Hackaday Prize Entry: Germanium Vision

June 3, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

The first digital cameras didn’t come out of a Kodak laboratory or from deep inside the R&D department of the CIA or National Reconnaissance Office. The digital camera first appeared in the pages of Popular Electronics in 1975, using a decapsulated DRAM module to create fuzzy grayscale images on an oscilloscope. For his Hackaday Prize project, [Alexander] is recreating this digital camera not with an easy to use decapsulated DRAM, but with individual germanium transistors.

Phototransistors are only normal transistors with a window to the semiconductor, and after finding an obscene number of old, Soviet metal can transistors, [Alex] had either a phototransistor or a terrible solar cell in a miniaturized package.

The ultimate goal of this project is to create a low resolution camera out of a matrix of these germanium transistors. [Alex] can already detect light with these transistors by watching a multimeter, and the final goal – generating an analog NTSC or PAL video signal – will “just” require a single circuit duplicated hundreds of times.

Digital cameras, even the earliest ones built out of DRAM chips, have relatively small sensors. A discrete image sensor, like the one [Alex] is building for his Hackaday Prize entry, demands a few very interesting engineering challenges. Obviously there must be some sort of lens for this image sensor, so if anyone has a large Fresnel sitting around, you might want to drop [Alex] a line.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Glow In The Dark Plotting

June 2, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 79 Comments

We like big displays, whether they’re gigantic LED displays, CNC whiteboards, or a gigantic laser projectors. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [nilo] has come up with an easy way to create a huge graphical display. It might only work at night, but the Glowboard Plotter is still really cool.

[nilo]’s display is simply a very large glow in the dark sheet wrapped around two rollers, controlled by a stepper motor. By running the motor, the blank glow in the dark sheet slowly scrolls across.

To add some color to this display, [nilo] fixed 64 UV LEDs to one end of the display. By lighting these LEDs up at specific intervals and specific intensities, a ghostly green glowboard image appears across this display. Is it useful? About as much as any other gigantic LED matrix. Is it cool? About as much as any other gigantic LED matrix.

Right now, [nilo] is working on mk. 2 of the Glowboard Plotter, upgrading the control system and increasing the number of UV LEDs to 128. It may seem useless, but it’s still very cool and an excellent entry into the Anything Goes portion of this year’s Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: You Know, For Kids

June 1, 2016 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

Like the fictitious invention of the Hula Hoop in Hudsucker Proxy, [David Spinden]’s big idea is small and obvious once you’ve seen it. And we’re not saying that’s a bad thing at all. What he’s done is to make a new kind of prototyping connector; one that hooks into a through-plated hole like a pogo pin, but in the horizontal direction.

This means that your test-points can do double duty as header connectors, when you need to make something more permanent, or vice-versa. That’s a lot of flexibility for a little wire, and it takes one more (mildly annoying) step out of prototyping — populating headers.

[David] makes them out of readily available header pins that already have the desired spring-like profile, and simply cuts them out and connects them to a standard Dupont-style hookup wire. Great stuff.

When we opened up the “Anything Goes” category for the Hackaday Prize, we meant it. We’re excited to see people entering large and small ideas that improve the world, even if it’s just the world of hackers.

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Hackaday Prize Entries: Inventing New Logic Families

May 30, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 46 Comments

One of the favorite pastimes of electronics hobbyists is clock making. Clocks are a simple enough concept with a well-defined goal, but it’s the implementation that matters. If you want to build a clock powered only by tubes and mains voltage, that’s a great skill tester. A relay-based timepiece is equally cool, and everyone should build a Nixie tube clock once in their lives.

For [Ted]’s Hackaday Prize entry, he’s building a clock. Usually, this would be little cause for celebration, but this is not like any clock you’ve ever seen. [Ted] is building this clock using only diodes, and he’s inventing new logic families to do it.

Using diodes as logic elements has been around since the first computers, but these computers had a few transistors thrown in. While it is possible to make AND and OR gates using only diodes, a universal logic gate – NANDs and NORs – are impossible. For the computers of the 1950s, that means tubes or transistors and DTL logic.

For the past few years, [Ted] has been working on a diode-only logic family, and it appears he’s solved the problem. The new logic family includes a NOR gate constructed using only diodes, resistors, and inductors. The key design feature of these gates is a single diode to switch an RF power supply on and off. It relies on an undocumented property of the diodes, but it does work.

