the hackaday prize

439 Articles

Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: Helping Out In The ER

September 18, 2015 by 6 Comments

[Moldovanu] and [Radu] are out to fix emergency medical care in their native Romania. They’re developing a very inexpensive bracelet that keeps track of heartbeat, blood oxygen, and temperature of a patient, either in an ER or in the waiting room.

The Health Mate, as the guys are calling it, is a small bracelet loaded up with IR LEDs, photodiodes, a temperature sensor, and a WiFi module. They’ve wired all these parts up on a home made board, connected a battery, and are starting to measure their vitals.

It’s a simple device, but it’s simple for a reason: heart rate and blood oxygen saturation are some of the most important indicators doctors and nurses look at when triaging patients. By making their health monitor cheap and good enough, it eventually makes its way onto the wrists of more patients, and will hopefully save more lives

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Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: Walking Robots From Scratch

September 17, 2015 by 7 Comments

The usual way robotics is taught – and nearly everything, for that matter – is simple. A teacher gets a pre-built module or kit, teaches the students how to use the kit, and class is adjourned. There are significant and obvious drawbacks to this. [Kevin Harrington]’s entry for the Hackaday Prize turns that pedagogy on its head. It’s a robotics development platform that encourages everyone to create their own robots from scratch, starting with the question, ‘how many legs do you want your robot to have’.

Bowler Studio uses OpenCV for image processing, a kinematics engine, a JCSG-based CAD and 3D modeling engine to interface with motors, create 3D models according to kinematic models, feed imaging data to a robot, and create graphical interfaces for robots. It’s an entire robotics creation studio in a single package, and of course everything can be backed up to the cloud.

The electronic backbone is another one of [Kevin] and Neuron Robotics’ projects, DyIO, a USB peripheral that makes for a great robotics platform. The DyIO can control up to 24 servos, enough for a very, very complex robot, and also has the ability to control motors, read encoders, or just blink pins.

These two projects together make for a great way to learn the ins and outs of robots that are a little more complex than a simple wheeled robot, and expandable enough to make some really, really cool projects

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Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: Artificial Muscles And Supercapacitors

September 16, 2015 by 29 Comments

For [Lloyd T Cannon III]’s entry to the Hackaday Prize, he’s doing nothing less than changing the way everything moves. For the last 100 years, internal combustion engines have powered planes, trains, and automobiles, and only recently have people started looking at batteries and electric motors. With his supercapacitors and artificial muscles, [Lloyd] is a few decades ahead of everyone else.

There are two parts to [Lloyd]’s project, the first being the energy storage device. He’s building a Lithium Sulfur Silicon hybrid battery. Li-S-Si batteries have the promise to deliver up to 2000 Watt hours per kilogram of battery. For comparison, even advanced Lithium batteries top out around 2-300 Wh/kg. That’s nearly an order of magnitude difference, and while it’s a far way off from fossil fuels, it would vastly increase the range of electric vehicles and make many more technologies possible.

The other part of [Lloyd]’s project is artificial muscles. Engines aren’t terribly efficient, and electric motors are only good if you want to spin things. For robotics, muscles are needed, and [Lloyd] is building them out of fishing line. These muscles contract because of the resistive heating of a carbon fiber filament embedded in the muscle. It’s been done before, but this is the first project we’ve seen that replicates the technique in a garage lab.

Both parts of [Lloyd]’s project are worthy of a Hackaday Prize entry alone, but putting them together as one project more than meets the goal: to build something that matters.

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Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: A Full-Stack IoT Platform

September 15, 2015 by 16 Comments

There are millions of devices and sensors connected to the Internet, and the next decade will bring billions more. How will anyone keep track of all these sensors? With analog.io, a platform for IoT devices, and [Luke]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize.

The problem of aggregating data from an Internet of things has been tackled before. Last year, Sparkfun released data.sparkfun.com, built on Phant, a tool for collecting data from the Internet of Things. Even though Phant can collect the data, it only does this in neat columns with values and time stamps. To turn this into something a little more visual, analog.io was born. In the future, [Luke] will add support for thingspeak and Xively data streams; the entire project is intended to be backend agnostic, allowing anyone to get their data from any thing, store it on any server, and connect it to analog.io for visualization and sharing.

