Hackaday Prize 2022: Turning Big Box Trash Into Art Student Treasure

June 17, 2022 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

How can the big box store mix the perfect shade of English Wedgwood right before your eyes? The answer is in highly-concentrated pigments that come in many different sizes up to a whopping five gallons. Now, just imagine the amount of watercolor, acrylic, or other types of paint that could be made by simply scraping the walls of an empty 5-gallon tub, which you know is just getting thrown away with all that usable pigment inside.

Not only is [technoplastique] making watercolors and other paints out of these pigments, but their true focus is on creating an easily-reproducible process for turning not just pigments into paint, but other things as well, like dried turmeric, charcoal, or any other feasible material.

The process will likely take the form of an open-source three-roller milling machine, which are commonly used in paint manufacture. Basically you have three rollers that process the pigment and binder, and the mixture is run through as many times as necessary. Although they are fairly simple machines in design, building them to work well requires adherence to precise technical specs.

We can’t wait to see what [technoplastique] comes up with to use for the stainless steel rollers. The rest of the plan involves a Raspberry Pi Pico, one DC motor per roller, a motor shield, and a power supply, but the rollers are pretty crucial. If you have any ideas other than steel rolling pins (the kitchen kind) or pipe couplings (which are too short, anyway), let us know in the comments!

DIY Automated Printer Kerchunks Out Classic Embossed Labels

June 15, 2022 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

For our money, the best label for pretty much any purpose is one of those embossed Dymo-style stick-on labels, the kind with the raised white letters. There’s just something about them — the raised letters just beg to be touched, their legibility is outstanding, they lend an unmatched retro feel to a project, and the experience of creating one with one of those manual kerchunkers is oddly satisfying.

But alas, those manual label makers aren’t what they used to be, as [Andrei Speridião] discovered when his fell apart in his hands. Rather than complain, he automated his label maker and turned it into a computer peripheral. Dubbed “E-TKT”, the DIY label printer takes the daisy-wheel embossing die from his defunct labeler and puts it under computer control. Rather than the ratchet mechanism of the original, a stepper motor advances the tape, another stepper rotates the wheel to the correct position, and a servo does the kerchunking duty. The process repeats until the label is complete and neatly cut off, ready to apply. An ESP32 runs the mechanism and serves up a web application to compose labels and control the printer. There’s also an OLED display and, of course, an embossed label. Video demo below.

We don’t care what [Bart Simpson] thinks, embossed labels are cool, and this makes them even cooler. And as [Andrei] points out, this is also a neat way around the nasty DRM trick that some companies are foisting on the label-making public. That alone is reason to cheer this project on — but we won’t complain about the beautiful photography and excellent documentation, either.

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2022 Hackaday Prize: Hack It Back And Make It Yours

June 13, 2022 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

The 2022 Hackaday Prize continues to hurtle along, with two of the five Challenges already in the rear-view mirror. While we’re naturally excited about every phase of this year’s contest, we’ve got particularly high hopes for what the community can do with this third Challenge: Hack it Back.

It’s a simple formula: find some outdated and disused piece of gear, spruce it up, and keep it out of the landfill. But extending the lifetime of consumer hardware is only one side of the coin, by upgrading and modifying something instead of buying an off-the-shelf replacement, you also turn the mundane into something unique and personal. But of course, we hardly have to explain the benefits to you fine folk — this is the sort of bespoke engineering we see on a nearly daily basis here at Hackaday. The difference now is that there’s cash prizes on the line.

So if there’s an old iPod collecting dust in your desk, perhaps now is the time to replace its guts with some modern silicon and teach it a few new tricks. Sure a brand-new robotic vacuum might be nice, but you could save yourself some money by picking up a second-hand Roomba and tucking an ESP8266 onboard. Got a nice piece of test equipment that predates the handy data export functions we take for granted these days? You might need to use the nuclear option and skim the desired data right off the unit’s LCD controller. We could spend all day pulling examples from the archives, but you get the picture.