Although [Ted] can create a NOR gate without transistors — a feat never before documented in the history of electronics — that doesn’t mean this is a useful alternative to transistor logic. The fan-out of the gates is terrible, the clock uses about 60 Watts, and the gates require an AC power supply. While it is theoretically possible to build a computer out of these gates, it’s doubtful if anyone has the patience to do so. It’s more of a curiosity, but it is a demonstration of one of the most mind-bending projects we’ve ever seen.

You can check out a video of the diode clock below.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Raspberry Pi Zeros And Drones

May 29, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

How do you get eyeballs on a blog post? Put Raspberry Pi Zero in the headline. How do you get even more eyeballs? Put the word drone in there too. Lucky for us, there’s one very special project in the Hackaday Prize that combines both. It’s the Pi0drone from [Victor], and it’s exactly what it looks like: a flying Raspberry Pi Zero.

[Victor] has been working on the PXFmini, a ‘shield’ or ‘hat’ for the Raspberry Pi that integrates a barometer, IMU, and a few PWM outputs into a very small form factor that is just a shade larger than the Raspberry Pi Zero itself. It comes with standard connector ports for UART and I2C to attach GPS and on screen display for FPV flying.

Of course, there are dozens of flight controllers for drones and quads out there, but very few are running Linux, and even fewer platforms are as well supported as the Raspberry Pi. To leverage this, [Victor] is running Dronecode on the Pi for mission planning, real autopilot, and everything else that turns a remote controlled quadcopter into a proper drone. It works, and it’s flying, and you can check out the video proof below.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An Interface For The Headless Linux System

May 28, 2016 by Moritz Walter 17 Comments

Connecting a headless Raspberry Pi to a wireless network can be quite a paradoxical situation. To connect it to the network, you need to open an SSH connection to configure the wireless port. But to do so, you need a network connection in the first place. Of course, you can still get command-line access using a USB-to-UART adapter or the Pi’s ethernet port – if present – but [Arsenijs] worked out a much more convenient solution for his Hackaday Prize entry: The pyLCI Linux Control Interface.

His solution is a software framework written in Python that uses a character display and buttons to make a simple hardware interface. This allows you to configure all important aspects of a Raspberry Pi – or any other Linux SBC – from a tidily organized click-and-scroll menu. [Arsenijs] implemented a whole bunch of useful tools: There’s a network tool to scan and connect to WiFi networks. A systemctl tool that lets you manage the services running on the system, which is especially helpful when you need to restart a stuck service. A partition tool helps with viewing and unmounting mass storage devices. He’s even planning to add a filesystem browser.

With his Open Source project, [Arsenjs] aims to shorten the development time for embedded projects by taking out the efforts of implementing the basic interface functions from scratch. Indeed, there are countless scenarios, where a basic display interface can be of great value. Given the great project documentation and the fact that this can work with virtually any Arduino or Raspberry Pi LCD-pushbutton-hat or shield, we’re sure this is going to be used a lot. Enjoy the video!

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Adding HDMI To Small Displays

May 27, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

LCDs come in a lot of sizes, and there’s a lot written about pushing pixel data out to larger displays. Smaller LCDs, like the 4, 5 and 7 inch variety, aren’t used much, because no one seems to know how to drive the things. For [Joe]’s Hackaday Prize Entry, he’s creating an open source interface for tiny LCDs, making it easy and cheap to add one to everything with an HDMI port.

[Joe]’s Open LCD Interface comes on two boards, with the first providing connections to an LCD, all the power circuitry required, and a bunch of pads to break out every IO line. The second part of the puzzle is a decoder that takes HDMI signals and drives a small LCD.

HDMI decoders are nothing new to the world of hobby electronics – there are multiple projects that give the BeagleBoard a display through HDMI. Even Adafruit sells one of these converters. [Joe]’s board has another trick up its sleeve, though: it can give any microcontroller a high-resolution display, too.

There’s another module that connects to [Joe]’s breakout board that turns the LCD into an SPI display. This means any microcontroller can drive a high-resolution display. It’s fast, too: in the video below, [Joe]’s SPI display can push pixels at least as fast as any other microcontroller-based display we’ve seen.

It’s a great project, and a by opening up the doors to millions of cheap LCDs on eBay and Alibaba, [Joe] has a great entry for the Hackaday Prize on his hands.

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