Hackaday Prize 2023: This Challenge Makes It So Easy Being Green

May 31, 2023 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

This year’s Hackaday Prize is our first nice round number – number ten! We thought it would be great to look back on the history of the Prize and cherry-pick our favorite themes from the past. Last year’s entire theme was sustainable hacking, and we challenged you to come up with ways to generate or save power, keep existing gear out of the landfill, find clever ways to encourage recycling or build devices to monitor the environment and keep communities safer during weather disasters, and you all came through. Now we’re asking you to do it again.

There are hundreds of ways that we can all go a little bit lighter on this planet, and our Green Hacks Challenge encourages you to make them real. Whether you want to focus on clean energy, smarter recycling, preventing waste, or even cleaning up the messes that we leave behind, every drop of oil left unburned or gadget kept out of the landfill helps keep our world running a little cleaner. Here’s your chance to hack for the planet.

Inspiration

One thing we really loved about last year’s Green Hacks was that it encouraged people to think outside the box. For instance, we got some solar power projects as you’d expect, but we also got a few really interesting wind power entries, ranging from the superbly polished 3D Printed Portable Wind Turbine that won the Grand Prize to the experimental kite turbine in Energy Independence While Travelling, to say nothing of the offbeat research project toward making a Moss Microbial Fuel Cell.

3D Printed Portable Wind Turbine

Moss Microbial Fuel Cell

Energy Independence While Travelling

Plastic was also in the air last year, as we saw a number of projects to reuse and recycle this abundant element of our waste stream. From a Plastic Scanner that uses simple spectroscopy to determine what type of plastic you’re looking at, to filament recyclers and trash-based 3D printers to make use of shredded plastic chips.

Polyformer

The Trash Printer – Version 3

Plastic Scanner

Finally, you all really put the science into citizen science with projects like OpenDendrometer that helps monitor a single tree’s health, and the Crop Water Stress Sensor that does the same for a whole field. Bees didn’t get left out of the data collection party either, with the Beehive Monitoring and Tracking project. And [Andrew Thaler]’s tremendously practical Ocean Sensing for Everyone: The OpenCTD brought the basics of oceanic environmental monitoring down to an affordable level.

OpenDendrometer

Crop Water Stress Sensor

Beehive Monitoring and Tracking

Ocean Sensing for Everyone: The OpenCTD

Now It’s Your Turn to be Green

If any of the above resonates with your project goals, it’s time to put them into action! Start up a new project over on Hackaday.io, enter it into the Prize, and you’re on your way. Ten finalists will receive $500 and be eligible to win the Grand Prizes ranging from $5,000 to $50,000. But you’ve only got until Tuesday, July 4th to enter, so don’t sleep.

As always, we’d like to thank our sponsors in the Hackaday Prize, Supplyframe and DigiKey, but we’d also like to thank Protolabs for sponsoring the Green Hacks challenge specifically, and for donating a $5,000 manufacturing grant for one finalist. Maybe that could be you?

2022 Hackaday Prize Enters Second Round: Reuse, Recycle, Revamp

May 5, 2022 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

Ding! That’s the bell for the second challenge round of the 2022 Hackaday Prize. If your project reuses or recycles what would otherwise be waste materials, or helps you to do the same for further projects, we want to see it.

Hackers are often frugal folk — we’ll recycle parts for projects because it’s easier on the pocketbook when prototyping. But in these strangest of times, when we’ve seen $1 microcontrollers in such shortage that they fetch $57 apiece (if you can get the parts at all), making use of what you’ve got on hand can be an outright necessity. If this is going to become the new normal, it’s going to make sense that we automate it. There’s gold, literally and metaphorically, in busted PCBs. How are you going to get the most value out of our broken electronic waste in our post-apocalyptic near future? Have you built an unpick-and-unplace machine? We’d like to see it.

But electronic parts are a small fraction of your recyclable materials, and plastics might play a larger role. If you’re a 3D printerer, you’ve doubtless thought about recycling plastic bottles into filament. Or maybe you’d like to take some of the existing plastics that are thrust upon you by this modern world and give them a second life? This factory churning out paving stones by remelting plastic with sand is doing it on an industrial scale, but could this be useful for the home gamer? Precious Plastic has a number of inspirational ideas. Or maybe you just need an HDPE hammer?

