Eyedriveomatic are the Grand Prize winners of the 2015 Hackaday Prize. The winners were just announced on stage at the Hackaday Superconference, and awarded by the prize Judges. Eyedriveomatic is a non-invasive method of adding eye-control to powered wheelchairs. Many times these wheelchairs are rented and permanent alterations cannot be made. This inexpensive and easily adaptable hardware has the power to improve life for those who need more options for controlling powered wheelchairs.
We will be publishing more information about this year’s winners in the coming week. The full standings are listed below. Please check out all of the 2015 Hackaday Prize Finalist and the Best Product Finalists.
In the 80s and 90s, building a professional quality PCB was an expensive proposition. Even if you could afford a few panels of your latest board, putting components on it was another expensive process. Now, we have cheap PCBs, toaster-based solder ovens, and everything else to make cheap finished boards except for pick and place machines. ProtoVoltaics’ semifinalist entry for the Hackaday Prize is the answer to this problem. They’re taking a cheap, off-the-shelf CNC machine and turning it into a pick and place machine that would be a welcome addition to any hackerspace or well-equipped garage workshop.
Instead of building their own Cartesian robot, ProtoVoltaics is building their pick and place around an X-Carve, a CNC router that can be built for about $1000 USD. To this platform, ProtoVoltaics is adding all the mechanics and intelligence to turn a few webcams and a CNC machine into a proper pick and place machine.
Among the additions to the X-Carve is a new tool head that is able to suck parts out of a reel and spit them down on a blob of solder paste. The webcams are monitored by software which includes CUDA-accelerated computer vision.
Of course a pick and place machine isn’t that useful without feeders, and for that, ProtoVoltaics built their own open source feeders. Put all of these elements together, and you have a machine that’s capable of placing up to 1000 components per hour; more than enough for any small-scale production, and enough for some fairly large runs of real products.
You can check out some of the videos for the project below.
Preterm infants frequently require ventilator support while they’re in the neonatal ICU, and this is usually done with a CPAP machine. The machine to infant interface is called a nasal cannula, a bit of plastic that connects an infant’s nose to the machine. Because there aren’t that many sizes of nasal cannula available, and preemies come in all sizes, there are inevitable problems. Ill-fitting nasal cannula can reduce the effectiveness of a CPAP, and can even cause significant damage to an infant’s septum.
For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Ben] is tackling this problem head on. He’s working on creating individualized nasal cannula for newborns using 3D modeling and printing, allowing nasal cannula of all shapes and sizes to be created in a matter of hours.
To create these customized cannula, [Ben] is 3D scanning an infant mannequin head to gather enough data to import it into a Processing sketch. A custom cannula is then created and printed with flexible 3D printer filament. In theory, it should work, apart from the considerations involved in building a medical device.
As for why custom plastic tubes matter, [Ben] works at the only NICU in Western Australia. Even though he only sees 8-10 CPAP ‘pressure injuries’ in his unit each year, these kids are extremely fragile and some parents have expressed a desire for something that isn’t as uncomfortable for their newborn than the off-the-shelf solution. Customizing these cannula from a quick 3D scan is a great way to do that, and a perfect example of the Hackaday Prize theme of ‘build something that matters.’
Robots of the future will be in the home, and ready to do whatever job we tell them to do. But they’ll need to know where they are within the house. Dead reckoning with accelerometers and gyroscopes are just a sufficient solution; what we really need is an indoor location service. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Göran] is doing just that. He’s building a small device that will find its position with 10 cm precision, indoors.
[Göran]’s LPS Mini is built around a very interesting part – the Decawave DWM100. It’s a module that uses an 802.15 radio to trilaterate the distance from several ‘anchors’ to a tag. This, by itself, gives the LPS Mini a navigation system with 10 cm precision. Even higher precision can be accomplished with an IMU gathering accelerometer, gyro, and compass data, and even further with a tiny altimeter. The result is a tiny board that knows exactly where it is.
As far as practical uses go, these LPS Mini boards were used to move beds around an art exhibit at Hayward Gallery in London. While moving beds around an art gallery doesn’t sound like a game-changing invention, think about the uses for GPS in the 1980s – no one could have imagined a chip that would tell you where you are or that could keep a quadcopter on the right heading.
You can check out [Göran]’s video for the LPS Mini below.
Industrial robot arms are curious devices, found everywhere from the back of old engineering classrooms where they taught kinematics in the 90s, to the factory floor where they do the same thing over and over again while contemplating their existence. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Dan] is building a big robot arm. It’s not big enough to ride on, but it is large enough to automate a few processes in a reasonably well-equipped lab.
This is not a tiny robotic arm powered by 9 gram hobby servos. For the bicep and tricep of [Dan]’s arm, he’s using linear actuators – they’re high precision and powerful. A few months ago, [Dan] tried to design a hypocycloid gear but couldn’t get a $3000 prototype to work. Although the hypocycloid is out, he did manage to build a strange differential pan/roll mechanism for the wrist of the arm. It really is a thing of beauty, and with the engineering [Dan] has put into it, it’s a very useful tool.
