Hackaday Prize 2023: The NEOKlacker Pocket Computer

May 13, 2023 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Science fiction always promised us pocket computers. These days, we’re spoiled for choice. [Spider Jerusalem] eschewed a simple smartphone or tablet, though, instead building a custom pocket computer of their own design.

Like so many other DIY cyberdecks and handheld computers, this one relies on a Raspberry Pi. In this case, it’s built using a Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM, which offers a snappy experience that wasn’t available on the earliest boards. [Spider] paired it with a nifty 720×720 LCD screen and a full QWERTY button pad, wrapped up in a tidy 3D-printed case. Like any good pocket computer, it’s well-connected, thanks to a 4G LTE cellular data connection.

It might seem to be a build without a purpose in this era, but that’s not necessarily the case. When it comes to running barebones Linux utilities at a real command line, a Raspberry Pi offers some utility that the average smartphone doesn’t have out of the box. It’s a useful tool if you need to interface with a server on the go or do some low-level network diagnostics without carrying a whole laptop around. Video after the break.

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Hackaday Prize 2023: Finger Tracking Via Muscle Sensors

May 12, 2023 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Whether you want to build a computer interface device, or control a prosthetic hand, having some idea of a user’s finger movements can be useful. The OpenMuscle finger tracking sensor can offer the data you need, and it’s a device you can readily build in your own workshop.

The device consists of a wrist cuff that mounts twelve pressure sensors, arranged radially about the forearm. The pressure sensors are a custom design, using magnets, hall effect senors, and springs to detect the motion of the muscles in the vicinity of the wrist.

We first looked at this project last year, and since then, it’s advanced in leaps and bounds. The basic data from the pressure sensors now feeds into a trained machine learning model, which then predicts the user’s actual finger movements. The long-term goal is to create a device that can control prosthetic hands based on muscle contractions in the forearm. Ideally, this would be super-intuitive to use, requiring a minimum of practice and training for the end user.

It’s great to see machine learning combined with innovative mechanical design to serve a real need. We can’t wait to see where the OpenMuscle project goes next.

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Hackaday Prize 2023: Uno Plus+ Updates A Classic

May 11, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 19 Comments

As an introduction to embedded electronics and programming in a straightforward environment, there isn’t much out there that can hold a torch to the Arduino Uno. Cheap (especially if you count the clones), easy to find, and quick to deploy, with countless support libraries, it’s a go-to for many a hack. This scribe simply can’t remember how many he’s bought, hacked, and deployed over the years. But can it be improved? [John Loeffler] thinks so, and his 2023 Hackaday Prize entry, the Uno Plus+ could be the one.

If this is too much bling for you, there is a version with LEDs adjacent to non-illuminated headers.

After clearing the top deck of extraneous components (by shoving them on the bottom) there was much more space to expand the header labeling, so there can be no accidental misplacement of those DuPont wires this thing will inevitably sprout randomly.

The board also has an additional Stemma/Qwiic connector and a Neopixel LED for indication duties. Also sitting on the PCB bottom are a ton of opamps, to drive the header indicators. Yes, this board has a full set of colour-coded LED bling indicators, showing the logical state of each and every pin on all headers, giving an easy way to check the desired activity is occurring. Plus it looks cool. Illuminated headers? YES!

Think the Uno too light on resources to perform any meaningful modern workloads? Think again!

Hackaday Prize 2023: Meet The Ten Re-Engineering Education Finalists

May 11, 2023 by Tom Nardi 31 Comments

They say time flies when you’re having fun, and doubly so when you’re hacking hardware. If you can believe it, we’ve already closed out the first challenge of the 2023 Hackaday Prize, and you know what that means — it’s time to announce the 10 finalists.

As a reminder, each of these projects not only takes home $500 USD, but moves on to the next round of judging. During the recently announced 2023 Supercon, we’ll announce the six projects that were selected by our panel of judges to collect their share of $100,000 in prize money– plus a residency at Supplyframe’s DesignLab and eternal hacker glory for the Grand Prize winner.