What’s that you say? You aren’t the type to be seduced by shiny new features? Happy to keep things local while others ship it all off to the cloud? You’ll get no complaints from us, and that’s why the Hack it Back Challenge also recognizes repairs that simply put a piece of gear back into service. But don’t be fooled, as fixing something can often be harder than rebuilding it from scratch.

When you’ve got to crack out the x-ray machine to find all the damaged traces on a decades-old PCB, only to then tediously replace them all with microscopic bits of wire, you may find yourself wondering what you’ve done to anger the Keeper of the Magic Smoke. On the other hand, plenty a gadget has been disabled due to nothing more exotic than a single bad solder joint. In either event, there’s a certain sense of satisfaction when you can return a literal piece of history to working condition.

Ready to put your hardware-reviving skills on display? Just head over to Hackaday.io, make a new project page, and get hacking. But don’t wait too long, you’ve only got until July 24th to enter the Hack it Back Challenge and stake your claim on one of the ten $500 awards up for grabs.

2022 Hackaday Prize: Reuse, Recycle, And Revamp All The Things

June 7, 2022 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

Where has the year gone? It’s already summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and the second Challenge of the 2022 Hackaday Prize ends this weekend, along with your chance at one of ten $500 prizes. If you thrive on last-minute challenges, consider the eleventh hour upon you. But don’t panic; there’s still a decent amount of time left to start a new project over on Hackaday.io and get it entered into the contest.

The second Challenge focuses on creating new ways of recycling materials. What does this look like? That’s a pretty broad topic, but it could be anything from a better method of chip harvesting to an inexpensive and/or low-energy process for shredding used plastic and forming it into millable blocks.

Don’t just think big on a commercial scale — imagine what people can do at home with the stuff in their recycle bin or their neighbor’s trash. If everyone had access to one of [Jerzeek]’s plastic scanners for identifying the type of plastic that mystery bucket or old watering can was made of, just think what could be done. As long as your project focuses on reusing, recycling, or revamping, we want to see it!

So far, we’ve seen a bunch of excellent projects, many of which are focused on recycling plastic. There’s the Pullstruder, which creates PET filament from plastic bottles, and a method for vacuum-forming HDPE plastic directly from milk jugs. There has to be more than one way to upcycle acrylic scraps into new sheets and jewelry, but the best one definitely involves a panini press and a car jack.

Recycling plastic is totally fantastic, but it’s not the only material available at the dump. You’ll probably have no trouble finding tires from which to make footstools and tables, and if you’re lucky, there’ll be an old phone that could be turned into an IoT assistant. If you want to take the circularity thing literally, dig up a printer and and old CD player and turn them into a mini pottery machine that uses cornstarch.

[jude_pullen] is vacu-forming plastic milk jugs ’til the cows come home.

[Guillermo Perez Guillen]’s cornstarch mini pottery machine spins us right round.

So basically, we have a bunch of awesome entries right now, but we don’t have yours! Remember: it doesn’t have to be a new project, just a new project page. Did you revolutionize recycling during lockdown? Make a new project and tell us about it! Just don’t forget to actually enter the thing by using the drop-down on the left before 7AM PDT on Sunday, June 12th. Need a time converting countdown thingy? We’ve got you.

After the recycle bin is empty, we’ll be moving on immediately to the Hack It Back challenge. This time, we’ll be asking you to teach old tech new tricks, or to bring a piece of gear back from the dead. Turn a blender into a Dremel-like tool, or give an old ‘scope a screen upgrade. You know what to do!

the dongle developed by Marcel, with a USB-A plug on one end and an SMD antenna on the other

Hackaday Prize 2022: House Ventilation Reverse-Engineered And Automated

June 1, 2022 by Arya Voronova 5 Comments

[Marcel] thought – what if he had more control over his house ventilation system? You could add some nifty features, such as automatically ventilating your house in the mornings when everyone’s away, only creating noise when nobody’s around to hear it. Sadly, most ventilation systems are not automation-friendly at all – he was lucky, however, as his system came with a wireless remote. [Marcel] reverse-engineered this remote, created a USB dongle speaking the same protocol, and tied it into his Home Assistant setup!