Have you built a fancy can crusher, or a plastics sorter, or a recycling robot? Head on over to Hackaday.io, write it up, and enter it into the Prize!

Basically any project that helps you recycle or reuse the material around you is fair game here. (But note that if you’ve got epic repair hacks, you’ll want to enter them in the upcoming Round Three: Hack it Back.) This round runs until June 12th and there are ten $500 awards up for grabs, so get hacking!

Automating Mobile Games With A Robot Arm

November 28, 2021 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

My Singing Monsters is one of those mobile titles that has users play simple games to earn coins and gems in the usual way. [Anykey] found that his son was a fan of the game, but that sometimes it felt a little rigged. Thus, rather than waste time playing themselves, he set up a robot to do the job for them. (Super-boring video, embedded below.)

The player must complete a basic but time-consuming memory game. Upon winning, the player gets to choose a prize from 17 mystery cards. The top prize of 1,000 diamonds always seemed to be hidden under another card, leading to the aforementioned frustration.

In order to test if the game was rigged, [Anykey] set up a uArm Swift Pro to play the game, with the robot arm moving a small stylus over the iPad playing the game. The iPad’s video was piped to a PC via HDMI out, going into a Camlink capture card. A Python script using OpenCV was then created to play the game automatically, and log the results of prizes gained along the way. All the code is up on GitHub.

After over 100 attempts, the robot never managed to pick the right card to score 1,000 diamonds. Given that there are only 17 cards to choose from, one would expect the 1,000 diamond prize to come up several times in that many selections.

It seems then that the prize selection for completing the memory game may not actually be down to picking the right card. Instead, the prize given is selected by some other calculation entirely.

We love a robot playing games at Hackaday, even if it’s as simple as Tic-Tac-Toe. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Automating Mobile Games With A Robot Arm” →

Hackaday Links: December 27, 2020

December 27, 2020 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

We’re always pleased to see one of our community’s projects succeed, and we celebrate that success in whatever what it comes. But seeing a company launched to commercialize an idea that started as a Hackaday.io project and a Hackaday Prize entry is especially gratifying. So we were pleased as punch to see that MAKESafe Tools has managed to bring the idea of add-on machine tool braking to market. We’d love to add this to several tools in our shop. Honestly, of all the terrifying ways machine tools can slice, dice, and shred human flesh asunder, we always considered the lowly bench grinder fairly low-risk — and then we had a chance to “Shake Hands with Danger.”

Another great thing about the Hackaday community is the way we all try to keep each other up to speed on changes and news that affects even our smallest niches. Just last week Tom Nardi covered a project using the venerable TI eZ430-Chronos smartwatch as a makeshift medical alert bracelet for a family member. It’s a great application for the proto-smartwatch, but one eagle-eyed commenter helpfully pointed out that TI is shutting down their processors wiki in just a couple of weeks. The banner at the top of each page warns that the wiki is not read-only and that any files needed should be downloaded by January 15. Also helpfully, subsequent comments include instructions to download the entire wiki and a torrent link to the archive. It’s always sad to see a platform lose support, especially one that has gained a nice following, but it’s heartening to see the community pull together to continue to support each other like this.

We came across an interesting article this week that’s was a fascinating glimpse into how economic forces shape and drive technological process, and vice versa. It turns out that some of the hottest real estate commodities these days are the plots of land occupied by AM radio stations serving metropolitan markets. It’s no secret that terrestrial radio in general, and AM radio in particular, are growing increasingly moribund, and the infrastructure needed to keep them on the air is getting harder and harder to justify. Chief among these are the large tracts of land devoted to antenna farms, which are often located in suburban and exurban areas near major cities. They’re tempting targets for developers looking to plunk down the physical infrastructure needed to support “New Economy” players like Amazon, which continue to build vast automated warehouses in areas that are handy to large customer bases. It’s a bit sad to watch a once mighty industry unravel and be sold off like this, but such is the nature of progress.

