The Hackaday Prize: The Hacker Behind The First Tricorder

November 3, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 38 Comments

Smartphones are the most common expression of [Gene Roddneberry]’s dream of a small device packed with sensors, but so far, the suite of sensors in the latest and greatest smartphone are only used to tell Uber where to pick you up, or upload pics to an Instagram account. It’s not an ideal situation, but keep in mind the Federation of the 24th century was still transitioning to a post-scarcity economy; we still have about 400 years until angel investors, startups, and accelerators are rendered obsolete.

Until then, [Peter Jansen] has dedicated a few years of his life to making the Tricorder of the Star Trek universe a reality. It’s his entry for The Hackaday Prize, and made it to the finals selection, giving [Peter] a one in five chance of winning a trip to space.

[Peter]’s entry, the Open Source Science Tricorder or the Arducorder Mini, is loaded down with sensors. With the right software, it’s able to tell [Peter] the health of leaves, how good the shielding is on [Peter]’s CT scanner, push all the data to the web, and provide a way to sense just about anything happening in the environment. You can check out [Peter]’s video for The Hackaday Prize finals below, and an interview after that.

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Who Will Win The Hackaday Prize? Judging Begins Tonight

October 27, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

It’s been a long road for each of the five finalists; but after tonight they can breathe easy. The last judging round of the 2014 Hackaday Prize begins at 11:50pm PDT.

Each finalist must finish documenting their project by that time as a cached version of each of the project pages will be sent off to our orbital judges. Joining the panel that judged the semifinal round is [Chris Anderson], CEO of 3D Robotics, founder of DIY Drones, former Editor-in-Chief of Wired, and technology visionary. These nine are charged with deciding who has built a project cool enough to go to space.

In case you’ve forgotten, the final five projects selected by our team of launch judges are:

ChipWhisperer, an embedded hardware security research device for hardware penetration testing.
Open Source Science Tricorder, a realization of science fiction technology made possible by today’s electronics hardware advances.
PortableSDR, is a compact Software Defined Radio module that was originally designed for Ham Radio operators.
ramanPi, a 3D printed Raman Spectrometer built around a Raspberry Pi.
SatNOGS, a global network of satellite ground stations.

The ultimate results of the judging will be revealed at The Hackaday Prize party we’re holding in Munich during Electronica 2014. We’re also holding an Embedded Hardware Workshop with Moog synths, robots, hacked routers, computer vision, and a name that’s official-sounding enough to convince your boss to give you the day off work. We hope to see you there!

THP Entry: The Improved Open Source Tricorder

June 11, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

Since [Gene Roddenberry] traveled back in time from the 23rd century, the idea of a small, portable device has wound its way through the social consciousness, eventually turning into things like smartphones, PDAs, and all the other technological gadgetry of modern life. A few years ago, [Peter Jansen] started The Tricorder Project, the start of the ultimate expression of [Mr. Roddneberry]’s electronic swiss army knife. Now [Peter] is building a better, smaller version for The Hackaday Prize.

[Peter]’s first tricorders borrowed their design heavily from The Next Generation props with a fold-out section, two displays, and a bulky front packed to the gills with sensors and detectors. Accurate if you’re cosplaying, but not the most practical in terms of interface and human factors consideration. These constraints led [Peter] to completely redesign his tricorder, disregarding the painted wooden blocks found on Enterprise and putting all the electronics in a more usable form factor.

A muse of sorts was found in the Radiation Watch, a tiny, handheld Geiger counter meant as an add-on to smartphones. [Peter] envisions a small ~1.5″ OLED display on top, a capacitive sensing wheel in the middle, and a swipe bar at the bottom. Basically, it looks like a 1st gen iPod nano, but much, much more useful.

Plans for what to put in this improved tricorder include temperature, humidity, pressure, and gas sensors, a 3-axis magnetometer, x-ray and gamma ray detectors, a polarimeter, colorimeter, spectrometer, 9-axis IMU, a microphone, a lightning sensor, and WiFi courtesy of TI’s CC3000 module. Also included is something akin to a nuclear event detector; if it still exists, there has been no nuclear event.

It’s an astonishing array of technology packed into an extremely small enclosure – impressive for something that is essentially a homebrew device.Even if it doesn’t win the Hackaday Prize, it’s still an ambitious attempt at putting data collection and science in everyone’s pocket – just like in Star Trek.

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.

Sci-Fi Contest Roundup: Star Trek

April 24, 2014 by James Hobson 7 Comments

Ah yes, how could we miss Star Trek? To be honest, we’re surprised there aren’t more entries of Star Trek related projects in our Sci-Fi Contest!

Star Fleet Communicator Badge

There’s actually no info on this project yet, but we have to admit — it’s a pretty cool (albeit nerdy) concept. They want to fit a Bluetooth headset with a loudspeaker into a Star Fleet Communicator Badge, activated by tapping on it gently.

Just don’t wear a red shirt with it…

Star Trek: The Mirror Universe Pinball Machine

This ones a really cool hack. A team of four have taken a 1978 Bally Star Trek Pinball machine, and converted it into a Star Trek Mirror Universe Pinball machine based on the TOS episode Mirror, Mirror where Kirk and his crew are transported to a parallel (mirrored) universe!

Notable features include the custom CNC machined table with custom artwork, a Nixie tube score board, and that they’ve made the design open source! Minus copyrighted artwork of course…

JJ Tricorder

The JJ Tricorder, named after its team [Julia] and [Jaromir] is planned out to look just like the SR-580 type Tricorder — except its going to be backed with 21st century technology.

The main goal of the project is to have it be able to detect and analyse electromagnetic, geographic and environmental parameters. There’s lots of inspiration for it, like the now-open-source Berkeley Tricorder or the Tricorder Project itself!

Still haven’t entered the contest? Don’t worry — there’s still time for you to put an awesome Sci-Fi project together to win some crazy cool prizes! It just needs to be done and documented by April 29, 2014!

Tricorder Project Brings The Fabled Devices Into Existence

March 29, 2012 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

Whether or not you love Star Trek we’d bet you know what a Tricorder is. The handheld device capable of gathering information about the environment around you, or taking health diagnostics about an injured crew member, seemed like unfathomably advanced technology when first seen on the original television series. But our technology has advance so quickly that you can now build a Tricorder of your own. That’s exactly what [Peter Jansen] has done. He founded the Tricorder project as a way to put a useful scientific instrument in the hands for the curious masses.

In the promo video embedded after the break [Dr. Jansen] gives us a recap of his progress so far. Three versions of the project have already been produced, and a fourth is under way. The first iteration could take atmospheric, spacial, and magnetic readings. This covers things like temperature, humidity, GPS data, light intensity, and distance measurements among others. Housed in a dark grey case it looks much like the original prop.

The second model, which is seen above, implements a swapable sensor board. That’s the part hanging off the top, but the finished model will enclose that part of the case. The hardware on this is fantastic, using an ARM processor running Linux and two 2.8″ OLED touchscreen displays. But both of these models have a price tag that’s just too high for widespread use. He’s been working on two more, the Mark 3 and Mark 4. The most recent is in software development right now with the hopes of mass production when all the details are worked out.

There’s a lot of info to dig through on the project’s site. It’s open source and all the goodies we usually look for are there.

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