Hackaday Prize

462 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: PICs And Arduinos, Cats And Dogs Living Together

August 6, 2015 by 11 Comments

Half of our little corner of the Internet complains about the Arduino, how the pin headers of the Arduino standard don’t make any sense, how the Arduino IDE is rubbish, gives well-reasoned arguments why the Arduino language is hindering the next generation of embedded programmers, and laments the fact that everything is commoditized into Arduino-compatible packages. The other half of our little corner of the Internet uses Microchip PICs.

[Jarrett] is stubborn, and he wants to use a PIC with the distinctive Arduino pin layout. Thus was born PIC-On-The-Go. It’s a PIC18F4520 in the familiar goofy-pin package, made specifically for everyone who just wants to buckle down and get some work done.

This isn’t the only PIC-become-Arduino board out there; the Fubarino is a great board that speaks Arduino, but that doesn’t take advantage of our favorite Arduino shields. Either way, we’re surprised something like [Jarrett]’s project doesn’t exist yet, making it a great entry for The Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Detecting New Meteor Showers

August 5, 2015 by 5 Comments

Go out to a field on a dark night, far away from city lights, and you might just see a shooting star. A single meteor is just a tiny fraction of all the space dust that hits our atmosphere every day; most of it goes completely unnoticed. To get a better idea of where these meteoroids come from, [Dario] and [Denis] have come up with a network of meteor-detecting ground stations to search for these extraterrestrial visitors and make it possible to retrieve the largest of these fallen stars.

This project started at the Croatian Meteor Network, a team with about two dozen surveillance cameras pointed skyward as an unblinking eye, looking for meteoroids entering the Earth’s atmosphere over the Balkans and the Adriatic sea. When two cameras detect a meteor, the path it came from – and its orbit around the Sun – can be computed. The team has already found a possible new meteor shower (PDF) that is active from late August to the middle of September.

With hundreds of cameras scattered around the globe, it’s possible to triangulate the position of these meteors and their orbit around the Sun, just like what was done with the innumerable Russian dash cams after the Chelyabinsk meteor. It’s a great project, and also one that requires a lot of computer image processing – a favorite around these parts.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: 20,000 Weather Stations

August 4, 2015 by 17 Comments

Team Tahmo has a plan to put a network of 20,000 weather stations across sub-Saharan Africa. That’s an impressive goal, and already they have pilot stations in Senegal, Chad, Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa. For their Hackaday Prize entry, they thought it would make sense to add more advanced sensors to their weather stations, and came up with GPS, lightning, and large scale soil moisture sensors.

The sensors already deployed have the usual complement of meteorological equipment – thermometers, anemometers, barometers, and rain gauges. These stations are connected to a school’s Internet connection where students can monitor the local weather patterns and upload the data. Team Tahmo is building a small add-on board for their Prize entry using an AS3935 Franklin Lightning sensor and a GPS module.

In the interests of rapid design cycles, the team is using off-the-shelf modules for the lightning detector and GPS module. They hit up the Hackaday Prize Collabratorium for some advice on PCB design and have everything pretty much nailed down thanks to a few helpful hackers.

It’s a great project for one of the most ambitious crowdsourced data gathering projects ever conceived, and something that would vastly improve weather predictions across the African continent. Even if their entry does just monitor lightning strikes, it’s still an admirable goal and one of the most useful projects for this year’s Hackaday Prize.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Wearable Electrodermal Activity Monitor

August 3, 2015 by 1 Comment

Electrodermal activity, or galvanic skin response has a lot of practical applications. Everything from research into emotional states to significantly more off-the-wall applications like the E-meter use electrodermal activity. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [qquuiinn] is building a wearable biofeedback wristband that measures galvanic skin response that is perfect for treating anxiety or stress disorders by serving as a simple and convenient wearable device.

Detecting electrodermal activity has been within the capability of anyone with an ohmmeter for over a hundred years. [quin²] is doing something a little more complex than the most primitive modern means of measuring galvanic skin response and using a dual op-amp to sense the tiny changes in skin resistance. This data is fed into an ATMega328 which sends it out to a tiny LED display in the shape of an ‘x’.

Reading electrodermal activity is easy, but doing it reliably in a wearable device is not. There are issues with the skin contacts to work though, issues with the amplifier, and putting the whole thing in a convenient package. [qquuiinn] asked the community about these problems in group discussion on the hacker channel and got a lot of really good advice. That’s a great example of what a project on hackaday.io can do, and a great project for the Hackaday Prize.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: The Internet Of Plants

August 2, 2015 by 7 Comments

The theme of this year’s Hackaday Prize is ‘build something that matters.’ Acrobotic Industries is in beautiful Southern California, where it won’t rain an appreciable amount until the mudslides come. For a little bit of help during this unprecedented drought, they’ve created Clouden, a system of irrigation that only waters yards and parks when the plants need it. This is apparently a novel concept for Southern California, and is most certainly something that matters.

The Clouden system has two parts. The first is a node with an array of soil water sensors and a Particle WiFi module. This node connects to the controller which alters watering schedules in response to actual conditions and predicted rainfall from the WeatherUnderground API.

There’s more to just listening to sensors – the Clouden controller also has the hardware to control 24VAC water valves and a web interface for scheduling irrigation times. With this many sensors – and the ability to not water when there’s a ban in place – it’s a great watering system, and something Southern California desperately needs.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Real Time Power Monitoring

August 1, 2015 by 19 Comments

The Internet of Things promises real-time monitoring of appliances, HVAC, and just about everything else in the home. One of the biggest technologies behind this is the smart meter, an electrical meter that will tell you how much power you’re sucking down from the grid at any given moment. A meter need not be smart, though, because [jlbrian7]’s entry for the Hackaday Prize does the same thing without an entirely new meter.

[jlbrian]’s power monitor is a non-intrusive monitor for electrical systems, allowing anyone to retrofit an electrical meter – or just a single breaker panel – with smart meter tech. It uses a small current transformer to monitor the amperage running through a wire. By sending that information to the Internet, anyone with this system gets power monitoring with much higher temporal resolution than what the power company provides in a monthly bill.

As a nice little addition to his Power Monitor, [jlbrian] is adding a few environmental sensors to his data logging platform. This allows for a little bit of interpolation to figure out what all that power is actually being used for; if the power turns on and a few minutes later the temperature drops, there’s a pretty good chance the AC just went on.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

The Countdown Begins — Last Two Weeks For Entries

August 1, 2015 by 13 Comments

Procrastination is a wonderful thing, but now is the time to stop delaying. Get those hacks documented and entered in the 2015 Hackaday Prize. We’ll close entries in just about two weeks. There’s a handy little countdown on the Prize page which lets you know that your entry must be in by August 17th at 1:50pm PDT (UTC-7).

There’s a lot at stake here, so let’s take another look at what this is all about: Build something that solves a problem faced by a lot of people and you could score a Trip to Space, $100,000 for Best Product, or 2nd-5th place prizes worth $5,000-10,000 each.

Of course the goal is to show off your build. This could end up inspiring others to Build Something that Matters and that means to win you need to document your work. Join us after the break to see the minimum needed for your entry to qualify for judging.

Continue reading “The Countdown Begins — Last Two Weeks For Entries” →