Hackaday Prize

462 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: A CPU For Balloons

August 22, 2016 by 17 Comments

Launching a high altitude balloon requires a wide breadth of knowledge. To do it right, you obviously need to know electronics and programming to get temperature, pressure, and GPS data. You’ll have to research which cameras will take good pictures and are easily programmable. It’s cold up there, and that means you need some insulation to keep the batteries warm. If you ever want to find your payload, you’ll also need an amateur radio license.

There’s a lot of work that goes into launching high altitude balloons, and for his Hackaday Prize entry, [Jeremy] designed a simple embedded data recorder capable of flying over 100,000 feet.

This flight data recorder for balloons is based on the ever popular ATMega328, and includes humidity, temperature, pressure, accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer sensors. All of this data is recorded to an SD card. The Real Engineers™ who are wont to criticize design decisions they disagree with might laugh at the use of a 7805 voltage regulator, but in this case it makes a lot of sense. The power wasted by a linear regulator isn’t. It’s turned into heat which keeps the batteries alive a little bit longer.

This balloon data recorder has already flown, and [Jeremy] got some great pictures out of it. It’s a great piece of the puzzle for an exceptionally multidisciplinary project, and a great entry for the Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Charlieplexed Wristwatch

August 21, 2016 by 18 Comments

If there’s one thing we like, it’s blinky stuff, and you’re not going to get anything cooler than a display made of tiny SMD LEDs. That’s the idea behind this wristwatch and Hackaday Prize entry. It’s a tiny board, loaded up with an ATmega, a few buttons, and a bunch of LEDs in a big charlieplexed array.

The big feature of this display is the array of LEDs. This is a 16×5 array of 0603 LEDs packed together as tightly as possible. That’s a tiny, high-resolution LED display, but even with the ATmega88 microcontroller powering this board, all the LEDs are individually addressable, and a proper font for displaying the time, or anything else, is already mapped out.

LED matrices are pretty common around these parts, but building a custom display out of SMD LEDs is another level entirely. The best one we’ve seen was this unofficial badge from two DEF CONs ago. That was done the cheater’s way with a bunch of serially addressable LED drivers. This charlieplexed version goes above and beyond, and we’re eagerly awaiting the board files so this display can be replicated easily.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A CNC Plasma Table

August 20, 2016 by 13 Comments

CNC routers and 3D printers are cool, but the last time I checked, cars and heavy machinery aren’t made out of wood and plastic. If you want a machine that will build other machines, you want a CNC plasma cutter. That’s [willbaden]’s entry for the Hackaday prize. It’s big, massive, and it’s already cutting.

A plasma CNC machine isn’t that much different from a simple CNC router. [will]’s table controller is just a GRBL shield attached to an Arduino, the bearings were stolen from many copy machines, and your motors and drivers are fairly standard, barring the fact they’re excessively huge for a simple 3D printer.

The real trick up [will]’s sleeve is the controller interface. For this, he’s mounted a Raspberry Pi display, a big, shiny, red button, and all the associated electronics behind a beautifully rusty welded enclosure. This part of the build just sends gcode over to the GRBL shield, and is doing so reliably. Right now [will] is looking for some way to save, arrange, and queue jobs on the Pi, a problem that is almost – but not quite – the same job Octoprint does. A software for big, mean CNCs that spew exotic states of matter is an interesting project, and we can’t wait to see where [will] goes with this one.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Raspberry Pi Password Manager

August 19, 2016 by 28 Comments

Every week there’s new a new website that has been compromised and the passwords of a few hundred thousand accounts have been leaked to a pastebin. To protect yourself you can change your passwords often, not reuse passwords, and use long compilcated strings; all of these techniques are far beyond the capacity for human memory, or even a Post-it note. Thus the age of electronic password keepers began.

Electronic password keepers are simple devices that save your passwords and can recall them over a USB connection. The Raspberry Pi Zero functions perfectly fine as a USB device, leading [gir] to build the Raspi Zero WiFi Enable Hardware Password Manager for the Hackaday Prize.