And finally, you may recall a Links article mention a few weeks back about a teardown of a super-sized IBM processor module. A quarter-million dollar relic of the 1990s, the huge System/390 module was an engineering masterpiece that met an unfortunate end at the hands of EEVblog’s Dave Jones. As a follow-up, Dave teamed up with fellow YouTuber CPU Galaxy to take a less-destructive tour of the module using X-ray analysis. The level of engineering needed for a 64-layer ceramic backplane is astonishing, and Dave’s play-by-play is pretty entertaining too. As a bonus, CPU Galaxy has some really interesting stuff; his place is basically a museum of vintage tech, and he just earned a new sub.

2020 Hackaday Prize Hack Chat With Majenta Strongheart

May 25, 2020 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, May 27 at noon Pacific for the 2020 Hackaday Prize Hack Chat with Majenta Strongheart!

It hardly seems possible, but the Hackaday Prize, the world’s greatest hardware design contest, is once more at hand. But the world of 2020 is vastly different than it was last year, and the challenges we all suddenly face have become both more numerous and more acute as a result. We’ve seen hackers rise to the challenges presented by the events of the last few months in unexpected ways, coming up with imaginative solutions and pressing the limits of what’s possible. What this community can do when it is faced with a real challenge is inspiring.

Now it’s time to take that momentum and apply it to some of the other problems the world is facing. For the 2020 Hackaday Prize, we’re asking you to throw your creativity at challenges in conservation, disaster response, assistive technology, and renewable resources. We’ve teamed up with leading non-profits in those areas, each of which has specific challenges they need you to address.

With $200,000 in prize money at stake, we’re sure you’re going to want to step up to the challenge. To help get you started, Majenta Strongheart, Head of Design and Partnerships at Supplyframe, will drop by the Hack Chat with all the details on the 2020 Hackaday Prize. Come prepared to pick her brain on what needs doing and how best to tackle the problems that the Prize is trying to address. And find out about all the extras, like the “Dream Team” microgrants, the wild card prize, and the community picks.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, May 27 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

These Projects Bent Over Backward To Win The Flexible PCB Contest

June 19, 2019 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Back in March, the call went out: take your wiggliest, floppiest, most dimensionally compliant idea, and show us how it would be better if only you could design it around a flexible PCB. We weren’t even looking for a prototype; all we needed was an idea with perhaps a sketch, even one jotted on the legendary envelope or cocktail napkin.

When we remove constraints like that, it’s interesting to see how people respond. We have to say that the breadth of applications for flex PCBs and the creativity shown in designing them into projects was incredible. We saw everything from circuit sculpture to wearables. Some were strictly utilitarian and others were far more creative. In the end we got 70 entries, and with 60 prizes to be awarded, the odds were ever in your favor.

Now that the entries have been evaluated and the winners decided, it’s time to look over the ways you came up with to put a flexible PCB to work. Normally we list all the winners in our contest wrap-ups, but with so many winners we can’t feature everyone. We’ll just call out a few of the real standout projects here, but you really should check the list of winning projects to see the full range of what this call for flexibility brought out in our community.

Continue reading “These Projects Bent Over Backward To Win The Flexible PCB Contest” →

2019 Hackaday Prize Hack Chat

April 15, 2019 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

Join us Wednesday, April 17 at noon Pacific time for the 2019 Hackaday Prize Hack Chat!

The 2019 Hackaday Prize was just announced, and this year the theme is designing for manufacturing. The hacker community has come a long, long way in the last few years in terms of the quality of projects we turn out. Things that were unthinkable just a few short years ago are now reduced to practice, and our benches and breadboards are always stuffed with the latest and greatest components and modules, all teaming up to do wondrous things. But what about the next step? Do you have what it takes to turn that mess o’ wires into a product? What skills do you need to add to your repertoire to make sure you can actually capitalize on your prototype — or more importantly, to get your ideas into someone else’s hands where they can actually do some good? That’s what the Hackaday Prize is all about this year, and we want you taking your projects to the next level!

Majenta Strongheart will be hosting the Hack Chat as we discuss:

The importance of designing for manufacturing;
What tools we have available to turn prototypes into projects;
How the Hackaday Prize is set up this year, and why the theme was selected; and
Why you should participate in the 2019 Hackaday Prize

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the 2019 Hackaday Prize Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, April 17, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.