the hackaday prize

439 Articles

A Raspberry Pi In An FPGA

April 26, 2016 by 50 Comments

Somehow or another, the Raspberry Pi has become a standardized form factor for single board computers. There are now Raspberry Pi-shaped objects that can do anything, and between the Odroid and bizarre Intel Atom-powered boards, everything you could ever want is now packaged into something that looks like a Raspberry Pi.

Except for one thing, of course, and that’s where [antti.lukats]’s entry for the 2016 Hackaday Prize comes in. He’s creating a version of the Raspberry Pi based on a chip that combines a fast ARM processor and an FPGA in one small package. It’s called the ZynqBerry and will, assuredly, become one of the best platforms to learn FPGA trickery on.

Xilinx’ Zynq comes with a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 running around 1GHZ, and from that fact alone should be about comparable to the original Raspberry Pi. Also inside the Zynq SoC is a very capable FPGA that [antti] is using to drive HDMI at 60hz, and can stream video from a Raspberry Pi camera to a display.

Last year for the Hackaday Prize, [antti] presented some very cool stuff, including a tiny FPGA development board no bigger than a DIP-8 chip. He’s hackaday.io’s resident FPGA wizard, and the ZynqBerry is the culmination of a lot of work over the past year or so. While it’s doubtful it will be as powerful as the latest Raspberry Pis and Pi clones, this is a phenomenal piece of work that puts an interesting twist on the usual FPGA development boards.

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A Green Powered Sailboat

April 25, 2016 by 20 Comments

Drones fill the sky raining hellfire on unsuspecting civilians below. Self-driving cars only cause half as many accidents as carbon-based drivers. Autonomous vehicles are the future, no matter how bleak that future is. One thing we haven’t seen much of is autonomous marine vehicles, be they submarines, hovercrafts, or sailboats. That’s exactly what [silvioBi] is building for his entry into the Hackaday Prize: a sailboat that will ply the waters of Italy’s largest lake.

Every boat needs a hull, but this project will need much more, from electronics to solar panels to sensors. Luckily for [silvio], choosing a hull is as simple as heading over to eBay. [silvio] picked up a fiberglass boat hull for about €40 that fill fit both is needs and his workbench.

The electronics are a bit trickier, but the basic plan is to cover the deck with solar panels, and use a few sensors including GPS, IMU, and an anemometer to steer this sailboat around a lake. Building an autonomous vehicle is a hard challenge, and for the electronics, [silvio] has a trick up his sleeve: he’s using redundant electronics. All the sensors are connected via an I2C bus, so why not put two microcontrollers on that bus in a master and slave configuration? It won’t add much mass, and given the problems had by a few of the teams behind robotic sailing competitions, a bit of redundancy isn’t a bad thing to have.

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Poopable Cameras

April 24, 2016 by 51 Comments

Pill cameras, devices for ‘capsule endoscopy’, or in much cruder terms, ‘poopable cameras’, are exceedingly cool technology. They’re astonishingly small, communicate through a gastrointestinal tract to the outside world, and have FDA certification. These three facts also mean pill cameras are incredible expensive, but that doesn’t mean a hardware hacker can’t build their own, and that’s exactly what [friarbayliff] is doing for his entry into The Hackaday Prize.

First things first: [friarbayliff] is not building one of these for human consumption. That’s a morass of regulatory requirements and ethical issues. This pill camera is only being built as an experiment, because it would be fun to build one. The pill cams swallowed by patients every day have millions of dollars in R&D behind them before human trials. That said, given a good food-safe enclosure, I’d down one of these as an experiment.

This pill camera will use a simple, off-the-shelf 2 megapixel image sensor that can be bought on eBay for less than five dollars. With a small 32-bit micro, these cameras are easy to drive and capture images from. Power is provided from a single silver oxide button cell battery and a boost converter. In total, [friarbayliff] estimates the total PCB area to be just under one square inch, making this a relatively inexpensive device to build. There will be a radio transceiver in there somewhere, but [friar] hasn’t figure that part out yet.

Pill cameras are some amazing technology, but relatively inaccessible unless you get a used one. Ew. [Mike Harrison] tore one of these pill cams apart a few years ago, and it really is an incredible device. Building one for fun – even if it won’t be used in a human – is a fantastic learning experience and a great entry for the 2016 Hackaday Prize.

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Magical Blinky Capacitive Sensing Tweezers

April 23, 2016 by 10 Comments

Electronic tweezers – the kind that can test the voltage between two contacts, the resistance of an SMD resistor, or the capacitance of a circuit – are very cool and very useful if somewhat expensive. We’ve seen commercial versions of these smart tweezers, hacks to make them more useful, and homebrew versions that still work very well. All of these versions are pretty large, as far as tweezers go. [kodera2t]’s version of electronic tweezers submitted for this year’s Hackaday Prize goes in the other direction: it’s the smallest set of electronic tweezers that’s still useful.

