sci-fi

39 Articles

Sci-Fi Contest: Both Wars And Trek Represented

February 8, 2017 by 7 Comments

Hackaday’s Sci-Fi Contest is in its third week. We’ve passed warp speed and were heading toward ludicrous speed. There is still almost a month to enter before March 6, when the deadline hits and everything goes to plaid. With 22 submissions all vying for 4 great prizes, there is still plenty of room for new challengers!

This contest is all about projects inspired by science fiction. There is a great mix of projects so far.

BB-8 Using Roll-On Deoderant

bb-8partsStar Wars is well represented with [Tech Flare’s] DIY Phone Controlled BB-8 Droid. [Tech Flare] is improving upon an existing BB-8 build. This is a low-cost build, so many of the parts are sourced from everyday items.

A new one for us is the 11 roll-on deodorant balls that are used as internal bearings. We’re not sure how well this robot will work, but it sure will be the best smelling BB-8 out there and you have to admit that is a creative use of easily source materials!

An Arduino is the brains of this Robot. As the title suggests, control comes from a smartphone. There is some creative work happening to fabricate the ball that makes up the body of the bot so be sure to jump in and check out that writeup.

LCARS In Real Life? Yes, Please!

lcarsAny Star Trek fan knows what the LCARS interface is [Elkentaro] is bringing LCARS life with LCARS NASA ISS Live Stream Viewer. [Elkentaro] is using a Raspberry Pi to display the International Space Station High Definition Eart-Viewing System (ISS HDEV) experiment.

The ISS is constantly streaming live views of the earth from one of 4 cameras. The Pi takes the stream and adds an LCARS image overlay. Everything is displayed on a 7″ TFT LCD. The same view Wesley Crusher would have seen at the helm of the NCC-1701D.

The overlay really brings the content to life and it has us thinking. If you have a refrigerator with one of those questionably-useful built-in montiors, it needs LCARS. Show us what you got!

Use the Schwartz

So what is missing from this contest? You of course! There is plenty of time left to create a great Sci-Fi inspired project. The deadline is Monday, March 6, 2017, 09:00 pm PST (+8 UTC). We dropped some Spaceballs references at the top of this article but haven’t actually seen an entry for that theme. Who’s going to build a voice-changing Dark Helmet?

[Phaser shown in the main image is the Original Series Phaser which Think Geek used to carry]

Hackaday’s Sci-Fi Contest Hits Warp Speed

January 23, 2017 by 31 Comments

Hackers’ perspiration may go into soldering, coding, and building. For many of us, the inspiration for these projects comes from science fiction. The books, movies, TV shows, short stories, and comics we all grew up on, and continue to devour to this day. We’re paying homage to all these great Sci-Fi stories with our latest contest.

The Sci-Fi Contest isn’t about the most efficient way of building a 555 circuit or the tightest code. This one is about celebrating science fiction in the best way we know how — building awesome projects. This is Hackaday, so you’re going to have to use some form of working electronics in your entry. Beyond that, it’s up to you. Bring us your Overwatch cosplays, your Trek Tricorders, your Star Wars pod racers.

This isn’t our first Sci-Fi contest. In fact, Sci-Fi was one of Hackaday.io’s first contests way back in 2014.
3 years and over 100,000 new hackers later, it’s time to take a fresh look at what you all have been up to. Projects that were entered in the first Sci-Fi contest are eligible, but you need to create a new project page and do some new work.

Check the rules for the full details. Once you’ve published a project use the drop-down menu on the left sidebar to enter it in the Hackaday Sci-Fi Contest.

Prizes

Great work reaps great rewards. Here’s what we’ve got for this contest:

  • Grand Prize is a Rigol DS1054Z 4 Channel 50 MHz scope.
  • First Prize is a Monoprice Maker Select Mini 3D printer
  • Second Prize is a complete Blu-Ray box of Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • Third Prize is Lego’s latest rendition of the Millennium Falcon.