The remote in question is Orcon R15, with an Atmel MCU talking to a CC1101 chip through SPI. He sniffed the SPI communications when pressing different buttons, figured out the protocol by comparing the recordings, and built a test setup with a spare Arduino and CC1101 module. It worked, and he set out to design a separate dongle, using an ATMega32U4. The dongle looks pretty neat, and fits a Hammond enclosure – what’s not to like?

Then he set out to develop the firmware, and didn’t disappoint on that front either. His code doesn’t just imitate the original remote perfectly in terms of control, it also has user-friendly pairing flow, keeps track of the system’s current state, and still lets the original remote be used in parallel. Eagle files for the PCB are available on the project page, with the code and a PDF schematic available in the GitHub repo. This entire journey is described in the Hackaday.io page, and we would recommend you check it out for all the insights it provides!

Ventilation systems don’t tend to be designed for automation, and it’s endearing to see hackers working on conquering this frontier. Last time we’ve seen a ventilation system hack, it had the additional challenge of being landlord-friendly, and we think the hacker nailed it!

The new PewPew with an LCD showing some patterns, being held in someone's hand.

Hackaday Prize 2022: PewPew LCD Plays With Python

May 27, 2022 by Arya Voronova 4 Comments

[deshipu] aka [Radomir Dopieralski] has been building educational handhelds for a good part of a decade now, and knows how to design hardware that makes for effective teaching. Today, we are graced with the PewPew LCD project, latest in the PewPew student-friendly handheld series, powered by CircuitPython.

The goal for all of these devices has been consistent — making game programming accessible and fun. This time, as an entry in the Reuse, Recycle, Revamp round of Hackaday Prize, the new PewPew receives an upgrade – from an 8×8 LED matrix to an LCD display. This might not sound like much, but the change of display technology itself isn’t the main point. [deshipu] is working on ways to bring down the price and assembly complexity of PewPew handhelds, and he’s found there’s plenty of old stock RH-112 displays, previously used on cellphones like Nokia 1202, which these days go for as little as $1.30 a piece.

It’s exceptionally simple to get into writing games for the PewPew – one of the reasons why it’s a strong platform for workshops and individual learning. There’s already a slew of games and tutorials, and we can’t wait to see all the cool games people can build when given all the extra pixels! And, of course, we appreciate setting an example for giving new life to old displays – displays that’d otherwise inevitably end up in a trash container behind a warehouse in China.

The Reuse, Recycle, Revamp Hackaday Prize 2022 round is going on for two more weeks. If you’re making good use of something that would otherwise be discarded, please do share it with us, so that we can all learn and draw inspiration from your projects!

Hackaday Prize 2022: Upcycling Acrylic Scraps

May 25, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

Living and working in a remote rain forest may sound idyllic to those currently stuck in bland suburbia, and to be sure it does have plenty of perks. One of the downsides, though, is getting new materials and equipment to that remote location. For that reason, [Digital Naturalism Laboratories], also known as [Dinalab], has to reuse or recycle as much as they can, including their scraps of acrylic leftover from their laser cutter.

The process might seem straightforward, but getting it to actually work and not burn the acrylic took more than a few tries. Acrylic isn’t as thermoplastic as other plastics so it is much harder to work with, and it took some refining of the process. But once the details were ironed out, essentially the acrylic scraps are gently heated between two steel plates (they use a sandwich press) and then squeezed with a jack until they stick back together in one cohesive sheet. The key to this process is to heat it and press it for a long time, typically a half hour or more.

With this process finally sorted, [Dinalab] can make much more use of their available resources thanks to recycling a material that most of us would end up tossing out. It also helps to keep waste out of the landfill that would otherwise exist in the environment indefinitely. And, if this seems familiar to you, it’s because this same lab has already perfected methods to recycle other types of plastic as well.

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