Don’t Miss Your Last Chance To Enter The Hack It Back Challenge

July 21, 2022 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

While the 2022 Hackaday Prize as a whole winds its way through a good chunk of the year, each individual challenge that makes up the competition only sticks around for a limited time. As hard as it might be to believe, our time with theHack it Back challenge is nearly at a close, with just a few days left to enter your project before the July 24th deadline.

Each challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize has been designed around the core themes of sustainability, resiliency, and circularity — and for the Hack it Back phase of the competition we asked hackers to essentially keep as much hardware out of the landfill as possible. That could mean making a simple fix that puts a piece of equipment back into service, or it might be a be complete rebuild of an older device to bring it up to modern standards. These are the kind of projects Hackaday was built on, so turning it into an official challenge this year made perfect sense. Continue reading “Don’t Miss Your Last Chance To Enter The Hack It Back Challenge” →

The printer in question - it's tall, about a meter and a half tall, in fact!

Hackaday Prize 2022: $40k Stratasys Printer Fix Costs $1

July 19, 2022 by Arya Voronova 36 Comments

Companies don’t treat equipment in the same way that we, hobbyists, do. When it comes to reassessing equipment state, there’s calculations to be done – how many failures it’s experienced, what’s the rate of the support contract for it (often increasing as equipment ages), and whether it’d be more price-efficient to just buy a new one. Hobbyists aren’t tied to commercial support contracts that prohibit DIY repair, however. We can investigate things and try our luck, and in many cases, the repair will be super simple and satisfying! Today’s lucky repair story is about [Gregor], who has acquired a written-off ±$40k Stratasys 3D printer for peanuts, and repaired it with $1 in parts.

The error code shown on the display indicated an extruder changer error — yes, this is a dual extruder printer! Earlier, [Gregor] noted that some of the chamber lighting LEDs failed, very likely because of the constant heat in the chamber. After investigating the infrared LED responsible for extruder change detection, it indeed had failed as well, presumably for the same reason. After the installation of a new SMD LED, the error message went away. Thus concludes the story of [Gregor] getting himself a new professional-grade printer! He also documents other possible failure modes, some just as easy to fix. In short, if you ever spot a Stratasys Dimension printer for sale, you might want to consider it!

As it turns out, this isn’t the only Stratasys success story we’ve seen on Hackaday.io. After you’ve repaired your newly obtained Stratasys, you might want to bypass the cartridge DRM, by the way. Got repairs of your own to share, industrial printer or otherwise? Submit it for the 2022 Hackaday Prize, there’s still a few days left in the Hack it Back round!

The 2022 Hackaday Supercon Is On! And The Call For Proposals Is Open

July 18, 2022 by Elliot Williams 42 Comments

After two years in remote mode, we’re very excited to announce that this year’s Hackaday Supercon will be coming back, live! Join us Nov. 4th, 5th, and 6th in sunny Pasadena, CA for three days of hacks, talks, and socializing with the Hackaday community. And we’d love to see and hear in person what you’ve been up to for the last two years – so start brainstorming what you’re going to talk about now and fill out the call for proposals.

Supercon is On!

We’ll be starting off on Friday Nov. 4th with early-bird registration, a mellow afternoon of badge-hacking and workshops, and a party to kick off the con. Saturday and Sunday will be the full enchilada: two tracks of talks, hacking stations and food set up in the alley, and workshops aplenty. (Just thinking about hacking in the alley and sharing tacos afterward again brings a tear of joy to my eye.) We’ll close up Sunday night with the 2022 Hackaday Prize Awards and a chance to demo the weekend’s badge hacking on stage.

If you haven’t ever been to a Supercon before, it’s Hackaday in real life. People bring hacks to show and share, projects to work on, and their ideas that are too big to fit in the overhead compartment anyway. The crowd is awesome. There are seasoned pros, famous YouTubers, and brand-new hackers to boot. But yet it’s not overwhelming – Supercon is too big to fit in your living room, but it’s nonetheless cozy. The folks in attendance are all fantastic and you’ll stumble into the most awesome conversations.

It’s a weekend you don’t want to miss, so start figuring out how you’re going to get to Pasadena now.

We’ll be putting tickets on sale soon, and while we can’t see into the future, they have sold out every year, so keep your eyes on Hackaday to get yours. And of course, speakers don’t need no stinking tickets. Continue reading “The 2022 Hackaday Supercon Is On! And The Call For Proposals Is Open” →

Hackaday Prize 2022: MasterPi Is A Capable Robot With Fancy Wheels

July 1, 2022 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

When it comes to building a mobile robot, often maneuverability is more important than outright speed. The MasterPi robot demonstrates this well, using fancy wheels to help it slide and skate in any direction needed.

Four DC gear-motors are fitted to a metal chassis, each one driving a mecanum wheel. These are special wheels with rollers fitted around their circumference at an angle that allows the robot to move in all directions and rotate in various ways depending on how each wheel is driven.

