he hopes will let the blind “see” their surroundings.

One of the most fascinating examples of the human brain’s plasticity is in its ability to map one sense to another. Some people, for example, report being able to see sound, giving them a supernatural ability to distinguish tones. This effect has also been observed in the visually impaired. There are experiments where grids of electrodes were placed on the tongue or mechanical actuators were placed on the lower back. The signals from a camera were fed into these grids and translated in to shocks or movement. The interesting effect is that the users quickly learned to distinguish objects from this low resolution input. As they continued to use these devices they actually reported seeing the objects as their visual centers took over interpreting this input.

Most of these projects are quite bulky and the usual mess you’d expect from a university laboratory. [Jakob]’s project appears to trend to a much more user-friendly product. A grid of haptics are placed on the back of the user’s hand along with a depth camera. Not only is it somewhat unobtrusive, the back of the hand is very sensitive to touch and the camera is in a prime position to be positioned for a look around the world.

[Jakob] admits that, as an interaction designer, his hardware hacking skills are still growing. To us, the polish and thought that went into this is already quite impressive, so it’s no wonder he’s one of the Hackaday Prize Finalists.

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Servo Socks Is A Brilliantly Simple Solution For Quick Hacking

November 5, 2019 by 8 Comments

[Dan Kitchen] has a great solution for making servos easy to hack.

Every hacker has a drawer full of servo’s somewhere. Just about every project that uses them starts off by measuring the spacing and designing some obscure bracket to meet that unique motor’s size. However, what if you could use common wood screws and hand tools to use them right away?

[Dan]’s solution is to make a case from recycled HDPE lumber, the same sort of material you might buy for a deck. This material is sandable, carvable, and can be drilled into. The case encapsulates the servo motor completely. One side has a freewheeling wooden disk and the other side’s disk is attached to the motor.  Now when you need motion you can work with the servo as if it were just a block of wood. Very cool.

[Dan] appears to be moving to make this a commercial product and we can see why. Though we see no reason why an enterprising hacker or hackerspace couldn’t come up with their own variations on this great idea.

Axiom, A 100+kW Motor Controller For Making Big Motors Move

November 4, 2019 by 47 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of motor driver boards for robots and the odd electric skateboard. What we haven’t see a lot of is one big enough to drop into an electric vehicle. 

The Axiom motor controller was a winner of the bootstrap contest and is a Finalist in the 2019 Hackaday Prize. The driver aims to deliver 300A continuous at 400V all day long. Which is a very impressive amount of power from a board that appears to be quite compact.

The brains of the device is an ice40 FPGA from Lattice running software based on the VESC Project. Its open source roots will certainly allow for some interesting hacks and an increasingly stable platform over time. Not to mention the existing software tools will aid in the sometimes cumbersome motor-driver tuning process.

The board designs are available, but we agree with the team that the complexity of assembly is likely going to be high (along with the price). The amount of research and skill going into this complicated kit is a bit mind-boggling, but we hope it will really enable some cool hacks, from cars, to ATVs, and maybe even an electric flyer.

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SmallKat: An Adorable And Dynamic Robot

November 3, 2019 by 11 Comments

SmallKat is a cute little robot with a lot of capability designed around teaching and experimenting with dynamic robot control. It’s a shame we haven’t covered SmallKat yet, as it’s both a finalist in the 2019 Hackaday Prize and was one of the Bootstrap Winners this year.

Many hobby robots move by repeating a pre-programmed sequence of movements. Most hexapods for example follow this line of thought. However, robots like Spot and the MiniCheetah show a different world where robots determine the locations of their limbs by their current state, the measured state of their environment, and some imagined future. These robots are capable of so much more than their predecessors.

However, even a cost-effective version of these robots climb into the tens of thousands of dollars at a steep curve. SmallKat will help there: based around hobby servos and an ESP32 the hardware stays affordable. Data can be streamed to a much larger computer for experimentation which saves on some of the weight that supporting a larger device like a Pi would add.

This device will let students experiment with all kinds of dynamic models and even machine learning-based movements without breaking the bank. There’s even a nice software studio for experimentation to aid in the learning process.  Video of it shuffling around after the break.

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Forget Printing Labels For Your Bathtub Hooch, Why Not Engrave The Bottle?

November 2, 2019 by 20 Comments

[BlueFlower] sends in this cool wine bottle engraver. It’s a simple machine that reminds us of the infamous EggBot. One axis can move in x and z while the other axis rotates the work piece. The EggBot works in spherical coordinates while this one lives in a cylindrical world.

The base of the device appears to be an older project of [BlueFlower]’s an XY-Plotter/Cutter. The plotter itself is a very standard twin-motor gantry design. In fact, it looks like when the machine is converted to bottle engraving, the drivers which previously moved the Y-axis are re-purposed to move two rollers. The rollers themselves are suspiciously similar to those found inside 2D printers. We all have them kicking around our junk drawers, but it’s rare to see them actually being used. The spindled is just a DC motor with a ball grinder coupled to the end.

As for the final result, we have to admit that the engraved bottles are quite fetching. Catch a video of the engraving process after the break.

Continue reading “Forget Printing Labels For Your Bathtub Hooch, Why Not Engrave The Bottle?” →