This USB gadget uses pass, the ‘standard unix password manager’ to store all the passwords. Everything is controlled by a few buttons, a small OLED display, and of course the Raspi’s ability to become a USB HID device. This allows the Pi Zero to type passwords in just like a USB keyboard.

It’s a great project, and since the Pi Zero actually exists now, much to the surprise of its many detractors, the perfect entry for the Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Russian Roulette With A Soldering Gun

August 18, 2016 by 38 Comments

You’re driving along a lonely, dark highway with the knowledge that suicide rates are highly correlated with fatal single vehicle car accidents. A highway overpass bridge appears ahead. You might be able to make it around the guard rail. Might is the operative word. You’ve failed at everything else so far, and there’s no reason to believe this would be any exception.

The suffering will not end, but you can delay it a bit. That’s what the Internet is all about. Cat pictures. Memes. Rare Pepes. Distraction is your digital analgesic. Like this post if you agree. The problem with using distraction as a candle of hope in your empty, wind-blown existence is simply finding new things to distract yourself with. This Hackaday Prize entry is the solution to that. It’s a randomizer for Hackaday.io. Russian roulette with a soldering gun.

This Hackaday.io project randomizer works on a property unique to the greatest project hosting site. All the links have a number and the project name in the URL. Remove the project name, and the link still works. It’s a handy pseudo-URL shortener if you ever want to put a link to your project on a PCB, but also a great way to look at all the projects on .io – all you need is a bit of Python, Perl, or some other scripting language

Right now, [Greg] has a Perl script running on one of his servers (sure to be down by the time you read this), that chooses a random number, and tries to grab that Hackaday.io project. If 404 is returned, it tries again until it succeeds.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Robot Shore

August 17, 2016 by 16 Comments

Everyone knows the ocean is not a gigantic garbage can, but unless you live in the middle of Asia, below sea level, Utah, or some other inhospitable place, all trash eventually makes it to sea. This is a problem not only for the the sea and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but for shorelines as well. For her Hackaday Prize entry, [Erin] is building a series of robots designed to walk the shore, pick up garbage, deposit it in a bin, and do it again after the next high tide.

The key problem for a robot that picks up trash is simply finding that trash. This means cameras and a lot of computing power. Lucky for [Erin], smartphones are cheap and have excellent cameras and a ton of processing power. The brains for these robots will be built around an off-the-shelf smartphone mounted on a pan/tilt mast on the bot.

[Erin] is already testing her bot, and after a few field tests she noticed a family left behind their trash on the beach. The robot moved into action before the flying rats could choke on a bottlecap, and the cleanup operation was a success. Not bad for a prototype, and an excellent entry to the Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Grasshopper Neurons

August 16, 2016 by 4 Comments

A plague of locusts descends on your garden, and suddenly you realize grasshoppers are very hard to catch. Grasshoppers are nature’s perfect collision avoidance system, and this is due to a unique visual system that includes neurons extending directly from the eye to the animal’s legs. For this Hackaday Prize entry – and as a research project for this summer at Backyard Brains, [Dieu My Nguyen] is studying the neuroscience of grasshopper vision with stabs and shocks.

We visited Backyard Brains about two years ago, and found three very interesting projects. The first was a project on optogenetics, or rewiring neurons so flies taste something sweet when they’re exposed to red light. The second was remote-controlled cockroaches. Number three will shock you: a device that allowed me to expand my megalomania by shocking people with the power of my mind. It’s not all fun and games, though. This grasshopper neuron probe will use the Backyard Brains SpikerBox to investigate when those neurons are activated in response to a stimuli.

The utility of looking at the common grasshopper to learn about collision and object avoidance may not be very apparent at first. The more you learn about neuroscience, the more apparent the biological connection to common computer vision tasks becomes. That makes this a great research project and an excellent entry into the Hackaday Prize.

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