the hackaday prize

439 Articles

Hackaday Prize Entry: Text To Speech The Hard Way

September 18, 2016 by 10 Comments

Studies have shown reading to children leads to improved academic performance later in life, a trait that will make them more competitive in the workforce, and ultimately happier human beings. It follows, then, that having a robot read to children will also lead to happier and more productive adults, while normalizing the cyborg uprising takeover of the AI apocalypse of 2037.

It’s a good thing the above paragraph is a complete non-sequitur and has nothing to do with this Hackaday Prize entry. The TextEye, [Markus]’ entry for the Assistive Technology portion of the Hackaday Prize, is a handheld device that translates the written word into speech, useful for anyone who either can’t see well or can’t read gooder. Yes, it will also read to children, but so did Teddy Ruxpin.

If you’re keeping track, this isn’t the first time [Markus] has entered this project in a Hackaday Prize contest. The first time was six months ago in the Hackaday / Adafruit Raspberry Pi Zero contest. [Markus] was inspired by a group of blind computer science students using specialized hardware that allowed them to study the same thing as everyone else.

Since the first few project logs, a lot has changed in this project. You can buy a Pi Zero easily, and the updated Pi Zero 1.3 now comes with a camera connector. [Markus] is swapping out his Pi Model A and USB webcam for the Pi Zero and Pi camera. The software remains the same — GraphicsMagick, Tesseract OCR, Festival and Wiring Pi handle reading text and turning those words into speech — with a slight refactoring of the code. It’s a great use for the Pi Zero, and an excellent example of an Assistive Technology, and we’re happy to see it again in the Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: AutoFan Saves Tired Drivers With Face Recognition

September 17, 2016 by 10 Comments

Long distance driving can be tedious at times. The glare of the sun and the greenhouse effect of all your car’s windows make it hot and dry. You turn on the fan, or air conditioning if you have it, and that brings relief. Soon enough you’ve got another problem, the cold dry air is uncomfortable on your eyes. Eventually as you become more tired, you find yourself needing the air on your face more and more as you stay alert. You thus spend most of the journey fiddling with your vents or adjusting the climate controls. Wouldn’t it be great if the car could do all that for you?

AutoFan is a project from [hanno] that aims to automate this process intelligently. It has a fan with steerable louvres, driven by a Raspberry Pi 2 with attached webcam. The Pi computes the position of the driver’s face, and ensures the air from the fan is directed to one side of it. If it sees the driver’s blink rate increasing it directs the air to their face, having detected that they are becoming tired.

The build logs go into detail on the mathematics of calculating servo angles and correcting for camera lens distortion in OpenCV. They also discuss the Python code used to take advantage of the multicore architecture, and to control the servos. The prototype fan housing can be seen in the video below the break, complete with an unimpressed-looking cat. For those of you interested in the code, he has made it available in a GitHub repository.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: High End Preamps

September 16, 2016 by 37 Comments

While compact disks are seeing an uptick in popularity thanks to a convenient format that offers a lossless high-quality 44.1 KHz sample rate with 16-bit depth, some people are still riding the vinyl bandwagon of 2010. With that comes a need for the best hardware, and that means expensive cartridges and preamps designed by someone who knows what they’re doing.

For this year’s Hackaday Prize, [skrodahl] is building a really, really good preamplifier for moving coil turntable cartridges. It’s already built, it’s already tested, and the results are good: it produces between 36 and 46dB of gain, -110dB of dynamic range, and a signal to noise ratio of 79.46 relative to a 5mV input. That puts this preamplifier into the same territory as preamps sold with serial numbers, crystal lattices, and other audiophile nonsense.

The quality of this preamp comes from the design, and like any good open hardware project, [skrodahl] has made the schematic, PCB, and layout of this preamp completely open. It’s a great preamp, and a great entry for the Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Neopixel Pocket Watch

September 15, 2016 by 10 Comments

A timepiece is rather a rite of passage in the world of hardware hacking, and we never cease to be enthralled by the creativity of our community in coming up with new ones.

Today’s example comes from [Joshua Snyder], who has made a pocket watch. Not just any pocket watch, he’s taken the shell of a clockwork watch and inserted a ring of Neopixels, which he drives  from an ESP8266 module. Power comes from a small LiPo battery, and he’s cleverly engineered a small push-button switch so that it can be actuated by the knob from the original watch. Different colour LEDs traverse the ring to simulate the hands of a traditional timepiece, and the whole nestles behind the perforated cover of the watch shell for something of a steampunk feel.