Graphing data provides for some interesting opportunities, like when [Luke] found his Internet-connected water meter was logging far, far too much water consumption. A fitting on a garden hose came loose, and the hose started pouring water onto the ground, a foot away from his basement wall. That’s a swimming pool’s worth of water on [Luke]’s foundation, easily and readily graphed. He’s now adding an alert feature to analog.io.

Graphing data does present its own problems, like when a sensor sends a single erroneous data point. [Luke] is calling this a ‘burr’, and analog.io can filter out these small spikes that make data unreadable as a graph. There’s a lot of work that goes into making a usable graph, and [Luke] is crossing all his ‘t’s and dotting all his lowercase ‘j’s.

While many of the entries for the Hackaday Prize are running at the ground level with individual sensors connected to the Internet, [Luke]’s project tackles the Internet of Things problem from the other end, providing everyone a way to easily visualize their data. It’s a great Hackaday Prize entry, and will surely come in useful for a number of other prize entries as well.

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Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: Balancing Humanoid Robots

September 14, 2015 by No comments

A few years after we all tire of our remote control BB-8 droids we’ll all have personal human robots designed specifically for human interaction. We’re not there yet, but [Poh Hou Shun] out of Singapore is working on a robot like this for the Hackaday Prize. It’s called OSCAR, the Omni Service Cooperative Assistance Robot.

As with any robotics platform, the use case defines the drive system; you’ll want knobby tires or treads if you’re building a sumo bot, and a strange articulating suspension if you’re driving over alien terrain. OSCAR is built for humans, and this means a humanoid chassis is required. Legs, however, aren’t. Instead of a complex system of motors and joints, OSCAR is balancing on a ball. No, it won’t go up stairs, but neither will many other robots either.

So far, [Poh Hou Shun] has built the basics of a drive system, and it’s surprisingly similar to the BB-8 droids we’re still not tired of yet. On the bottom is a large ball held in place with a spring-loaded retainer. On top of this are three stepper motors, each holding an omni wheel. It will work, there’s no doubt about that, and with the right humanoid chassis, some sensors, and a lot of software, this could be a very cool social robot.

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Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: An Open Smartphone

September 13, 2015 by 22 Comments

One of the biggest trends in DIY electronics, both now and fifty years ago, is creating at home what is usually made in a factory. Fifty years ago, this meant radios and amplifiers. Today, this means smartphones. It used to be the case that you could pull out a Heathkit catalog and find kits for every electronic gadget imaginable. There are no kits for DIY smartphones.

For [Gerard]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize, he’s tapping into the spirit of the decades-old DIY movement and building his own cell phone. He’s calling it the libresmartphone, and it’s able to make calls and send emails, just like any other portable, pocketable computer.

The libresmartphone is built around a Raspberry Pi, with a large battery, HDMI display with touchscreen, and a GSM and GPS module rounding out the build. He’s also rolling his own software to make calls, read SMS, and take a peek into some of the phone’s hardware, like the charge state of the battery.

[Gerard]’s libresmartphone is one of the purest examples of modern DIY electronics you’ll find; it’s not about building something from a kit, but instead building something that’s needed out of the parts he has on hand. That’s the purest example of the DIY movement, and a great entry to this year’s Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: Superhero Powers

September 12, 2015 by 8 Comments

The inspiration for [K.C. Lee]’s project for The Hackaday Prize didn’t come from seeing a grave injustice or inhuman suffering. He was watching Daredevil on Netflix. A show about a blind guy who fights crime in his spare time. People don’t have superhuman senses, and radioactive material falling off a truck in New York City leads to Ninja Turtles, not superheros. Still, a crude form of echolocation is well within the reach of the a capable hacker and would be very useful for those who are legally blind.

[K.C.]’s idea for human echolocation is a small wearable with ultrasonic sensors, 6DOF IMUs, and audio and haptic feedback. With a bit of math and a lot of practice, it’s possible to walk down a hallway, avoid obstacles, and find your way around without sight.

Human echolocation is a real thing, and it’s great to see a device that makes this minor human superpower a little more accessible. [K.C.] says there are 40 million people world wide that could use a device like this, and for an idea that was inspired by a superhero on TV, it’s one of the more interesting inspirations for an entry to The Hackaday Prize.

 

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by: