Hackaday Prize

462 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: Orchestral Invention Defies Convention

July 17, 2015 by 3 Comments

Like many of us, [Laurens] likes video game music and bending hardware to his will. Armed with a Printrbot, a couple of floppy drives, and some old HDDs, he built the Unconventional Instrument Orchestra. This 2015 Hackaday Prize contender takes any MIDI file and plays it on stepper and solenoid-based hardware through a Java program.

A while back, [Laurens] won a Fubarino in our contest by using a MIDI keyboard and an Arduino to control the Minecraft environment with Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time songs. The Unconventional Instrument Orchestra uses that Fubarino of victory to control the steppers of two floppy drives. He only needed three pins to control the drives—one to enable, one to set the head’s direction, and one to make it step once per pulse.

If ever you’ve been around a 3D printer, you know they make music as a natural side effect. The problem is getting the printer to obey the rests in a piece of music. In order to do this, [Laurens] used his software to control the printer, essentially withholding the next command until the appropriate time in the song.

The percussive elements of this orchestra are provided by a hard drive beating its head against the wall. Since it’s basically impossible to get an HDD to do this as designed (thankfully), [Laurens] replaced the control board with a single transistor to drive the coil that moves the head.

[Laurens] has made several videos of the orchestra in concert, which are a joy all their own. Most of the visual real estate of each video is taken up with a real-time visualization of the music produced by the software. There’s still plenty of room to show the orchestra itself, song-specific gameplay, and a textual commentary crawl in 16-segment displays. Check out the playlist we’ve embedded after the break.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Hackaday Prize Entry: New Firmware For A Smartwatch

July 16, 2015 by 25 Comments

Smartwatches are the next big thing. Nobody knows what we’re going to use them for, but that’s never stopped a product from being the hottest item around. The WeLoop Tommy isn’t the Apple Watch, it isn’t the Moto360, and it isn’t the Microsoft Band. It is, however, a nice smartwatch with a Sharp memory display and a battery that lasts longer than a few days. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Krzysiek] is making an open source firmware for the WeLoop Tommy that will add capabilities no other smartwatch has.

This project is a complete reverse engineering of the WeLoop Tommy smartwatch. [Krzysiek] is tearing everything down to the bare components and figuring out how the RAM, Flash, buttons, LCD, and accelerometer connect to the processor. After that, it’s time for custom firmware.

Already [Krzysiek] has a test app that displays [OSSW] on the Sharp memory display. It’s not much, but the hardware is solid. With the right firmware, the WeLoop Tommy will be able to do just about everything an Android, Apple, or Microsoft smartwatche can do using repurposed hardware and open source firmware.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Better Bench Power Supply

July 15, 2015 by 20 Comments

Back in February, [The Big One] started building the bench power supply to rule them all. His previous power supply was just an ATX computer power supply. It worked, but that didn’t give him fancy stuff like different channels of individually adjustable voltages. Since then, we’ve spun up the 2015 Hackaday Prize, and [The Big One] has changed his DIY power supply into a Hackaday Prize entry that competes well against $1000 mid-range commercial units.

The single most expensive component in this power supply are a pair of isolated switched power supplies rated for 15V and 7A. This is a change from [The Big One]’s original plan to use a big ‘ol transformer; a switched mode supply is smaller, lighter, costs about the same, and is much better suited to the modular nature of the project.

The final design for this power supply has some interesting features: up to six channels are possible, voltage and current can go all the way down to zero, and everything can be controlled over USB. Those are amazing features that won’t be found in any $100 cheapo bench power supply, and [The Big One]’s amazing documentation for this project makes it a perfect entry for The Hackaday Prize.

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Carbon fiber weaving robot!

Hackaday Prize Entry: Weaving Carbon Fiber With Industrial Robots

July 14, 2015 by 24 Comments

Oh to have a 6-axis robot arm to play with… For [Basia Dzaman’s] final graduation project for School of Form, she designed and 3D printed an end effect tool for an industrial KUKA robot — for weaving carbon fiber.

