Automated Judging Of Hackaday Prize Entries

August 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

cock

We have some of the Internet’s hacking elite judging The Hackaday Prize, and that means they can’t enter any projects into the prize. All the better for everyone else, we suppose. One of the judges, [Sprite_tm], is a resourceful guy and when it comes to judging the entries for The Hackaday Prize, he’s going to do what comes naturally to him: build a machine to automate the task.

[Sprite]’s plan for the JudgeTron 9001 is to use neural networks embedded in biological specimens to do the judging for him. Honestly, we really appreciate the effort he put in to this; biohacking is really in vogue right now, and we do love the classic throwback to the AI renaissance here. It certainly doesn’t hurt that he’s using a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino for this project, either.

Grabbing a touchscreen LCD and a few other parts out of his junk drawer, [Sprite] quickly whipped up a project that would display entries to The Hackaday Prize to the biologically embedded neural nets. These nets needed a little bit of encouragement to select winning entries, so a ‘feed’ back mechanism was laser cut out of acrylic, mounted to a servo, and filled with positive reinforcement.

The software running on the Pi crawls through the list of entries to The Hackaday Prize, extracting images from each one. The plan was for the biological neural nets to select winning entries and be rewarded via the feedback mechanism. These neural nets proved to be very sensitive to the sound of the servo gears of the feedback mechanism, and [Sprite]’s attempt at finding a winning entry with his creation has so far proved unsuccessful. Still, there’s a video of it in action, you can check that out below.

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THP Entry: A Theatrical Lighting Controller Powered By A Calculator

August 3, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

DMX

Theatrical lighting usually runs with the help of DMX, a protocol that’s basically MIDI for lights; small, lightweight, ancient, and able to run on the lowest spec computers imaginable. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Alex] figured a regular ‘ol graphing calculator was sufficient to run a complete DMX controller, and with the help of an Arduino, figured out a way to do it.

The hardware for the system consists of a TI-84 graphing calculator, a few bits and bobs in the way of components, and an Arduino Pro Mini powered from the USB port on the calculator. The Arduino handles the transmitting of DMX packets at 250 kbaud using the DMXSimple library over a 5-pin XLR jack.

The software running on the calculator is where the novel part of the project begins. The software is designed to be extremely lightweight, sending packets to the Arduino using the 2-wire link cable. DMX Commands are wrapped up and transferred using the TI-83/84 link protocol, decoded on the Arduino, and sent out to the lighting rig.

While this probably won’t replace the multi-thousand dollar lighting consoles found in theatres, it’s still a very handy and portable tool for debugging lights. It’s also [Alex]’s My First Electronics Project™, and a pretty good one at that.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

Astronaut Or Astronot: Totally Giving Away A Power Supply

August 1, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

Hey! It’s time for another round of Astronaut or Astronot, where we try to give away a jumbo power supply to someone on hackaday.io if they have voted in the most recent community voting round.

Before I get around to telling you who won, we need to go over the criticism of the current voting scheme. There’s a lot of valid criticism out there about how the algorithm that presents projects to the voting page is broken. Yes, it weights projects so some are seen more often than others. And yes, it can be frustrating. However, the results of the voting have no bearing on The Hackaday Prize (the space thing), and the purpose of the entire community voting is to get people looking at the projects, give away t-shirts to the project creators and 3D printers, o-scopes, and power supplies to random people who have voted. We listened to your suggestions and we’re tweaking the algorithm that presents projects for the next round of voting. That starts Monday, we’re doing the drawing on Wednesday, and votes don’t carry over from round to round.

With that out of the way, it’s time to do the whole ‘pick a random person on hackaday.io and see if they voted’ thing. For this week’s lottery, I chose five random people on the site, hoping I wouldn’t go through all of them before giving away a nice bench power supply. The first person, [in3rtial], didn’t vote. You just lost out on a really cool prize there, man.

The second person randomly selected was [tyler]. He voted a total of six times this round. I voted fifty times, but we’re not picky. That means he wins a nice power supply. Everyone go congratulate him for living somewhere that’s cheap to ship a power supply to.

That’s it for this round of Astronaut or Astronot. We’ll have a new round of voting up on Monday. For a change of pace (and because we’re going to be at DEFCON at this time next week), ~~we’re going to do the drawing on Wednesday~~ nevermind, we’re totally doing the drawing from DEFCON. Oh, and if you haven’t, you might want to submit a project to The Hackaday Prize. There’s still time, and your odds of winning something are really, really good.

