Hackaday Prize Entry: Lucid Dreaming Research

September 4, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

Lucid dreaming is one of the rare psychological phenomenon terrible sci-fi frequently gets right. Yes, lucid dreaming does exist, and one of the best ways to turn a normal dream into a lucid dream is to fixate on a particular object, sound, or smell. For their Hackaday Prize entry, [Jae] is building a device to turn the electronic enthusiast community on to lucid dreaming. It’s a research platform that allows anyone to study their own dreams and access a world where you can do anything.

The core of this project is an 8-channel EEG used to measure the electrical activity in the brain during sleep. These EEG electrodes are fed into a 24-bit ADC which is sampled 250 times per second by an ARM Cortex M4F microcontroller. The captured data is recorded or sent to a PC or smartphone over a Bluetooth connection where a familiar sound can be played (think of the briefcase in Inception), or some other signal that will tell the dreamer they’re dreaming.

We’ve seen a few similar builds in the past, most famously a NeuroSky MindWave headset turned into a comfortable single-channel EEG-type device. The NeuroSky hardware is limited, though, and a setup with proper amplifiers and ADCs will be significantly more helpful in debugging the meatspace between [Jae]’s ears.

Hackaday Prize Entry: BunnyBot Helps Out All On Its Own

September 2, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 14 Comments

[Jack Qiao] wanted an autonomous robot that could be handy around an ever-changing shop. He didn’t want a robot he’d have to baby sit. If he said, ‘bring me the 100 ohm resistors’, it would go find and bring them to him.

He iterated a bit, and ended up building quite a nice robot platform for under a thousand dollars. It’s got a realsense camera and a rangefinder from a Neato robotic vacuum. In addition to a mircrophone, it has a whole suite of additional sensors in its base, which is a stripped down robotic vacuum from a Korean manufacturer. A few more components come together to give it an arm and a gripper.

The thinking is done on a Nvidia Jetson TK1 board. The cores on the integrated graphics card are used to perform faster computer vision calculations. The software is all ROS based.

As can be seen in the video after the break. The robot uses SLAM techniques to successfully navigate and complete tasks such as fetch resistors, get water, and more. [Jack Qiao] is happy with his robot, and we would be too.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Magic Bit-Of-Wire Motion Detector Library For Arduino

September 1, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 11 Comments

We’re still not sure exactly how [connornishijima]’s motion detector works, though many readers offered plausible explanations in the comments the last time we covered it. It works well enough, though, and he’s gone and doubled down on the Arduino way and bundled it up nicely into a library.

In the previous article we covered [connor] demonstrating the motion detector. Something about the way the ADC circuit for the Arduino is wired up makes it work. The least likely theory so far involves life force, or more specifically, the Force… from Star Wars. The most likely theories are arguing between capacitance and electrostatic charge.

Either way, it was reliable enough a phenomenon that he put the promised time in and wrote a library. There’s even documentation on the GitHub. To initialize the library simply tell it which analog pin is hooked up, what the local AC frequency is (so its noise can be filtered out), and a final value that tells the Arduino how long to average values before reporting an event.

It seems to work well and might be fun to play with or wow the younger hackers in your life with your wizarding magics.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Sip And Puff

August 31, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

A sip-and-puff device is an assistive technology used by people who cannot use their hands. Being a quasi-medical device, you can imagine this technology is extremely expensive, incapable of being modified, and basically a black box that can’t do anything except what it was designed for. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Jason] is building his own sip-and-puff interface that’s cheaper and more capable than the available commercial versions.

Sip-and-puff devices can be mapped to control a wheelchair, click a mouse, or press a key on a keyboard. You can do a lot with USB, so for this open sip-and-puff device, [Jason] is using the ever-popular ATmega32U4 microcontroller.

USB is only one part of the problem, and to measure the sips and puffs of air through a plastic hose, [Jason] is using a pressure sensor from Freescale/NXP. While this is very similar to what would be found in the off-the-shelf version of a sip-and-puff device, it’s rather hard to interface with. The current version of the board is using an instrument amplifier, and the mechanical connection between the pressure sensor and the board is slightly bizarre. [Jason] has a few ideas for a better sensor, and for the rest of the Hackaday Prize he’s going to work on redesigning this device with simplicity in mind.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Coffee Machine Grows In Complexity With No Sign Of Stopping

August 30, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 24 Comments

In Star Trek, there is a race of cyborgs with a drive to slowly assimilate all sentient life. Their aesthetic is not far off from the one [Ronald]’s ever expanding coffee machine is taking on. One has to wonder, what dark purpose would bring the Borg into existence? Where did they start? If [Ronald] doesn’t get a satisfying cup of coffee soon, we may find out.