Through an iterative design process, she developed many prototypes of the tool until the one you see above. It’s capable of holding a Dremel multi tool which can be used to drill into a work surface for installing pegs which make up the custom weaving jig. The pegs (nails) are then installed by hand so that the robot can thread carbon fiber — fed through an epoxy bath as it is dispensed — onto the jig. In the example, she shows a traditional Polish handcraft called Snutki (a type of stitching), wrapping the carbon fiber in patterns around the pegs. Once the epoxy cures, a strong structure can be removed.

Remember the 6-axis robot that can 3D print in metal, and is currently working on 3D printing a bridge? [Basia’s] design could do similar things, for a completely different industry. You can check out [Basia]’s video for the project below.

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Free 3D printing in NY

FREE 3D Printing In New York?

July 14, 2015 by 20 Comments

Looking to prototype some of your designs for the Hackaday Prize? Miss the Shapeways Gift Card Giveaway we did? Well if you happen to live in NYC, [John Tirelli] just wrote in to tell us about a FREE 3D printing lab!

That’s right — free. They don’t even charge for materials.

And we aren’t talking about a bunch of community rickety RepRaps falling apart in someone’s college dorm, nope, this place has CAD workstations with SolidWorks licenses, industrial Stratasys printers (Fortus 250mic, SST 1200 es, and a uPrint SE Plus) — not to mention a Roland LPX-1200 DS 3D laser scanner! Oh, and they’re getting a Fortus 400 and Connex 3 Objet soon!

It’s all thanks to a grant for Haverstraw Rockland Community College, which allowed them to open up this Smart Lab.

RCC’s 3D Printing Smart Lab offers manufacturers a proof-of-concept center where they can evaluate, customize, and expedite prototypes in a sandbox environment. The Smart Lab’s services are available to New York companies free of charge. Assistance is provided by RCC staff and CAD (Computer Assisted Design) students.

How awesome is that? Sounds like you do have to be a New York Company… but you filed that LLC paperwork, right?

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Tracking Rhinos With UAVs

July 13, 2015 by 17 Comments

For his Hackaday Prize project, [tlankford01] is using RC planes and UAVs as an anti-poaching system for rhinos and elephants. It’s a laudable goal for sure, but the conditions of this use case make for some very interesting engineering challenges.

The design goals [tlandford] has set are relatively simple for a bush plane, but building a plane that can fly 200km with a 6kg payload and return to base is a challenge that isn’t usually taken up by RC enthusiasts. For this project, [tlandford] is using an entirely 3D printed airframe, with living hinges printed right into the control surfaces. That in itself is pushing the limits of amateur airframes, but [tlandford] isn’t stopping there.

This UAV system will be completely automated, with a single ground control system taking care of controlling a swarm of planes, pointing a tracking antenna, and connecting to the Internet for observation or control from anywhere in the world.

The project that has seen a lot of improvement since it was entered in last year’s Hackaday Prize. The addition of a completely 3D printed airframe is a big one, and replacing the RVJet with something that looks a bit more like a glider should increase the loiter times over the target. There’s a video of the Icarus flying available below. If you also have a UAV project entered in The Hackaday Prize, there is now one obvious choice of what music you should use.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: 3D Printed Modular Keyboard

July 12, 2015 by 24 Comments

There is a big community of people creating all kinds of synthesizers, but until now no one has attempted to make a keyboard controller like the one [Tim] created. Not only has he created the keyboard synthesizer, but he’s developed one that is modular and 3D printed so you can just expand on the synth you have rather than go out and buy or build a new one.

The design has a lot useful features. Since the design is modular, you can 3D print extra octaves of keys if you need, and simply build off of the existing keyboard. The interior has mounts that allow circuit boards to be screwed down, and the exterior has plenty of available places to put knobs or sliders. Anything that could possibly be built into a synthesizer is possible with this system, and if you decide you want to start small, that’s possible too!

All of the design files are available from Pinshape if you want to get started. The great thing about this controller is that you could use a 555-based synth in this keyboard controller, or a SID synth, or any other synth you could think of!

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by: