There are numerous instances where we need to know our location, but cannot do so due to GPS / GSM signals being unavailable and/or unreachable on our Smart Phones. [Blecky] is working on SubPos to solve this problem. It’s a WiFi-based positioning system that can be used where GPS can’t.
SubPos does not need expensive licensing, specialized hardware, laborious area profiling or reliance on data connectivity (connection to database/cellphone coverage). It works independently of, or alongside, GPS/Wi-Fi Positioning Systems (WPS)/Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) as an additional positioning data source by exploiting hardware commonly available.
As long as SubPos nodes are populated, all a user wishing to determine their location underground or indoors needs to do is use a Wi-Fi receiver. This can be useful in places such as metro lines, shopping malls, car parks, art galleries or conference centers – essentially anyplace GPS doesn’t penetrate. SubPos defines an accurate method for subterranean positioning in different environments by exploiting all the capabilities of Wi-Fi. SubPos Nodes or existing Wi-Fi access points are used to transmit encoded information in a standard Wi-Fi beacon frame which is then used for position triangulation.
The SubPos Nodes operate much like GPS satellites, except that instead of using precise timing to calculate distance between a transmitter and receiver, SubPos uses coded transmitter information as well as the client’s received signal strength. Watch a demo video after the break.
This week we’re giving away 125 Teensy-LC Boards. You’ve sat on the sidelines long enough. Time to write down your Hackaday Prize idea and get it entered!
It isn’t just the big prize (a trip into space) on the line. Each week we’re giving away things to help your build. Below you can see the 50 projects which won a LightBlue Bean from last week’s giveaway. This week it’s a huge number of Teensy-LC boards going out to those who need them. These little wonders pack a real punch, with a 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M0+ that has 62K of flash, 8k of RAM, plenty of IO and a 12-bit analog module for both input and output! You’ll also be eligible for each of the future weekly giveaways… we’re distributing $50,000 in prizes to hundreds of projects over 17-weeks!
Entering is easy. Write down your idea to help solve a problem faced by a wide range of people. Start fleshing out your build plan. Pictures are a huge help, even if they’re just a hand-drawn sketch on some paper! Your best bet at getting recognized for a giveaway is to post a new project log which mentions how you would add this Teensy board to your creation.
Last Week’s 50 Winners of a LightBlue Bean
Congratulations to these 50 projects who were selected as winners from last week. You will receive a LightBlue Bean which combines Bluetooth LE with an ATmega328 in a nice little package ready for prototyping. Don’t forget to post pictures and information about what you build with these little wonders!
Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) is a town full of awesome hackers. So when Workbench Projects, a local maker space there, asked if I’d like to come down and talk about the Hackaday Prize, I immediately set things in motion. We decided to arrange a “Bring-a-Hack” event, asking local makers to turn up with their hacks and give a talk or drop by and discuss ideas that matter. To reach out to a larger audience, we also partnered with IoT-BLR, a pretty large group of IoT enthusiasts in Bengaluru. 10,000 Startups (NASSCOM for Startups) helped ensure that all the hackers were well fed with sandwiches and cookies while Paper Boat chipped in with a cooler full of beverages. A freak hail storm meant that we had to delay the start a bit. But that turned into a blessing of sorts, as it allowed those already at the space to check out the hacks that had been set up at demo tables and generally network with each other.
almost 100 Hackers turned up
[Anupama], who set up Workbench Projects with [Pavan], set the ball rolling by telling us about how it all started off a year ago. She and [Pavan] had ideas buzzing in their heads, but no means to prototype them. “You can either continue cribbing about the lack of maker spaces, or jump right in and start one on your own”.
We then had [Pavan] tell us about the various “studios” that they have set up. He was also excited to announce their addition to the world-wide MIT FabLab network. Their space is located right under the escalator that goes to the Halasuru Metro Station. The use of that space, which would other wise have been wasted and empty, itself is brilliant.
I stepped up and talked about the Hackaday Prize and our call to makers this year to “Build something that matters”. I showed off last years winners, this years prizes and gave out other details asking the assembled hackers to jump in and submit their hacks to the Hackaday Prize. Next up we had [Nihal], who founded IoT-BLR and talked to us about their projects, events and initiatives. IoT-BLR is the 3rd largest IoT-focused Meetup community in the world.
Pavan talking about the facilities at Workbench Projects
Anupama talking about how Workbench Projects started
Anool talking about the Hackaday Prize
With that done, we opened up the floor for the assembled hackers to come forth and talk about their hacks. First up was [Anmol Agrawal] who showed off his earthquake early warning system which was prototyped using Littlebits, PubNub and Ruby.
I was glad that at short notice, my friend [Mohammed Khasim], who works at Linnaro, agreed to drop by to talk about and show off the modular phone being developed by Google as part of Project Ara.
Project Ara – front
Project Ara – back
The all-girls team of [Kruti], [Chitra] and [Archana] showed off their intelligent cane for the blind. Five ultrasonic ping sensors, one light sensor and a camera are all hooked up to a Raspberry Pi running off a battery pack. The cane communicates with a paired smart phone and the app provides audio cues. There’s also a pager motor for haptic feedback.
[Rahul] and his team showed up with what looked like the Iron-Man Arc Reactor on a T-shirt. It turned out to be an HID device that could be used to send key presses back to a paired computer. Their next iteration was less flashy and unobtrusive. They are now working on using this to provide safety for school kids by allowing them to send alerts in case of an emergency.
[Chetan] and his team from EdgeVerve showed off the work they are doing with putting various sensors on drones – CO2, temperature, humidity, multi-spectral camera – to enable them to be used for some real world applications. They have also integrated collision avoidance using cheap ultrasonic sensors and a ballistic parachute which deploys during an emergency.
The IoT-BLR connected cars project team talked about their project to tap into on-board diagnostics on vehicles and use the various sensor data to control pollution.
[Kumar Abhishek] came down just in time to show us his BeagleLogic. I had written about this project on the blog earlier, and it was nice to be able to see it in action.
There were some more projects up for display. [Osho Bajpai] had a demo of his “Smart Driving alert system” which detects if driver is falling sleep and wakes him up. [Sanju Mathew] demo’ed his prosthetic arm while [Supreet Joshi] showed off his “Smart Robotic Arm” which replicates the movements of a human arm using a smart glove. On display was also a remote controlled skate board driven by a BLDC motor controlled via the ESC. It was also interesting to see a bunch of school kids wheel in their chopper-inspired bicycle which is still work in progress. Those kids are learning a lot in the process such as ergonomics and welding. [Abdul] showed off a couple of devices he is working on to help harness tidal energy from coastal areas. The team from WiSense showed off some network connected environmental sensors. One measures soil moisture and temperature and transmits data via text message over GSM. This is aimed for use by Farmers and alerts them to water their farms at the right time. Another sensor worked as a tank level detector and controlled flow rate to prevent over flow.
Chopper inspired Bicycle, built by school kids
Remote controlled Skate Board
Drone gets some attention
Supreet Joshi’s Smart Robotic Arm
11 year old Nihar Thakker’s solar powered fan Cap
Smart Driving alert system
By this time, it was quite late in the evening, so folks spent the next hour looking up the various projects, talking and getting selfies taken using the OpenSelfie photobooth that I had set up. [Rishi Bhatnagar] from Workbench Projects, who set the whole event in motion, managed to archive the evening’s proceedings and you can watch the (long) video after the break.
My wife Samata, with her LED necklace
We ran out of chairs – standing room in a packed house
When it comes to the history of medicine and drugs, Aspirin, or more properly acetyl-salicylic acid, is one of the more interesting stories. Plants rich in salicalates were used as medicines more than four thousand years ago, and in the fourth century BC, [Hippocrates] noted a powder made from willow bark was an excellent analgesic. It was only in the 1800s that acetylated salicylic acid was first synthesized. In 1897, chemists at Bayer gave this ancient remedy a new name: Aspirin. It’s on the WHO List of Essential Medicines, but somehow millions of people don’t have access to this pill found in every pharmacy.
[M. Bindhammer] is working to make Aspirin for Everyone for his entry to the Hackaday Prize, using a small portable lab designed around chemicals that can be easily obtained.
The most common synthesis of Aspirin is salicylic acid treated with acetic anhydrate. Acetic anhydrate is used for the synthesis of heroin, and of course the availability of this heavily restricted by the DEA. Instead, [M. Bindhammer] will use a different method using salicylic acid and acetic acid. If you’re keeping track, that’s replacing a chemical on a DEA list of precursors with very strong vinegar.
[M. Bindhammer] even has a design for the lab that will produce the Aspirin, and it’s small enough to fit in a very large pocket. Everything that is needed for the production of acetyl-salicylic acid is there, including a reaction vessel with a heating element, a water/oil bath, flask, an Allihn condenser, and a vacuum filtering flask. Even if shipping millions of pills to far-flung reaches of the planet were easy, it’s still an exceptional Hackaday Prize entry.
Now it’s not uncommon to have a desktop and a laptop at a battlestation with tablets waiting in the wings. Add in a few Raspis, consoles, and various cheap computers, and it’s pretty easy to have an enormous number of machines and monitors on a desk. Traditionally, a KVM switch would be the solution to this, sharing a keyboard, mouse, and monitor with many different boxes, but this is an ugly solution. [frankstripod] has a device that fixes that with some interesting software and a few USB hacks.
[frankstripod] is in love with a program called Synergy this program combines the keyboard, mouse, and display of several computers over a network so you’ll only ever have to use one keyboard and mouse; it’s as simple as dragging your mouse from one computer to the other. There are a few limitations, though: keyboards don’t work until the OS has loaded (no BIOS access, then), it doesn’t work if the network is down, and setup can be complicated. This project aims to replace the ‘server’ part of a Synergy setup with a small, networkable KVM.
Right now the plan is to use a small embedded board running Linux to read a USB keyboard and switch the output between several computers. A few scripts detect the mouse moving from one screen to another, and a microcontroller switches USB output between each computer. If it sounds weird, you’re right, but it does work: [frank]’s 2014 Hackaday Prize project was a mouse that worked with two computers at once.
[Peter]’s MRI scanner addresses some of the shortcomings of his Open Source CT scanner. While the CT scanner worked, it was exceptionally slow, taking hours to image a bell pepper. This was mostly due to the sensitivity of his particle detector and how hot a check source he could obtain. Unlike highly radioactive elements, you can just make high strength magnetic fields, making this MRI scanner potentially much more useful than a CT scanner.
There are a few things that make a low-cost MRI machine possible, the first being a way to visualize magnetic fields. For this, [Peter] is using an array of Honeywell HMC5883L 3-axis magnetometers, the smallest sensors he could find with the largest range. These magnetometers are I2C devices, so with a few multiplexers it’s actually a relatively simple build.
Imaging with these magnetometers is not simple, and it’s going to take a lot of work to make a signal from all the noise this magnetic camera will see. The technique [Peter] will use isn’t that much different from another 2014 Hackaday Prize entry, A Proton Precession Magnetometer. When a proton in your body is exposed to a high strength magnetic field, it will orient towards the high strength field. When the large field is turned off, the proton will orient itself towards the next strongest magnetic field, in this case, the Earth. As a proton orients itself to the Earth’s magnetic field, it oscillates very slightly, and this decaying oscillation is what the magnetic camera actually detects.
With some techniques from one of [Peter]’s publication, these oscillations can be turned into images. It won’t have the same resolution as an MRI machine that fills an entire room, but it will work. Imagine, an MRI device that will sit on a desktop, made out of laser-cut plywood. You can’t have a cooler project than that.
The reason we can feed six or seven billion people isn’t GMOs. It’s the massive increase in the use of fertilizers over the past hundred years. Most of the nitrogen-based fertilizers are produced using the Bosch-Haber process, a bit of chemical engineering that consumes one percent of all energy worldwide.
For his entry in the Hackaday Prize this year, [Peter Walsh] is improving the Bosch-Haber process, making the production of nitrogen simpler with less equipment.
The Bosch-Haber process runs at temperatures 400°C and pressures of about 200 atmospheres. Right now, this process is run in huge pressure vessels. [Peter]’s idea is to use ultrasonic cavitation to produce the same environment in equipment that can sit safely on a workbench.
[Peter]’s idea is inspired by sonoluminescence, a phenomenon seen when tiny bubbles in water implode producing light. It’s estimated that pressures and temperatures inside these imploding bubbles reach 2000 atmospheres and 5000°C – more than enough for the Bosch-Haber process. By injecting hydrogen and nitrogen into a machine that creates these sonoluminescent bubbles, ammonia will be created and turned into fertilizers to feed the planet.
