the hackaday prize

439 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Minimal ATtiny Voltage And Frequency Counter

July 2, 2016 by 4 Comments

Sometimes when you build something it is because you have set out with a clear idea or specification in mind, but it’s not always that way. Take [kodera2t]’s project, he set out to master the ATtiny series of microcontrollers and started with simple LED flashers, but arrived eventually at something rather useful. An ATtiny10 DVM and DFM all-in-one with an i2c LCD display and a minimum of other components.

The DFM uses the ATtiny’s internal 16 bit timer, which has the convenient property of being able to be driven by an external clock. The frequency to be measured drives the timer, and the time it returns is compared to the system clock. It’s not the finest of frequency counters, depending as it does on the ATtiny’s clock rather than a calibrated crystal reference, but it does the job.

The results are shown in the video below, and all the code has been posted in his GitHub repository. We can see that there is the basis of a handy little instrument in this circuit, though with the price of cheap multimeters being so low even a circuit this minimal would struggle to compete on cost.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: DIY Foot Orthotics

July 1, 2016 by 7 Comments

What does your gait look like to your foot? During which part of your gait is the ball of your feet experiencing the most pressure? Is there something wrong with it? Can you fix it by adding or removing material from a custom insole? All these answers can be had with an expensive system and a visit to a podiatrist, but if [Charles Fried] succeeds you can build a similar system at home. 

The device works by having an array of pressure sensors on a flat insole inside of a shoe. When the patient walks, the device streams the data to a computer which logs it. The computer then produces a heat map of the person’s step. The computer also produces a very useful visualization called a gait line. This enables the orthotist to specify or make the correct orthotic.

[Charles]’s version of this has another advantage over the professional versions. His will be able to stream wirelessly to a data logger. This means you can wear the sensor around for a while and get a much more realistic picture of your gait. Like flossing right before the dentist, many people consciously think about their gait while at the foot doctor; this affects the result.

He currently has a prototype working. He’s not sure how long his pressure sensors will last in the current construction, and he’s put wireless logging on hold for now. However, the project is interesting and we can’t wait to see if [Charles] can meet all his design goals.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An MRI Machine

June 30, 2016 by 27 Comments

Magnetic resonance imaging devices are one of the most fantastically incredible machines humans have ever built. They’re capable of producing three-dimensional images of living tissue by flipping protons around with a magnetic field. Ninety percent of the population doesn’t know what that sentence means, yet you can find an MRI machine inside nearly any reasonably equipped hospital in America.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Peter Jansen] is building a magnetic resonance imager, capable of producing the same type of images you’d get from the radiology department at a hospital. It’s going to be a desktop unit, capable of scanning fruit and other similarly sized objects, and can be built using tools no more advanced than a hot air gun and a laser cutter.

This project is a continuation of what should have been [Peter]’s Hackaday Prize entry last year. Things got busy for him last summer, he dropped out of the Hackaday Prize, which means he’s welcome to continue his build this year.

Last year, [Peter] developed the plywood mechanism that would rotate a magnetic sensor across the diameter of the scanning volume, rotate the object to be scanned, and lift the object through the volume. It’s a weird 3-axis CNC machine, basically, but the parts near the magnetic sensor can’t be made out of metal. Dental floss worked okay, but we have a few hundred feet of Spectra fishing line if we ever bump into [Peter]. Magnetic resonance imaging means big coils of wire, too, which means the tedious task of winding coils around a cylinder is part of the build. [Peter] built a machine to do the work for him.

This is not [Peter]’s first attempt at building an imaging device. He built a desktop CT scanner that is exceptionally slow, but does shoot radiation through fruit to produce an image. His first project on Hackaday.io was the Open Source Science Tricorder, one of the top five finalists in the first year of the Hackaday Prize.