We covered the first iteration of his brewing machine in 2013. We like to imagine that he’s spent many sleepless, heavily caffeinated days and nights since then to arrive at version 2. This version is a mechanical improvement over his original Rube Goldberg contraption. On top of that, it has improved electronics and code, with a color screen reminiscent of industrial control panels.

He’s also working on something called, “AutoBaristaScript(TM),” which attempts to hold the entire universe of pour-over coffee within its clutches. We don’t know when he’ll stop, but when he does finally create that perfect cup, what’s left of the world will breathe easier. They’ll also drink good coffee.

Editor’s Note: The Borg do not necessarily want to assimilate all sentient life as an end unto itself. The Kazon were deemed unworthy of assimilation (VOY: Mortal Coil). The Borg are driven towards perfection, accomplished by adding technological and biological distinctiveness to their own.

Hackaday Prize Entry: 1337 Haxxor Keyboards

August 29, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

If you’re like us, you spend most of your time in front of a computer keyboard, wondering where your life went wrong. [AnonymouSmst] has a slightly more positive outlook on life, which led them to create a truly DIY keyboard with OLEDs, Bluetooth, NFC, Analog joysticks, an ‘Internet of Things thingy’, local storage, and ostentatious backlighting. It’s a 1337 h4x0r keyboard, and one of the coolest input devices we’ve seen since that weird GameCube controller.

[AnonymouSmst] was one of the very elite, very privileged hackers that made it out to the Hackaday Munich meetup where [sprite_tm] first demoed his firmware hack that allowed anyone to play Snake on a keyboard. Here, the idea of building the ultimate keyboard was planted, and [mst] quickly began researching which keyswitches to use. Apparently, [mst] hates his neighbors and chose the obnoxiously loud Cherry Blues.

To a standard 60% keyboard layout, [AnonymouSmst] added a lot of hardware you don’t usually see in even the most spectacular mechanical keyboard builds. A few dozen WS2812 RGB LEDs were added to the build, as was an Adafruit Bluefruit module, an NFC reader, a LORA module and a ESP8266 for WiFi capability, an OLED display just because, and two analog joysticks on either side, one acting as the arrow cluster the other acting as a mouse.

We’ve seen dozens of mechanical keyboard builds over the years, but this takes the entire concept of a DIY keyboard to the next level. It’s bright, shiney, glowey, and a vulgar display of conspicuous consumption and engineering prowess. It is the perfect keyboard, if only because it was designed and built by the person who would ultimately wield it.

Hackaday Prize: 20 Projects That Are The Height Of Automation

August 29, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Automation makes the world go around. Whether it’s replacing elevator attendants with buttons, replacing songwriters with computer algorithms, or giving rovers on Mars the same sense and avoid capability as a Tesla, Automation makes our lives easier and better. Today we’re excited to announce the twenty projects that best demonstrate the possibilities of Automation in the running for the 2016 Hackaday Prize. These projects tackled problems ranging from improving the common stepper motor to flying Lidar around a neighborhood on a gigantic ducted fan.

The winners of the Hackaday Prize automation challenge are, in no particular order:

If your project is on the list, congrats. You just won $1000 for your hardware project, and are now moving up to the Hackaday Prize finals where you’ll have a chance to win $150,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe DesignLab in Pasadena.

If your project didn’t make the cut, there’s still an oppurtunity for you to build the next great piece of hardware for The Hackaday Prize. The Assistive Technologies Challenge is currently under way challenging you to build a project that helps others move better, see better, or live better.

We’re looking for exoskeletons, a real-life Iron Man, a better wheelchair, a digital braille display, or the best educational software you can imagine.

Like the Design Your Concept, Anything Goes, Citizen Science, and Automation rounds of the the Hackaday Prize, the top twenty projects will each win $1000 and move on to the Hackaday Prize finals for a chance to win $150,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe DesignLab in Pasadena

If you don’t have a project up on Hackaday.io, you can start one right now and submit it to the Hackaday Prize. If you’re already working on the next great idea in assistive technologies, add it to the Assistive Technologies challenge using the dropdown menu on the sidebar of your project page.

The Hackaday Prize is the greatest hardware competition on Earth. We want to see the next great Open Hardware project benefit everyone. We’re working toward that by recognizing people who build, make, and design the coolest and most useful devices around.