If you’d like to meet [Dan]’s robot arm in person, he’ll be at the 2015 NYC Maker Faire this weekend. Check out [Dan]’s Hackaday Prize video for his robot arm below.
GPS-based location services will be around with us forever. If you’re in the outback, in the middle of the ocean, or even just in a neighborhood that doesn’t have good cell coverage, there’s no better way to figure out where you are than GPS. Using satellites orbiting thousands of miles above the Earth as a location service is an idea that breaks down at some very inopportune times. If you’re in a parking garage, you’re not using GPS to find your car. If you’re in a shopping mall, the best way to find your way to a store is still a map. Anyone every tried to use GPS and Google Maps in the hotel/casino labyrinth that is the Las Vegas strip?
[Blecky]’s entry for the Best Product competition of the Hackaday Prize aims to solve this problem. It’s an indoor location service using only cheap WiFi modules called SubPos. With just a few ESP8266 modules, [Blecky] can set up a WiFi positioning system, accurate to half a meter, that can be used wherever GPS isn’t.
The idea for a GPS-less positioning system came to [Blecky] after a caving expedition and finding navigation though subterranean structures was difficult without the aid of cell coverage and GPS. This got [Blecky] thinking what would be required to build a positioning service in a subterranian environment.
A SubPos node, equipped with an ESP8266 WiFi module
The answer to this question came in the form of a cheap WiFi module. Each of the SubPos nodes are encoded with the GPS coordinates of where they’re placed. By transmitting this location through the WiFi Beacon Frame, along with the transmitted power, any cell phone can use three or more nodes to determine its true location, down to a few centimeters. All of this is done without connecting to a specific WiFi network; it’s a complete hack of the WiFi standard to allow positioning data.
The most shallow comparison to an existing geolocation system would be a WiFi positioning system (WPS), but there are several key differences. In WPS, the WiFi APs don’t transmit their own location; the AP is simply cross-referenced with GPS coordinates in a database. Secondly, APs do not transmit their own transmit power – important if you’re using RSSI to determine how far you are from an Access Point.
The best comparison to an indoor location service comes from a new Decawave module that sets up ‘base stations’ and figures out a sensor’s location based on time of flight. This, however, requires additional radios for each device receiving location data. SubPos only requires WiFi, and you don’t even need to connect to an AP to get this location data; everything is broadcast as a beacon frame, and every device with WiFi detects a SubPos node automatically.
As an entry to the Hackaday Prize Best Product competition, there is an inevitable consideration as to how this product will be marketed. The applications for businesses are obvious; shopping malls could easily build a smartphone app showing a user exactly where in the mall they are, and provide directions to The Gap or one of the dozens of GameStops in the building. Because the SubPos nodes also work in 3D space, parking garage owners could set up a dozen or so SubPos nodes to direct you to your exact parking spot. Disney, I’m sure, would pay through the nose to get this technology in their parks.
Already [Blecky] is in talks with one company that would like to license his technology, but he’s not focused only on the high-dollar business accounts. He already has a product that needs manufacturing, and if he wins the Best Product competition, he will be working on something for the hacker/homebrew market. The price point [Blecky] sees is around $15 a node. The economics of this work with the ESP WiFi module, but [Blecky] is also looking at alternative chip sets that would allow for more than just RSSI position finding; an improved version of the SubPos node not based on the ESP-8266 could bring time of flight into the mix, providing better position accuracy while still being cheaper to manufacture than the current ESP-based solution.
[Blecky] has a great project on his hands here, and something we will, undoubtedly, see more of in the future. The idea of using WiFi beacon frames to transmit location data, and received signal strength to suss out a position is groundbreaking and applicable to everything from spelunking to finding your car in a parking garage. Since the SubPos system isn’t tied to any specific hardware, this could even be implemented in commercial routers, giving any device with WiFi true location data, inside or out. It’s also one of the top ten finalists for the Hackaday Prize Best Product competition, and like the others, it’s the cream of the crop.
A while ago, [Joshua Young] had a conversation with an environmental scientist. There aren’t many government-funded pollution monitoring stations around Texas, but there are a lot of well-off home owners associations in Houston that have the sensors to collect the data. Air quality monitoring is important, and more data is usually better, and without these HOA’s providing the data for free, these environmental scientists wouldn’t have the data to do their job.
The system [Joshua] is building uses a suite of air quality sensors to measure sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone and particulate matter. These sensors connect to the Internet through either an ESP8266 WiFi module or a LoRa radio module, push the data onto the cloud, and let the entire world know what the air quality is.
Using tens of thousands of individual base stations to gather data has been done before; Weather Underground uses ten times as many weather stations than the National Weather Service to get better weather tracking resolution. Pollution sensors aren’t normally a part of a weather station, and with [Joshua]’s project, the environmental scientists tracking this data will hopefully get the data they need.