The deadline is Monday, March 6, 2017, 09:00 pm PST (+8 UTC), so don’t waste time! Warm up your soldering irons, spin up your warp drives, and create something awesome!

Bicycle-Powered Wimshurst Machine

May 4, 2015 by 16 Comments

A lot of great pieces of real technology were inspired (or, at least, look like) pieces of technology from science fiction of the past. Like the smartphones of today have a surreal resemblance to the Star Trek communicators of the 60s, [Steve] took inspiration from a story about a bicycle racing in space and set out to make his own.

In the story, the bicycle wheels are replaced by electrostatic generators that power a type of (fictional) ion drive. Since an ion drive wouldn’t add much thrust to a bicycle operated on the Earth, [Steve] used the electrostatic generator he built to create a sparking light show. The generator is called a Wimshurst machine and has two counter-rotating discs which collect charge. The charge is dissipated across a spark gap which is placed where the bike light would normally go.

We don’t know if the sparks from the Wimshurst generator are enough for a proper headlight, but it’s definitely a cool effect. [Steve] also points out that it might also work as a bug zapper, but either way you should check out the video after the break to see it in action! While it’s not quite a tricorder it’s still a pretty impressive sci-fi-inspired build, and something that’s definitely unique in the bicycle realm.

There’s quite a collection of these Wimshurst projects beginning to come together. Here’s one made using a trio of soda bottles, and another example which used 3D printing.

Continue reading “Bicycle-Powered Wimshurst Machine” →

Walk Like A Xenomorph

February 28, 2015 by 19 Comments

[James Bruton] is busy working on his latest project, a “scrap metal sculpture”-inspired Alien Xenomorph suit.  However, he wanted to get a boost in height as well as a digitigrade stance. To that end, [James] 3D-printed a pair of customized stilts. Each stilt consisted of a lifter with several parts laminated together using acetone. He bolted an old pair of shoes onto the stilts, adding straps across the toes to keep the shoes from lifting up.

While the stilts worked very well, [James] wanted to add soles to them to give him some traction as he walked – falling while in a Xenomorph costume composed of sharp plastic sounds painful enough! He decided to hybrid print the soles using ABS and Ninjaflex. The ABS part of the sole was then acetone-welded to the bottom of the stilts.

[James] hopes to add some claws for effect, so long as they don’t impede his walking too much. He has already completed a good amount of the 3D-printed suit. We know the finished project is going to be amazing: [James] has created everything from Daleks to Iron Man!

Continue reading “Walk Like A Xenomorph” →

Star Wars Training Droid Uses The Force

May 2, 2014 by 2 Comments

Star Wars Training Droid

We all know the scene, Obi-Wan Kenobi gives Luke a helmet with the blast shield down. He tells Luke “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them. Stretch out with your feelings!” Easy for Obi-Wan to say – he doesn’t have a remote training droid flying around and shooting at him. [Roeland] and his team are working to create a real-life version of the training droid for Hackday’s Sci-Fi contest.

The training droid in Star Wars may not have had the Force on its side, but it was pretty darn agile in the air. To replicate this, the team started with a standard Walkera Ladybird micro quadcopter. It would have been simple to have a human controlling the drone-turned-droid, but [Roeland and co] wanted a fully computer controlled system. The Ladybird can carry a small payload, but it just doesn’t have the power to lift a computer and sensor suite. The team took a note from the GRASP Lab and used an external computer with a camera to control their droid.

Rather than the expensive motion capture system used by the big labs, the team used a pair of Wii Remote controllers for stereo vision. A small IR LED mounted atop the droid made it visible to the Wii Remotes’ cameras. A laptop was employed to calculate the current position of the droid. With the current and desired positions known, the laptop calculated and sent commands to an Arduino, which then translated them for the droid’s controller.

Nice work guys! Now you just have to add the blaster emitters to it!