On top of this highly maneuverable chassis is placed a 5-degree-of-freedom robotic arm. The robot also gets a ultrasonic sensor for avoiding objects, as well as a camera for line-following duties. The camera also allows the robot to pick up blocks and identify their color, and it can then sort them into boxes. It’s all powered by a Raspberry Pi, running a bunch of Python code to make everything happen.

It’s a neat project that shows off just how capable a robot can be with some smart design choices and modern computing hardware on board. We’ve seen some other smart block sorters before, too. Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2022: MasterPi Is A Capable Robot With Fancy Wheels” →

Hackaday Prize 2022: The Baffatari 2600 Adds Atari Compatibility To Retrocomputers

June 29, 2022 by Robin Kearey 16 Comments

Like today’s Intel-AMD duopoly, the market for home computer CPUs in the 1970s and ’80s was dominated by two players: Zilog with their Z80, and MOS Technology with their 6502 processor. But unlike today, even if two computers had the same CPU, it didn’t mean the two were software compatible: differences in memory layout, video interfaces, and storage media meant that software developed for an Atari 2600 wouldn’t run on an Apple I, despite the two sharing the same basic CPU architecture.

[Augusto Baffa]’s latest modern retrocomputer design, the Baffatari 2600, cleverly demonstrates that the difference between those two computers really is only skin-deep. The Baffatari is a plug-in board that adds Atari 2600 functionality to [Augusto]’s earlier Baffa-6502 system, which was designed to be Apple I-compatible. Since both the Apple and the Atari are powered by 6502 CPUs, only a few peripherals need to be swapped to change one into the other.

Sitting on the Baffatari board are two chips essential to the Atari 2600’s architecture: the 6532 RAM I/O Timer (RIOT) that contains the RAM and joystick interface, and the Television Interface Adapter (TIA) that handles the graphics and audio. These chips connect to the Baffa-6502’s system bus, enabling the main CPU to communicate with them and run Atari 2600 software titles. In the video embedded below, you can see several classic games running on the Baffa system.

The basic idea is similar to this RC2014 plug-in board that enables a Z80-based retrocomputer to run MSX and Colecovision titles. In fact, [Augusto] also built such a board for his earlier Z80 project.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2022: The Baffatari 2600 Adds Atari Compatibility To Retrocomputers” →

2022 Hackaday Prize: Reuse, Recycle, Revamp Finalists

June 28, 2022 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

The 2022 Hackaday Prize is focused on taking care of the planet. The theme of our second challenge round, “Reduce, Recycle, Revamp” is all about tailoring your projects to make use of existing resources and keeping material out of the landfill rather than contributing to it. Our judges have scrutinized the entries and handed me the sealed envelope. All of these ten projects will receive $500 right now and are eligible for the Grand Prize of $50,000, to be announced in November.

We were looking for two broad types of recycling projects in this round, either projects that incorporate a significant recycled component in their build, or projects that facilitate recycling themselves, and frankly we got a good mix of both!
Continue reading “2022 Hackaday Prize: Reuse, Recycle, Revamp Finalists” →

Motherboard on the desk, with a CM4 plugged into it, and all kinds of wires connected to it for purposes of debugging

Hackaday Prize 2022: A CM4 Upgrade For Your Old IPad

June 27, 2022 by Arya Voronova 9 Comments

There’s no shortage of nicely built tablets out there, but unfortunately many of them are powered by what are by now severely outdated motherboards. Since manufacturers releasing replacement motherboards for their old hardware doesn’t look like its likely to be common practice anytime soon, the community will have to take things into their own hands. This is where [Evan]’s project comes in — designing a Raspberry Pi CM4-powered motherboard for the original iPad. It aims to have support for everything you’d expect: display, touchscreen, audio, WiFi, Bluetooth, and even the dock port. Plus it gives you way more computing power to make use of it all.

Testing part fitment with some cardboard CAD.

The original iPad got a lot of things right, a factor definitely contributing to its success back when it was released. [Evan]’s high-effort retrofit works with the iPad’s plentiful good parts, like its solid shell, tailored lithium-ion battery, eye-friendly LCD, and reliable capacitive touchscreen. You’d have to fit the new motherboard inside the space available after these parts all come together, and [Evan] has shaped his PCBs to do exactly that – with room for CM4, and the numerous ICs he’s added so as to leave no function un-implemented.

This project has been underway for over a year, and currently, there’s fourteen information-dense worklogs telling this retrofit’s story. Reverse-engineering the capacitive touchscreen and the LCD, making breakouts for all the custom connectors, integrating a custom audio codec, debugging device tree problems, unconventional ways to access QFN pins left unconnected on accident, and the extensive power management design journey. [Evan] has a lot to teach for anyone looking to bring their old tablet up to date!

The hardware files are open-source, paving the way for others to reuse parts for their own retrofits, and we absolutely would like to see more rebuilds like this one. This project is part of the Hack it Back round of the 2022 Hackaday Prize, and looks like a perfect fit to us. If you were looking for an excuse to start a similar project, now is the time.