[kodera]’s electronic sensing tweezers only measure capacitors, and for good reason: chip caps usually don’t have values printed on them. These tweezers don’t print out the value of a cap on a display, either. Instead, these tweezers just flash an LED if the value of the cap is above 0.1uF. It’s simple, but surprisingly useful for most soldering jobs.

The circuit for this pair of magical tweezers is about as simple as if can get, with all the smarts contained in a very small ATtiny10. The PCB [kodera] designed is smaller than the coin cell battery, and with the help of some copper tape and possibly an insulator, this device can be mounted to any pair of tweezers. It’s a simple tool, yes, but that’s the beauty of it, and makes for a great entry into the Hackaday Prize

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TinyDriver – ATtiny84 Platform Without Arduino

April 22, 2016 by 28 Comments

You don’t need an Arduino for everything! Or do you? This is an argument that plays out here quite often. Whatever the outcome, most folks agree that once you’ve dipped your feet in the shallow end of the pool, the real fun is when you dive into the deep end.

[Mahesh Venkitachalam] designed tinyDriver, an experimental Open Source breakout board for the Atmel ATtiny84 chip. His idea was to create a convenient platform which can be used to understand microcontrollers in-depth, by letting users dive under the hood and make use of the various features of the chip such as timers, PWM, interrupts, ADC, and digital I/O. The ATtiny84 is cheap and simple enough for starters. Add a low-cost AVR programmer, install the free and cross-platform avr-gcc and avrdude tool chain, read up the data sheet, learn some C programming and start experimenting. Rinse and repeat and you’ll be a pro at it soon. He’s got a few starter projects documented on his website to get you going.

The hardware is open source, and the Git repository contains the hardware source and example code. If you’re a hardware noob, he’s thoughtfully added a PTC resettable fuse and reverse polarity protection on the board to make sure you don’t release the magic blue smoke prematurely. All of the I/O’s are broken out on a header, and the motor driver and RGB LED can be disabled when not needed. The board isn’t hand-assembly friendly, but he plans to crowd fund it shortly. If you want to move beyond the Arduino platform, projects like the tinyDriver are the way to go.

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USB-less WiFi For The Pi Zero

April 21, 2016 by 27 Comments

Since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi Zero, the hacker, maker, and hobbyist electronics world has been thrown into turmoil. ‘The Raspberry Pi Foundation is corrupt,’ the detractors said, ‘and the Pi Zero is just a marketing ploy to get their name out.’ Others chimed in that the Raspberry Pi Zero doesn’t even exist. Despite what a million monkeys on a million keyboards say, the Raspberry Pi Zero does exist and is very cool, despite how limited it is. There’s only one USB port, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have WiFi. [ajlitt] came up with a WiFi hat for the Pi Zero that goes right through the GPIO pins, and shouldn’t cost more than a few dollars to implement on any Raspberry Pi.

There is no Ethernet port on the Pi, and apart from a single USB OTG port, no apparent high-speed interfaces to the outside world. On the other hand, there’s a few things hidden deep down in the SoC on the Pi including two MMC controllers. One of these controllers is used for the SD card, but the second can be broken out on a few GPIO pins. By tapping into those pins and configuring the kernel just right, SDIO is available on the GPIO pins, giving the Pi WiFi through a cheap ESP8266 module.

We’ve seen [ajlitt]’s work on SDIO devices on the Pi before, but he’s slowly been reworking this build with the Pi Zero in mind. It didn’t begin as a project for the Hackaday Prize, but already it’s one of the more popular entries so far. Of course there are thousands of projects on Hackaday.io that aren’t entered into the Hackaday Prize this year, and if you’re behind one of those, this is your call to step up.

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A Friendly Flying Robot Pet

April 20, 2016 by 14 Comments

[luca] has always wanted a flying robot, but despite the recent popularity of quadcopters and drones [luca] has never seen a drone that is truly autonomous. Although sometimes billed as autonomous, quadcopters and fixed wing aircraft have always had someone holding a remote, had to stay in a controlled environment, or had some off-board vision system.

Computers are always getting smaller and faster, battery and motor technology is always getting better. That’s why [luca] is building a truly autonomous flying robot for the 2016 Hackaday Prize.

Since [luca] is building a coaxial copter – something that looks like a ducted fan with a few vanes at the bottom – there will be control issues. Normal helicopters use the pitch of the blades and the torque produced by the tail rotor to keep flying straight. A quadcopter uses two pairs of motors spinning in opposite directions to stay level. With just two rotors mounted on top of each other, you would think [luca]’s coaxial copter is an intractable problem. Not so; there are bizarre control systems for this type of flying machine that make it as nimble in the sky as any other helicopter.

The design of this flying robot is a bit unlike anything on the market. It looks like a flying ducted fan, with a few electronics strapped to the bottom. It’s big, but also has the minimum number of rotors, to have the highest power density possible with current technology. With a few calculations, [luca] predicted this robot will be able to hoist an IMU, GPS, ultrasonic range finder, optical flow camera, and a LIDAR module in the air for about fifty minutes. That’s a remarkably long flight time for something that hovers, and we can’t wait to see how [luca]’s build turns out.

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