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Hackaday Prize 2023: 65uino 6502 Learning In A Familiar Package

May 10, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 20 Comments

[Anders Nielsen] presents his entry for the 2023 Hackaday Prize: The 65uino. Which as you might be able to guess, is a 6502-based microcomputer wedged into an Arduino Uno form factor (well, almost wedged in, but we’ll let it slide) The premise is simple, older micros are easier to understand, the board can be build up from new-old or salvaged stock, and that’s more chips on boards and less sitting on a dusty shelf. After all, even though the 6502 in its original form is long obsolete, it’s far better to be pushing some electrons around, than sitting there decaying.

The OLED frame buffer is bigger than the host’s entire RAM. No problem!

From an educational perspective, the first lesson is the hand-soldering of through-hole DIP components and a smattering of straightforward surface mount parts in their supporting roles. Then on to setting up the cc65 toolchain. To say this is a pure 6502 system is a little misleading, it actually uses the 6507 device variant, which is a die-bond variant of the same device but with only 28 of the pins utilized.

The use of the 6532 RIOT (RAM-I/O-Timer) chip provides two 8-bit ports of GPIO as well as a timer and 128 bytes of SRAM, making the design more compact. There is a socket that will accept a 24 or 28-pin E(E)PROM device, with the extra four pins removable and the PCB snapped off if fitment into a standard ‘Uno case is desirable. Neat!

Full hardware build and PCB design (using KiCAD) are available on the 65uino GitHub page. Just remember folks, with everything minimal 6502 related — some assembly required :D

We see the 6502 a lot, let’s be fair. But why not? Here’s a slightly more practical board with a bit more resources, an absolute beast of a luggable dual-6502 machine, and yet another 6502 verilog implementation ready to be dropped into a spare corner of a FPGA project that needs a little extra.

Hackaday Prize 2023: Bolt Bot Micro Servo Droids

May 9, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 1 Comment

This Hackaday prize entry from [saul] is the beginning of a reconfigurable kit of 3D printed parts and servo motors for robotics learning. With just access to a printer, a few cheap-as-chips servo motors, an Arduino, and some nuts and bolts, you could be hacking together robot walkers within a few hours of starting!

Bolt Bots is very simple to understand, with all the mechanics and wiring out there in the breeze, but strictly for indoor use we reckon. If you want to add remote control to your application, then drop in one of the ubiquitous nRF24L01 boards and build yourself a copy of the remote control [saul] handily provides in this other project.

There really isn’t a great deal we can say about this, as it’s essentially a build kit with quite a few configuration options, and you just have to build with it and see what’s possible. We expect the number of parts to proliferate over time giving even more options. So far [saul] demonstrates a few flavors of ‘walkers’, a rudimentary ‘robot arm’, and even a hanging drawbot.

The bolt hardware can be found in this GitHub repo, and the remote control code in this second one.

Servo-based designs are sometimes sneered at due to their dubious accuracy and repeatability, but with a little of effort, this can be vastly improved upon. Also, multi-legged walkers need multiple servos and controllers to drive ’em. Or do they?

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Hackaday Prize 2023: Eye Tracking On A Budget

May 2, 2023 by Donald Papp 4 Comments

There is a lot to be learned from the experience of building something functional, and even better if doing so doesn’t break the bank. [Sergej Stoetzer]’s 20€ DIY-Eyetracker aims to be an educational process that covers everything from hardware to functional software in an accessible way.

Hardware based on an economical USB endoscope, and can be used as-is or repackaged with IR illumination.

The eye tracker is based on an economical USB endoscope, which is a small camera optimized for up-close applications. By attaching the camera to a pair of common safety glasses so that it looks at one’s eye, some OpenCV and Python code can do simple tracking and interfacing with other projects.

Basic eye tracking — like determining whether a user is looking up, down, left, or right — can be all that’s needed depending on one’s application. That means that it’s possible to get something working with very little hardware and some easy-to-use OpenCV functions.

Even better performance can be had by adding IR illumination and repackaging the camera into a 3D printed enclosure. The pupil of the eye is an aperture in the iris that appears as a black circle, and that’s even more true under IR illumination which is invisible to the naked eye. If you’re curious about what’s inside those USB endoscope cameras and how to remove their IR filter, there are some good pictures of that process in this project.

The ability to get something prototyped quickly and working well enough to learn new things is a valuable skill, and that’s why re-engineering Education is one of the challenges in the 2023 Hackaday Prize.