He admits the battery life is not very good at the moment, probably because for now the WiFi is always enabled so he can reach its web interface for debugging. Sadly he appears to have not yet posted the software, but he does tell us it uses NTP to update its time, and that it supports over-the-air updating for new versions. He suggests a future version might dispense with the ESP and use an ATtiny or similar with a real-time clock giving better battery life.

We’ve covered a lot of LED timepieces over the years, including quite a few watches. Only a small selection are this PIC LED ring in a pocket watch case, another LED ring this time powered by an ATMega645, and this very stylish OLED wristwatch.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Environmental Regulation

September 14, 2016 by 14 Comments

A while back, [Kyle] wanted to grow gourmet mushrooms. The usual way of doing this is finding a limestone cave and stinking up half the county with the smell of manure. Doing this at home annoys far fewer neighbors, leading him to create a device that will regulate temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide concentration. It’s called Mycodo, and it’s one of the finalists for the Automation portion of the Hackaday Prize.

Mycodo is designed to read sensors and activate relays, and when it comes to environmental sensors, there’s no shortage of sensors available. Right now, Mycodo has support for the usual DHT11 and DHT22 temperature and humidity sensors, HTU21D, AM2315, SHT* DS18B, and infrared sensors like the TMP006 and TMP007. These are connected to a Raspberry Pi equipped with a 7-inch touchscreen and a few relays to turn power outlets on and off. It’s not a complete system, though: think of it as a firmware for a 3D printer – the firmware doesn’t give you a 3D printer, it just makes building your own much easier.

Already Mycodo has been used for a few environmental control issues in addition to growing mushrooms. It was used to control the humidity in a bat cave – for real bats, not some cosplay thing – and a temperature- and humidity-regulated apiary. With the right environmental control system, there’s nothing you can’t do, and we’re glad to have Mycodo in the running for the Hackaday Prize.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: The Internet Of Garbage

September 13, 2016 by 32 Comments

The Internet of Things is garbage. While the most visible implementations of the Internet of Things are smart lights that stop working because the company responsible for them folded, or smart thermostats that stop working because providing lifetime support wasn’t profitable, IoT could actually be useful, albeit in devices less glamorous than a smart toaster. Smart meters are a great idea, and so is smart trash. That’s what [mikrotron] and company are entering into the Hackaday Prize – smart trash cans – and it’s not as dumb as spending $40 on a light bulb.

The idea behind the Internet of Trash is to collect data on how full a trashcan is, and publish that data to the Internet. This information will be used by a city’s trash collectors and recycling agencies to know when it’s time to collect the garbage.

The hardware for the Internet of Garbage needs to know how full a can is, and for that the team has turned to an ultrasonic sensor pointed down into the garbage. The amount of trash in a can is pinged once a day, and the information is sent over the Internet via a GSM network. Additionally, the GPS coordinates and a unique ID are delivered to the server, with everything ultimately powered by a solar panel.

The future of the Internet of Things isn’t putting Twitter in a coffee maker, it’s all about infrastructure, whether that’s power, solar freakin’ roadways, or the trash. We’re glad to see a useful application of a billion smart things, and the Internet of Trash makes for a great Hackaday Prize entry.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Alarm Detection For The Hearing Impaired

September 12, 2016 by 22 Comments

A few years ago, [K.C. Lee] woke up in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke. He was drying a futon next to the heater and it caught on fire. A smoke detector would have helped in that situation, but wouldn’t have for anyone who was hearing impaired. Since we’re in the Assistive Technologies portion of the Hackaday Prize, [KC] decided to build on his previous work and build an alarm alarm – a device that would tell anyone when an alarm is going off

Smoke detectors and other alarms are surprisingly standardized – loud, somewhere around 3kHz. (Not coincidentally around the resonant frequency of a 3/4″ piezo disc.) Some modern alarms use a 520 Hz alarm, but in either case, you’re looking at something very loud with a very narrow peak when viewing the audio spectrum.

[KC]’s Alarm Detector relies on this one property to detect alarms and light up, vibrate, or really do anything else that can be controlled electronically. Right now the device is a tiny STM32F0-based device with an old Nokia LCD working as a spectrum analyzer, with the entire device lighting up whenever an alarm is detected. It’s simple, it works, and it’s a great entry for the Assistive Technology portion of the Hackaday Prize.

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