Hackaday Prize Entry: Waterspace, A Floating Hackerspace Lab

June 9, 2016 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

It’s a boat! It’s a hackerspace! It’s a DIY research platform and an art gallery! It’s Boat Lab!

[Andrew Quitmeyer] lead a project in the Philippines that was nominally charged with making an art and technology space. After a few days brainstorming, four groups formed and came up with projects as wide-ranging as a water-jet video screen and a marine biology lab. What did they have in common? They were all going to take place on a floating raft hackerspace in a beautiful body of water in Manila.

This is a really crazy meta-project, and any of the sub-projects would be worth their own blog post. Even more so is the idea itself — building a floating hackerspace is just cool. The write-up on Hackaday.io linked above is pretty comprehensive, and the “Waterspace” book talks a bit more about the overarching process. Boat Lab is a great entry into the Citizen Science phase of the Hackaday Prize 2016.

But we also love the idea of hackerspaces in non-traditional places. The Cairo Hackerspace is working on a van-based space. And now we’ve seen a boat. What other mobile hackerspace solutions are out there? We’d love to hear!

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Hackaday Prize Entry: The Green Machine

June 8, 2016 by Anool Mahidharia 8 Comments

For Hackers, rapid prototyping is made easier using basic building blocks such as the Raspberry Pi, Arduino and the huge variety of add on shields for home brew projects. But we don’t see too many real world Industrial applications or machines built using these off-the-shelf electronics. [SlyScience] built The Green Machine – an industrial grade, automated spray painting device to help coat polycarbonate tubes consistently.

The Green Machine is essentially a linear drive that can move a spray gun across a spinning clear tube and coat it evenly with the desired color. These tubes are used as color filters – they slide over standard T5, T8 or T12 fluorescent lamps – and are used in advertising, special effects, films and similar applications. For almost 10 years prior to this machine, the task was done manually. The HPLV (high pressure, low volume) spray gun used for this process needed skilled hands to get consistent results. It was easy to ruin a tube and cleaning them was not possible. [SlyScience] figured things out on the go – teaching himself and figuring out all of the software and hardware pieces of the puzzle. The welded steel frame is about the only “custom” part in this build. Everything else is COTS. Check out the video of The Green Machine in action below, and if you have any tips to help improve the build, chime in with your comments.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Programming Juggling Props

June 7, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

It takes balls to learn how to juggle, but once you do you’re quickly moving on to rings, chainsaws, and those very strange juggling clubs. For their Hackaday Prize entry, [Laurent B] and [michael.creusy] are bringing the Internet of Things to juggling clubs. Their Rastello Club is a glowing, LED illuminated juggling prop with a 9-DOF IMU that makes juggling look even cooler than it already is.

Because there is a market for everything, glowing, programmable juggling clubs already exist. These clubs have a few limitations, though. They don’t have nine-axis orientation sensors, there is no communication to a computer or between individual clubs, and of course they’re not Open Source. The Rastello Club fixes these problems, makes programmable juggling clubs easy to use, and adds a bunch of visualizations.

Inside these juggling clubs are a bunch of LEDs, of course, along with a rather powerful STM32F4 ARM processor, the 9-axis IMU, and the circuitry to charge a battery. The radio connection between individual clubs and a computer will be handled with an RFM75 transceiver. No, it’s not WiFi, Bluetooth, or ZigBee; this radio module is faster than Bluetooth, cheaper than Zigbee, and lower power than an ESP8266.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: There’s An Elephant In The Room

June 6, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Elephants and people don’t mix as well as you’d hope. Human-elephant conflict causes deaths of both pachyderms and man alike. Elephants raid crops. Elephants are killed by trains. Obviously, where elephants are is useful knowledge. This is the problem [Neil] is solving for his entry into the Hackaday Prize. His project detects elephants, whether they’re on a railroad, in a field gorging on crops, or… in the room.

[Neil]’s goal is simple – he’s building a distributed elephant detection system that can be deployed at railway crossings, between forests and farmland, and along established elephant trails. This gives [Neil] exactly two problems: detecting elephants, and communicating that information to humans.

To detect elephants, [Neil] is relying on a webcam and Raspberry Pi 3 running OpenCV vision processing. He’ll either be comparing histograms, for faster and less resource intensive image processing, or feature matching. Each detector is equipped with a PIR sensor, so at the very least the Pi won’t be looking for elephants all the time.

Notifying humans of the existence of elephants is the next step of the project, and one that might even be harder than finding the elephants in the first place. [Neil] settled on using ZigBees on each Pi to talk to at least one base station. This base station then sends a message to the local human population over a much longer-range radio link. Networking a bunch of Pis in the middle of the African savanna is a hard problem, but by separating the communication aspect of this project into two radio links, [Neil] has a fairly robust solution.

