the hackaday prize

439 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Light Electric Utility Vehicle

June 7, 2015 by 32 Comments

[Chris] lives in South Sudan, where there are a lot of poor areas with terrible infrastructure. One of the bigger challenges for this area is getting people and materials over roads that are either bad or don’t exist. Normal vehicles aren’t built for the task, and a Hilux or Land Cruiser is much to expensive. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Chris] is building a rugged low-cost utility vehicle platform for the developing world.

This battery-powered, four-wheel cart is made out of what [Chris] could find. The frame is made out of 50x50mm angle iron that’s welded together, with the body panels fabricated out of 1200x2400x1.2mm sheet that’s sourced locally. While [Chris] would like better wheels, the cheap Chinese motorcycle wheels are everywhere and cheap – $65, which includes the bearings, breaks, and sprockets. It even has higher ground clearance than the Land Cruiser.

[Chris] already has a prototype of his project built and it’s rolling around. You can check out a video of that below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Hackaday Prize Entry: 3D Printed Parametric Motrs

June 6, 2015 by 8 Comments

If you’re building something that moves, chances are you’ll be using an electric motor. There are tens of thousands of different motors out there, each with their own properties, speeds, torque, and sizes. How do you pick the right motor? Most of the time it’s a highly educated guess, but [Solenoid] has a better idea: just 3D print a motor designed by a calculator that will give you the properties you need

This entry for The Hackaday Prize is just a web-based calculator for motor designs that takes torque, speed, size, or form factor as an input and spits out a complete motor design. Sure, you’ll need to wind coils on a 3D printed frame, but this calculator removes the need to calculate inductance, coil capacitance, and all the other bits needed to construct an efficient motor.

While actual products made in the millions will still be using off the shelf motors, this project is perfect for one-offs. If you want to motorize a telescope mount, this project will design a motor given the power and resolution per steps required. If you want to build a wind turbine, this calculator will put blades right on the outrunner of a brushless motor. It’s a great project, and something we can’t wait to see the results of.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Python Powered Scientific Instrumentation

June 5, 2015 by 28 Comments

A common theme in The Hackaday Prize and Hackaday.io in general is tools to make more tools. There are a lot of people out there trying to make the next Bus Pirate, and simply measuring things is the first step towards automating a house or creating the next great blinkey invention.

In what is probably the most capable measurement system in the running for this year’s Hackaday Prize, [jithin] is working on a Python Powered Scientific Instrumentation Tool. It’s a microcontroller-powered box containing just about every imaginable benchtop electronics tool, from constant current supplies, LCR meters, waveform generators, frequency counters, and a logic analyzer.

This project is stuffed to the gills with just about every electronic tool imaginable; there are programmable gain amplifiers, voltage references, DACs and constant current sources, opamps and comparators, all connected to a bunch of banana jacks. All of these components are tied up in a nifty Python framework, allowing a bunch of measurements to be taken by a single box.

If that’s not enough, [jithin] is also working on wireless extension nodes for this box to get data from multiple acquisition points where wires would be unfeasible. This feature uses a NRF24L01+ radio module; it’s more than enough bandwidth for a lot of sensors, and there’s enough space all the wireless sensors you would ever need.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Astronaut Or Astronot: Random Stuff For Random People

June 5, 2015 by 55 Comments

In case you’re not aware, we’re running a contest to send one lucky hacker into space. We’re already giving out $50k in prizes to entice the most worthy hackers to submit their project to the The Hackaday Prize. Now it’s time for community voting, and that means trotting out Astronaut Or Astronot, where you decide the best project for this week’s theme. Projects voted into the top ten for each theme will receive Hackaday Prize t-shirts.

But there’s something in it for you too. Everyone who votes in the community voting rounds will be eligible to win a $1000 gift card to The Hackaday Store.

Most Likely To Be Widely Used

This week’s round of community voting will decide which project entered into the Hackaday Prize will be the most likely to be widely used. Everyone on Hackaday.io gets 50 votes to pick the project that will be the most popular, most game changing, and most useful. Head on over to the voting page and spend those votes wisely.