Continue reading “Star Wars Training Droid Uses The Force” →

Sci-Fi Contest Roundup: Alien Autopsy And Jacking On

April 27, 2014 by 2 Comments

There’s still a few days left in our sci-fi contest, and unless you really pull out the stops today, it might be too late to get your entry in. Even though the contest is wrapping up, a lot of projects are wrapping things up and posting their finished projects. Here’s a few good ones.

These puns are awesome

chestbursterThe folks at the LVL1 hackerspace had the idea of making a life-sized game of Operation. This plan changed when someone at the hackerspace had the great idea of making it an alien autopsy. The game play remains the same, but this time the puns are awesome.

The play field is a life-sized alien, stuffed with metal-lined holes that set off a buzzer whenever the modified hemostat touches the side. Inside these holes are incredible puns that include, “Farscraped knee”, “Phantom Tentacle”, a “Tattoine removal”, “Jeffries Tuberculosis”, “HALatosis, “Babelfish in the Ear”, and “Grabthar’s Hammertoe”

The hackerspace took their alien autopsy game to the Louisville 2013 Mini Maker Faire where it was a huge hit. We’re thinking some of the puns were a little too obscure for the general population, but the attention to detail is impressive; there’s a 3D print of Pilot from Farscape. Awesome.

Jacking On

jackingon

In the Futurama universe, immoral robots get their fun by “Jacking On”, or supplanting their 6502-based CPUs with a ton of electricity. This is contraindicated by Bender’s operational manual, but a robot needs his fix, right?

[RodolpheH] and [pierrep] are building one of these jack dispensers, but instead of simply supplying a whole lot of electricity through a jack, they’re creating a Raspi-powered wireless audio streaming device. Plug some speakers into the jack, connect to the Raspi, and you’ve got a very cool audio system on your hands.

The team is going all out with the design of their jack dispenser, using random bits of plastic stuff for the enclosure and a USB-powered plasma ball for the top. It impresses random strangers, and that’s the only thing that’s important, right?

Sci-Fi Contest Roundup: Thinking 4th Dimensionally

April 26, 2014 by 14 Comments

Notwithstanding [John Titor] and his time travelling ’67 Corvette convertible, the coolest time machine on wheels has to be the DeLorean from Back to the Future. BTTF is apparently a very popular theme for our sci-fi contest, with a lot of great entries.

You mean to tell me  you made a time machine? Out of a Hyundai Accent?

fluxAfter a careful bit of research, it appears the Hyundai Accent (GLS) has both a higher top speed and faster 0-60 time than a DeLorean, and that’s before the installation of time circuits, a flux capacitor, and plutonium reactor. [docbrownjr] and [Jennifer] decided their Accent was the perfect vehicle for a time machine conversion and decided to add a Mr. Fusion  to the mix.

Like the on-screen version, this version of a Mr. Fusion is made from a kitchen appliance. With the original Krups coffee grinder out of production, the team settled on an iced tea machine. There will, however, be copious amounts of dry ice involved,  as will half-empty beer cans and banana peels.

WiFi-enabled Flux Capacitor

ledAfter knocking his head on a toilet, [Beamsjr] came up with a great idea – a networked flux capacitor, able to display the Teamcity build progress.

This build is going all out with custom PCBs – one for the controller board, and three for the shift registered LEDs underneath the acrylic knobbies in the flux capacitor. WiFi is provided by the TI CC3000 module, with the main microcontroller being an ATmega 328p,

Time circuits on

segmentsHonestly, we’d be a bit disappointed if this contest didn’t have a BTTF time circuit build entry. Luckily for us, [atheros] and [bwa] are on top of things with their time circuit clock, complete with an alarm and FM radio receiver (FM isn’t going to work in 1955, guys).

Unlike a few other time circuit builds we’ve seen over the years, the guys are doing this one up right, with 14-segment LEDs for the month display. They’re etching their own boards for this one, and it’s looking like it’ll be a very cool project when it’s complete.