Astronaut Or Astronot: Nobody Won (This Week)

July 25, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 55 Comments

Another week, another round of Astronaut or Astronot, the little lottery thing where we try to give away some fairly expensive tools to a random person on hackaday.io if they have voted for The Hackaday Prize. You should vote. Go here and do that.

This week, the random hacker selected was [oscar6ojeda], but he did not vote. This means he doesn’t get a huge bench power supply. Oh well. I’ll send him a t-shirt and a few stickers. That’s fair compensation for doing nothing, right?

We’re doing the same thing next week, so go here and vote. Voting in previous rounds doesn’t count, so you’ll only win the supply if you vote for The Hackaday Prize project with the most outrageous component.

Cosmonaut Or Taikonot: Vote For The Most Outrageous Component

July 24, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

We have a new round of Astronaut or Astronot, the little community voting thing we’re doing for The Hackaday Prize. Why should you care? Because tomorrow (Friday, 10:00 AM Eastern) we’re doing a voters lottery. We’re selecting a random person on hackaday.io, and if that person has voted, they win a pretty awesome bench power supply.

Why are we telling you this now? Because voting in previous rounds doesn’t count for this round. If you want to nab a power supply, you need to vote. We previously gave away an awesome scope, and a very cool 3D printer to a random person on hackaday.io. Judging from previous rounds, I’d guess the odds of us giving away the supply this week are pretty good, but I’m not doing those maths right now. I’ll post a video of the drawing tomorrow around 10:30 Eastern.

THP Entry: The Everything RC Transmitter

July 16, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

OSRC With few exceptions, most of The Hackaday Prize are things we really haven’t seen much of before: base-3 computers that have been relegated to the history books, extremely odd 3D printers, and fancy, new IoT devices are the norm. The OSRC is not a new project to us. (UPDATE: Looks like they deleted their project page. Here is a snapshot of it from the Internet Archive) We saw it once in 2011 and again a year later. What makes the OSRC an interesting project for The Hackaday Prize isn’t the fact that it’s the most advanced RC transmitter ever created. Creating that was evidently the easy part. The OSRC could use a big financial kick in the pants, and if [Demetris] wins, we’d guess he wouldn’t be taking that ride to space. Rather, he’d be taking the cash prize to get his ultimate transmitter into large-scale manufacturing and out into the wild.

While at first glance the base model OSRC seems expensive at about $6-700 USD, consider this: a six-channel transmitter from an excellent brand costs about $120 USD. Nine channels will run you about $400. The OSRC is a forty channel radio. The sticks are capable of force feedback, and of course the ‘pro’ model of the OSRC has that wonderful screen, capable of displaying video from an FPV camera, a GPS/map overlay, or an incredibly extensive telemetry display. There are multi-thousand dollar avionics for real airplanes out there that have a smaller feature set, and that’s not hyperbole.

A few months ago, [Demetris] was interviewed by the awesome people at Flite Test. That (highly suggested) video is embedded below.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

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The Electric Imp And An Easy Hackaday Prize Entry

July 10, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

impy

We’re a little under a month until the first cutoff date for The Hackaday Prize, and there have been a few questions we’ve been answering again and again: ‘what does ‘connected’ mean?’ and, ‘do I really have enough time to build something for The Hackaday Prize?’ Lucky for you, [Matt] from Electric Imp put together a very short demo of a sample THP entry. It’s a ‘HACKING’ light, kind of like an ‘on air’ light you’d find in a TV or Radio studio.

The idea for the project came from a tweet to [Matt] that seemed simple enough to implement. After grabbing an Imp and a breakout board, a LED, button, and resistor were wired up, with power supplied over USB. The code for the device was simple enough, and the Imp makes it easy to make that ‘hacking’ button tweet and serve a simple web page.

[Matt] pulled this project together in an afternoon, and although it’s not nearly as complex as the 3D printers, CNC machines, and freakin’ tricorders that are also entered into The Hackaday Prize, it meets all the requirements we’re looking for.

Of course, ‘connected’ is a very broad term, and even if you have a project that communicates with LEDs, a serial connection, or even pigeons, it’ll be more than enough to tick that ‘connected’ check box.

There’s still a few weeks until the first cutoff date for The Hackaday Prize, so get moving.

[via Bearded Inventor]