For the last few months, we’ve been asking the Hackaday.io community for their thoughts on what the best projects are in the 2015 Hackaday Prize. We’ve also been giving away some fabulous prizes to people who have voted, and we just wrapped up the last round of voting? Did anyone win? Check out the video below.
Continue reading “Astronaut Or Astronot: The Final Round Is Over”
Simple blood tests can lead a doctor toward a diagnosis of blood cancers, like leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma, but to really see what’s going on, he or she needs to go to the source of the problem: the bone marrow. Examining maturing blood cells from the marrow with a microscope is an important step in staging the disease and developing a plan for treatment, but it’s a tedious and error-prone process that requires a doctor to classify and tally a dozen or so different cells based on their size, shape and features. Automated systems like flow cytometry and image analysis software can help, but in an austere environment, a doctor might not have access to these. Luckily, there’s now an on-line app to assist with bone marrow cytometry.
Thanks to [Eduardo Zola], a doctor can concentrate on classifying cells without looking up from the microscope, and without dictating to an assistant. Keys are assigned to the different cell morphologies, and a running total of each cell type is kept. With practice, the doctor should be able to master the keying for the various cells; we suspect the generation of physicians that grew up with the WASD keying common in PC-based gaming might have a significant advantage over the older docs when it comes to learning such an app.
[Eduardo]’s app seems like a simple way to improve on an important medical procedure, and an enabling technology where access to modern instrumentation is limited. To that end, one area for improvement might be a standalone app that can run on a laptop without internet access, or perhaps even a version that runs on a smart phone. But even as it is, it’s a great entry for the 2015 Hackaday Prize.
[Conrad] was tasked with building a synthetic aperture multispectral imaging device by his professor. It’s an interesting challenge that touches on programming, graphics, and just a bit of electrical engineering.
Tucked inside a garish yellow box that looks like a dumb robot are five Raspberry Pis, a TP-Link Ethernet switch, three Raspberry Pi NOIR cameras, and a Flir Lepton thermal camera. With three cameras, different techniques can be used to change the focal length of whatever is being recorded – that’s the synthetic aperture part of the build. By adding different filters – IR pass, UV, visual, and thermal, this camera can record images in a huge range of wavelengths.
[Conrad] has come up with a completely modular toolbox that allows for a lot of imaging experiments. By removing the filters, he can track objects in 3D. With all the filters in place, he can narrow down what spectra he can record. It’s a mobile lab that’s completely modular, and we can’t wait to see what this little box can really do.
The Parallax Propeller is an exceptionally interesting chip that doesn’t get the love it deserves. It’s a 32-bit microcontroller with eight independent cores that are each powerful enough to do some real computation. Around this time last year, the source for the Propeller was opened up and released under GPL 3.0, along with the mask ROM and an interpreter for the Propeller-specific language, Spin. This release is not only a great educational opportunity, but a marvelous occasion to build some really cool hardware as [antti.lukats] is doing with the Soft Propeller.
[antti]’s Soft Propeller is based on the Xilinx ZYNQ-7000, a System on Chip that combines a dual core ARM Cortex A9 with an FPGA with enough logic gates to become a Propeller. The board also has 16MB of Flash used for configuration and everything fits on a Propeller-compatible DIP 40 pinout. If you’ve ever wanted to play around with FPGAs and high-power ARM devices, this is the project for you.
[antti] already has the Propeller Verilog running on his board, and with just a bit more than 50% of the LUTs used, it might even be possible to fit the upcoming Propeller 2 on this chip. This build is just one small part of a much larger and more ambitious project: [antti] is working on a similar device with HDMI, USB, a MicroSD, and 32MB of DDR2 RAM. This will also be stuffed into a DIP40 format, making it an incredibly powerful system that’s just a bit larger than a stick of gum.
Because people are generally idiots when it comes to choosing passwords — including people who should know better — Google created Google Authenticator. It’s two-factor verification for all your Google logins based on a shared secret key. It’s awesome, and everyone should use it.
Actually typing in that code from a phone app is rather annoying, and [Alistair] has a better solution: an Authenticator USB Key. Instead of opening up the Authenticator app every time he needs an Authenticator code, this USB key will send the code to Google with the press of a single button.
The algorithm behind Google Authenticator is well documented and actually very simple; it’s just a hash of the current number of 30-second periods since the Unix epoch and an 80-bit secret key. With knowledge of the secret key, you can generate Authenticator codes until the end of time. It’s been done with an Arduino before, but [Alistair]’s project makes this an incredibly convenient way to input the codes without touching the keyboard.
The current plan is to use an ATMega328, a real-time clock, and VUSB for generating the Authenticator code and sending it to a computer. Getting the secret key on the device sounds tricky, but [Alistair] has a trick up his sleeve for that: he’s going to use optical sensors and a flashing graphic on a web page to send the key to the device. It’s a bit of a clunky solution, but considering the secret key only needs to be programmed once, it’s not necessarily a bad solution.
With a small button plugged into a USB hub, [Alistair] has the perfect device for anyone annoyed at the prospect at opening up the Authenticator app every few days. It’s not a replacement for the app, it just makes everything easier.
The last few years have seen an incredible increase in the marketing for home automation devices. Why this tech is just picking up now is something we’ll never understand – home automation systems have been around for decades, mostly in the form of security systems. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [IngGaro] is building an Arduino-based security system that does everything you would expect from a home automation system, from closing the shutters to temperature monitoring.
[IngGaro]’s system is built around a shield for an Arduino Mega. This shield includes connections to an alarm system, a GSM modem, temperature and humidity sensors, an Ethernet module, and IR movement sensors. This Arduino Mega attaches to a control box mounted near the front door that’s loaded up with an LCD, an NFC and RFID reader, and a few buttons to arm and disarm the system.
This project has come a long way since it was featured in last year’s Hackaday Prize. Since then [IngGaro] finally completed the project thanks to a change in the Ethernet library. It’s much more stable now, and has the ability to completely control everything in a house that should be automated. Now all [IngGaro] needs to do is create a cool PCB for the project, but in our opinion you can’t do much better than the mastery of perfboard this project already has.
There are a lot of environmental monitors in the running for this year’s Hackaday Prize. Whether they’re soil moisture sensors for gardens or ultraviolet sensors for the beach, the entrants for The Hackaday Prize seem to grasp the inevitable truth that you need information about the environment before doing anything about the environment.
But what about sharing that information? Wouldn’t it be handy if there were an online repository where you could look up environmental conditions of any location on the planet? That’s where [radu.motisan]’s Portable Environmental Monitor comes in. It’s a small, pocketable device that measures just about everything and uploads that data to the Internet.
This project is a continuation of [radu]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize last year, the Global Radiation Monitoring Network. This was more than just a Geiger tube connected to the Internet; [radu] has a global network of Geiger counters displaying counts per minute on a nifty live map.
[radu]’s latest project expands on the capabilities of the Global Radiation Monitoring Network with more sensors and portability. Inside the Environmental Monitor are enough sensors to look at Alpha, Beta and Gamma radiation, dust and toxic gas, and other types of pollution. With the addition of an ESP8266 WiFi module, this portable device can upload sensor readings to the Internet, greatly expanding [radu]’s uRADMonitor network.