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These 20 Projects Just Won $1000 In The Hackaday Prize

June 6, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

For this year’s Hackaday Prize, we’re doing something spectacular. We’re funding the next great piece of Open Hardware by giving away thousands of dollars for the best hardware projects. Just a few days ago, we wrapped up the Anything Goes portion of The Hackaday Prize, an electronic free for all to build the coolest gizmos imaginable. Now, it’s time to announce the twenty winners of the Anything Goes portion of The Hackaday Prize.

The winners of the Anything Goes challenge, in no particular order, are:

These twenty project just won $1000 and will now move on to the last phase of The Hackaday Prize, to be judged by our fourteen celebrity judges. Congrats! There’s a lot of work for these project to do before the final judging in October. Better get to work!

If your project didn’t make the cut, there’s still ample opportunity for you to build the next great hardware gizmo. For the next few weeks, we’re running the Citizen Scientist portion of The Hackaday Prize. We’re looking for projects that expand the frontiers of knowledge, and give the common man the tools to discover the world.

Citizen Scientist is this month’s Hackaday Prize challenge to create something new, study something undiscovered, or replicate scientific studies. We’re opening up the gates for everyone to build their own apparatus and do their own research.

Like the Design Your Concept and Anything Goes rounds of The Hackaday Prize, the top twenty projects will win $1000, and go on to the Hackaday Prize finals for a chance to win the Hackaday Prize – $150,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena.

If you don’t have a project up on Hackaday.io, you can start one right now and submit it to The Hackaday Prize. If you already have a project up, add it to the Citizen Scientist challenge using the dropdown menu on the left sidebar of your project page.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Dave Thomas’ Desert Dryer

June 5, 2016 by Elliot Williams 34 Comments

It seemed utter madness — people living in hot desert climates paying to heat air. At least it seemed that way to [David Thomas] before he modified his tumble dryer to take advantage of Arizona’s arid environment.

Hanging the wash out to dry is a time-honored solution, and should be a no-brainer in the desert. But hanging the wash takes a lot of human effort, your laundry comes back stiff, and if there’s a risk of dust storms ruining your laundry, we can see why people run the dryer indoors. But there’s no reason to waste further energy heating up your air-conditioned interior air when hot air is plentiful just a few meters away.

[David]’s modification includes removing the gas heating components of the dryer and adding an in-line filter. He explains it all in a series of videos, which at least for his model, leave no screw unturned. It’s not an expensive modification either, consisting mostly of rigid dryer hose and copious amounts of aluminum duct tape. He mentions the small fire that resulted from failing to remove the gas igniter, so consider yourself warned. The intake filter and box were originally intended for a house air-conditioning system, and required only minimal modifications.

This is a great build, being both cheap and easy to implement as well as being environmentally friendly without requiring a drastic change to [David]’s lifestyle. It makes us wish we had a similar endless supply of hot air.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Numerically Controlled RepRap

June 4, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

The story for permanent storage for computers begins with the Jacquard loom. Hackaday commenters that are less clever than a Wikipedia article may argue that it was the earlier Bouchon and de Vaucanson looms, but either way we owe permanent storage methods to loom designers. So the story goes that punched cards for weaving brocades and damask patterns in cloth turned into punched cards for tabulating a census, calculating artillery trajectories, and ends with hundreds of gigabytes of storage in a thumbnail-sized micro SD card.

This story glosses over one important fact. The automated looms of the 17th century were simply a way to make a manufacturing process faster. These automated looms were the forebears of numerically controlled machine tools. These machines, first a lathe, followed by mills and all sorts of metalworking tools, first appearing in the 1950s, used punched tape to store the commands required to mill a part out of metal. Just like the SD card on a modern 3D printer.

For [will.stevens’] Hackaday Prize entry, he’s going back to the roots of automated manufacturing and building a punched card reader for his 3D printer. Is the idea sound? Yes. Is it going to be easy? No, [will] is creating his punched card reader on his 3D printer. It’s the ultimate expression of the RepRap philosophy of self-replication, and an interesting engineering challenge, too.

[will]’s idea for a punch card print controller uses relays. It’s a simple control system that encodes the individual steps for the X and Y axes, along with a length of a line. This printer won’t be able to create lines that go in every direction, instead, there are only 48 possible angles this printer can use out of 360 degrees. At large scales, prints and plots will have the jaggies, but at smaller scales, this control system will be able to print something resembling a circle.

[will] has a PDF of his proposed control system, and he’s already hard at work creating the 3D printed relays and solenoids. [will]’s goal for this year’s Hackaday Prize is to create a 2D plotter – just one axis short of a 3D printer, and he’s well on his way to printing off his own punched cards.

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