Already, [Peter] has some amazing work under his belt that produces real data that could not be otherwise obtained. An Open Source MRI is the perfect project for the Hackaday Prize’s Citizen Science phase, and we’re very happy to see him enter this project.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Invisible

June 29, 2016 by 20 Comments

[Kate Reed] found a quote by a homeless person that said “No one sees us”, which led her to exploring what it actually means to be invisible — and if we actually choose to be invisible by hiding away our emotions, sexual preference, race or income. She realized that too often, we choose to only see what we want to see, rendering all the rest invisible by looking away. Her public art campaign and Hackaday Prize entry “Invisible” aims to increase social awareness and strengthening the community by making hidden thoughts, feelings and needs visible.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Universal Glucose Meter

June 28, 2016 by 77 Comments

If you need an example of Gillette’s razor blade business plan, don’t look at razors; a five pack of the latest multi-blade, aloe-coated wonder shaver is still only about $20. Look a glucose meters. Glucose meters all do the same thing – test blood glucose levels – but are imminently proprietary, FDA regulated, and subsidized by health insurance. It’s a perfect storm of vendor lock-in that would make King Gillette blush.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Tom] is building what was, until now, only a dream. It’s a universal glucometer that uses any test strip. The idea, of course, is to buy the cheapest test strip while giving the one-fingered salute to the companies who release more models of glucometers in a year than Apple does phones.

As with any piece of consumer electronics, there are plenty of application guides published by the biggest semiconductor companies explaining to engineers how to use their part to build a device. After reviewing the literature from TI, Maxim, Freescale, and Microchip, and a few research articles on the same subject, [Tom] has a pretty good idea how to build a glucometer.

The trick now is figuring out how to build an adapter for every make and model of test strip. This is more difficult than it sounds, because some test strips have two contacts, some have three, some have five, and all of them are proprietary. Calibration will be an issue, but if you’re building a glucometer from scratch, that’s not a very big problem.

This is one of the most impressive projects we’ve seen in this year’s Hackaday Prize. No, it shouldn’t be the only way a diabetic tracks their sugar levels, but diabetics shouldn’t rely only on test strips anyway. If you’re looking for a Hackaday Prize project that has the potential to upend an industry, this is the one.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: MyComm Handheld Satellite Messenger

June 27, 2016 by 54 Comments

We live in a connected world, but that world ends not far beyond the outermost cell phone tower. [John Grant] wants to be connected everywhere, even in regions where no mobile network is available, so he is building a solar powered, handheld satellite messenger: The MyComm – his entry for the Hackaday Prize.

The MyComm is a handheld touch-screen device, much like a smartphone, that connects to the Iridium satellite network to send and receive text messages. At the heart of his build, [John] uses a RockBLOCK Mk2 Iridium SatComm Module hooked up to a Teensy 3.1. The firmware is built upon a FreeRTOS port for proper task management. Project contributor [Jack] crafted an intuitive GUI that includes an on-screen keyboard to write, send and receive messages. A micro SD card stores all messages and contact list entries. Eventually, the system will be equipped with a solar cell, charging regulator and LiPo battery for worldwide, unconditional connectivity.

2016 will be an interesting year for the Iridium network since the first satellites for the improved (and backward-compatible) “Iridium NEXT” network are expected to launch soon. At times the 66 Iridium satellites currently covering the entire globe were considered a $5B heap of space junk due to deficiencies in reliability and security. Yet, it’s still there, with maker-friendly modems being available at $250 and pay-per-use rates of about 7 ct/kB (free downstream for SDR-Hackers). Enjoy the video of [Jack] explaining the MyComm user interface:

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Local Positioning System

June 26, 2016 by 34 Comments

Use of the global positioning system is all around us. From the satnav in your car to quadcopters hovering above a point, there are hundreds of ways we use the Global Positioning System every day. There are a few drawbacks to GPS: it takes a while to acquire a signal, GPS doesn’t work well indoors, and because nodes on the Internet of Things will be cheap, they probably won’t have a GPS receiver.

These facts open up the door for a new kind of positioning system. A local positioning system that uses hardware devices already have, but is still able to determine a location within a few feet. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Blecky] is building the SubPos Ranger, a local positioning system based on 802.15.4 radios that still allows a device to determine its own location.

The SubPos Ranger is based on [Blecky]’s entry for the 2015 Hackaday Prize, SubPos that used WiFi, RSSI, and trilateration to determine a receiver’s position in reference to three or more base stations. It works remarkably well, even in places where GPS doesn’t, like parking garages and basements.

The SubPos Ranger is an extension of the WiFi-only SubPos, based on 802.15.4, and offers longer range and lower power than the WiFi-only SubPos system. It’s still capable of determining where a receiver is to within a few feet, making this the ideal solution for devices that need to know where are without relying on GPS.

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