Submit Your Entry For Community Feedback

We’ll be doing a new round of community voting as often as every seven days. Everyone registered on Hackaday.io gets 50 votes for each round of voting, and every Friday (around 20:00 UTC), we’ll randomly select one person registered on Hackaday.io. If that person has voted, they get a $1000 gift card for The Hackaday Store. If they haven’t vote — nothing.

So what do you need to get in on this action? Vote, obviously. We’ll be tracking which projects make it to the top of the list, and next week we’ll do it all over again. Enter your project now because we’re giving away a trip to space and hundreds of other prizes.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Very, Very Small Logic

June 4, 2015 by 55 Comments

Despite the existence of FPGAs and CPLDs, there’s still a necessity for very small programmable logic devices. GALs, PALs, and other old tech just won’t cut it, though, and so we are left with a new generation of programmable devices that aren’t microcontrollers or CPUs. The GreenPAC from Silego fill this niche quite nicely, with the ability to implement counters, ADCs, logic glue, level shifting, and comparators in a single chip. For any homebrew electronics tinkerer, these devices have one very obvious problem: they’re really, really small. The smallest GreenPAC device has 12 pins stuffed into a 1.6 x 1.6mm QFN package. You’re not hand soldering this thing.

For [Nick Johnson]’s Hackaday Prize entry, he’s taking these small programmable logic chips and making it easy to create your own custom ICs. Basically, it’s a breakout board for GreenPAC devices that stuffs these tiny chips onto a much more reasonable DIP package.

Breakouts aren’t enough, and to program these small chips, [Nick] is also building a board based on an ARM microcontroller. With USB input, a way to generate the 7.5V used for programming, and a breadboard friendly format, this programmer will tell these tiny chips what to do.

Not many people are building stuff with PALs and GALs anymore, but there are still a lot of work that can be done with small programmable chips. There’s certainly a place for tiny programmable logic chips like this, and anything that gets them in to the hands of more people is okay in our book.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Solving The Shortage Of Walking Robots

June 3, 2015 by 23 Comments

The world has a severe lack of robots, and the shortage of walking robots is untenable. We were promised flying cars and fusion reactors, yet here we are, 15 years into the twenty-first century without even a robotic pet spider.

[Radomir]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize aims to fix this bizarre oversight of scientific and technological progress. He’s designed a small, inexpensive, but very well designed quadrupod robot that will put full reverse kinematics on your desk for under $50.

To solve humanity’s glaring lack of walking robots, [Radomir] designed Tote, a four-legged robot whose chassis is mostly composed of only 9 gram servos. There are twelve servos in total, three on each of its four legs. It’s an extension of his earlier µKubik robot. While the µKubik was powered by Python, the Tote is all Arduinofied, calculating the trajectories of each leg dozens of times a second with an Arduino Pro Mini.

This isn’t the only walking robot kit on hackaday.io; last year, [The Big One] created Stubby the Teaching Hexapod. Even though Stubby featured six legs, it’s still remarkably similar to Tote; 9 gram servos provide all the locomotion, and all the software is running on a relatively small ATMega microcontroller. Both are great introductions to walking robots, and both bots will surely be capable and just rulers of mankind after the robot apocalypse.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Welding Plastic Filament

June 2, 2015 by 13 Comments

There are a lot of neat toys and accessories that rely on 3D printing filament. The 3Doodler is a 3D printing pen, or pretty much an extruder in a battery-powered portable package. You can make your own filament with a Filastruder, and of course 3D printers themselves use up a lot of filament. [Bodet]’s project for this year’s Hackaday Prize gives those tiny scraps of leftover filament a new life by welding filament together.

The EasyWelder [Bodet] is designing looks a little bit like a tiny hair straightener; it has a temperature control, a power switch, and two tips that grip 1.7 or 3mm diameter filament and weld them together. It works with ABS, PLA, HIPS, Nylon, NinjaFlex, and just about every other filament you can throw at a printer. By welding a few different colors of filament together, you can create objects with different colors or mechanical properties. It’s not as good as dual extrusion, but it does make good use of those tiny bits of filament left on a mostly used spool.

Since the EasyWelder can weld NinjaFlex and other flexible filaments, it’s also possible to weld NinjaFlex to itself. What does that mean? Custom sized O-rings, of course. You can see a video of that below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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